Mission statement or “Free games development - you’re doing it wrong!”
by m64 on Jan.17, 2009, under Uncategorized
Before I’ll start posting more original content I would like to elaborate a bit more about what I will hopefully be doing on this blog, why and how. I am a man of many interests, perhaps even of many passions. I think it’s good to be able to connect your passions. Some time ago I’ve managed to connect my passions for computer games and for programming by becoming a game developer. Now I would like to add another passion to that duo - a passion for freedom and for Free Software. This blog will be a chronicle of my attempts on doing so.
Free Software games have seen a very moderate rate and scale of success when compared to other types of Free Software. There are numerous reasons for that and not so numerous solutions. In this blog I will attempt to identify the reasons and find and advocate the solutions. I also want to practice what I preach so I will probably start a game project or two, test my ideas there and report how well it went.
Having the mission statement out of the way let me present to you my starting assumptions about Free Software games upon which I will base my further posts.
- First of all, I believe it is possible to have a vibrant Free Software Games scene that will produce creations on par with that from indie scene and even commercial studios. This is my belief - a more or less rational gut feeling, not necessarily supported by any empirical evidence other than success of other types of Free Software.
- Second, because I believe that it’s possible and yet despite years off effort we are far from that goal, I think there is something wrong about the way we approach the Free Software game development.
- Third, once we find a way to do it right, I think it will make a huge difference and in few years could lead to and explosion in Free Gaming similar to what has happened in the general Free Software scene once the Open Source development process has been discovered and more or less consciously applied by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel and described by Eric S. Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
- Fourth, I think that the way commercial studios operate is not completely healthy too and we can see a lot symptoms of that. Flood of sequels and cookie cutter clone games is one symptom. Aversion towards innovations in game design is another. Self-censorship when it comes to subjects like sex and politics is yet another. I think they are caused or reinforced by the business model of selling overpriced optical discs in colourful boxes. I think having Free Software alternative to that would be good for the whole industry.
- Fifth, I think Free Software operating systems will need good, commercial quality games if they are to succeed on the desktop. I also don’t count on big studios providing them.
Having these assumptions I would like to list some major wrongs I can see in Free Software game development process.
- Failure of Open Source, bazaar-like development model. For some reasons most of the Free games and even game engines are developed by small teams of very dedicated core members and not by a communities.
- No business strategies. General Free Software has some typical business strategies, or models associated with it, for example the service provider model employed by Red Hat. This allows people to work full time on the projects. This also makes many companies consider open sourcing their software for purely business reasons.
- Poor content and lack of artists. Many Free games are just plain ugly when compared to commercial ones that use similar technology. This can be attributed to the general scarcity of skilled artists in Free Games scene. Where in typical game studio there are 4-5 artists and level designers for one programmer, in Free Games scene it’s quite the reverse. Something has to be done about it.
That’s all. I encourage everyone to discuss these ideas. Do you think my assumptions are wrong? Perhaps you would add more of them? Can you see other major problems in Free Gaming scene? Perhaps minor? Let me know so we can discuss them either in the forum, or in the future posts.
January 19th, 2009 on 2:48 pm
ah, sweet stuff, i’d encourage you to make a thread in the forums about that, should get quite a bit of discussion going, and maybe lead to a few interesting ideas =)
other troubles i can think of :
most os games are 2d, they might look good, but does not appeal to gamers that have seen screenshots/vids of latest commercial 3d games.
i don’t say os games have to offer the same level of content and graphics, but at least some 3d games instead of always 2d would be good.
“reeinventing the wheel” : building an own engine instead of using the existing ones (ogre,crystalspace,irrlich,etc).
art sharing of commonly needed things in gamedev : e.g. typical animated models (human animals:horse,wolf,dog monsters:spider,dragon,slime), weapons (medieval:axe,sword,spear,bow modern:pistol,mg,uzi,shotgun,rocketlauncher,grenade sicfi:plasma,lightning,laser), vehicles (tank,yeep,motorcycle,boat,plane,jet,helicopter).
Here people often see the identity of a game by the look of the models, but a good set of generically usable models might serve well as placeholders in new projects. Same for commonly used sounds (footstep,sword,magic,gunfire,explosion, something hitting the ground, bullet hitting wall). lowpoly coop are doign some nice work here.
opensource mapping tools are bad compared to commercial systems, not artwise but also featurewise.
lots of new features that should be cloned, ask sindwiller at freegamedev commmunity.
licenses scare artists away. protective mentality / culture. money. some want their art only used in one project, and don’t want to bother informing themselves about free art-licenses (creative commons?).
resistance to cooperation with indie and modding communities, closed mindset, opensource-zealot/elitist mentality ?
confusing terms : freeware/free-software . unfriendly reactions towards people developing freeware not aware of the difference ? (”hey, where’s the source ?”)
———-
a bunch of linux related things, i’m not sure how relevant it is due to most gamers being on win, but linux being the opensource-heaven might play a bigger role even though the userbase is small :
linux : distributable crossplatform binaries. playing a game is done for fun and should be as easy as possible. having to compile first is bad. For the gamedevs compiling so it works with different distros is tricky, and making packages if you get it right is tricky too. A few projects going in the directon of steam (halflife). A few links regarding that :
* http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/linuxprogramming2/ Distributable Binaries
* http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/linuxprogramming3/ installers
* steamlike : http://openfrag.org/forum/viewthread/1340
* steamlike : http://p2posgamehosting.tiddlyspot.com/ (also in fgd forums)
got a few more, but don’t want to spam here too much =)
linux : availability and up-to-date-ness of engines/libs in the default packaging systems. (e.g. one of the major libs, ogre3d, is more than a year old, and a major version behind. i might be biased as i like ogre, but i think this is rather bad)
linux : audio systems are troublesome (e.g. try hearing music, using teamspeak/ventrillo while playing a game with sound)
** http://forum.freegamedev.net/index.php?t=msg&goto=8050
** http://forum.freegamedev.net/index.php?t=getfile&id=1359
** http://forum.freegamedev.net/index.php?t=getfile&id=1360
linux : graphics profiling : something like nvidia perfhud.
January 19th, 2009 on 3:26 pm
These are all great topics and I hope to cover them sooner or later. But I will post one, two longer posts a week tops, much like the economic blogers do, so it will take a while to cover all the subjects.
January 19th, 2009 on 3:29 pm
As for a thread in the forum, I still have to figure out how separate things that should go to the forum from things that I will keep on the blog - I don’t want to look like I’m using the forum to promote the blog.
January 19th, 2009 on 3:51 pm
since your blog is about gamedev and mostly about foss gamedev, i don’t think anyone will mind if you do mix them and connect them for discussion, since it is very on-topic =)
January 19th, 2009 on 4:20 pm
Well, you are the admin, so I guess you are right. It won’t do much harm if I link to a one article per week or so.
January 19th, 2009 on 6:48 pm
i’m not the boss, it’s a community =)
charlieg (=freegamer, the guy writing the blog) originally started it and hagish and me offered to take over hosting as his old hoster became troublesome.
other things that came to my mind :
modding, especially scripting. commercial games are going more and more towards player created content, e.g. halflife mods, warcraft3 scenarios (towerdefense especially, you could say it developed into a whole genre), and spore.
This means good editing tools, and being able to change game mechanics without knowing how to use a compiler to make binaries, e.g. heavy scripting.
Modding communities produce vast amounts of content, i think there are the artists that are missing in foss games.
Why ? I think better tools for content creation (mapping, asset pipelines like importers/exporters, tutorials, docs and forums/communities) and large target audience due to the popularity of the game itself (henn/egg problem here, no content : not popular : can’t find artists to make content).
Building up a pile of generically usable high quality placeholder content might help reaching the critical mass needed for popularity and getting artists in to replace the placeholders creating a unique graphical style for the game later.
January 20th, 2009 on 12:24 pm
Sorry for taking so long to reply, I keep on forgetting to check your blog.. I agree with ghoulsblade though, this topic would fit fine in the forums.
Also, all of the points mentioned pretty much fit my view, and here are a few more that I would mention
-Many free game projects are done mainly as a means of education and skill improvement. This is a pretty big contributor to the “re-inventing the wheel” syndrome..
-Few reasons to contribute. When developing a tool, you know that your improvements will directly affect everything you use it for. When developing a game, it sort of detracts from the fun you get from playing it (well, at least as I see it). Playing becomes playtesting, and you lose a lot of immersion from knowing the inner workings of the game and storyline. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if a huge community of developers were working on a project, and you were experiencing more than your own work, but as was said, very few people contribute…
January 20th, 2009 on 3:22 pm
Thanks ghoulsblade and TheAncientGoat - now I’ve got enough subjects to write about for a year. As for copying my posts to the forums - I think making a poll on FGD will be a most honest way to decide this.
January 20th, 2009 on 6:49 pm
I pretty much agree fully with ghouly’s latest reply, good tools for creating content is very hard to come by.
Other then that I just want to check my gravy.
And nice blog keep it up!
January 20th, 2009 on 8:46 pm
I just realized that you probably should link to this (and perhaps the previous post) from “about”
January 25th, 2009 on 1:06 am
> Failure of Open Source, bazaar-like development model. For some reasons most of the Free games and even game engines are developed by small teams of very dedicated core members and not by a communities.
I disagree with you on that point. Every open-source project is developed mainly by a relatively small core team.
Also it seems that communities tend to grow more rapidly around multiplayer games - Freeciv, Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Teeworlds etc are good examples of that. Which is quite natural I think - when you play for 10000th time on dm1 map (and love it) you really want to make something new for that game.
On the other hand single-player games are usually very linear - you finish it one time and then forget about its existance.