n3wt0n!

So I started something yesterday.

It’s quite early, but I find motivation in sharing my progress. The goal? A retro-style space war inspired by Blendo Games’ Flotilla.

I’m just listening to an interview at RoboAwesome with Edmund and Tommy (when their powers combine, they are Team Meat) responsible for the upcoming Super Meat Boy. It’s 1 hour 10 minutes and 10 seconds in length. Right around the 30 minute 21 second mark, Tommy says,

We're never doing Linux because that's dumb.
I don't care what anybody says, nobody plays
games on Linux.

But I do! We exist. Linux gamers exist!

This caused me to think about the state of games on Linux. I’m talking about real commercial support for games on Linux. It’s a catch-22. Simply put, I believe people don’t use Linux as their every-day desktop because there are not enough commercial games for it. Why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? And I’m talking about games that are recently released with the intent of being available for Linux on or soon after launch, not games that have been out for a year and someone decided to port it over to Linux.

Anyway, back to the question of why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? It’s because developers feel that there aren’t enough Linux gamers.

Linux gamers say: Make games for Linux, more people will use Linux.

Developers say: I’m not going to make games for Linux because no one plays games on Linux.

Hopefully a Linux-native client of Steam can fix this. Hopefully by the end of August, 2010.

Development on the Generic 2D Platformer library is slow going, but I’m still making the occasional time to work on it.

This last weekend I finally got around to adding parallax in the vertical axis. It’s something that I’d just never gotten around to doing, and all that was needed was an additional 4 or 6 lines of code.

Osmos for Linux has gone gold. I was one of the handful of people to help test the Linux build of the Osmos demo and I’ve got to say that it’s smooth.

I’d played Osmos at PAX 2009 and was hooked. Of course I purchased it on Steam, but who wants to swap partitions just to play games? Native Linux is where it’s at.

I’m so happy to see more and more commercial releases of games for Linux. There is a market. Developers, hear our call!

Thank you, Hemisphere Games, for being an addition to the studios who recognise this growing market.

Other notable Linux-friendly developers

• id software (Doom3, Quake, etc)
• Icculus (Prey)
• Frictional Software (Penumbra, Amnesia)
• 2D Boy (World of Goo)
• Wolfire (Lugaru, Overgrowth)
• S2 Games (Heroes of Newerth)

And the list goes on. Introversion, Amanita, etc.

Grab the Linux build of Osmos now!

I’ve been reading a series of articles about a “Game Design Canvas”. The series focuses on game design, broken into 5 catagories. I recommend giving the articles a read.

There are currently three published, and presumably at least two more on the way.

• The Game Design Canvas: An Introduction
• “Feeling Powerful” as a Core Experience
• The Game Design Canvas: Base Mechanics