into this:
But frankly. Who cares? Let's see... UP TO AND INCLUDING TEN PEOPLE!!! It's trending! See for yourselves:
If this continues much longer all the folks at Epic Games will be out of a job soon!
So I was right (no surprise there): nobody will "get it", a handful at most will find it useful (probably not) and nobody will ever use it. Trial and epic fail on the one hand, but on the other it's a fantastic tool and I really think I did a good job so far. This is the first time I've ever thought that of software I made. Bring it on, you say? No? Well, I'll do it anyway.
| What went wrong | What went right | |
| Bound to be forgotten by history Big players will never find this, and they might think that they won't need it. Which might be true as they generally don't do new types of gameplay. Small indie studios are too focused on the daily grunt to even care about prototyping. Single-person developers don't think they'll need it, and once they realize something is awry with their game, they will neither know what went wrong nor that prototyping would have helped. Thus I've made a product that is only going to be used by me. | Rapid The terrain improvement depicted above touched three lines. One of which was adding an import statement. If you don't get the significance of that, you've got a hole where the left part of the brain normally goes. | |
| Looks booooooring Not using assets is a key success factor. But it also makes every scene look like an angular blobfish out of Minecraft. | No assets = focus Altogether ditching assets means you can prototype your game idea without even giving looks a second thought. Thus game mechanics gets 100% focus. | |
| iOS IDE I wanted the IDE on the iOS device so that people (not me) could fiddle with the code on the bus. But the iOS IDE is bound to be misunderstood as the primary means of development. And as such it sucks. | Just a little bit of application code The basics are done for most type of games in half an hour. It's all application code. The API and the IDE both take on stealthy roles, and there's no callbacks, naming, loading, initializing and most of all: no framework (god I hate those)! | |
| 80-20 The Pareto principle applies to playing-developing in Trabant too. So for some strange reason I keep playing my dull prototypes 80% of the time, leaving only 20% left for developing. | Best API I've never seen an API even close to this. Srsly. It sometimes feel like divine intervention for me to come up with some of these things. Reusing pos() and pos(x) as a getter and a setter was genius! Using ASCII art as models is fucking brilliant! If I should be remembered for one thing in my software career, it's definitely this style of API and I couldn't be more proud, divine intervention or not. I also must mention that rigid body simulation is always right there, without adding any code your graphical models will double as physical bodies unless you explicitly choose not to. | |
| Sounds too good to be true All software developer companies these days use big words for half-ass products. Trabant is a small but excellent product, but nobody could ever think that from looking at my web page. It just comes out as half-ass words for a shitty product. | No installation for the IDE Unzip Trabant_Win32.zip and run the .exe inside. Press F5 to run a prototype. That's all you need to know. But that might not be entirely positive, "sound too good to be true?" |
Fully booked
Now that this product is done, and I've rested for a bit, I'm going to start tinkering with my next project. The next project is not a game, it's a book. A book on parapsychology. I'm really looking forward to researching and writing that!
