55+ and still going strong

Today I found to my surprise that my 55+-somewhat female colleague, who normally works with mainframe computers, is a game developer. Didn't see that coming. She and her friend decided to build a game, bought a game engine, learnt PC programming, went to a game developer exhibition for inspiration and spent three years actually building the stuff. That is sooo cool to me - fuck the comfort zone! Ok, so the outcome may not have been the awesomesty in the universe.

But still! It's on par with my design for sure. And both I and my colleague still has a couple of magnitudes to go before we're anywhere near modern graphics. Take this GDC talk at the other side of the spectrum:



I'm glad I've always postponed graphics, I couldn't have kept up with shaders, GLES 1, 2, 3, Vulcan and the rest. Come today where all game engines are free-ish and a fork in the road for me. Should I:

1. try to build a great game, using my own game engine and ignore everything graphical; or
2. try to build a game using Unreal Engine 4; or
3. finally take off my rugged and ugly indie game development hat.

Both #1 and #2 involves huge loss of time and energy, and at a staggering risk of failure. The third option closes one door but opens even more. So, at least for now, I'm going to go with #3. Here's my plan:

1. Build and release a couple of my sad games for Linux. How hard could it be?
2. Port Trabant to Linux.
3. Try to find some angle of sales and/or education around Trabant.

Trabant is really good, possibly the only really good software I've ever written. But the hard part about marketing it is making game developers realize that rapid, interactive prototyping is essential.

As an example, just look at the AppStore. According to PocketGamer there were over half a million currently active games in 2012, and by a five-minute google I'm assuming that number is fairly stable. 20-25% of all AppStore apps are games. How many of those games have more than a handful users ever heard of? 10%? 20%? Considering that by 2015 35 apps in Google Play had 100+M downloads among them, and that by 2012 400k apps on the AppStore had never once been downloaded, a lot of indie game developers have a long way to go.

The same is probably true for smaller studios as well, so I'd say that there is a desperate need for Trabant among those that want to create arcade, racing, simulation, puzzle, dice, strategy or robotics games.

It is really invaluable to be able to start seeing things on screen from the first line of code, to test an idea in hours and to start testing on your iPhone in seconds. I hope I am somehow able to convey that message and make Trabant the go-to product when it comes to simulation prototyping. Before that can happen, there's a lot of work to be done.