Blogs

My experiences with the nonexistent open-source game development community

Submitted by Duion on

Hello Internet, over all those years of being into open-source game development I just have to tell someone my experiences with that.

Let's just start with the biggest problem right ahead and the biggest problem with the nonexistent open-source game development community is its nonexistentness and the biggest problem with nonexistent things is, that they don't exist.

On a second look I think, it could also have been my fault to assume the nonexistent open-source game development community exists to begin with. To my defense I have to say that there was quite some evidence that the nonexistent open-source game development community exists, like many seeminlgy existing games being developed as well as websites dedicated to that and of course many people seemingly developing open-source games. However now after almost 6 years of being into game development, I can pretty safely say to have never met a serious active open-source game developer. Before people now go nitpicking on my definition of what is serious and what is active, I want to try to give an easy explanation for that, serious means that someone seriously tries to accomplish anything and active means, that he is currently actively trying to seriously accomplish anything, or even easier explanation it has to be an existing open-source game developer, since only an existing open-source game developer can develop existing open-source games, while a nonexistent open-source game developer can only develop nonexistent open-source games.

Sadly there exist many nonexistent open-source game developers, who develop even more nonexistent open-source games, which may give the impression to outsiders, that they are actively existent open-source game developers, but as an insider you will quickly find out that they do not exist. How I'm so certain, they do not exist? Well I never met them, it is that simply. One could argue, that I have not searched enough and I may meet one some day, but I have to say I searched very well and found many regular game developers and I'm able to interact with them almost daily and talk about real existing game development, so even if the open-source game developers exist, they must be of such small quantity, that they are basically nonexistent.

My views may sound a bit radical and of course it was a bit exaggerated, in reality there are of course exceptions. I indeed did meet some existent open-source game developers from time to time, but as said they were of very small quantity and not very active overall and most of them quickly abandoned their (mostly nonexistent) game projects. So yes there may be small exceptions, but generally I think I'm correct with my conclusions.

I also do not think I was delusional when starting doing open-source game development, since I started it, since there was nobody doing an up to date 3D shooter that is not a ripoff of Quake over and over again. So the main reason I got into existent open-source game development was, that at least as I thought in my niche open-source game development was nonexistent, but later it turned out I was wrong with my assumptions, since not only did open-source game development not exist in my niche, but it did not seem to exist in total.

Somewhere inbetween those experiences I also joined some communities of nonexistent open-source game developers developing nonexistent open-source games, but they quickly censored and banned me for doing real existent open-source game development, they were probably just scared since real existent projects are superior to nonexistent projects which cannot prevail against existent projects, but that is another story.

Blog Reference: 
Development

People like to be fooled

Submitted by Duion on

In the past I always thought people really mean it seriously, if they complain about bad products or shady business practices from companies and therefore want improvement of the situation. I don't want to go into detail about those shady practices, since there are a lot of them, but in its core it is all about milking as much money from the customer while at the same time spending as little as possible into the development, this results in never fixing issues with the game or just abandoning it straight after it was released and those games that do not get abandoned get filled with microtransactions which results in the game experience being destroyed, since it is no longer a fair game which makes it meaningless to play on a competitive level. Most peopel probably know the problems very well, since they complain about them and even make documentaries explaining all in detail whats wrong.

I watched it for a long time and noticed nothing ever changes, so I decided to take things into my own hands and solve the issue, at least in the small niche I was interested in. My idea was, that if there are so many people who are unsatisfied with the situation on the games market, that at least some will join and make it better, you know, supply and demand logic. Then the most amazing reaction happened after I released my first prototypes and tried to find a team that would help me developing the game further and the thing that happened was absolutely nothing. So either the supply and demand logic is wrong, or there is no demand and people are just dishonest about what they want.

So let's compare the supply in the games industry, on the one hand you have honest companies trying to make good games for a fair price and on the other hand you have companies that are dishonest and only make the games as good as they need to be and then use shady methods to milk as much money out of the customers as possible. Basically the customer has the choice between companies that fool them and companies that are honest to them and it looks like most customers are chosing to be fooled, therefore giving money to those companies and making the bad companies more powerful so they can produce even better methods to fool people and people chose them again and so on.

This is not just theoretical, since there are indeed cases where companies provably fooled people, for example one famous case I will not name promised in alpha access that they will not add microtransactions to their (full price) game and when the game then got released they immediately filled it to the brim with super expensive microtransactions and people loved it. So you may think that straightforward lying to customers is bad publicity and will reflect in loss of sales, but in reality it did not have any negative impact. It is almost as, if people like to be fooled, they may not admit it, but indirectly they like it, additionally they then have a reason to complain and hate on someone else, which seems to give their life meaning and distracts from their own problems.

Psychologically this is a very weird phenomenon and I have not fully figured it out yet, but the facts are pretty clear, people like to be fooled, just the "why" and "how" is not that easily explainable. My main theory for that is the ego-theory, people have an ego and the ego does not like to be wrong, so when an ego driven person is fooled, he will not admit he has been fooled, but then just ignore the fact that he has been fooled and/or rationalize that there is no problem and they wanted it that way anyway. Additionally the ego likes to be flattered, so you can gain ego driven peoples favor, by just making impossible promises (lying) to them that no honest company can compete with and they will like it, they think if they buy the superior product, it makes them also better and the previous explained mechanism will prevent them from realizing they have been fooled. After that there is a longer list of other psychological phenomenons, for example a famous and important one here is probably the sunken cost fallacy. For example if someone paid a lot of money for a product, in this example a video game, he will stick to it and never admit that he may have been fooled and paid all that money for nothing or for an inferior product and again here comes the ego mechanism to back it up since the ego can never be wrong and in ego logic the more money or energy has been dumped into something, the more value it has.

Well these are some of my attempts to figure this out and often when I think about those topics I remember my father always saying to me as a child: "Son, people like to be fooled", when I asked why things are the way they are in this world. So theoretically I knew this fact for almost all of my life already, but often I was in denial about this, because I could not believe it, but now after so many time and life experienced I see it confirmed over and over again and I'm finding more and more proofs for it.

So people like to be fooled, just the question why is more complicated and no I will not fool people just so they like me, since being fooled is stupid and I do not like having stupid people around me.

Blog Reference: 
General

To Battle Royale or not to Battle Royale

Submitted by Duion on

People keep asking me, if I will make a Battle Royale game mode for Uebergame, because it is so popular now, but I always found it boring and retarded.

My first encounter with this game was on some streaming website, where I watched it out of curiosity, since suddenly everyone was playing it. So I watched a guy walking alone through the wilderness, well you cannot really call it wilderness, it is more like a desert with an occasional tree planted randomly here and there, but he was walking around alone doing nothing for like half an hour or so. Occasionally he would pick up items and he also found a car, he got in then he drove around alone doing nothing else, then he ran himself over with his car through some glitch or so and was instantly dead without having started playing and lost all his stuff that he collected. After that he did the same again, but that time he was not fully dead, only 80% dead, so he used up all his medpacks he collected to heal himself from running himself over. Then I shut the stream off, since it was too boring, I just wasted half an hour or more of my life watching a guy walking around and killing himself and I thought to myself "Is this really the new thing now? Is this what gaming is about now?", well most likely I picked up a bad stream, but still not that great of a concept.

Regarding that I remember watching some documentary about game design and the guy there said, that the future of game design will be games that consist mostly of players just walking from A to B and he said, people will love it. It seems his prediction got fullfilled once more with this Battle Royale game that consists mostly of running around from A to B and people love watching it.

I really cannot understand all this hype, people try to argue how fun and innovative it is, but I still don't get it, lets analyze the innovative part. Battle Royale is basically the "last man standing" game mode, where death is permanent until everyone except one person is still alive and the last person alive is the winner. It existed almost as long as there existed 3D shooters, but it was always one of the most, if not the most unpopular game mode for obvious reasons, I mean think about it, everyone has to wait until everyone was dead, so you end up waiting most of the time instead of getting the action. You wait till you meet other players or wait hiding, since that was the best tactic to survive longer and when you were dead, you had to wait until everyone else was dead also, which could take a long time. The current Battle Royale games solved that problem partly by just joining another game, but the exiting and joining process takes time again and then you have warmup phase, running around phase, collecting gear etc. The other part people claim is so innovative is that you start naked without clothes or weapons, well this also existed in 3D shooters as long as you can imagine (if you ignore the clothes part), you could just remove the starting weapons, but this was retarded also for obvious reasons and nobody did play that way, it is not a fair game, if you have no chance to defend yourself. It is kind of perverted to like to beat a defenseless enemy, I mean there is no honor in that and also not fun.

So I start to seriously questioning the sanity of humanity, how can something that was the most unpopular in the past that nobody played, become the most popular that almost everyone is playing? I mean it is not that it is new or innovative, I even knew a guy over 15 years ago who build a mod or level based on the same Battle Royale movie intenting to have the same gameplay as in the movie and of course nobody played it. So if this game mode is so fun and innovative, it would have at least catched some people.

Next part for me was researching into marketing tactics and human psychology and to make it short, I found that popularity is all manufactured and most people have no ability at all to determine, if a product is good quality and fun to use or not. As long as it looks popular everyone jumps on and what is popular is decided by streamers, youtubers, PC magazines etc and most of them are bribed, which I don't have the money for. I mean I also had to play games I hated that were "popular" as a child to get accepted by my "friends" and to have someone to play with, at that time it was Counter-Strike, sure it was not that bad compared to alternatives at that time, but it was not what I really liked.

I even watched that Battle Royale movie all that stuff now is based on and found it very weird and perverted, I thought typical japanese stuff, they are all crazy, no sane human would tolerate such a future where school children are forced to kill each other on a remote island, because overpopulation and bla bla. Seems I was proven wrong and this pervert trend entered into our civilized western world now.

So the question I have to ask myself all the time is: "Will I become corrupt, go with the masses, go with the degeneration, deny my own ideals and become popular as a result or stay true and stay unpopular?" So far the answer was always obvious to me...

 

PS: Maybe I'm just too lazy to build it, but if someone wants to help building it I can integrate it, since hey Uebergame is open source and development is democratic and stuff.

Blog Reference: 
Uebergame

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