Comment by noduerme
9 months ago
I really miss the days of Flash when I could write lots of mini-engines as needed (e.g. platformers or side scrollers or 2.5D, multiplayer, chat ... all hand coded but reusable) and rely on being able to mix lots of different pipelines for vector art, bitmaps, 3D, audio and UI. There's nothing like that now. I tried to reinvent a few wheels. But at this point... a fairly low level (for script) rendering library like PixiJS is really the best we have. No frameworks, please.
That being said, games are kind of dead. The idea of spending another year or two on another indie game that barely cracks the top 50 for a couple days on an app store is... depressing. Going through the bureaucratic hoops to even get it there and maintain it seems like an exercise in self-torture. I'm kinda back to just making art in my spare time - screen savers, weird web experiences, one-off toys. I think having all my mini-engines in Flash suddenly deleted forever just made me realize how pointless it all was.
Maybe I just spent 20 years getting to be great at the wrong thing. I don't know of a historical parallel of someone spending their life perfecting an art that literally was burned down and blackholed overnight, in quite the same way. I imagine the scribes at Alexandria could at least have gone and scriven somewhere else the following year. So screw it, when I started learning code I was 8 and my brother was a CS major, he gave me his laptop to learn BASIC, and he said "we're just writing on sand." I finally learned that was true.
I got sour on games for a while but I think there are good things awaiting them, because we're starting to get past the hurdle of "new technology usurps the old" actually being germane to the artistic processes that go into game design. Like, it still exists because the devices are so locked down, but it's stopped being a tech-driven business - there's little interest in AAA now, and the broader trends are shaken up too; there's more of a symbiotic pipeline of "make a game that helps people make video content" taking hold, one which has little relationship to recency or production values.
That said I have been pursuing the sustainable elements of gaming for years at this point, seeing the same issues - and for me what it comes down to is what I summarize as "the terrarium problem" - the bigger the software ecosystem you build the game over, the more of the jungle you have to port to the next platform du jour. When we approach gaming as a software problem it's just impossible, we can't support all the hardware and all the platforms.
But within that there are elements of "I can plan for this". Using tech that is already old is one way; Flash, for example, is emulated now. But if you go back to an earlier console generation or retro computers, you can find even more accuracy, better preservation. I took the compromise of "neo retro", since there are several SBCs around that mix old chips with new stuff - those have much more comfy specs to tinker with, while building on some old ideas. Tech that assumes less of a platform is another: I've taken up Forth, because Forth is the language that assumes you have to DIY everything, so it perpetuates ground-up honesty within your software, especially within a retro environment where there's no API layer to speak of and you have full control. And tech that has more of a standardized element is good: if something is "data structure portable", it's easier to recreate(this is why there are many homebrew ports of "Another World" - it's all bytecode).
The last piece of the puzzle in it is - okay, if I take things in that direction, how do I still make it fun to develop with? And that's the part I've been working on lately. I think the tools can be fun. Flash found some fun in it. But Flash as a model is too complex, too situated in just supplying every feature. PICO-8 is also fun, but very focused on a specific aesthetic. I think it's related to data models, conventions and defaults. Getting those things right clears the way.
Games are “dead” in the same way that music is “dead.”
I'm not saying there isn't a ton of brilliant creativity in the field. But there's no path to success in either of those fields. If there ever was, it was when spending 2 years perfecting a game or an album could separate you from the pack, if you were talented. To some extent, the work you did could stand up for itself, without everything being contingent on luck and how much you were willing to make yourself a social media tool. I didn't mean games and music are "dead" in the sense that no one is innovating. Lots of people are. I mean that for people who need to know that they aren't going to waste years building something beautiful that will be forgotten ten seconds later, indie games are no longer a lucrative area unless you have a fat bank account and can afford to waste a couple years of your life.
As a creative outlet, I'll always love making games that no one will ever play, but that's a hobby and not a job.