I'm starting to think (once again) that I've been going about things all wrong.

I like to think of marketing (or any sort of audience-targeting in general, really) along the lines of that old story about the little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in the breach of a dike, and kept it there until someone eventually noticed him, and help was sent to repair the leak.

How does this story relate to marketing?

It's the concept of the niche -- A niche is a subset of a market. With video games in particular, there are various types of niche which cater to a wide range of players' tastes. A first-person shooter is a much different experience from that of a turn-based role-playing game. While some people may enjoy both these types of game, I imagine most gamers have a preference -- and a strong bias toward one or the other, at that.

A niche is a specific market subset. Then you have meta-niches -- the niches within a niche -- because, obviously, if you don't do something slightly different from Game A, then people just say "Game B is a cheap clone of Game A" and turn their nose up at it (theoretically -- in practice, this is often not the case). Because of this, some people prefer certain meta-niches -- for example, a Roguelike and a JRPG (such as the Final Fantasy series) cater to the same genre-niche (both are turn-based role playing games in general), but the meta-niches involved are quite different. Although these examples are, by cursory definition, of the same genre -- they are so different that you often have snobbery involving those two meta-niches.

Then you have the crossover niche: A product that takes a game of a certain genre, and combines with it aspects from another genre. For example, the so-called "MetroidVania" type -- a style of game that combines RPG elements with platform-jumping action; for example, the game Cave Story is considered a MetroidVania-style game.

I could continue by rambling on over things like needle-eye niches, and generic audience targeting... but meh, I'll spare you this tangent by going back to my original one.

So, I see targeting a niche as aiming your finger at a hole in a dike. The thing about plugging a leaking hole with your finger is that there is quite a bit involved beyond just jamming your digit in there and waiting until daylight. For example -- what if your finger is too fat to fit the hole properly? You won't stop the leak -- you'll just spray water everywhere. What if your finger is too small to create a seal? The same thing happens.

Being that most of us do not have access to the means required to order hordes of followers do our bidding, or fund a mass-marketing ad campaign, we kind of have to step back a moment, observe where we are, and think about where we're going. In other words, if we stick our finger in the dike, and water is still rapidly spurting forth, we need to consider whether this situation is an acceptable patch -- or if we'll drown before we reach our goal.

A few weeks ago, I got into a vicious argument with a friend over one of my projects (specifically, WulaBugr). By the time the argument was done, I was pretty much put off on that project, and have hardly worked on it since (and probably not at all in the past couple weeks). I tried to keep to it, but honestly, whenever I think about it, I start getting bitter thoughts and wind up wasting hours staring at an IDE (they should probably make Clippy say something like "I notice you're sitting there like a lump, would you like to go to the liquor store?").

The argument wasn't over WulaBugr itself, so much as my typical way of going about things. I was developing the FOV stuff, and was stuck on it for a couple weeks. It was all I worked on. Of course, my friend got on my case about burning myself out on a useless (in his eyes) feature before getting an actual *game* done. Which, honestly, I understand. If I had it to do over again, I would have left the FOV until later. But once I get started on something, I *must* stay completely focused on it, or I will go chasing whatever shiny thing flits by next, and anything before that is left to rot.

Couldn't get that through to him. It got out of hand, we had a huge falling-out, and after that, WulaBugr development has been stagnant since.

Since then, I've focused more on taking some of the stuff I learned while developing WulaBugr and putting it into a library (i.e. Mbark). I didn't put much thought into *why* I am making Mbark. I just thought it would be a good tool for people to use. As such, I put a lot of effort into making sure the library is fully modular, and that people would be able to do whatever they wanted with it (for example, it will by default use a 2D canvas context via the standard "display" object; but someone wanting to use WebGL could replace that display object with one of their own creation).

I kind of realized after a while that this isn't really what I want to do.

I just want to make games. Having a nice, clean engine is a good thing -- but being able to develop a *game* is more important to me. By fiddling around with an all-purpose library, I am basically using my pinky to plug a hole that would take my middle finger to seal. The only reason I've ever worked on actual game engines is to make game authoring easier (which is obviously a wrong-headed approach -- even most game studios know that, as programming and program engineering are tasks often delegated to separate individuals).

To Be Continued...

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Previously, in "Save Holland!"...

Marketing... the little Dutch boy... niche... meta-niche... MetroidVania... spraying water... WulaBugr argument... Mbark is not my thing... Sally points a gun at Rick...

*cue intro sequence*

I've been questioning many things. One of these things is why I picked up JavaScript in the first place to write games.

I was convinced due to it being the wave of the future in a sense -- it's a new standard. It is supported by virtually all modern platforms with a Web browser. It allows me to get my game to more platforms more easily (I can play a game in Windows, Linux, OS X, Android OS, and iOS, no recompiling needed, and only one version of the software to "distribute"). While that is great, I wonder if it is worth what I've had to sacrifice.

With HTML5, JavaScript is capable of some amazing 2D graphics stuff with minimal work. Caveat: It is not as much of a performer as native code (as you're working with an abstraction layer on top of an abstraction layer, on top of an abstraction layer). WebGL handles 3D, but it just isn't there yet -- it is not widely supported by browsers, and those that do support it don't allow it to run on many GPU drivers (I cannot even initialize a WebGL context on any of my computers).

I don't plan on making a visually stunning 3D extravaganza in my lifetime... but it would be nice to have the option of being able to at least make something with graphics along the par of Minecraft without having to buy a computer with a souped-up GPU (and still run the risk of the GPU being blacklisted)...

Getting my game to more people isn't worth squat if I have to sacrifice things I do not wish to sacrifice. After all, everything to which people point as being the "problem" with the gaming market has to do with everything being too watered-down.

Being that I can never adequately compete with a real development studio with any degree of competency, the best I can do is reach for a goal I can realistically achieve -- without succumbing to the temptation to water things down. So what if I can reach more platforms? If my game is a product of bending over backwards for market-share, then that will do little more than ensure my game will be completely ignored.

This leaves me at a bit of an impasse. I'm currently re-evaluating my goals and aspirations. Who knows where I'll head next -- or whether I might actually get there someday?

Guess there's only one way to find out...

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Okay, so I've spent my time since I started the initial gag-reflex resulting in this puddle of existential vomit looking at various game development routes.

I'm thinking of going back to native roots to some extent. I figure I want to target Windows specifically (compatibility with other platforms is something I don't really care about in either direction), mainly because it's the only platform I use to any real extent (only exception is an Android tablet, but meh). Apart from that, I've compiled a short-list of things I desire:

* No documentation crap. Was looking at Irrlicht, which I came very close to adopting; however, I get migraines trying to pinpoint the obsolete information intermingled within the documentation.

* No copyleft crap. GPL and LGPL can go straight to hell and kiss my ass on their way down. Give me either a *truly* libre-licensed library (zlib, MIT, New/Modified BSD), or give me a closed-source solution with a proprietary license (assuming it is inexpensive -- preferably not much more than $200).

* No parental issue crap. I want a synergistic relationship with my third-party libraries -- I don't like being smothered by an overbearing mother any more than feeling abandoned by an absentee father. Let me focus on building my game. Give me the features I need to get up and running, but not so many features that I have to jump through hoops to tweak the recipe.

Seems nothing like this out there exists (as far as I can tell). Some come close, such as Irrlicht (my first option, but I foresee much agony resulting from the lack of attention directed toward documentation), UDK (sounds nice, but seriously -- 1.5GB download? Isn't that a tad much even by today's standards?), and perhaps Panda3D and Torque (though both seem a bit too "smotherly motherly" to me).

Of course, I could also try building my own engine and completely abandon all hope of ever finishing anything ever again.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Mbark seems like a worthwhile project. Whether it was widely used or not doesn't really matter, I think your goal of creating a well-designed engine would serve you well for future game development so Mbark is justified simply by those terms. If it turns out other people can use it, so much the better but it shouldn't be something you care too much about.

JavaScript is very cool in its cross-platformness. There's always a price for such luxuries, and that price is usually performance. The more generic something becomes, the less powerfully it can cater to each individual. But that just becomes one of the many challenges of game development on your chosen platform. If you chose something else where you get great performance on Windows, you'll be paying the price somewhere else. The point is just that it's something you can build into your game design. So you limit your design to not include stuff which would require some kind of uber rig. The most interesting, creative solutions come about in spite of limitations, rather than thanks to great freedoms.

Switching platforms seems like a fine idea, but you can already see there are difficulties just in choosing a library that will suit you best. With JS there was no choice, so you just had to forge ahead with something that was not perfect. Yet you still ended up getting far enough with it to have a game at some level of completion and a general purpose JS engine. What I'm saying is, trying to make the right choice upfront is sometimes an inferior way to go, compared with just flipping a coin and adjusting along the way. After all, the most enjoyable part of development for me is the actual development. As long as I'm developing, the other stuff can be left to kind of solve itself (or not, as it may turn out).

(OMFG, I'm glad I copy-paste before every post. I just got a fatal exception here. Codehead, is your server sad?)

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Right -- I never really had any expectations as far as usage. I originally built it up as an "in-house" tool. Of course, somewhere along the way I figured "why not" and decided I would push it out with a New BSD license tacked on.

Of course, Mbark doesn't really give me the ability to make the kind of game *I* want to make. Although I don't need bleeding-edge performance, I would really like to have a bit more breathing room as far as processing power. Without any sort of hardware acceleration -- coupled with the degree of abstraction involved -- a 3D game, for example, is possible... but it would have to be flat-shaded for any degree of complexity in a scene. Adding texture mapping would slaughter performance on all but the most rudimentary scenes.

Probably would not be so bad if WebGL were an option. For me, it isn't.



Yeah, either way, sacrifices have to be made. I'm just not comfortable with the sacrifices I've been making recently. To be honest, I would be fine with a software renderer, as long as it can perform. I don't need any uber-fancy hardware shader stuff. I just want something capable of decent performance when it comes to 3D rendering (more along the lines of Quake II, and not necessarily UDK).

As far as solutions, I'm not trying to sell myself as some awesome code guru who is capable of "discovering" groundbreaking algorithms or whatnot. I want to make a game, not a tech demo -- nothing I have in mind is particularly earth-shattering... just a pain in the butt finding a way to get there that doesn't make me pull my hair out every 20 minutes.



I mainly got to that level with JS because things pissed me off. Which is the problem -- my goal isn't to make engines, but to make games. Then again, this is the way things have gone since my VB6 days. I always fiddle around over-engineering crap, picking up the slack others left me with, and end up getting nothing done until I get fed up and seek greener pastures.

I guess until I can either create an engine that does what I want; or, someone conjures up such an engine and makes it available to the public -- I'm stuck in game development limbo.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Have you looked at Unity? That's the direction I may be leaning towards once Win8 comes out if XNA continues to get crapped on.

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Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP

Unity does seem like one of the best options I've come across (I looked at it before, but in a cursory manner -- I had all but forgotten about it!).

Of course, it would help if I knew what all was required (since I will have to get a duplication service to download and burn everything to disc and mail it to me... and it would be nice if I could get what I needed without having to spend a month ordering new discs every time I learn about something I missed). The Unity installer is just over 500MB, so it seems like it probably has everything to get started, but just to be sure, let me know if I'm missing anything important!

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

The other advantage to Unity is that you can transfer your knowledge of JavaScript to write Unity scripts.

When I downloaded the installer, there wasn't anything else that was required, but I did also download a sample game from their site and followed along with their tutorial to see how they did stuff.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve