[IGDA_indies] Amateur/Independent Game Development Tools Market 2004-2008

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Jason Della Rocca
> Some interesting research:
>
> http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/45530/
>
> Too bad it costs a few grand to look at...

Indeed!  Wouldn't want to pay that much to find out they're bullish on
Visual Basic.  :-)  I also wonder at a report that defines the terms
GPL/LGPL but not BSD.  The 3D engine I'm committing to is BSD.
http://nebuladevice.sourceforge.net

Glad someone's taking a look at our problems though.  Not everyone is a
corporation with legions of bodies and capital to throw at projects.  My
own technological goal is to facilitate the efforts of solo developers,
or as darned close to that as I can get.

Personally I've decided to skip the C# generation and move on to Python.
C# is only incrementally better than Java, it is no leap of programmer
productivity.  Nor is it exciting, performance-wise, to a 3D graphicist.
So if you're going to go bloatwad to gain productivity benefits, why not
go all the way?  Java and C# are just halfway houses to more advanced
things.

Here are some articles that caused me to start thinking in these terms,
along with a one sentence summary of the point I think each article
makes:

"Use the most advanced technology you can."
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

"Python Success Stories"
http://www.pythonology.com/success

"Microsoft keeps spewing technologies so that you stay on their
treadmill playing catch-up."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

Jonathan Blow has also been running a series of articles in
GameDeveloper about languages using predicate logic, and how that could
potentially save software engineering labor.  I've also looked long and
hard at functional languages recently, particularly OCaml.  The problem
I see with the more abstract programming paradigms is they only seem to
fit certain game development problems.  I'm still working at a fairly
low level and don't know that they fit, say, pathfinding problems over
large numbers of hexes.  The predicate logic stuff, in particular, only
seems to be appropriate for "qualitative reasoning" problems, not
quantitative.

But I do think there's a clear trend here.  Indies have to stop working
on low-level stuff.  Move on to middlewares, higher level languages, and
more abstract programming methodologies.  Otherwise, we soloists simply
can't get enough done.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                          - anonymous entrepreneur

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