@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad I always complain about modern games not being as wild west as they used to, but with indie games you have to be a little bit too wild west to get popular.
@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad The market is over-saturated. Everyone who has skimmed a programming text book is making their own game now. You need to be really unique or drown in the endless sea of shovelware, no matter how good your game is.
I thought about getting at least a cult following by porting my games to obscure operating systems like BSD or Haiku. There is probably an audience for people who want to play something other than Tux Racer on those platforms.
@PurpCat @lonestarr @Owl @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad I know that SFML (which I currently use) is available for FreeBSD, but I've heard that a lot of BSD users already run native Linux games on BSD just by swapping library files or something like that, given how similar it is to Linux. Apparently, it's very easy to do that with MonoGame and FNA games despite neither of those officially supporting BSD.
@lanodan @PurpCat @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad
>That said I think it's worth it for indie games to have some kind of Unix-like support (or retro-platform support lol) because they have strong communities so word of mouth likely works much better than doing yet-another Windows/Android release.
Only problem is that most indie developers don't write their own engines and most of those engines don't support BSD. Maybe if more and more people switch to Godot, we would probably see more.
@PurpCat @lanodan @coolboymew @noyoushutthefuckupdad Even Nintendo, who is notorious for developing most things internally and being very secretive about the development of their games, are using engines like Unreal for games like Yoshi's Crafted World and Pikmin 4. Even Unity is used for more recent Pokemon games, but that can be excused for GameFreak being mediocre programmers.
That's pretty much the idea behind homebrew games now, especially console games. Pier Solar and Xeno Crisis were ported to a LOT of things. The thing is, unlike obscure OSes there's someone who will buy a n64 game cartridge of a new homebrew game. As long as you're not targeting a platform too obscure like the Atari 7800, or at the very least have some way of wrapping it in an emulator for Steam, you can do a lot.
There's just less for stuff like classic Macs outside of "Hypercard games" all over itch.io (a bitch and a half to program for), Japanese computers (language barriers and apathy, this is in fact changing as some Japanese indie devs write new PC-88 or X68k games along with Project EGG offering new games), UNIX workstations (expensive and the people who own them could care less about games), and more. Most of the time when someone writes old computer games they solely target something that either was gaming oriented (Amiga, MSX, C64, etc.) or DOS.