Why or how did the Amiga Indie gaming scene die!

[Cpt. Hindsight]

I was just reading most of this thread and I have to say that some people here are dreamers.

The C64 still has a pretty active scene for commercial games and even to this day a much bigger user base than the Amiga. The quality of a lot of modern releases there is also better than in 99% of commercial releases back then (i.e. Knight 'n' Grail or Bomberland), but they still sell (according to the coders, designers, musicians) just enough to buy some beer. How on earth should someone be able to sell a game for the Amiga generating enough money to make a living? This will never happen again.

[jbenam]

Indeed, if you're really lucky and your game sells a bunch, you will be able to treat yourself to a few times in the pub with some friends.

The market is too small and will never grow much past the current point - actually I suspect that we're probably in the peak for the Amiga retro market by now.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Sephnroth

- As an existing dev I am comfortable in my environment - I'm probably going to want to stay in it too. That means I will be searching for ways to make the tools and IDE's I already use on my modern OS (windows for me, mac or linux for others) work for amiga dev. I already have experience with making visual studio use external compilers etc for ARM so that will not be a problem. The next step would be finding ways to quickly test builds in local environment which I expect to use Win UAE to do.

As I specified already in several other threads, this already exists.
Hannibal built such a toolchain which works with Visual Studio and compiles then runs straight into UAE (or WinFellows).
It contains a *lot* of useful tools as well as example projects and use cases.

Do not reinvent the wheel, improve the existing one instead otherwise you become part of the problem instead of the solution.

Link: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78242

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Cpt. Hindsight

The quality of a lot of modern releases there is also better than in 99% of commercial releases back then (i.e. Knight 'n' Grail )

Nice game, i must check this out

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Indeed, if you're really lucky and your game sells a bunch, you will be able to treat yourself to a few times in the pub with some friends.

The market is too small and will never grow much past the current point - actually I suspect that we're probably in the peak for the Amiga retro market by now.

Yes and because of that I would prefer a cross-platform tool like Hollywood covering commercial platforms.

nobody (except some idealists for fun) will develop for such a small market and optimise it for A500

[desiv]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

nobody (except some idealists for fun) will develop for such a small market and optimise it for A500

Isn't that exactly what this is for?
We're Amiga owners.. We specialize in idealists!


desiv

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by desiv

Isn't that exactly what this is for?
We're Amiga owners.. We specialize in idealists!


desiv

I know...

my comment was to the above who wrote that the market is too small to earn any money

[saimon69]

@OlafSch

in fact thats what i think: we should build for leisure rather that for revenue and stop try to milk the dead cow: then once the place is healthy enough i can figure between sw/hw emulation and original users that might appear some slim chance of earning higher than now, but make a living doing Amiga (and NG) games or sw not gonna happen anymore imo

[Adrian Browne]

I don't think anyone thought they would make a living from Amiga games but a nice boxed game could still be made. A few thousand euros could perhaps be raised via kickstarter.

What is the likely hood of creating a game for both Amiga and Atari systems, and any other similar platform?
If the game was designed to be easily portable could a theoretical 500 pre-orders be achieved? At 25 euros per copy that would be 12,500 euros. Some of this sum would be reserved for manufacturing as well as the game budget.

This all simply depends on how many pre-orders one can achieve. The only way to know is to do some research and gauge potential interest via forums and more importantly number of active hardware users etc.

[saimon69]

@Adrian Browne

If i find a way to finish my own projects i would not mind do sometihng like that, just have no clue on where and how to get the logistics for it - plus despite seems nobody is doing donations i would still keep it open as option for digital downloads

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Adrian Browne

What is the likely hood of creating a game for both Amiga and Atari systems, .

OK, there's a thought!
Write great games for the Amiga, and then provide a cr@ppy ST port, just to make up for all the bad ports we got early on!!!!!


desiv

[TenLeftFingers]

One thing is for sure, an Amiga game once created could easily have a port automatically created for:

PC
Mac
Linux

And with modification to the controls:

Android Phonet/Tablet
Ubuntu Phone/Tablet

Another interesting thing to consider would be how to get them to run in the browser (I have seen this online). Because if we could get them on people's TVs by having them run in the browser that could be another vector.

It's a pity iPhone doesn't allow emulation as from the projects I know of where people have published to both platforms, they made their money on iPhone - not Android.

[Adrian Browne]

Originally Posted by saimon69

@Adrian Browne

If i find a way to finish my own projects i would not mind do sometihng like that, just have no clue on where and how to get the logistics for it - plus despite seems nobody is doing donations i would still keep it open as option for digital downloads

Yeah, I guess proper research and data gathering would be the way to go.
Surveys and such. There are companies making retro games like watermelon etc.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by matthey

GCC 2.95.3 had a solid 68k backend but lacked a good peephole optimizing assembler for the 68k. Vbcc today has the world's best 68k peephole optimizing assembler but the backend is basic.

Basic as in ...?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate?

Originally Posted by matthey

Is there any other way to solve this problem besides new 68k Amiga hardware?

Yes. A better analysis of the situation.

Tools, frameworks, compiler backends, convenience-non-accelerating hardware (CF HD, Network, etc.) are coming, the retro movement brings new users, it is not going to be explosively fast but if everyone does their part of the job there will be an Amiga market eventually as long as the historically significant machines are targeted. (Retro fans do not care about new hardware by definition unless it is spec-identical to the original one.)

The only things which are required are: contribute, be patient, rinse, repeat.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

One thing is for sure, an Amiga game once created could easily have a port automatically created for: PC, Mac, Linux

And with modification to the controls:

Android Phonet/Tablet
Ubuntu Phone/Tablet

I want to disprove this myth. I work in game development and to be successful in the mobile market you have to design your game around the touchscreen input method first and foremost. Converting from classical input methods with tons of buttons and analog sticks is a complete nightmare and the success stories are few and far between (they exist but are the exception, not the norm).

Although mouse and touch screens might seem naively similar, they aren't. There are dozens of nasty little differences which cause the naive translation approach to fail miserably especially in a game where reaction speed and comfort are paramount. The games industry has tried it and they learned their lesson hard so please let us bury this notion deep and pour concrete over it so that it cannot be resurrected again.

Another interesting thing to consider would be how to get them to run in the browser (I have seen this online). Because if we could get them on people's TVs by having them run in the browser that could be another vector.

Same remark. Browsers input methods are keyboard and mouse,most Amiga games require a joystick. Converting input methods is much harder than you think when it is at all possible.

[amigapd]

Originally Posted by Cpt. Hindsight

The C64 still has a pretty active scene for commercial games and even to this day a much bigger user base than the Amiga. The quality of a lot of modern releases there is also better than in 99% of commercial releases back then (i.e. Knight 'n' Grail or Bomberland), but they still sell (according to the coders, designers, musicians) just enough to buy some beer. How on earth should someone be able to sell a game for the Amiga generating enough money to make a living? This will never happen again.

I think releasing games on the Amiga for commerical success has long gone - as part of my Amigapd website I interviewed a lot of indie programmers and most left the Amiga around the mid 90s to develop on newer hardware - Have a look at Ola Zandelin's softography - it shows the typical journey of Indie programmers who are still making money from game develpment

http://www.olazandelin.com/softography.html

In terms of the current Amiga scene - I don't think it is as bad as it is made out there have been plenty of fun games made over the last few (3) years such as


Boxx 2
Solomon's Key 2
Maxwell Mouse And The Missing Game Mystery
Tales of Gorluth: The Tear Stone Saga
Incredible Adventures of Moebius Goatlizard, The
Asgard Met Vikings
Solid Gold
Sqrxz
Downfall
Agent Lux


Its just these games are being made by hobbist with other commitments and not as a full time job - this means development takes longer - in some cases over a year rather than a few months.

With one central website to promote all these gems and games under current development - I think the Amiga scene would be seen as more active and Cammys Underground Arcade is probably the way forward.

I think the C64 and other 8 bit indie developments might be exagerated - Knight N Grail I think was released I think in 2009 and the blog for Psytronik Software hasn't been updated since Jan 2014 - unless I am looking at the wrong website.

Also I think there are plenty of Amiga game creation tools available for those eager to make their own amiga games eg -REality - GRAC - Backbone - yes they are clunky and not as user friendly as modern technology - but with some patience you can make games of good homebrew quality - the limitations of the creation software adds to the challenge in the same way as the technical constraints of the hardware add challenges when programming -

[matthey]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Basic as in ...?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate?

Basic as in simple, not highly refined, not perfected, rough around the edges, etc. What is there is for the most part good and correct. However, Dr. Volker Barthelmann had this idea that a good portion of the complexity of the compiler backend could be removed by letting the assembler do the peephole optimizations. This was a good idea and he found Frank Wille's optimizing assembler vasm to use with vbcc but it doesn't work as well on the 68k where CC flag changes of most instructions occur. Only 100% safe peephole optimizations are done by default (the only useful option for a compiler). A good example is MOVEM.L which will be generated when loading/storing registers even if only 1 register is in the list. VASM is expected to peephole optimize:

MOVEM.L Dn,-(sp) -> MOVE.L Dn,-(sp)
MOVEM.L (sp)+,Dn -> MOVE.L (sp)+,Dn

But it can't because the CC is unnaffected in the MOVEM.L cases and set according to Dn for MOVE.L. Vasm can and does do the peephole optimization in some cases with address registers because the CC is unaffected in either case.

MOVEM.L (sp)+,An -> MOVE.L (sp)+,An

Adding the extra needed complexity to the vbcc 68k backend has not been done for a long time which I assume is because its not a priority. I'm not criticizing because a backend is some of the most complex code I have seen and has to be nearly perfect. Also, Volker has done most of the tedious backend work for most CPU targets himself. The 68k backend just needs that last effort to make it great. It has the potential to be great but what is the incentive and priority for an old retro CPU?

A compiler backend is a very important part of code output quality. Here is my opinion of the different parts of vbcc responsible for 68k code generation quality.

vbcc frontend (not CPU or OS dependent) - good
vbcc 68k backend output - average
vbcc/vclib link libraries written in C - average (compiled by vbcc)
vbcc/vclib link libraries written in 68k assembler - very good
vbcc assembler inlines in include files (default) - very good
vasm peephole optimizing - excellent
vbcc instruction scheduler - doesn't exist (most important for 68040+)

Vbcc will do some sophisticated, innovative and amazing things and other times it will make me cry. It has improved a lot over the years but development moves at Amiga pace (which does have a few advantages).

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Tools, frameworks, compiler backends, convenience-non-accelerating hardware (CF HD, Network, etc.) are coming, the retro movement brings new users, it is not going to be explosively fast but if everyone does their part of the job there will be an Amiga market eventually as long as the historically significant machines are targeted. (Retro fans do not care about new hardware by definition unless it is spec-identical to the original one.)

The new FPGA hardware is exciting but taking a long time to improve. It would be better if there was more cooperation and sharing. I agree that many existing Amiga users will wait until FPGA hardware is as good or better spec than what they have but there is some potential to bring back old Amiga users who can now easily buy almost reasonably priced hardware and possibly a few retro computer geeks. An upgraded classic Amiga is more usable than most retro computers.

[nobody]

Originally Posted by amigapd

I think the C64 and other 8 bit indie developments might be exagerated - Knight N Grail I think was released I think in 2009 and the blog for Psytronik Software hasn't been updated since Jan 2014 - unless I am looking at the wrong website.

I don't think c64 scene is exaggerated at all. And usually releases of much (miles away) higher quality than the Amiga
It has the following, maybe i am missing some

Rocket smash ex
New commando
New Ghosts n goblins
New Bombjack
Bruce Lee 2
super Bread Box
Canabalt
Micro Hexagon
Donkey Kong junior
Powerglove
Knight n grail
trance sector ultimate
Sam's journey
many new quality SEUCK games
Awakening
brilliant maze

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

It's a pity iPhone doesn't allow emulation as from the projects I know of where people have published to both platforms, they made their money on iPhone - not Android.

Lots of games on iPhone were/are bundled with emulators in it.

Just look at all the DotEmu games, or Defender of the Crown. The latter one is bundled with an Amiga emulator, which you can "hijack" to play other ADFs if your iPhone is jailbroken

I think that profiting from an Amiga game is still possible, but only if the game would also be released on Mobile using an ad-based revenue model. Retro is all the rage at the moment, but still it needs to be simple enough to attract casuals and you have to get lucky and hope that people actually notice your game in the slew of retro-styled games that are getting released nowadays.

So profiting from an Amiga game, maybe - but not from the Amiga sales

[nobody]

Profiting yes, but would have to be of this quality (meaning HIGH quality).

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