Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsak
- For the community as a whole, we need to make sure that we build a healthier environment for all those great things to happen and flourish. How we behave to each other and the level of tolerance and endurance we show is crucial (this stands true both for developers and public). Unfortunately the lack of those above is yet another reason that underminds the situation in the scene. For example, when a 9 year old pops up in the forum, eager to learn how to make games on Amiga (with the obvious lack of etiquette and naivity you WOULD expect from a 9 year old) and gets bashed 9 seconds later, this speaks volumes about the level of intolerance and toxicity towards creativity in our retro community. It's a rather extreme example (I know) but tells a very true, all too familiar story here.
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That toxic attitude exists for long time ago (more than a decade). Probably because Amiga users were used to extremely good games for free (back from early 1990) and later the very good Aminet releases (full Point&Click adventures, Cannon Fodder clones etc), their expectations are pretty high and tolerance is very low.
Back in early 2000-ies I was developing a lot for the classic Amigas. Since I was very bad at graphics (my best was 8-bit quality gfx) and even worse at music, I had to find people for the graphics and the music. Okay, I found a young willing artist from Norway (Im>bE), who helped me a lot with the graphics and I used some music from demo scene artists (with permission from them). After months of hard work of coding, testing, putting everything together and making the best effort to make my games Enforcer hits free and as system friendly as possible, I started releasing Amiga games on Aminet. I knew they weren't the best ones, but I was improving over time and getting more and more satisfied while polishing the games, adding more features, levels, better graphics etc...
Then I released the game BoxWorld 2 and even it got featured as news on the amiga-news.de site. That was a pretty achievement for me and I was very happy. Until I've read the comments under the article
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/comment...l?frm_start=30 that killed most of my future motivation for the Amiga. People complaining about the graphics - why not using graphic cards features, why not higher resolution etc. I wanted to make my games using as few resources as possible and even working on Amiga 500, while still compatible with graphics cards and 68060 processors. No point in using fast processors or graphics cards for games that will work on Amiga 500 fine. I wasn't expecting getting slammed for a game that was public domain. I couldn't even imagine what comments it would have been if I did the graphics by myself. Oh well whatever, the graphic artist told me to ignore the comments and that we shall continue making enjoyable games, but for me the Amiga world was not the same again. Later I bought AmigaOne and started mostly porting emulators, I've finished some older projects and eventually ported the games to MacOS X and PC (thanks SDL most of the code stayed from the Amiga), but there was no point for me in creating new games for Amiga anymore.