[HN Gopher] Games Worth Continuing to Develop (Part 6)
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Games Worth Continuing to Develop (Part 6)
Author : ibobev
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-10-24 10:41 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (c64games.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (c64games.net)
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Sometimes I find myself thinking about the difference between
| video games and traditional games. For some reason, we assume
| video games are transient. What you played a few years ago
| probably isn't what you're playing today, and you certainly
| aren't playing something that you played 25 years ago. Of course
| there's the nostalgia remakes and all that, but that's a small
| subset.
|
| On the other hand, you have chess, poker, monopoly, etc. These
| games persist unchanged for decades, sometimes centuries.
|
| Obviously the transience and rapid development of software is a
| major factor. But it's interesting to ponder what a persistent
| digital game would look like.
|
| I suppose Tetris is probably the closest example I can think of.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Traditional games cannot iterate because they exist as an
| agreement by the players, they don't have anybody who "owns"
| the game to improve it. Notice that in tabletop and modern
| boardgaming, where they do have a coherent owner, we _do_ see
| revisions and iterations. If I play Dungeons and Dragons today,
| or Cosmic Encounter, or Magic the Gathering, it 's not the same
| game as 25 years ago. Not as radically as video games have
| changed, but still they have evolved because the owners of
| those games have iterated on them.
|
| To my mind, the non-transient part is that these old games have
| clear successors that hew very close to their original form
| that still draw new players. If you want to play Quake, you
| will find a massive number of games that play very very close
| to Quake and have active playerbases.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| There's always The Ur-Quan masters:
| https://sc2.sourceforge.net/
| cardanome wrote:
| Really? This might be true for multiplayer games (though people
| still play Counter Strike 1.6 I guess) to some extend but for
| single player games I don't see how they are transient.
|
| Most of the games I play are ten years or older. Admittedly
| lots of games that I never got around playing as a child. Also,
| retro gaming is huge.
|
| With gog.com it is pretty easy to play old game[?]. Though many
| more modern games might get lost forever because they require
| access to certain servers. We need legislation that forces
| publishers to open source games including the server-side code
| once they stop supporting them.
| acomjean wrote:
| Well some games are eposidic. I play a little fortnite, and
| the island keeps changing, significant things come and go
| (some weapons, map locations, bosses, ufos, boats). Its keeps
| it from getting stale, but you can never go back to the way
| things were..
| reidjs wrote:
| Many of those games have sequels, doesn't that mean they have
| been developed further?
| wzyoi wrote:
| It's not original games, but their remakes for C64:
|
| "8 Bit Civilizations (working title) by Fabian Hertel is a
| impressive fan remake of the classic for the Commodore C64."
| mathnode wrote:
| The term "demake" is really popular in the fantasy console scene:
|
| https://itch.io/games/tag-demake/tag-pico-8
|
| Some of these projects like Alone in the Dark and UnduneII are
| incredible.
|
| The forum post for UnduneII has lots of info on it's creation:
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=47155
| mdtrooper wrote:
| Well, the first famous "demake" was fan version of GTA for NES.
| But the project really dead...very cold dead.
|
| I am not sure but I think that the developer changed the game
| title and the platform.
|
| https://www.grandtheftwiki.com/Grand_Theftendo
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _I am not sure but I think that the developer changed the
| game title and the platform._
|
| Correct, the wiki page you linked actually mentions this:
|
| > _It was developed in 2002, and was due to be released in
| Fall of 2005. It was never released, and instead it was
| replaced with a brand new game, Retro City Rampage._
|
| Here is the game in question:
|
| https://www.vblank.com/RetroCityRampage/
| bitwize wrote:
| When I first saw Retro City Rampage I thought of Grand
| Theftendo, but I didn't know they were related!
|
| Retro City Rampage did actually get "retro system" releases
| -- for DOS and Windows 3.1.
| aasasd wrote:
| There were official GTA 1-2 for Gameboy Color, so I'm not
| sure there was even much need for that effort.
|
| (There was also 'Driver' for GBC.)
| [deleted]
| thomaspark wrote:
| Cool site. Here's the rest of the series:
|
| https://c64games.net/2022/04/15/abandoned_games/
|
| https://c64games.net/2022/07/23/abandoned_games_2/
|
| https://c64games.net/2022/07/27/abandoned_games_3/
|
| https://c64games.net/2022/08/21/abandoned_games_4/
|
| https://c64games.net/2022/10/06/abandoned_games_5/
|
| I always felt Starcraft: Brood War was a near perfectly balanced
| game worthy of preservation.
| nz wrote:
| In a similar vein, Age of Empire 2 had a very interesting
| resource-balance that few other games have managed to
| replicate. With 5 resources (food, wood, gold, stone,
| population), and each of those resources being good for very
| different things (i.e. gold for stronger attack units, and
| stone for static defenses), and with the population being
| capped at 200, it presents the player with very interesting
| choices that have ripple-effects down the line. The sequels
| didn't quite manage to pull this balance off. And the dynamic
| is very different from other classics like Civ or Humankind,
| because those games about geographic control instead of worker-
| management.
|
| Hoping someone undertakes a formal study of game-balance and
| economics in various strategy games (to help us make better
| games).
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Definitely. Also there are four ages in AOE, each one
| increasingly expensive but opens up a lot of technology. It
| is a big investment and doing so without much control can you
| leave you very vulnerable and is a key window for your
| opponent to attack. It's a unique mechanic that adds a lot of
| strategy to the game
| nz wrote:
| Yep, which creates a first-strike/second-strike trade-off.
| If you have enough resources to click-up an age (or to
| research some tech-upgrade), you have to choose whether to
| do _that_, or to build up your military. If you choose the
| latter, you are implicitly trying to cripple/destroy your
| opponent before they attack you. If you succeed, then well
| played. But should you _fail_, you have a huge problem.
|
| The interesting thing is that the first-striker's failure
| implies that the opponent had built himself up enough to
| survive the first strike. Which implies that their economy
| was not vulnerable to the first strike, and might also be
| capable of launching a second-strike soon.
|
| As a kid, I never really _understood_ decisions like Pearl
| Harbor -- classic first-strike/second-strike tradeoff
| example -- until I played this game.
| bullen wrote:
| I thought I had seen them all but nope so I downloaded the
| single file .prgs on the first page and zipped them if anyone
| want to give them a run:
|
| http://move.rupy.se/file/prv.zip
| bullen wrote:
| Just had to fire it up for a quick 4v4 Hunters...
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| <on the slim chance anyone from Eidos or Embracer game devs are
| in here/>
|
| Please can you continue with the Deus Ex series, the three games
| with their Cyberpunk storylines and tech futurism/pessimism are a
| real gaming treasure.
|
| It would be a shame for the franchise to just become another IP
| asset gathering dust.
| bitL wrote:
| How about Half Life, Splinter Cell, Mirror's Edge...?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I realize everyone hates Invisible War and pretends it doesn't
| exist, but there are actually four games in the franchise so
| far (five if you count that mobile game)
| FortiDude wrote:
| Some games could become immortal just like chess or go or poker
| are today, if only they were open sourced...
|
| This concept of continued developement is incredibly intriguing
| to me
| yakubin wrote:
| Chess is immortal, not because its inventor left clear
| instructions how to make chess boards and pieces, but because
| the rules are well understood. To extrapolate it to video games
| it wouldn't be about preserving the source code, but having a
| good understanding of what makes a game what it is. It's more
| like all the different versions of Doom or Mario, which do not
| really share code.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes. I'd say any 25+-year-old game where 99% of gameplay
| knowledge is transferrable and they still have a large
| playerbase fits the bill for "immortal" games.
|
| There are opensource reimplementations of many of such
| classics anyways. Civ games definitely pass the test. The
| classic Doom style boomer-shooter, the mario-style
| platformer, the Arena-style Quake3 shooters also have many
| opensource reimplementations. Some may not be rule-for-rule
| bug-compatible reimplementations, but they're definitely
| "close-enough" variants of the game that scratch the same
| itches and could be picked up quickly by a player who enjoys
| the classic.
|
| What's more surprising are the giants of gaming that don't
| get this kind of treatment. Like, there are reimplementations
| of classic RTS games like Warcraft 2 and Red Alert, but the
| but the art in these games are all asset-rips. You don't have
| something like Xonotic or Unciv that rebuilds the game fully
| from scratch. The only RTS game to get that treatment AFAIK
| is Total Annihilation thanks to Zero-K and Beyond All Reason.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| There are several issues with open sourcing anything.
|
| Ownership is the first one. Who owns the code. Take something
| recent done with an unreal engine. Who owns that code? Most
| opensource licenses are very clear on who owns it as they are
| using copyright and contract law to back it up. The bits the
| dev added clearly are the studios code. But what about unreal
| that is fairly clearly not theirs to decide on. Then plugins
| they buy, those companies may or may not want to open source
| their code as that is what they sell to stay in business. You
| could make a case 'what about that 25 year old game'. Well that
| is interesting too as you still have to get owner approval. Yet
| the owner may not even know they own it. As the legal bits were
| long ago forgotten in some lawyers bottom filling drawer. Or
| for that matter want to pay someone to fixup that legal mess.
|
| That is assuming they even still have the code. When a company
| goes into 'sell everything' mode. They are not always very
| careful to keep that sort of thing around. They care more about
| 'these 20 chairs can get me 50 bucks a piece, and there are 30
| computers worth 200 each' not what is on them. Most of the old
| code dumps we have access too are from companies that did care
| or someone who pack ratted it away in their desk drawer at
| home, or someone was sloppy with their security.
|
| Then on top of that. Many times before 2000 there was no real
| source control. Some companies did it. But many did not bother.
| It was a folder on 'jims' computer that was the golden copy.
| Then there is the idea of heritage. You made a game. But you
| made 6 games since then, each one building on the previous one.
| Would giving out that code mess you up somehow today?
|
| There are also those who can do all of those things. They just
| do not want to. This is the thing they sell. They are not going
| to give it away, at all.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| I'm shocked by how many websites can't handle a few requests a
| second
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| I'm not. Plenty of people expect their traffic to be "a few
| friends", not "a few hundred thousand strangers", and they
| still use the first host that showed up in Google sixteen years
| ago.
|
| Those hosts cater to people who expect a few friends' worth of
| traffic, and have little incentive to optimize for the Hacker
| News Hug that is honestly unlikely to happen.
|
| Can you find an affordable host that could scale to big
| traffic? Sure. But that takes time to research, and they payoff
| might not be there for most people.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I am pretty sure my site would be ok. It's just static HTML
| and pretty streamlined. A $5/month VPS. Maybe some day I will
| write a cool enough post I feel like sharing.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Well, the only real way to know is by sharing the link and
| finding out. No plan surviving first contact and all that.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I ran a load tester at it. It is just nginx and a static
| site generated with tesla, nothing remarkable. 522
| Req/Sec and around 4 MB / Sec bandwidth consumed. 16K
| pages served in 32 seconds with zero errors. 122 MB
| total. At least, in its current form it would survive a
| pretty significant hug of death :)
|
| (stealthgoat.com if anyone is curious, I just started
| blogging again after many years of meaning to, currently
| just non-tech stuff.. kind of just my personal notes I
| felt like sharing with the world) :)
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