A double post, I didn't even realize Tokumaru got in before me.
tokumaru wrote:
You don't make retro games for other people (or at least you shouldn't) you make them for yourself. It's a hobby you picked and willingly chose to do it during your free time. If it feels so much like torture that you have to charge people to compensate for that, maybe you should pick a better hobby.
Heh. I've got a lot of hobbies. See my animations in the art topic. I'm not making this game FOR other people. It's still very self indulgent. It's just that the money is a motivating factor, beyond the joy of making of retro games. And it's just enough to push me to REALLY cool/complex stuff. Simply stated without the profit factor I'd still do it, I'd just do less complex things.
tokumaru wrote:
Like I said before, I probably haven't completed a game yet because of laziness or overall lack of motivation, those are the issues I have to resolve, not the complexity of the game, I'm sure.
That's where I was. The money motivates me to keep working on something complex. But it is not the WHOLE reason beyond why I do what I do. Otherwise I'd make a game for say... PC.
tokumaru wrote:
You won't be able to feed your family with this money, but it should still serve as incentive for you to keep going.
Indeed. That's exactly what I'm sayin' it's doing for me.
tokumaru wrote:
I'm far from being the most righteous person on earth, but I simply can't see myself releasing a purely commercial retro game when I download hundreds of old games for free, that's hypocrisy.
That's fair, man, and I understand that. But I'm one of those guys who goes to a retro game store near me every chance he gets to buy retro stuff. And I now own many games I would never have heard of it had it not been for such dark practices. It's just a shame that even when I buy a game used, the copyright holder still doesn't make any money. Owning a real copy vs owning a pirated copy of old games like this... isn't very different. The only right way to do it is buy stuff off the virtual console if it's even ON THERE. Which you have to admit is VERY different (BTW, I smell a split too) from me pirating any of Sivak's games, since there is still a way for the original copyright holder to make money off my purchase of the game, and I opted out.
tokumaru wrote:
And you simply can't stop piracy. If there is a demand, eventually there will be a ROM of your game floating around. I don't know how common they are, because I've never looked for pirate versions of homebrew games (yet at least), partially because of complete lack of interest (simple puzzle games) and partially because of minimal respect towards the programmer (the few games that actually got me interested), even though I doubt they haven't pirated several commercial games themselves.
Hmm... So I should never make anything that can be pirated? Cool, let's have everyone work at McDonald's and WalMart and call centers. Let's never make any cool software with a price tag attached, because everyone will just steal it! I shouldn't write a book? Or make a painting? Write a manga, etc, just bcause it can be pirated? I imagine a rom will be floating around of my game, and yeah, there's little I can do about it. But as I said the cash isn't the ONLY reason I'm doing this, and heck perhaps it's an optimistic outlook, but some people might pirate and like it enough to buy it. It HAS happened before.
tokumaru wrote:
Also, some programmers come off as selfish in my opinion, because they show up here, and we do everything we can to help them out, and once they are good enough to make nice games they don't give anything back, they just sell something they could only do because they got free help, free documents, free tools... Ironic, isn't it?
That's a fair assessment. In fact, I'm sure I'll be considered in this way. I try to give back when I can though, and in fact I'm currently teaching a friend of mine to make NES games for free. (Which takes a lot of my time.) Maybe... though... that's not quite giving back to this specific community. But I'm passing on the knowledge. Honestly, I try to help out on this forum whenever I can, but a lot of questions go over my head. I'm actually pretty bad at this whole programming thing and the only reason I get anywhere is sheer stubborn dedication. And having the repropak out there helps this dedication.