October Challenge: Monetize one of your games.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-09-30 05:48

Hey there,

I know there are some awesome, complete games hidden in the Showcase. The flood of free games is a bit overwhelming with thousands of Ludum Dare entries per year though. So I am happy to see this challenge:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/09/28/announcing-october-challenge-2011/

Make $1 off any of your games in October. Anyone in? I will probably make around $1 off Terava in October, but I really want to throw my old stuff on a store of some kind.

Here is a list of opportunities. Let me know if you want to throw Gosu into some distribution network and it is missing something/doing something illegal, I would be proud to help.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/09/29/october-2011-opportunities/

By RavensKrag Date 2011-10-02 00:26

Thinking about distributing my game over Desura when it's done, especially because they have a Linux client now. Don't know much about the legal ramifications of that, only that the company which controls Desura is based in Australia. Unfortunately, no Mac client, but I might have problems deploying for OSX anyway =/

Should be interesting to see how many Gosu games start making a bit of money this month :D

By Jwosty Date 2011-10-06 23:51

Huh, that wound be interesting to see how many people have good enough Gosu games that people would be willing to buy it... Probably almost all of the ones in the forums could :P

I wonder, do you think it's possible to deploy a Ruby-Gosu game on Steam? Now that would be pretty cool.

By RavensKrag Date 2011-10-07 06:25

All steam games have to be packaged in a self-contained executable if they are flash games, and I would assume a similar process would apply for ruby games. Personally, I see this as a problem, because then the user's computer would have multiples of the same packages installed.

But the only way out of that I see is a open-source games-as-service model, which will probably take a while to catch on, if it ever does.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-10-07 14:38

If you have some street cred, you can put a half-finished project on Kickstarter, ask for $1 and promise to finish it. That format of open-source-as-a-service gaming probably works.

(Or http://fiverr.com/! xD)

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-10-07 14:34

Well, if you port your stuff to C++, it should all work. Ruby/Gosu is probably not ready for prime time with Ocra, would feel weird to have a game extract its source code to %TEMP% all the time. I wonder if Rubinius with its bytecode-compilation works on Windows?

Ruby/Gosu on OS X is a little more sane, I think, but the weirdish menu bar of the .app wrapper will probably keep it out of the Mac App Store. It would be a nice project to retry with MacRuby, but from my little command-line experience, it's crashy sometimes.

By Spooner Date 2011-10-07 15:53

I'm sure that extraction to temp would be quite a problem with Steam, et al, but Ocra only does that so that it can make a nice clean exe. I can't see any particular reason why you couldn't run an Ocra exe and find the temp folder it creates (which will have everything you need to run it on a Windows PC, without being too bloated with stuff you don't need) and distribute that instead, since Steam would deal with managing all the separate files sensibly. I'm sure we could hack Ocra to do this for us anyway (or bug the Ocra people to do similar).

I did look into using http://spoon.net to distribute a game of this type through a browser and, since that uses a sandbox on the user's machine, there'd be no issue with extracting to a temp folder. I never followed it up, though, since they wanted usable products rather than dodgy beta stuff (most importantly, they lagged updates by about 2 weeks, I think, so they wouldn't be appropriate for rapid development cycles). Also, since noone would want to install a rather obscure client just to play your game, I am not sure this is a significantly better method than downloading exes.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-10-08 11:04

Oh, right. Anyway, the packaging probably would only eat up some leftover 2-3 days of an otherwise finished and sellable project.

I am still thinking which LD game to revive & polish. Tough. :(

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-11-01 10:41

Bah, what a boring failure. Needed to do more reliable work this month. The game is well planned-out though. :(