October Challenge: Monetize one of your games.

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. :(

By ml Date 2013-08-26 22:24

lol - I just think it's more of a long-term goal than a short-term goal.

I've been thinking about something - I don't know if it might be relevant. I am planning to go through and try to package a bunch of games from the showcase as a multi-game, sort of like the Chingu Example Loader, but in straight Gosu. This is going to be a very long-term project for me, as I am still in the learning phase.

At any rate, I was wondering if it might make sense to package three or four or eight or twenty good games together into one game, and release them as a gosu multi-game from multiple authors.

The main thing that would be needed is a way to load each of the different games as separate gamestates.

If anyone else is interested in participating in a project like this, please let me know.

EDIT: As a sidenote, I've also been wondering what it would take to get a gosu game into the Ubuntu Software Center. There are only a few games in the Ubuntu Software Center, and it could be a good place to put some games, although I don't have any idea what would be involved in putting a game up there, and I don't know how a game would need to be packaged for such a release....

By misbehavens Date 2013-08-27 00:22

Alright, so I decided I should just mention what I've been working on. Even if it becomes vapor-ware, probably better to go public with my plans rather that keep it secret for fear that someone will implement my idea before I do.

I'm working on building a Game Distribution platform for games written in Ruby (Gosu) that will allow developers to monetize their games in the same way that the iOS App Store allows you to list a game for a price (or free). It's called Rcade. My idea is that with a legitimate, standardized way to distribute games written in Ruby, similar to RubyGems, the community will benefit and we'll see more professional games develop since developers will be able to monetize their game. I haven't decided if it will be a pay-per-play or pay-to-own model. Maybe allow both. Developers would be able to host their game using their framework of choice: Gosu, Chingu, Gamebox, Metro, or Rcade game.

My motivation behind this is actually to target MAME arcade builders using Raspberry Pis. Currently, you can't run Gosu on the Raspberry Pi, but I'm hoping we can overcome that obstacle. I want to create an environment where people choose to learn Ruby so they can create a cool game, rather than use Python because it's installed by default. I would want to create a nice set of Ruby game programming tutorials, from beginner to advanced.

I have created a GitHub organization to host the repositories that I have created so far: https://github.com/ruby-rcade

It's a long way from being finished, but I'm motivated and want to see Ruby succeed. If you want to help, that would be cool. If not, that's fine too. =]

--Andrew

By SPK Date 2013-08-29 16:46

Interesting. I'll keep an eye on it. :)

By ml Date 2013-09-03 04:34

Sounds like an ambitious project. I wish you the best of luck. I checked out rcade on github. This for me serves as a nice tutorial on how to create ruby gems. At my limited level of programming experience, I could definitely use some tutorials to help make sense of how it all works.

I won't be able to help out with any of the heavy lifting, as I am a novice, but you can count me in on helping out with beginner-level tutorials.

By misbehavens Date 2013-09-18 19:37

Ruby gems are surprisingly simple to create. Bundler has a nice command for scaffolding a new gem. Use bundle gem mynewgem to create the directory. It comes with some nice rake tasks for installing and deploying your gem: rake install, rake release. Check out the .gemspec file to understand how a gem works. Good luck!

By ml Date 2013-09-24 05:55

Thank you for these useful tips.