Independent Game Developers

[Prophet]

The Pandora keyboard will absolutely prove to be a HUGE advantage, and people who thought they didn't need/want it will end up loving it.

I have no doubts there.

And from a design POV - that extra space where the keyboard sits is there for a very good reason - to house a higher capacity li-ion battery. And I'm sure everyone wants good battery life. So why not use that extra space below the controls for a keyboard? It's really very smart, and will enhance Pandora's uses many times over.

My only concern with the KB is missing keys. Seems there's room to add a couple more useful ones, like CTRL...

 

[Sphinxter]

Was against it at first but what the hell, don't have to use it and if you do then even better. The design has totally grown on me, can hardly wait for it. I'll still code for the old mantra, "The best games are played with one hand", doing more with less is better, too many controls confuse the user and spoil the game. I see nothing wrong with the old school arcade joystick methods of entering a user name, either is ok. Interesting thing will be seeing how much will be ported from it to devices without enough buttons. Scaling 800x480 down to 320x240 is not real pretty either.

 

[pupnik]

Wow. I'd not considered the infinity engine games as possibilities. I would absolutely adore Torment on the move - especially since, unlike on a PC, on a small sceen it won't hurt my eyes (the graphics are amazing for the time, but definitely not great when blown up on a modern LCD).

GemRB needs contributors, testers, good bugreports!

Forums
http://forums.gibberlings3.net/
Wiki
http://linux.prinas.si/gemrb/doku.php
Homepage
http://gemrb.sf.net
Irc
#gemrb on irc.freenode.net

Build it on yer PC and catch up on this, so we can help finish this project in 2008!

 

[trooper]

Nothing more to say except .

Trooper

 

[icurafu]

Does gemRB suport 800x480 correctly. That is, without screctching the pixels from the standard 4:3 view?

 

[sparr]

judging from the photo, i would say yes. i just loaded the same scene in real BG2 and it looks the same (although i cant see as wide of a viewport)

 

[quasist]

As I think the must suitable successor for gp2x would be the "XGP mini", pandora is for emulation old geezers

 

[BaDToaD]

As I think the must suitable successor for gp2x would be the "XGP mini", pandora is for emulation old geezers

What a sad little life you must lead trolling in a forum that you frequent.

 

[quasist]

As I think the must suitable successor for gp2x would be the "XGP mini", pandora is for emulation old geezers

What a sad little life you must lead trolling in a forum that you frequent.

yeah! I'm the mortiis era 1-2 fan!

 

[dodgyville]

As I think the must suitable successor for gp2x would be the "XGP mini", pandora is for emulation old geezers

Something pocket-sized compared to the gp2x, with uber-long battery life, but a faster CPU, 3D chip, and more memory. (and wifi). That would be sweet. Basically a really, really, flat and smaller gp2x.

 

[pupnik]

Does gemRB suport 800x480 correctly. That is, without screctching the pixels from the standard 4:3 view?

That's running in 800x600 mode, with SDL throwing away the bottom 120 pixels. I'm not going to work on hacking the UI to display custom resources (border elements). There's a guy in #gemrb who is interested in doing this though (for the EEE).

GemRB is still missing some core elements: Proper Combat Rounds. Area effect spells. Also neeeded is a lot of game-specific playtesting and scripting. The project really needs one or two more committed developers.

 

[pupnik]

BACK ON-TOPIC:

Indie game developers.

I think it would be worthwhile at this stage for us in the 'community' to reach out to ~established~ indie game developers and make the 'pitch for the pandora' - priming the pump as it were.

Now we all know there are a million things out there competing for 'eyeballs'. And generating awareness for indie games is a similar problem to generating awareness for the pandora. I've found a couple of sites and blogs about indie games (that I'd like to play) which hilight some of the stars of the indie scene. Surfing through these yields a lot of games that could run GREAT on the pandora.

http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=658 GameTunnel Best RPGs of 2007
http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=556 GameTunnel Best RPGs of 2006

http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/ Indie Gaming Portal

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3461 RPGwatch Indie RPG of the year

So check out some of those offerings - a bunch of them could run great in 800x480 or 640x480 and fall within pandora's specs. What should we do to get ahead of the game on bringing indie developers to pandora? Compile a list of the best companies so CraigIX/MWeston can send them an Promo kit with information on the base system available libraries etc?

Maybe we can pull together and do something to help pandora on this?

 

[Chip]

Maybe we can pull together and do something to help pandora on this?

It is a really good idea, but it is still too early to go recruiting developers. We can't expect people to port their games to a system without an SDK to port it with.

Once the first run of test units is ready, then you can maybe offer them to 3rd party indie developers to start working with.

 

[OrR]

I would like to help recruiting indie game developers. (In fact I have already started...)

Some things that would be useful to know:

What will the official Linux distro be like? I'm not very knowledgeble about these things but it would certainly be good to know asap how to design your game to get it running on Pandora quickly.

What are the possible distribution channels? I guess Clickgamer will sell Pandora games. There is always the option to sell them yourself. What about official sales at the distributors? (Craig, ED) What kind of services to they plan to offer in that regard?

What is the risk? Past sales numbers of the GP32, the GP2X and their commercial games could make it easier for indie devs to calculate the investment they should risk on making a commercial game for a new and emulator centered platform. Developers also like low risk opportunities like their game being featured in a bundle with the consoles for a fixed price paid to them in advance. I'm not sure Craig and ED can/want to do commercial game bundling, though.

What methods are available to let people know about your game? When the GP2X was new, we started the GP2X.letter, a newsletter to inform everyone in the community about recent developments. It wasn't really successful and the project soon lost it's energy and went belly-up. I still think the general idea is good, though: Collect the email addresses of everyone who bought a Pandora (if they allow it) and everyone else who is interested and send out a newsletter regularly. It gets you a way to push information to everyone, even to the people too busy/lazy to be an active part of the community. This needs distributor support as we need to collect the email address of everyone who buys a Pandora (and is willing to get our spam). It could still be community-organized, though. I guess I'll make a new thread about it...

 

[atomicthumbs]

The official Linux distro will be like Debian.

To let people know, there could be announcements in the package manager, a news ticker on the menu, an announcement on the front page of GP32X, and various other things.

As I think the must suitable successor for gp2x would be the "XGP mini", pandora is for emulation old geezers

*snork*

 

[OrR]

I like the idea of pushing info directly to the device. Of course only if the user wants that. Is this something that might realistically be done?

 

[Chip]

I like the idea of pushing info directly to the device. Of course only if the user wants that. Is this something that might realistically be done?

There is no reason why it couldn't be done. Once somebody decides on a package distribution system, it would not be hard to manage it from your Pandora directly. I sort of assumed from the beginning that this is how it would work.