Where Are The Homebrew Games ?

[Magic Sam]

Hi,

I'm typing this from my bed, on the Pandora

While I like emulators and ports for their technical achievements, I do prefer homebrew games...

We are now some months after the official launch day, and there are still very few of them

If you're a dev and you're currently working on an homebrew game, could you please post details and pictures about your ongoing stuff here ?

P.S: maybe an homebrew competition would help ?

Bye and thanks !

Magic Sam

 

[andmaz]

You may have noticed that not alot of Pandoras have actually been delivered (about 25% of the intitial 4000) and is presently on hold due to various issues the latest and with luck the last being the nubs.

No matter how great it is, without more DEVs having units and more users to make potential donations then homebrew games etc will be few and far between.

Hopefully this should change after Christmas.

 

[TrashyMG]

This.

Also you may want to browse the development section on this forum. A few projects are going on.

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

It's a pain in the arse to develop for. PNDs are messy. Until a decent, official, SDK is released it will stay that way.

Also, ports are easier, and for the most part better than anything most homebrewers (I fucking hate that word) will come up with.

Just my 2 pence.

 

[sebt3]

It's a pain in the arse to develop for. PNDs are messy.

I strongly disagree.
You develop for it like for any linux host... This one don't have GL acceleration but GLES. That's it.
If you're used to Visual Studio or eclipse, I can understand the gnu way disrupt your usage. But once used to it, it is as good as anything else.

How can you say PND are messy, do you have a pandora ? (I though yes, but your claim let me think otherwise...)

 

[Esn]

You may have noticed that not alot of Pandoras have actually been delivered (about 25% of the intitial 4000)

Not even that. According to the official estimate it's "about 900", but some of those are replacements or double orders. I'm 350-450 in Craig's queue and haven't received mine yet.

 

[quartercast]

Poor Esn, you'll get yours soon! Mine was 395-495 and I got mine.

 

[rabidpoobear]

Yeah there are a lot of devs that have been just sitting on our asses for 2 years waiting for a pandora to start writing software for.

 

[iprice]

Call me Mr Impatient, but after waiting over 2 years for my Pandora, I finally cancelled my pre-order.

The number of returns/replacements, the unexpectedly long wait (still!), the forum fights have all had a negative affect on my desire for the Pandora.

As a developer, I was always disappointed by the "emulators and ports are far more important anyway" attitude to homebrew games - I wanted pandora to be different to every other machine and host new software, specially made for it that took advantages of the sytem. But not any more. I don't care for it any longer and will not be developing for it, despite having several apps either on the go or near ready for it. So those that were looking forward to the likes of Zomb'd, well sorry but it's cancelled. My apps will probably be seen in one form or another on different formats though. A shame, as I was really excited about the Pandora for quite some time.

Who knows, if the issues get sorted and they speed up production, then maybe I'll reconsider devving for the Pandora, but unless that happens - and despite being optimistic about the project initially - I'm just not sure that the Pandora has a long enough lifespan to make it a worthwhile investment. If they can't make and sell Pandora 1s, then there's not going to be a Pandora 2...

 

[Pleng]

I hear you Price. I was deliberating over cancelling my batch 2 pre order. As it happens I was lucky enough to pick up a new unit in the MarketPlace for a reasonable enough price so I most probably will cancel that batch 2 order. I do however feel that OPT have missed the boat, and the fact that they're now needing to raise shares to cover themselves rings more than a few alarm bells.

As it is, though, the Pandora is great, and performs a lot of tasks, reasonably well. If they don't ramp up production soon, then there will always be this little niggle inside of me wondering what MAY have been. Specifically, aside from games, it's crying out for a decent video chat package (I might look at PNDing up aMSN when I get my new one, it's python based so shouldn't be too difficult), some music creation software (LMMS?), a decent finger friendly media player, and a nice GUI.

All of these were being looked at at some point, but most seem to have fallen by the wayside. It's a shame, really.

 

[Miner49er]

As soon as I get mine I'm gonna churn out loads!...Well okay, I'll compile my lemming rip-off and probably start work on something else (Actually have already started).

I find it very difficult working on stuff for a console I don't own yet though. I spent a year doing lemmings in the hope I would have my Pandy by the time I finished but alas...

Oh, if anyone wants to compile lemmingsSDL then go ahead! Some kind soul setup a bitbucket repo of it (with the intention of porting to N900) here:

http://bitbucket.org/covox/lem900/

...it contains a few fixes that make it a bit more stable.

Get the graphics etc from http://lessermatters.homeunix.com/LemmingsSDL

 

[skeezix]

I'm working on a turn based wargame; it is a huge project (client server, multiplayer) and I don't have as much free time as I'd like .. but its coming along. Porting an existing app, or an emu, can take hours to days or weeks, but creating a new game and all assets and so on, is months of work (or more) .. given one or a couple people teams, etc. Theres a few homebrew projects from various people, have patience.

That aside.. making pnds is trivial; they're a great solution .. not ideal, but what is? You dont' go for ideal with 1.0, you go for somethign that works, is easy to use and to build, and you get the spec to grow, and you tweak over time; the pnd spec is very trivial, and it works great, and it is absolutely trivial to turn an app into a pnd (2 commands on the shell, with scripts provided to do it, and some GUI tools on the way); we have some improvements we can do to pnd, and evfen some total compatible replacements.. but in time; theres not many developers around, right? (a pnd is an iso with an XML appended, not hard, mnot really messy either. A little goofy, but awesome nonetheless

jeff

 

[WizardStan]

I'm working on a bunch of things but get easily distracted by something else to do.

 

[Bosbeetle]

I am not a dev myself but I might just have to do with the open attitude of the pandora. It would seem that it would be a big pro for development but what Ive been noticing is that because it basically is just a linux environment people dev for a desktop linux machine and than compile that for pandora. In short that is very limiting since the same software can run very well on a resonable prized desktop can run crap on a pandora, so why go for the latter. Especially with a small market like this.

I've been trying to play every game that comes out but I dont have enough time to check them all out. So what happens now in the news sections is a dev posts some new software and than 1 or 2 people say "nice " and thats it. They could also post the same game on a linux games forum and most people will say it's a bit 'meh' because it doesnt use the whole screen or has a strange resolution, or has some weird input like touchscreen or nubs.

If you have a more closed system, as a dev you are a bit more rewarded for making it work and since it is not the same platform it is not as easy to put it on a desktop.

But I can be completely mistaken. But I can imagine if I was a dev and I was making a linux game I would just release it for desktop.

 

[Bosbeetle]

a decent finger friendly media player, and a nice GUI.

Whats wrong with OMMPC

Btw according to wikipedia homebrew is "a term frequently applied to video games or other software produced by consumers to target proprietary hardware platforms not typically user-programmable or that use proprietary storage methods." So I think we shouldnt be calling it homebrew because it isn't. Why not call it "games"

 

[Pleng]

a decent finger friendly media player, and a nice GUI.

Whats wrong with OMMPC

Not seen it. Where can I find it? It's not in the app store.

 

[Prometheus]

It's here - I remembered seeing it in the News Zone.

 

[Pleng]

OK So it's audio only? It looks nice, I'll have to give it a try when I get my new Pandy.

Is the appstore pretty much dead then? There doesn't seem to be an awful lot on it; the file archive seems much more heavily populated!

 

[Esn]

OK So it's audio only? It looks nice, I'll have to give it a try when I get my new Pandy.

Is the appstore pretty much dead then? There doesn't seem to be an awful lot on it; the file archive seems much more heavily populated!

Yep, sebt3 explained it over here. The file archive also doesn't have everything; the most up-to-date lists are actually on the wiki:
http://pandorawiki.org/Software_projects
http://pandorawiki.org/Emulator_list
http://pandorawiki.org/Games
You can sort them by date to see what has been released since you last visited.

Sorry for repeating this so often, but it seems that many people still aren't aware of how much useful stuff is on the wiki...

 

[Pleng]

OK So it's audio only? It looks nice, I'll have to give it a try when I get my new Pandy.

Is the appstore pretty much dead then? There doesn't seem to be an awful lot on it; the file archive seems much more heavily populated!

Yep, sebt3 explained it over here.

That's a shame. Dev's abandoning it because they didn't like something Craig said/did? If we all took that stance there'd be far less Pandoras in the pre-order queue!

The file archive also doesn't have everything; the most up-to-date lists are actually on the wiki:
http://pandorawiki.o...ftware_projects
http://pandorawiki.org/Emulator_list
http://pandorawiki.org/Games
You can sort them by date to see what has been released since you last visited.

Sorry for repeating this so often, but it seems that many people still aren't aware of how much useful stuff is on the wiki...

Wohoo yet another page to check for apps