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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I was unexpectedly successful in the gaming business (Empire). All I did was make the game I wanted to play, but couldn't find.

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... in 1977.

You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone. The dynamics of virality are very different.

Look at the vast majority of successful indie games on Steam produced by, say, no more than five people. They're basically all labors of love, the missing niche game that they wanted to make and play.

I can't think of a single independent success story that involved someone doing careful market research and engineering a product. There's a reason only big companies take that approach.

As in all such things, you must count the negatives (failures) as well as the positives.

It is a common problem to look at what successes do, and ignore what failures don't. See the Watson selection task[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

Competition is very tough nowadays though, while in 1977, not so much. For every successful indie game on Steam, there’s dozens of unsuccessful ones.

> dynamics of virality

'virality' is a very ... particular thing to be clinging to. many things 'go viral' then fall off a cliff.

"virality" is the indie game version of winning the lottery.

Everyone wants to be the guy who wrote Flappy Bird in a weekend, and then wound up making so much money so fast that it actually scared him.

It's especially difficult when the game you want to play is probably out there, but impossible to find because it's buried by tons of other crap. So do you build the game only to find that the one you're looking for was there all along, then have everyone call you a copycat?

I think this is an awesome point -- and I can't help getting a bit giddy at Walter Bright replying to my comment. I think being passionate about what you're building is one of the best indicators to success (as opposed to something that you want to make a ton of money with).

If you are the Walter Bright, thank you for writing Empire! I played the hell out of that game in one of its ASCII PC ports.

> If you are the Walter Bright

There can be only one!

Anyhow, glad you liked it! I still regularly get email about Empire 40 years later.

Yeah, that's the most rational approach to independent game development. You, the developer, are the target audience.

It's _really_ not. It is important to enjoy and be passionate about your game. But writing your ideal game is a recipe for making crap, in my humble experience, unless you happen to be intuitively skilled in game design.

Dude, "build it and they will come". They even made a movie about that fact...

> in my humble experience

what experience is that? you seem to suggest something which seems unlikely; there are a bunch of second order effects involved with making a game you're interested in.

"Scratch your own itch"; if you like it, maybe others will too; instant user feedback

The same idea has worked for a lot of things for me. I often get told I'm a unique snowflake in what I like, but it turns out that's not true at all.

Write any games in D in your spare time sir? If not commercial, just for fun? I'd be curious to hear how good D can be in that area.

D is used by Remedy Games for Quantum Break:

http://dconf.org/2016/talks/watson.html

http://dconf.org/2017/talks/watson.html

Thanks Walter! It looks like there might be a Empires port in D as well. I'm sure that was much easier than C.

There is a FPGA port presented at this year's DConf.

http://dconf.org/2017/talks/marques.html

I read that as a D DSL for FPGA's, not D used for a game right? Did I miss something?

If you watch the presentation, he shows how he used it to port Empire into a FPGA and plays with it for a bit.

That is on the 2nd part of the presentation, because he had some issues initially.

EDIT: Here is the Empire demo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjaKFTHQSxQ&index=4

> I’d be curious to hear how good D can be in that area

Many of the games by ABA Games/Kenta Cho (Torus Trooper being the one I played the most, a long time ago) are all written in D, as is his BulletML library that is used in most of his games.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games

I read about Carmack/Romero making Doom, and they also made the game they wanted to play.

Best way to go. It's hard to make something great unless you're personally invested imo. Although, Carmack can do about anything he sets his mind to. Love that guy.

Wrinkle: "scratch your own itch" make the game you want to play (not the game you want to make)

    1. Something you'd *love* to play
    2. Prototype: are you right?
    3. is it feasible (for you) to make?
    4. is it worth it?

Maybe it's not necessary to articulate it, just some idea or sense is enough to move toward it.

That is my goal right now. I am making a game that I want to play and I will release it when I feel it is worth it to do so.

The key though is that I have a steady job so I have the free time to work on it without worrying about funding.

Did you do anything to keep seeing the game as a player, despite spending so much time and effort with it as a developer?

> but couldn't find.

And there are those unlucky ones who always find what they need done by others... :(

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