Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I’m fascinated by the “outsider” profile of the Myst creators.

Per the article, they didn’t play contemporary games and only used off-the-shelf GUI tools on the niche Mac platform — this in an era where “real games” used handcoded x86 assembly. Yet their creation outsold practically everyone in the industry by an order of magnitude.

Where are the tools today for someone like this to be successful? Unity is of course impressive but seems very tightly bound to gaming industry thinking — not that approachable or interesting to an outsider.

Around 2000-2005, the Flash GUI had lots of potential here... But then Adobe turned Flash into a programmer-oriented sprawling mini-Java and eventually Apple threw it under the iPhone bus.

View on HN

This article links to a lot of tools meant to make game dev (or other computer art) more approachable for non-programmers: http://www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/the-wonderful-world-...

From what I recall, the creators were not devoid of programming experience. Rand Miller had some experience writing software for banks, and first game required quite a bit of programming. I would suspect Unity is pretty similar in terms of complexity but perhaps not in terms of simplicity of interface.

Look up "Dreams" on the PS4. This is absolutely today's version of that.

That’s very cool. I remember an excellent Siggraph presentation about the still in-development Dreams engine a few years ago. Nice to see it shipping.

There’s a difference in distribution freedom though. HyperCard and Flash were conceived as production tools. You could interface with other tools and APIs. For the finished work, you could put it in a box and sell 6 million copies (like Myst), or host a game on your own server (like everything in the Flash golden era).

The Dreams runtime is a console game — a prerequisite investment, and limited audience compared to desktop / web platforms. Hopefully they’ll offer some kind of player-only licensing program for creators eventually?

Indeed that is a very important difference. But in the absence of something truly open and free, Dreams is still incredibly empowering.

I suspect that a truly open platform/distribution would never realistically exist alongside something of this quality. It's a nice idea but it just wouldn't happen.

Something simple enough to be good and free is probably also not going to catch the attention of this generation of budding creatives.

Like a demo-tape, a great game could be picked up (like Portal was). Why wouldn't Sony do this?

A distributable runtime, to a market of 100,000,000+ PS4 (plus PS5's), royalties to creators as publishers, would be an intermediate step.

Bundled with PS5 for early gen content.

You're not selling anything made with Dreams, though. And anything you make is only playable by PS4 owners with a copy of the game. It's far more limited and not really comparable.

Roblox gets a lot of traction with young people right now.

I’d say Unity is a free, fairly simple entry-level tool for this kind of thing.

Especially in combination with the Asset Store, which has a lot of free assets, and Fuse/Mixamo, you can pull stuff together with very little programming knowledge and share it to most major platforms.

I really love it.

Unity is great but it’s a mainstream 3D pipeline. I was thinking something leftfield; superficially limited but with untapped artistic potential unlike standard gaming experiences, like the HyperCard+QuickTime combo was in 1993 for Myst.

Five Nights at Freddy’s was made in ClickTeam.

Twine and Bitsy have been two recent somewhat popular choices for getting into making games.

It was HyperCard, so HTML/CSS/JS is there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com