Submission + - Can the Elite-like niche sustain a small scale product? (dailymotion.com)
Heliosphere1 writes: I'm the sole developer of an Elite-like indie game in development called Heliosphere: I made some demo videos to show what I have done so far. If someone wants to toss the original AVIs up on bittorrent, that's cool; I can post filehosting links separately. I recommend using fullscreen and "HD" mode on DM:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7py5_heliodemo1-pt1_videogames
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7qiq_heliodemo1-pt2_videogames
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7qpa_heliodemo1-pt3_videogames
There is no staff or money behind this effort. I decided to take the last few years before I can retire to try something creative, and attempt to write a game. I'm just over one year into the project, so the road ahead is long. I'm trying to decide whether this is viable to pursue. I'm aware of about 4 or 5 other impressive efforts in this genre, all of which have more resources (programmers, sometimes artists and/or money, where anything more than 1 person and zero dollars can be defined as "a large project" from my POV).
On one hand, I think it's absurdly cool that this genre might stage a bit of a comeback, and also that the efforts are coming from indie developers, who in my opinion are keeping gaming alive in the face of various major studios who are crushing it. I hope at least some of those indie projects will see wild success. On the other, Elite-likes are a small niche: for every gamer interested in such games and who hasn't abandoned the PC as a gaming platform, there are a million who'd prefer Angry Farmville In Space. It's unclear to me whether this niche can sustain a lone developer with all the limitations and constraints that brings on what I can create. Unfortunately, I will need to make a living wage, as I am currently chewing through my retirement savings to create this. It's this, or a few more years at the grindstone.
I can answer questions about the project here, but cannot accept or read implementation ideas.
(And yes, it runs on Linux, as well as Windows).
[Editors: Sorry for the double submission: the first attempt appeared to disappear from the queue — not down voted, but just gone, after about 5 minutes, so I figured it didn't work.]
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7py5_heliodemo1-pt1_videogames
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7qiq_heliodemo1-pt2_videogames
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq7qpa_heliodemo1-pt3_videogames
There is no staff or money behind this effort. I decided to take the last few years before I can retire to try something creative, and attempt to write a game. I'm just over one year into the project, so the road ahead is long. I'm trying to decide whether this is viable to pursue. I'm aware of about 4 or 5 other impressive efforts in this genre, all of which have more resources (programmers, sometimes artists and/or money, where anything more than 1 person and zero dollars can be defined as "a large project" from my POV).
On one hand, I think it's absurdly cool that this genre might stage a bit of a comeback, and also that the efforts are coming from indie developers, who in my opinion are keeping gaming alive in the face of various major studios who are crushing it. I hope at least some of those indie projects will see wild success. On the other, Elite-likes are a small niche: for every gamer interested in such games and who hasn't abandoned the PC as a gaming platform, there are a million who'd prefer Angry Farmville In Space. It's unclear to me whether this niche can sustain a lone developer with all the limitations and constraints that brings on what I can create. Unfortunately, I will need to make a living wage, as I am currently chewing through my retirement savings to create this. It's this, or a few more years at the grindstone.
I can answer questions about the project here, but cannot accept or read implementation ideas.
(And yes, it runs on Linux, as well as Windows).
[Editors: Sorry for the double submission: the first attempt appeared to disappear from the queue — not down voted, but just gone, after about 5 minutes, so I figured it didn't work.]
