lars_doucet - Slashdot User

Submission + - Procedural Death Jam to benefit OpenGameArt.org (opengameart.org)

Submitted by lars_doucet on Monday March 03, 2014 @06:08PM

lars_doucet writes: There's a new name for "games with RogueLike Elements": Procedural Death Labyrinth. The new genre term encompasses everything from FTL to Spelunky, and is the center-piece of a new game jam that is benefiting OpenGameArt.org, a site for freely licensed art assets for use indie games.

Procedural Death Jam will run for 7 days starting March 8th, and will be a "sister jam" to the popular 7-day roguelike challenge. The events aren’t competing with one another, but cross-promoting instead.

Submission + - SimCity vs. Piracy & The Four Currencies (Video) (youtube.com)

Submitted by

lars_doucet

on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @06:29PM

lars_doucet writes: "The SimCity debacle is another example of AAA publishers resorting to DRM because "game developers can't compete with free."

But piracy is only "free" in terms of Money-dollars ($M). There's also Time-dollars ($T), Pain-in-the-butt-dollars ($P), and Integrity-dollars ($I). If we look at the total "4-currency" cost, we can see that piracy is not only not "free," but that there's plenty of opportunities for legitimate services to compete through convenience ($T), service ($P), and appealing to higher principles ($I).

This short video explains the whole theory, showing how SimCity's always-online DRM not only misses a golden opportunity, but shoots itself in the foot and actually *raises* its four-currency cost well above that of piracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP7KUVfx9ec"

Submission + - Steam Linux Sale - 3x as many Linux sales as Mac! (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by

lars_doucet

on Thursday February 28, 2013 @03:10PM

lars_doucet writes: "I'm an independent game developer lucky enough to be on Steam. Recently, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale.

The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including our cross-platform game Defender's Quest. In preparation for this article, I asked the good people of Reddit's /r/linux_gaming subreddit what sort of data they'd like to see, and today I'd like to answer both their questions and yours.

Bottom line: during the sale we saw nearly 3 times as many Linux sales of the game as Mac (Windows still dominated overall)."

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