games developement


Wrath Of Khan

Soul soother...
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As a communnity it might be possible to jointly fund the creation of some pandora specific games at some point.


Amiga style games/megadrive or more advanced.Everyone paying a little towards the creation of an agreed upon game


design.Maybe some people would like to make a game on the basis of preorders(like the pandora was made)Craigs investment idea gave me this idea.Personally id like


to see an official openpandora game shipped with every pandora.


Coded by Craig or ed and co.As a communnity we can do anything together. :)
 
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KHAAAAAAAAAN!


Usual salary of a progger is 50$/hour


Developing a game that is a bit more sophisticated than pacman easely takes 1000 man hours, probably more (sure, that depends on what game it is, arcade style shooters are done faster than story-heavy RPGs)


Ignoring graphic artists, song composers, story writers and so on, that would amount to 50'000$ and depending on the game, that could easely double


That would be quite a lot of money to raise. A dev from around here ("here" as in "Pandora community") would probably not expect a full salary for such a project, but I still think that it would be really hard to raise that kind of money.


Wouldn't it be better to let devs build the games they like (for free) and donate them some money if you like it? Sure, it wouldn't be an "official" pandora game, but OP could always ask a dev if his game may become the official Pandora game - I can't imagine anyone saying no to that.
 
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A successful community game just needs to have the fortune that many in the community feel it's worthwhile to invest their time to improve it.


It's not really a question of money but time and motivation for most homebrew coders since most code because they enjoy doing so.
 
and major lol's were had. :p


Programmers do not make that much, and game programmers make even less, especially when you add in unpaid overtime.
I took the number out of the code analyzing tool SLOCCOUNT because I was too lazy to search for median salary :)


Still, it will amount to quite a sum because software development usually takes a long time.

It's not really a question of money but time and motivation for most homebrew coders since most code because they enjoy doing so.
that's what I meant with the second part of my post - better let them build a game they like coding and then reward them if you like the result than get them to make a game they wouldn't normally enjoy coding using money.
 
If devs were able to make 50$/hour (≈ 35€/h), my brother would only have to work a bit more than a week per month to keep the same salary
laugh.gif



Before making big plans for a community funded game made by the OP team, we should wait until they smooth out the production process of the Pandora.


And ask them if they really want to make a game from scratch.


At the moment, the homebrew scene is a bit quiet around here, because most of us are still waiting for their brand new toy to come.


But when the first batch will be complete, I guess there will be plentiful of ported and new games coming.
 
I took the number out of the code analyzing tool SLOCCOUNT because I was too lazy to search for median salary :)


Still, it will amount to quite a sum because software development usually takes a long time.
I've never used this tool but can't even begin to see how it could possibly equate lines of code to dollars per hour. Seriously, it's more like $20/hour average, and involves a lot of extra hours.
 
I've never used this tool but can't even begin to see how it could possibly equate lines of code to dollars per hour. Seriously, it's more like $20/hour average, and involves a lot of extra hours.

Dang, where do you guys work? I'm at my first entry-level programming job making $25 an hr with virtually no extra hours, and I'm not getting paid nearly as much as most of my friends who graduated before the recession hit. Also the cost of living in Texas is fairly low as well.


Still, $50/hr is for the senior guys, not us lowly peons. (protip: once you're a senior guy you tend to not do a lot of programming)
 
I don't get it then? How can one guy and a community working together for free create this?:

cold answer: by taking so long.


my impressions:


first minutes: whatever, thats 3 (verry nice looking) models onscreen, looks like an EVE online ripoff


later: OMG WTF landing on the planet, from orbit??? dynamic loading??? procedural universe???


better answer: *procedural generation* that's how you do it.


this is some seriously cool tech, to bad there's no real gameplay yet.


i think i'll be wasting my evening reading the dev blog
 
Uhhh, yah, right, $50 an hour is no way the average pay of programmers. In some fields; notably finance/banking, the salaries are high. However, the hours are also long (like 8 to 8, but only paid for 9 to 5) and unless you're senior the work is boring. Self employed contractors can also earn more (e.g. FLEX jobs are pretty well paid... but I hate web development) but that opens its own can of worms too.


If I'm wrong, I think someone owes me a lot of money!
 
Uhhh, yah, right, $50 an hour is no way the average pay of programmers.

It depends on where you are. I make about 40$ a hour and I'm probably the lowest-paid dev in my company (because I'm still pretty new).


And guess what, it doesn't matter. Funding a great game still needs a big wad of cash, even if it only was $20/hour or less.


The only thing I wanted to say is that it is pretty much impossible for a community to pay for a game and instead, one should reward those who do it for free. Sheesh.
 
Switzerland.


And yes, the stuff we buy in the supermarket is equally more expensive ;)
 
Wow, infinity looks great. I've been wanting to get into a space exploration/combat game for a while now and I haven't found anything that tickles my fancy. X3 is supposed to have a drab story and be infinitely convoluted, and everything else either looks severely outdated, or has mediocre reviews.


Anyway, I'm all for original games being developed for the pandora. What I'd like to see most though are games coded for older systems that we can run via emulation. It would be awesome if somebody was crazy enough to code a pandora themed Amiga game.
 
I don't get it then? How can one guy and a community working together for free create this?:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/43eIjvoYfos?feature=oembed

- Because "one guy + community" is a lot more than one guy (in fact, the core programming team on it's own is 8 people).


- Because the game has been in development since 2004 (Doom 3 / Halflife 2 released, Wii announced).


- Because that guy was releasing tech demos and even complete games back in 2006 that were the prototypes / predecessors of this game to develop the engine.


- Because that guy is turning it into a pay-for MMOG and thus expects to recoup his investment someday.


- Because you can put awfully huge amounts of work into something for yourself that doesn't expect recompense (this is how programmers used to do it "back in the day" too... a lot of homebrew, indie and other games are developed after man-years of effort for free. I've spend years of my time solving programming problems only to give that code away later. The entire freeware / open source movement only collates and organises what's always existed amongst programmers which is a desire to have cool stuff they dream of working, and to share knowledge, whether it means they pay their own money / time / effort or even hire others to do it for them and then give it away - I know, I'm in the process of hiring an artist to work on a game of my own that I'm writing in my spare time that will probably never be played by anyone but myself).


- Because that game uses procedural generation - for years (read: Amiga / DOS days, if not before) you've been able to make realistic random landscapes, predetermined by an initial seed factor (get a copy of VistaPro for example) that can be extended to produce such infinite worlds quite easily (for a certain value of easy), and since the game that one was based on (Elite, 1984 - eight galaxies each with 256 planets to explore which could never normally fit in a computer's memory of that day) you've been able to produce "infinite" worlds based on such techniques. The problem is that they tend to be quite boring, that you have to populate them with "life" of some kind (i.e. I bet that space station in the video was manually inserted, but maybe the asteroid belt is "real") and although it prevents you from having to store Petabytes of universe models and "design" a universe, it has lots of associated problems (saving it, reproducing it, modifying it - e.g. destroying / modifying a landscape, populating it, calculating it, making it interesting and playable, storing the interesting stuff separately which means your savegames get bigger and bigger the more the player explores even if they never interact etc.) - basically your world / asteriods / stars are just the results of a function that ALWAYS returns the same worlds / asteroids / stars and everything else in the game has to be manually added, programmed, stored, etc. Zooming to another world takes no time or extra storage but the second you want to *DO* something there, you suddenly have to save every modification done on that planet. They also run into lots of gameplay problems (e.g. Elite had planets that were produced by the algorithm that was basically unvisitable).


But even a texture or model in that game, if developed by a commercial process, could costs tens to thousands of dollars. Some people, though, do things to that standard just to learn, to show off for potential employers, for their own amusement, or just because they can and then give it away for free.


P.S. programmer's fees vary greatly from area to area, depending on age, experience, sex, quality of work, previous employers, corporate culture, and even how much someone can make a case for a pay rise themselves. I can earn more than $50 an hour and have done pretty much since I left uni (starting with basic IT technical stuff like switching on machines and installing software) - it's just a question of the local employment arena, your skillset, personality, experience and being given the chance to demonstrate that. It's undeniable that to *hire* people to do the equivalent amount of work is roughly equal to such prices because it assumes an average, first-world company that has to undertake certain precautions (e.g. patent-searches, pension plans, employment law, etc.) - what you see in your pay packet is only half the story of what your employer pays to put it there. You wouldn't be able to produce Linux for less than several hundred million dollars and COCOMO estimates things like that pretty well - it is only a statistical average and of course you can't say that something with more lines of code costs more, but there's a correlation in professionally produced, business-critical, tested code between the number of LOC and the cost.


Put simply: Some people do amazing shit and give it away for us all to enjoy.
 
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