Tag Archives: linux

Humble Source

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Hi,

As some of you might have seen already, there’s this great great initiative called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s basically a group of five independent developers who decided to make a ‘pay-what-you-want’ promotion for a bundle of five games, and the money can be distributed however you want between the developers and two charities (Child’s play and Electronic Frontier Foundation).

This whole idea is really awesome! The minimum donation requested is 0.01$ so for just one cent, you could be getting 6 very awesome games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD,  Aquaria and as a bonus Samorost 2) although I hope you will be more generous than that!

I think that the initiative is indeed humble, and by giving the power back to the consumer, you let him decide on the price and ask him for his generosity, you can get some really good results.  And the proof is here.. After only 10 days, they have raised over one million dollars! 30% of that went to charity and the rest went directly to the developers! What does this mean? It means that people thought that the developers deserved the money because of this brilliant idea. This also gives us some pretty awesome statistics.

As of the moment of writing this, the average donation was 9.05$ and The distribution is  : an average of $7.95 for Windows users, $10.18 for Mac users and $14.55 for Linux users! It looks like Linux users are more generous than Mac users who are more generous than Windows users! The developer seems to have noticed this and talks about it in his blog.

You can also see the distribution of the downloads, it looks like the Linux and Mac gamers are also a big part of the gaming market. As explained in the developper’s blog :

Our most recent promotion, the Humble Indie Bundle, shows even more dramatic statistics for Linux: 52% Windows, 24% Mac, and 24% Linux.

Finally, the most interesting thing for which I want to salute those developers is that, considering the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, they decided to open source 4 of the games from the bundle! This is great news for the open source community and for the gaming community as well.

The bundle has been extended for 3 more days, so I encourage everyone to go buy these games and help the developpers who had this brilliant idea!

KaKaRoTo

New project!

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Hi,

I’d just like to announce to everyone that I’ve decided to start working on a new project!

Seeing as I’ve loved the game Braid, I thought it would be nice to have an open source clone of the game! I should start working on that soon(-ish), and I hope I can actually see this project through…

Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience or interest in UI/OpenGL work, so I’ll start by designing and writing the low level classes that would allow a game to have the same time-based manipulation mechanic as Braid. And I hope that I’ll find someone willing to join the project and provide the UI/art part of the project!

I’ve contact Jonathan Blow, the author of Braid, and he said he’d be willing to help and provide me with the level file format  he used for the game, so we might be able to have this project working with the levels of the official game (assuming you bought the game and have its data files)!

That’s it, I’ll let you know more about how that goes! In the meantime, maybe someone (who played the game preferably) could come up with a nice name for the clone! 🙂

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KaKaRoTo

Braid for linux!

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Hello world!

I feel honored to say that I’ve recently been in contact with Jonathan Blow, the author of the awesome game Braid.

For those who don’ t know the game, it is an extremely challenging, fun, rewarding and original puzzle platformer which is so far the best game I’ve found on PSN.

I’ve asked Jonathan whether or not a Linux port of the game was in the works, since I’ve seen him hint at that in old posts on his blog (January 2007 and August 2008). I’m glad to say that he reported that a Linux port of the game was indeed being developed. To quote :

“[..] one is in progress but hasn’t quite been completed, but may eventually be released.”

He also said that the porting is about 95% complete, but I don’t know how much time it will take for the remaining 5% to be completed, so maybe it will soon be available, maybe not, but this is great hope for the Linux community!

I also spoke with him a little about Open Source, and I was pleasantly surprised to see him not completely reject the idea of open sourcing his game, but he said “it is not likely at this time”, so although it is not likely to happen, it is maybe another hint of hope for the future!

Finally, as my last bit of news. Just in case you were wondering, I also asked about possible DLC, to which he answered (no surprise) :

“There will probably not ever be DLC for Braid. The game is complete without it.”

That’s it, I hope these news are comforting to those who are just dying to play Braid on their Linux systems!

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KaKaRoTo