Chaotic OSHW/FOSS dev/artist
Masto: https://mastodon.technology/@houkimenator

  • 22 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 14th, 2021
  • Houkime@fapsi.beOPtoFediverse Futures•Federated Game Store
    2·
    3 years ago

    Gamejolt has a so called Fireside for gamers to stream to each other, and I planned to redesign it for peertube-like or actual peertube streaming.
    A sort of a virtual family TV place with players deciding who will stream next.

    Yes, art jams and art assets are an absolute must. I also think there should be a possibility for devs to indicate that they need help with art or artists to indicate that they are available for help games. And that this needs to be right on the front page.

  • Houkime@fapsi.beOPtoFediverse Futures•Federated Game Store
    3·
    3 years ago

    Atheneum looks cool, they are currently too tied to flatpaks though. One could have a special place on the game page for flatpacks, but then one could just upload a game directly to flathub. I can try to make cute slots for package repos links though so that devs are properly encouraged.

    The thing with itch and other store games is that they are supposed to be portable and run from the folder.
    So, maybe it is also about atheneum supporting portable games.

    lib.reviews looks alright. They will need to federate though. so that reviews are auto-applied to game pages.

  • Houkime@fapsi.beOPtoFediverse Futures•Federated Game Store
    3·
    3 years ago

    Firebase here was used to store user client settings.
    I disabled this (It is using defaults) and also deleted this from package deps.

    The value of the game being stored on the server is that games are usually big (100+ mb) and for example git forges tend to have strict limits on file size. Unlike with peertube though, the headcount of games is way smaller than the count of videos, so largish uploads at game stores are totally ok, and also torrenting might be unnecessary, at least at first.

    It is also used to count downloads. This sort of harmless analytics i plan to reenable in the future. Views and downloads. Maybe browser plays.
    It is everything i use on itch, and it should be enough for gamedevs to roughly measure interest. It will also be used if there will be payments eventually, or at least download tokens that you purchase from the dev manually.
    The scheme with manual download tokens can be wider than just monetary payments. It can also be about promotion or even code contributions (not neccessariy to the same game! A dev can just say: Contribute to Godot in a nontrivial way and i will give you a token).
    Or just manual handout of the game to people the dev knows/decides to give access. Like with follow requests on masto.
    I believe that sort of schemes could be especially popular with LGBTQA+ communitites, just as locked accounts are.

    I do however think that it might be benefitial to separate the services of storage and jamming, if only just to allow parallel evolution. It can be done on protocol level so that for example gamejolt like servers can federate with more lightweight jam servers.

  • Houkime@fapsi.beOPtoFediverse Futures•Federated Game Store
    1·
    3 years ago

    Not really.
    They have an opensource desktop/mobile client for downloading and managing games but it has a severely limited functionality and does not support jams.
    The full-featured web frontend on itch.io is closed.
    I would actually like to fork itch’s frontend more because it is almost js-optional, but nope.