I really enjoyed yesterday’s Geek Night on game development.
Instead of writing an elaborate draft that ends up never getting published, I’ve decided to simply post a few quick notes (personal and non-authoritative):
- XNA (Microsoft’s game development toolkit for Windows and Xbox 360) live demo was fun, and it seemed fairly easy to get started
- Python is suitable for game development (e.g. OpenGL with pyglet), though with obvious performance limitations
- Agile methodologies would be even more suitable in game development than in traditional IT, but apathy and lacking/flawed feedback loops (publishers and retailers are harmful intermediaries) seem to prevent widespread adoption[1]
- Open Source is mostly shunned in game development, often due to apathy and ignorance (there are a few positive examples though, like Lua); extreme short-term thinking prevents the realization of FOSS’s long-term benefits; standardization is actively subverted by platform vendors[2]
- my overall impression is that the gaming industry is pretty messed up, largely because it’s dominated by vendors rather than consumer interests
- apparently, the gaming industry doesn’t perceive itself as part of the IT industry – while it sits somewhere between traditional IT and the movie/entertainment business, it tends to prefer the latter (which is also reflected in the semantics, e.g. “game studio”) [↩]
- instead of licensing game engines (e.g. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine), why are there no collaborative development efforts – similar to the way Apache now provides a superior alternative to IIS [↩]