Squirrel it away or spend it on expansion somehow, I'd expect.  I do not expect to ever have enough for the 'salary' thing, though.  If I ever did it would be just unbelievably awesome.

Regarding world contents, I had the foresight to draft this, though it's admittedly guesswork and might have problems.  It has been packaged with the game in a text file since the prototype world.

-------------------------------------------
|Infinite Blank End-User License Agreement|
-------------------------------------------


By participating in Infinite Blank, you agree to grant unlimited non-exclusive
distribution rights to your ingame creations to the Infinite Blank team.  These
include but are not limited to display through the game itself, through the web,
as part of a public exhibit, or in print.  (Drawings created with the program but
never uploaded to the game's server are not subject to this clause.)

To clarify on the last item, prints of the game's map(s) or parts thereof may be
sold in the future as a means of acquiring funding for the server or to support
development of Infinite Blank and other projects.  By playing you consent to this.

Infinite Blank claims no responsibility for the preservation of user drawings,
security of content, or accidental damages inflicted by the software or its
users, whether on your hardware or your sensibilities.

Infinite Blank claims no responsibility for its user-made ingame content.  By
playing you agree to understand that with freedom comes responsibility, and with
responsibility comes occasional immaturity and crude humor.


Infinite Blank copyright 2010 Evan Balster.  All rights reserved.  For now.

World contents copyright their respective creators.

I'll be surprised if Minecraft doesn't win the audience award, but I'll also be surprised if it wins anything else.

Again, I think it could get technical excellence.  It's got some pretty good tech for resource management, culling and other backend stuff, and it's networked.

Of course, the thing about backend programming is that no one ever needs to take notice of it.

I was hoping for something more invisible than this.  That said, it's looking cool and I may well have a look quite soon!  This is a problem I've wanted to address.

You might catch some crap about the name.

Anyway, good luck.

A few good points came up in the other thread, so I'll leave this here.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=15423


It's an interesting system, again, though the 'entrepreneurship' angle strikes me a bit oddly.  As a developer of a nonprofit game, I might have a look, but I've never cared for facebook app messages.  Not to be harsh; I understand they're the bread and butter of social network businesses.

[1 - Inherit from a base class, "Reflected", with virtual methods.]

So.  I'm curious whether anyone would make use of a little system of mine if I released it.  (For free!)

For my game engine, because it was useful, and because I hate designing a million file formats, I wrote a binary serialization system.  It lets you have unlimited, backwards-compatible versions of objects so you can keep developing without losing your data.  (The backwards compatibility doesn't require extra programming unless something especially fancy needs to be done, in which case it provides the option.)  It can serialize arbitrary graphs of objects which root at the first one passed in, and can re-establish references between them when it deserializes the data.

I designed the system to require as little work as possible in the code using it.


Making a class serializable requires three steps.

1 - Inherit from a base class, "Reflected", with virtual methods.

Code:

class MyClass : public Reflected, public MyBaseClass

2 - This in the class declaration:

Code:

//Reclection info
static Type _type; virtual Type type() const {return _type;}

3 - Something like this in a source file somewhere.

Code:

Type MyClass::_type = TypeSetup<MyClass>("MyClass",
____"Purely for demonstration.", 3) //3 is the version number

____<< Register(&MyClass::x, "x", "It's my X coordinate!", IsSerialized)

____<< Register(&MyClass::y, "y", "Y was added in the second version of this object.",
________IsSerialized, 2)

____<< RegisterRemoved<float>(&MyClass::z, "z", "Added in V.2, removed in V.3.",
________IsSerialized, 2, 2);

From there, it's as easy as this to use the serialization system, regardless of how complex MyClass' system of information dependencies gets.  (The only exceptions are reference members, which I can't really do anything about, and pointers to value-member objects of other objects, which I'd need to jump through extra hoops to handle.)

Code:

MyClass a(32.0f, 64.0f), b;

FileSystem::write("tempfile.myc") << a;
FileSystem::read("tempfile.myc") >> b;

Right now, my project Infinite Blank eats this system for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Every time a cell is downloaded from the server the client's deserializer eats through a few hundred kilobytes of vertex data in a split second.  The network engine it's running on actually has a feature (which IB doesn't use) for automagical object sync and time adjustment that has been tested to good effect.  Possibly, this network engine could be released as well, though it'd be more complicated to extract from the engine.


Anyway, would anyone find genuine use in something like this to ease their file-saving woes?  Or, should I not bother with the effort of making a standalone code base?

I actually had the good luck of talking to someone qualified in nonprofit management today.  The day after my first post there.

Apparently the big qualifier is that the business owner can't arbitrarily take the company's funds.  He can pay himself a salary (surprisingly) which I don't intend to unless I try to "go indie" in the future.  The advantages are mostly in a near-universal set of tax exemptions.

I think I'm going to go ahead with this.

An interesting idea; explicitly viral marketing of games.  Profit models on social networks always revolve around things like this, though I can't say whether I care for them.

Cred for being indie-focused though.  What kind of cut do you take?

If it's a bad-video-off you want, you should see my kickstarter proposal.  Six hours in after-effects hell for a shitty, transcoded-to-hell abomination that still somehow resulted in a successful fundraiser.

I really need to learn how to cut stuff together.

[EDIT:]

The first half of college saga was excellent.

And I've already expressed my opinion about Minecraft.

EDIT: Also, met Lexaloffle in Japan.  He's a good guy; hoping to see him again at GDC.

[What would be involved in making this a legal nonprofit, and would use of any portion of donations to cover the time I've spent on the software invalidate that?]

Hello, all.

I'm working on a certain donation-funded online game (which I brought up previously here) and I'm hoping to cover its costs and maybe (maybe) even refund a bit of my own working time from whatever I get.  Blue-sky, it might even help me go indie out of college, but I'm not counting on that at all.


So.  Basic idea.  The game is completely free and I'm running my own physical server, recently paid for (and more!) by Kickstarter donations.  The game revolves around drawing, and the game-world is effectively one gigantic drawing created by the players.  In the future I'd like to offer prints and/or clothing as well as hosted worlds as rewards for donations.

One last possibility for revenue is showing the game's worlds electronically at art exhibitions, as giant crowdsourced paintings.


At this point I'm running into a few places where I want to have my definitions straight.  The primary need for donations is the running and maintenance cost of the server (currently quite cheap but apt to rise) and I was always a little iffy about the distinction between rewarded donation and sale.

I also would like to set up a creative commons radio within the game that plays content streamed from the server or my Dreamhost service.  At some point, by the way, I plan to open source.


So.

What would be involved in making this a legal nonprofit, and would use of any portion of donations to cover the time I've spent on the software invalidate that?

Besides the pretty word, what kinds of benefits would running a nonprofit have in practice?

Would the donation model cause legal issues with the use of noncommercial-licensed creative commons music?  (...which would be available to anyone anyway?)


Thanks in advance for the wisdom, all.

[EDIT:]

Regarding Aquaria, you can't re-enter a game that's won a prize.

That is to say, if a game wins a relatively peripheral award one year (like audio design) and manages to improve dramatically over the course of the next, it's out of the running.

And Vimeo seems like a nicer system than YouTube, for what that's worth.

EDIT: I'm happy to see Air Pressure entered.  I rather enjoy bento's narrative games.

For what it's worth, my video isn't even a "trailer".  I screencapped it together in the hour before I submitted.

It's over here

I'm a nomad.



This, plus two or three years of beat-up.  I'm expecting to get another four or five out of it.

The silver jumpsuits haven't happened yet, either.  Shame, that.

I think games are a lot more careful about these predictions that movies are, or more intentionally disconnected from reality.  One of the two.

This sounds very interesting.  I am going to listen to it...  Soon.  I hope I don't forget.

I always liked to watch people play games.  I still do, and often will do that rather than playing myself.

When I was ten I'd look up cheat codes for my friends on the internet.  I knew all the websites.  One of them was free-games.com, which also had a repository of freeware games.  I got into the habit of downloading them (mostly point-and-clicks) and playing them with my one megabyte space allowance.  I got one at some point that just had a zip-file redirecting me to ambrosine.com, which surprisingly still exists and hasn't changed much.

Anyway, I played amby's games for a while before getting interested in the tool he kept mentioning--Adventure Game Studio.  I then got into the swing of playing with it and made the start of a few games that never went anywhere.  Kept playing freeware now and then.

I got tired of AGS (it was quite clunky) and the family also started to suspect it was behind some computer problems we were having, so I looked for a new tool.  Ambrosine's site had a huge list of tools; I quickly learned to avoid the ones which mentioned "C++" or were for apple operating systems.  I found Game Maker.

I've been using Game Maker since I was 12, though these days I only pick it up on rare occasion for a quick prototype.  I made games to show to school and neighborhood friends for a long time before getting into an online community.  The rest of the story is a bit long and irrelevant.

Hooray for games.  

This is starting to look oddly familiar...

I seem to remember flaming squirrels from the demo.  That didn't make much sense, but I rolled wid' it.

That clipboard doodad looks right choice, it does.  I might have a look-see in the future.