First, start small. The AAA developers are not interested. They have turn-around times measured in years for _becoming_ interested and they don't see a valuable market yet. We don't need them anyway. What we want is to encourage And To Help casual, independent game developers. Talented people / small groups that agree what they do is fun and like to do cool things.
And what _they_ tend to like is clarity. I see the success of dedicated game development languages like Blitz3D, and the very frequent use of packaged engines like Ogre3D, as examples to this end. These developers like APIs and development tools, of course. Good ones. Clear ones. Ones that say "use this; don't worry, we won't take it from you in a year." I'm not talking complex do-everything languages (like the horror that is Darkbasic), either. There should be nothing that somebody may not use in a given project. They need packaging tools, but we shouldn't jam these down their throats at the start because game development is all about rapid prototyping. Add in Makefiles and boilerplate wrangling and you have KILLED whatever creative spark there was ten minutes ago. A draw of something like Blitz is you can instantly have something working (and building anywhere) without any fussing. As for when fussing becones necessary, BuilDj or Gyp are perfect choices here because they're nice enough to use that you don't need to start early. (And they're strict enough that a dedicated IDE could generate their respective build description files magically). Quickly is a step in that direction because it gives the user a bunch of tools and says "these are the ones you're using." We need that, but focused on high performance stuff that doesn't use (or want to use) GTK, or anything particularly high level. Come to think of it, the modding community is a thriving one, too, building off fully formed games like HalfLife 2 (usually with total conversions like Eternal Silence and Project Reality). It could be interesting to explore what makes them tick, and see how a Quickly For Games could interest them. One other thing is Ubuntu needs to stop being so great to develop mundane software for. I was GOING to make a game. A really cool one. Then Python and "apt-get source" ruined me ;) Dylan
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