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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I enjoyed playing Ballionaire. I do like this style of rogue-likes where things can maybe break the game itself (infinity, slow down the game completely when too many eggs are spawned).

I was curious in your platform choice of windows only. Was this due to the framework/programming language you're using? Or was this more of a time savings of trying to support more than one system at a time? Or maybe both?

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FWIW, it works on the Steamdeck, natively, without Proton -- so it's a native Linux game in other words. Apparently a lot of folks are playing it on desktop Linux, as a result. It's just not "officially supported".

I'm a one-man dev operation, so it's strictly a matter of opportunity costs of my time. Linux and Mac are miniscule gaming markets, like 1% of Windows, but could potentially generate a significantly proportionately greater burden of support. So I have to be careful there.

I am playing it on the linux desktop. It's super nice.

I'm also curious about the changes required between linux and windows, is it quite a bit? Or is that just abstracted mostly by the framework?

How do you get it to run? The first time I clicked the [Play] button it installed Vulkan shaders, but it doesn't do anything on subsequent launches.

EDIT: Ah, a re-install fixed it!

Godot makes it easy to export to Linux and I'm sure it's still true that feedback from Linux users is better even in terms of finding bugs as mentioned in this interview with Croteam in 2015:

> The feedback from Linux gamers is great – they seem really happy that we’re supporting the platform and they are a huge help in finding bugs. Often, bugs that are initially reported as Linux specific turn out to be issues in all version of the game, it just sometimes happens that it’s easier to reproduce on some platforms. So, yeah – we’ll definitely keep on supporting Linux in the future.

[1] https://www.marcosbox.com/2015/02/13/interview-with-croteam-...

It's from 2023 but the last Godot community survey showed a marketshare of 27% for Linux amongst the developer's primary development platform and 55% for exports to Linux[1]. That's quite massive compared to the 2.06% Linux and 1.4% OSX have amongst gamers[2]. So, if you need help getting your game to those 3.4%, there should be plenty of helping developers on the usual godot forums.

[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXRE1nF64PUilO6fA7... [2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Here’s the ProtonDB entry: https://www.protondb.com/app/2667120

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