Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

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The influence of Kickstarter (largely due to Linux support for the popular game engine Unity) and Humble Bundle on the availability of games on Linux cannot be overstated. But even outside of Linux, it is wonderful to see how the indie gaming scene is blooming at the moment.

There was an editorial (which I can't seem to find now) on Rock Paper Shotgun, about how we're having the golden age of gaming right now, and it's very true - though we'll have to wait for many of these kickstarters (Torment and Wasteland, to name to two most well-known ones) to come to fruition.

It's also neat to see that they don't necessarily go the nostalgia route. The last one I've backed, Sunless Sea [1], is going to be a mix of different concepts (roguelike, exploration, survival, trade) along with a mechanism for madness, and is not a follow-up to anything in particular.

I'll toast the future of gaming, happening right now.

1: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/failbetter/sunless-sea/

I completely agree; the combo of Kickstarter, Unity and Humble Bundle has been a powerful force to demonstrate Linux gaming. Then add Steam in to help tie it all together in a convenient one stop shop and advertising platform and it really is looking great.

Thanks for pointing out Sunless Sea btw. I'm a big fan of FTL and this looks like a very interesting game in a similar vein.

It's probably worth mentioning that demand for Linux support on Kickstarter played a huge role in getting Unity ported over.

Ah, it's a kind of positive feedback loop, then. More of this, please.

> Thanks for pointing out Sunless Sea btw. I'm a big fan of FTL and this looks like a very interesting game in a similar vein.

You're welcome. You also get quality, funny, atmospheric writing for the same price.

But thinking about it, it would be interesting to have informal statistics about what kind of game gets funded on Kickstarter. I've seen adventure games, roleplaying games, one Diablo-like, a roguelike or two, and plenty of strategy/tactics games (marking a strong comeback of turn-by-turn play). On the other hand, there seems to be a dearth of manshooters/interactive torture games (apart from a tactical one I read about not so long ago) - either because the public is already well served by Medal of Duty XXIX or due to budget constraints. On average, the emphasis seems to be more on "thinking" games than clicky-clicky.

Were interactive torture games ever a thing?

I'm told you can punch people with broken glass in their mouth to make them talk in Black Ops.

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