Mithro rants about stuff

So last year at the end of November I spoke at OSDC. I had been meaning to blog about the conference but never gotten around to doing so. The conference was great, but like previous OSDC’s I came down with something. Sadly, this meant that missed Andrew Tridgell’s talk about the EU-Microsoft agreement. Joel, who had been camped out in my lounge room for the week, said it was really worth listening too. I really wish OSDC recorded all the talks like Linux.conf.au does.

As part of speaking at the conference I had to produce a paper. This paper puts into writing a lot of what I have been talking about. I wasn’t going to post it, but after getting a email out of the blue about the topic, I’ve decided to put a copy here on my blog. I might as well also upload the presentation I gave, but it won’t be very interesting by itself. Both are released under a CC-BY-SA.

If there is one thing that any budding game developer (open source or otherwise) should take away from this talk, it is the following:

When a person is looking for normal software, they have an issue to solve.
When looking for computer games, they are looking to be entertained.

This fundamental difference in mindset should drive every aspect of your game, website and release process.

Edit: How could I forget? A big thanks goes out to Leslie Hawthorn who helped proof read the paper and making it much easier to read!