| > I dare say that a Infocom's Zork is a better game than many of today's triple-A FPS shooters or whatnot! Graphics aren't everything; Interesting point of view, certainly. But the majority of game purchasers do care about graphics. Great graphics suggest (often incorrectly, I'll admit!) great production quality, and in the minds of many this is a 1:1 mapping to the monetary value of a product. So selling a game that's accessible via a URL is a bit of a barrier on the commercial front. I guess itch.io works here. On the technical/noncommercial side, for more high fidelity games I'd argue guaranteeing a stable framerate (and not having the rest of the browser chug while the game's running) and being able to use multi-threading would be a great help. Once WebAssembly gets threading support, I'd expect to start seeing more intensive games. Web workers are... okay, but hardly convenient. I genuinely believe multi-threading support is more important than a better graphics API. (Typical engines cross-compiled from C++ then basically only have to deal with targetting mobile-quality graphics with a few edges knocked off & workarounds.) As for Zork: You don't need WebGL for Zork. (Indeed, embedding text in a WebGL scene (as opposed to overlaying it) is very hard work.) So WebGL is a suitable technology when you need interactive 3D that can't be prerendered, but you don't need impressive 3D; you're happy with results from a decade ago with worse performance. It's not a bad prospect for me as a prospective indie developer, but the tooling is noticeably more difficult than in native solutions. And the WebGL API is much harder to use than glBegin(), glVertex3f()..., glEnd() from the bad old days... but that's just the influence of OpenGL ES. Suggested path: write something in C against bgfx ( https://bkaradzic.github.io/bgfx/examples.html#metaballs ), then pray to kripken. And if Emscripten doesn't work just put some binaries on itch.io. Even the subset of gamers interested in indie games expect to download binaries. -- Edit: You say you wish you had the talent to work in this field. If you're a fan of IF, you certainly have the technical talent to do that :) And writing is fun, but extremely time-consuming. Good grief it's time-consuming. If you can deal with some mildly heinous gameplay, consider buying & playing Sunless Sea. The writing is transcendental, and the universe is brilliant. |