Soliciting ideas for XAGE launch

Started by Clarvalon, Sun 31/12/2017 16:45:28

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Clarvalon

I'm hoping to launch XAGE this year, hopefully before my daughter's 10th birthday as that would represent a decade of vapourware.

Here are some ideas I'm mulling over: gamedev subreddit

Feel free to add your 2p either on reddit or here.  Given that XAGE supports converting AGS projects I thought it may be of some interest.
XAGE - Cross-Platform Adventure Game Engine (alpha)

Joseph DiPerla

It's hard to say really. Which do you prefer more of: Monetization or the fact that people will be making great adventures. I think it would be hard to have one over the other simply because you have to consider this: Release it free of charge and open source and you won't make anything for it unless you open up a donation system. At the same time, you have two other engines out there that are doing well(Debatably speaking) which are Adventure Creator for Unity and Visionaire Studio. Both are quite pricey. We had Jaguar which for a time was available and is no longer available now.

Then again, if you wish to gain some commercial monetization, that is a choice for you as well. But I think that will come with a limit and not many games will come from that as not a lot of folks can afford to dedicate their funds to a 3rd or 4th commercial adventure engine. I think the same would go for the module system.

You can always go the route that 3DRad went. They added a forum where folks made suggestions for new features or bug fixes. The developer would then decide a price to implement each feature or bug fix and allow users to donate towards the feature or big fix they wanted. The feature or fix that would reach it's goal first would be implemented next. Anyone who donated would then receive an early release version of the software.

You can always try and sell the engine and if that doesn't work you can later on revert to selling modules. And if that fails, go to a license system where if someone commercialized their product they would pay you a license fee. And then if that also fails, you can go to a donation system.
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Clarvalon

Figuring out how to monetise the engine, if at all, hasn't been a priority - it's only as we approach release that I'm forced to put some thought into it.  I realise that pitching a paid product to a community who are mostly used to working with free tools was always going to be a tough sell (I'm hoping that cross-platform support, along with the familiar AGS-inspired C# API is that selling point).  The main purpose of the post was to gauge people's preferences to each of the options, whether up-front licensing, revenue share, crowdfunding etc.  I have pretty low expectations about ROI, so ultimately I want to determine what's the best way forward for any potential users and myself.

I am hesitant to charge up front as, frankly, I don't like the idea of anyone being left out of pocket.  My preference would only be to collect revenue from people who are generating their own profits using my engine.  But plenty of developers are also not keen on the Unreal style revenue share model, which I can also understand.

Your suggestion for using commissions for enhancements may work (e.g. adding shader support), though I wouldn't want to charge for bugfixes.  Perhaps the best way forward is to release everything in an alpha state with a non-commercial license and figure out the commercial licensing later once (or if!) someone wants to sell their game.
XAGE - Cross-Platform Adventure Game Engine (alpha)

dactylopus

Quote from: Clarvalon on Tue 02/01/2018 11:48:44
Perhaps the best way forward is to release everything in an alpha state with a non-commercial license and figure out the commercial licensing later once (or if!) someone wants to sell their game.
For what it's worth, I think having the engine free for hobbyists is a great move, and a licensing fee for commercial releases is also a reasonable monetization strategy.

I wish you luck with the engine!

Crimson Wizard

#4
I was not aware this engine still exists (have heard very little about it in the past), and don't know much about how it works, but if it essentially does what the AGS does, just on portable .NET with C# scripts, I'd believe quite a few AGS-users (including myself) would like to try it. Maybe even commercial developers, like Wadjet Eye, since it supposedly gives better portability options (something that AGS has a lot of issues today with). I am no expert when it comes to selling software product, but may suggest making at least some demo/trial version for commerical gamedevs to bring their attention to your tool.

morganw

Because of ongoing discussions about rewrite, reimplementation on ScummVM, and a lack of direction in general, I think you would have a reasonable chance of switching everyone who is using AGS to your engine and Visual Studio tools if you pitched it as a direct replacement. There aren't many options for development which do not have tiered licence costs for revenue or building for extra platforms, and no-one else with an alternate open source engine has a replacement IDE ready to go. If you genuinely have got a working migration process for existing projects and were willing to open source the whole thing, perhaps you would consider that the user-base you would pick up would be of more value than trying to directly monetise a small number of users.

Quote from: Joseph DiPerla on Tue 02/01/2018 02:34:57
You can always go the route that 3DRad went. They added a forum where folks made suggestions for new features or bug fixes. The developer would then decide a price to implement each feature or bug fix and allow users to donate towards the feature or big fix they wanted. The feature or fix that would reach it's goal first would be implemented next. Anyone who donated would then receive an early release version of the software.
...and would perhaps combine nicely with the above.

Clarvalon

Thanks for the feedback.  I see XAGE as complementary to AGS, rather than a direct replacement.  AGS has its own path, whether that involves ScummVM or one of the other routes that have been suggested since being open sourced.

With regards to licensing, nothing has really been decided yet, but my preference is to keep it free to use for non-commercial use.
XAGE - Cross-Platform Adventure Game Engine (alpha)

Monsieur OUXX

#7
Reviving this thread.

EDIT: scratch all that!
QuoteNow that there is some hype around MonoAGS, it's heart-breaking to see that XAGE is actually still around too. And that it's moving towards modern technologies. It still has its quirks here and there (see the end of that blog article) but overall, it can claim to be as worthy as MonoAGS. Clarvalon understands the .Net Core roadmap pretty well.

After several years, I'm realizing now that it's true that Clarvalon has always kept a somewhat low profile about XAGE. Therefore, I don't know if the moderate adoption of XAGE was a result of Clarvalon not being all in-your-face about it, or if it's just the result of bad luck -- XAGE being mistakenly only associated to XBox, or arriving "too early" when AGS 3.x was still riding the coolio wave.

XAGE is super mature (or is it not?). Proof: If I'm not mistaken, "Terror of the Vampire" was entirely ported to it.

Clarvalon, what are your thoughts about XAGE future?. I can see that you've definitely given it some thought. I'm asking because a lot has changed since your last post in January.

People, what are your thoughts on the whole XAGE/MonoAGS/AGS 5 topic? Wouldn't there be a way of getting the best of both worlds?

EDIT: Clarvalon is going semi-commercial with XAGE, and will be the main source of support for the users, so there is no real competition.


 

Clarvalon

XAGE has been in development for an embarrassingly long time.  There are two main reasons it hasn't been public for most of this duration:

1)  Several major refactoring efforts have finally coaxed the engine and tooling towards a place I'm happy with.  This would have been a nightmare for anyone actually using it however, as their game project would periodically been affected by many breaking changes.  It's an unreasonable burden to place on a developer who just wants to focus on their game.

2)  My current workload is such that I just don't have the time to manage a support queue.  The work as part of the above have made it easier to introduce change however, so once we reach a certain level of maturity then I'll be comfortable with a public release.  Still aiming for this calendar year.

I don't want to mislead on engine maturity however - most recent ports I've attempted have gotten the games playable but still quite broken.  They have improved over time as I've implemented more and more missing engine functionality, but there's still a lot of work to do.  I am hoping to shortly start work on porting a commercial game, which will help give everything a proper workout and layer of polish ahead of release.

The momentum around MonoAGS is interesting to see, and it's clear a lot of effort has gone into it.  I wish the project well!  One main area we differ is that XAGE aims to more closely mirror the AGS scripting API, so that it should be reasonably painless for existing AGS developers to make the switch.  We'll see how well that pans out in reality.
XAGE - Cross-Platform Adventure Game Engine (alpha)

Monsieur OUXX

 

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