Monkey-X is my current favorite language for doing game prototypes and even full projects. It isn’t at all widely known, and has more than a few rough edges, but I still find it congenial and thought I’d share so that more people will give it a try.
When I went looking for something to code in, I had the following criteria:
- Get stuff on screen in under an hour. Ideally, under ten minutes.
- Output to as many platforms as possible.
- Web, because that is useful for accessibility, Facebook, demos, and more.
- Desktop, because that’s where midcore and core gamers still live.
- Mobile, because the whole world is moving to touch.
- Avoid porting. Porting is tedious and expensive. Yes, you get the advantage of maximizing use of the hardware, but the fact is that there’s a lot of headroom on hardware these days.
- A community large enough to supply libraries for things I don’t want to write myself. I am no great shakes as a coder, you see.
- Syntax that doesn’t make my eyes cross (looking at you, Objective C).
- Garbage collection. Why? Because I always mess it up, and then it gets in the way of being productive.
Monkey-X met these criteria, though the community is still pretty small.
A funder of some sort ponies up the money so that a creative can eat while they work. Sometimes this is self-funding, sometimes it’s an advance, sometimes it’s patronage.
A creator actually makes the artwork.
An editor serves the role of gatekeeper and quality check, deciding what makes it further up the ladder. They serve in a curatorial role not just for the sake of gatekeeping but also to keep the overall market from being impossible to navigate, and to maximize the revenue from a given work.
Marketing channels make it possible for the artwork to be seen by the public: reviews, trade magazines, ads. This is how the public finds out something even exists.
Stores then retail the packaged form of the artwork to the end customer. Stores have their own branding task, and likely serve as a curatorial and recommendation engine all over again, this time trying to find the right fit for the customer.
The audience then gets to experience the work.
Re-users then take the creation and restart the process in alternate forms; adaptations to movies, audiobooks, classic game packages, what have you.
