Feedback about monkey in the indie scene...
Monkey Forums/Monkey Programming/Feedback about monkey in the indie scene...
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| To Mark and chums, I went to the recent TigjamUk6 in Cambridge and spent the Friday and Saturday there making games and doing graphics with my brother. While I was there I chatted a little to some people, a few were fairly big in the indie scene. I asked if they had heard of Monkey and it seemed a fair few had! However... Most people had the view that monkey was really only focused on html5 or simplified games and no-one really knew what was happening with it or what its real "powers" were. Terry Cavanagh (creator of VVVVVV) said he liked the idea of coding in basic but shared the opinion that it didn't seem a suitable language feature-wise. I think perhaps monkey needs to connect a bit more with the indie community and drive the message home. It is a more than capable language especially compared to some of the alternatives so its a shame that it isn't currently being recognised for it. I will also be going to the new meetup group in Cambridge http://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Game-Developers/ so I am sure I can pass on some more feedback from there! |
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| I would consider making it more clear than monkey is a very flexible OO language that supports inheritance, interfaces, data type inference, fully managed using garbage collection, etc. It has automatic dead code elimination, and, while it keeps a nice and simple syntax, it is very capable to produce applications and games that are easy to develop and cheap to maintain. |
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| Maybe people are getting the HTML5 thing from the demo version only being HTML5? Where possible I will always put in the credits of anything I make the program I used. Ironically enough, I doubt it will be anything HTML5 any time soon! On a side note I'm trying to arrange being at my parents (who live in Newmarket) for a CB2 meeting. It's a shame as I think I'd like to go, but I don't think I can make the CGD meet. |
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| Hmm thats weird as the monkey language has all the features you could want, to make any game. Maybe when the 'apps' get more sophisticated people will realize. |
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| This is why I was pushing for more facebook coverage thankfully not sure who its managing it but the facebook page has been getting some love. I had a similar thing happen when talking to some old uni colleges, all of which work in the industry and they all had the same sorta feeling about it, which is just crap to be honest, one of them had gotten as far as looking at these forums and told me he was almost instantly turned off because the forums were so in-active and had hardly any posts. It's in everyones best interest that moneky not only gets more coverage but that it's reputation is good, it will not only help mark do his job and keep him funded but it will also help grow the community. Where ever possible I tout monkey and its abilities, sadly the other day in IRC(i now use the LudumDare channel) a new coder came in looking to learn a language I tried to pimp out monkey to him as you do, but I think in the end he was heading down the path of Action Script or Java, he was very interested in being able to hit other targets but what scared him off of monkey was again the light forums and the fear of not having an active community to take part in, think he was from Japan and worried about no one being active when he was. So yeah. it kinda sucks. I for one will continue to pimp and go on about monkey at every opportunity, it offers something few other languages do, which is brilliant. I think the demo SHOULD!. list all targets in the build option, if they pick a target thats not html5 then it should just throw a popup saying something like "To build for your xbox 360, please buy the full version". All of that aside, What it really needs is some magazine coverage, getting into the press will really help spread the word, so dont know who handles marketing for BRL but they could use some help. |
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| I would also like to recommend that as a community, we can help, pick your favorite PC , or Mac, or Linux magazine , and send them an e-mail letting them know all about monkey. I just sent a letter off to PC Gamer, a mag I read a lot. if as a community we pulled together and spread the word, I am sure it would have a very positive impact. Also getting as many of you guys on the facebook page would also help a lot. facebook is now the words leading marketing tool. http://www.facebook.com/BlitzResearchLtd I mean come on, 27 people liked, we can do a lot better than that I am sure. |
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| On a side note I'm trying to arrange being at my parents (who live in Newmarket) for a CB2 meeting. It's a shame as I think I'd like to go, but I don't think I can make the CGD meet. There is another group "cambridge indies" who meet at cb2 every week so I might start going along to that! the CGD is monthly (well I think it will be) so could always arrange to come down to one in the future? I think the demo SHOULD!. list all targets in the build option, if they pick a target thats not html5 then it should just throw a popup saying something like "To build for your xbox 360, please buy the full version". Agree, there should be some serious up selling going on like a splash screen, starting homepage pimping the full version features. The constant reminder to the user that they are only getting a fraction of the feature set is important (As long as its not too annoying)! I think there would definitely be a huge benefit for some kind of tech demo's to be commissioned with art and code to really impress. These can then be passed around the scene. Of course that's an expensive thing for me to easily just shout that would be a good idea, but based on teh reactions at the tigjam I reckon Monkey needs SOMETHING to sway peoples opinions. |
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| If anyone at BRL makes a press note, I'll be glad to send it to as many magazines as I know here in Spain. Monkey is a great programing language, and it would be great if people do know it. Couldn't a closed source version of the mojo module for GLFW be done (in the form of a static lib or similar) so it can be bundled with the demo, without the mojo source code, and with a watermark or something like this? this could be helpful if it can be freely distributed by some magazines and online techy blogs. Just an idea... I have no idea how much complicated this would be for Mark, but it couldn't hurt monkey sales and reputation. I'll glad add a free demo version of Jungle to this package. |
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| The forums seem a lot busier than those of, say, haxe! |
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| I think the html5 build option in the demo is fine no need for a windows one as thats a single platform but html5 is all platforms so the most number of people can benefit from it. Just write to your local mag like I just did, no need to wait for a letter from mark although it would be nice, magazines get a lot of their stories from readers sending them info. @ Skn3 a tech demo might be nice, as I see it monkey should appeal two three groups of people, those who cant code, they that do and those that make a living from it. Each group want something different from the PR, to really target it at them, the people who cant code yet or are new need to see source and need to see that stuff can really happen with a very small amount of easy to read code. Those that can code want to see examples of what its done before to see if it can do their idea as demonstrated by some one else. the app listing on this site helps with that but there are a lot of things on there that are not games just random little bits of code, I would suggest splitting that App page on this site so that it shows only complete full games, and have a second app section for all the cool little random bits of code people put up to show. And finally the people out to make money, they want to see two main things, A) that the application has good support, an active forum helps there, and b) they need to see that its feature rich or flexible enough that they can add what it does not have. Monkey at the moment can easily target those first two groups, the third is the one that's really sticking, the indies iv spoken to over at Ludum all tend to not think monkey is upto par when it comes to features and command set, that's something that needs work, and im not sure what could be done to change their minds short of just expanding monkey which I am sure mark is working his ass off on anyway. In the short term, e-mail your fav mag tell them about monkey, e-mail your fav tech blog tell them as well, and @ Mark, Simon change the app's listing split it into two groups, 1 for complete games, and another for random code samples. When people see that App link they expect a place to buy games not just lots of funky cool little code examples. |
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| i'm ok with a slow growth, mature user base. i also think that people will only see monkey as html5 because they do not want to pay for it. actionscript, javascript, and java are free. that is hard to compete against when a great number of game makers make games as a hobby and not professionally. |
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| has anyone watched the program CLICK on BBC NEWS as in that theres a section where they review whats new in software and apps.If you could get them to look at monkey and what it capable of im sure it would get a spot on their program. |
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| seen it a few times but dont watch to much normal TV, e-mail them let them know about it. take the initiative. |
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| I bigged up BlitzMax in PC Format once, doing the "community" thing:- http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=68050 Got the magazine interested, but, people didnt email in and after a query email, they replied saying they scrapped the idea of a write up. So, my advice is... Just leave it! Dabz |
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| Keeping this site up and running is obviously enough for Monkey to be growing as quick as it is. |
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| I don't understand. I didn't get a free banana when I bought Monkey. *beats up Beaker* |
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| Beaker was that in reply to dabz ? :P |
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| Taiphoz, totally agree. Monkey does seem to be catering less towards certain groups. I guess as long as your catering to some groups it will expand. It would be nice if monkey gained notoriety a bit more! Keeping this site up and running is obviously enough for Monkey to be growing as quick as it is. Monkey does seem to be growing well, sometimes I check the active userids to see how popular it is (sad I know). I didn't mean the topic as any kind of bashing to current efforts, I was just passing on some valuable feedback direct from scene. [edit] Lol at the picture Beaker. Very fitting.. now where's my banana! |
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| I love the idea of monkey, the name and the language but in practice monkey lacks when it comes to certain language features, when it comes to platform specific features, the IDE&the docs are a pain compared to proper docs and proper IDEs. I get easy things done very quickly in monkey for a platform like iOS but desktop is just annoying and i rather rewrite a project for desktop in BlitzMax, so there isn't much of a multiplatform benefit. HTML-5 could be nice but in practice it's a pain due to synchronisation, streaming, performance and sound issues. So for me monkey is only good for iOS, the rest of it isn't up to a quality level i would expect it to be. Maybe it will just take one, two or three years to get there but at the moment the usage of monkey is very limited. In January i did a quick test in which i could get a certain project done the best. Tried Ruby, Processing, monkey, BlitzMax, Unity and Objective C. All had their ups and downs but whilst i did enjoy monkey's language, i certainly did not enjoy certain restrictions in the language and the fighting when it came to dealing with media. Unity blows away monkey in this aspect. It's not fun to code in Unity but you just get things done. And when things which can't be done with Unity, due to a lack of features or bugs, you're taking Objective-C directly, because then you can access all of the system's capabilities. I have the feeling that the way Mark deals with BlitzMax and monkey, he subdivided his market even more, like he once already did with offering BlitzMax but without a 3D module. And if things don't dramatically change then monkey will be one of those weird languages which might be cool but no one cares about to use because a development process involves a little bit more than just having a cool programming language. Anyway i would love to see monkey to focus and enhance significantly and/or a monkey/Ruby like language in Unity. |
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| Well I put a reference to Monkey in every app I make. :) But yes, Mark always is an expert when it comes to programming but his marketing skills seem to lack a bit. ;) Mark, if you read this: I guess you could push your sales beyond imagination, because what you've created here is by far better than everything I've seen in the market up to now. |
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| You know, i wasn't taking about marketing, i was more talking about technical restrictions. I doubt that marketing would help monkey at this point a lot because the product isn't a convincing solution on all the supported platforms. |
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| I don't know if I would agree taumel, sure it definitively needs to expand and Mark I assume is working hard on that, you just need to look at the updates to see that hes working hard on it. So its growing, my only complaint if I am honest is the IDE, and thats not Marks call, the IDE is not under active development which means from a front end point of view monkey looks like its standing still which is a shame, we really need Active IDE development, either by Simon, Mark or the community. Monkey is not perfect but it is bloody amazing, and the best 120 dollars iv spent in a long time, par BlitzMax, as a loyal BRL customer I really wana help where I can make the product sell. and grow. if I was better at IDE development I would expand the IDE myself, but I suck when it comes to IDE's and would only be able to manage little hacks here or there which wont really help anyone. |
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| Jungle IDE? |
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| Beaker was that in reply to dabz ? :P Mmmm, I fancy a banana too... Think I'll go and get one... *Dabz ends up black and blue* Dabz |
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| Beaker's post is about a "famous" psychological study in the field of "superstitious behavior" (I think?). Most superstitions originated from a context where the "superstitious behavior" was functional for survival, but it some point it became no longer necessary. What happened in the second phase of the experiment is that they stopped soaking the monkeys with cold water If they happen to climb for the banana. Thing is, no single monkey tried to climb the ladder even when all the monkeys in the group were never soaked. Back to topic: Conditions have changed but behavior stays the same. The adoption of tools like monkey is (I believe) something like that. Most people tend to things just because it's the way it has been done. |
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| @Taiphoz I also don't regret buying monkey, it already was worth the investment when thinking of all the fun i had with BlitzMax and i also see that Mark does a lot of updates but to be a convincing solution on all platforms and so to convince others as well it simply needs to evolve a lot more. Otherwise i can see it ending up as a fan toy but not as a more common dev-tool with all the pros and cons. |
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| Conditions have changed but behavior stays the same. The adoption of tools like monkey is (I believe) something like that. Most people tend to things just because it's the way it has been done. It's very true. If you look at say the smartphone business: Nokia was the defacto for years and years. They produced "smart phones" that infact were pretty dumb, but at the time they seemed good; very good! People chose nokia just because it was the way things were done. There were other choices, but nokia were the mainstream choices... Then, just like that, apple came along and turned everything upside down. They throw some pretty visuals, slick interface, less functionality, some inmissable marketing and wow just like that they gone and changed 'the way things have been done'. 4 years later the era of Nokia "smart phones" seems like a distant and terrible memory, iPhones are the defacto and apple are one of the most successful companies.... Ever. That's not to say apple are perfect an their products are unbeatable, it's just to say that they set out to change people's minds and pulled it off! Just because the likes of unity and actionscript-based frameworks seem like the defacto and mainstream choices, all it takes is something to impact users and sway their decisions and everything can change! I am incredibly happy with blitzmax, maxgui, monkey, blide, jungleide and pretty much anything that seems to come from the community surrounding "blitz", i will continue to promote it at any "events" I goto.. But tbh I don't think I can do it justice chattering on in a noisy room full of semi tipsy/drunk event-goers, it needs something more... |
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| I also agree that Monkey is an excellent tool, but I really believe that Mr Sibly would be wise to work on a networking module, so we can play with multiplayer, I realise that the core needs to be stable first then other things can be added, but multiplayer opens up so much more, especially for mobile development. |
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| With each technology someone pops up and wants multiplayer. After many years of using different tools i can tell you that it never worked out for the majority. They want it but don't need it and can't handle it. It's a pain to develop&debug multiplayer stuff and mostly the functionality will suck as well which probably makes it the #1 of wasted resources in gamedev tools, especially at this scale/stage. |
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| We will be restricted to just stand alone single player games without any type of multiplayer. Do you think it's a waste of time implementing a bluetooth module so we can develop games that allow a multi-user experience? Perhaps a HTTP module is a waste too so we can't interact via the internet? |
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| I think at this stage there are much more important things to be done first. Whilst there do exist enjoyable muliplayer games, every tool i've ever used breeded far more and better single player games. |
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| There is no need to develop multiplayer module from scratch. There are some middleware engines that support Monkey's target platforms: http://www.exitgames.com/ http://www.electrotank.com/ http://www.smartfoxserver.com/ http://www.pubnub.com/ It is possible to create wrapper or module of any of this engines and use in games written in Monkey. |
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| Woah great, thanks for the links! Might be a good idea to wrap some of these. :) |
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| Pssst check out this thread -> http://monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=2397 I had a play with getting a pubnub module started... |
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