Steam greenlight release?

[bunnies]

Tome is on Steam, Adom is on Steam; has anyone considered putting Angband on Steam as well via Greenlight...?

A few reasons why people might want this:

1. Game is managed via Steam Library (which houses all of my games), instead of a standalone folder on my Desktop.
2. Gives people a chance to donate a small sum to development of the game
3. Reach out to wider audience
4. Cloud saves
5. Steam achievements

[Nick]

I've kind of avoided that question, because

• it seems like time that could be better spent on actual development and
• it might add constraints to our magnificently disordered release system.

Also, I instinctively steer away from the "everyone else is doing it" argument

[bunnies]

No worries, as a software engineer myself, I can fully understand the pain and effort required to develop this integration

Just thought that I'd bounce the idea around though, since having the game on Steam would be a massive convenience to me as a player, esp in terms of game library management, and cloud saves (so my saves aren't lost in some deep dark hole when I upgrade my machine, or my hdd dies).

Technically, I think Steamworks API integration shouldn't be challenging, and should be rather straightforward. I think the challenge would be primarily in managing the code complexity, this build and release complexity, and additional constraints that might be imposed if its added.

[Pete Mack]

That's what usb sticks or private cloud storage is for (sky drive, google drive, etc) you can configure the save file location , I think. A 32G USB stick is running at $13 as of yesterday when I picked up a new one.

[PowerWyrm]

Originally Posted by bunnies

Tome is on Steam, Adom is on Steam; has anyone considered putting Angband on Steam as well via Greenlight...?

ToME (as Tales of Maj Eyal) and ADOM have unique content. I don't think that Angband, which is based on Tolkien's work, can be put on steam (for obvious copyright issues).

[Nick]

Originally Posted by PowerWyrm

ToME (as Tales of Maj Eyal) and ADOM have unique content. I don't think that Angband, which is based on Tolkien's work, can be put on steam (for obvious copyright issues).

Good point - it would seem like rather asking for trouble.

[simon_a_robinson]

Originally Posted by bunnies

Just thought that I'd bounce the idea around though, since having the game on Steam would be a massive convenience to me as a player, esp in terms of game library management, and cloud saves (so my saves aren't lost in some deep dark hole when I upgrade my machine, or my hdd dies).

Nethack has a public server (nethack.alt.org) and if you choose to play on it then your save file is stored, er, somewhere else rather than locally. It has other neat features like being able to watch games in progress. I'm not a software engineer so I don't undertand the intricacies of all of this stuff, but perhaps something similar could be done with Angband?

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by simon_a_robinson

Nethack has a public server (nethack.alt.org) and if you choose to play on it then your save file is stored, er, somewhere else rather than locally. It has other neat features like being able to watch games in progress. I'm not a software engineer so I don't undertand the intricacies of all of this stuff, but perhaps something similar could be done with Angband?

It could, but I suspect it'd get relatively little traction, as many players prefer to play with multiple windows open, which is tricky to do remotely. It's not impossible, but it'd require a lot more work than just setting up an SSH server with a simple kiosk system (which at its core is how this kind of public server works).

The other concern with Steam Greenlight or similar concepts (e.g. Patreon) is, who gets the money? Angband is a community-run project. Conceivably funding could be used to pay for website hosting, but not all contributors uses oook.cz or rephial.org. Bottom line is that when money starts getting involved, arguments are not far behind...

Which is a pity, because having Steam integration really would be quite nice.