"Obscure programming language" partly blamed for Haunts failure

[Donovan Hide]

Slightly bad PR day for Go:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

[Larry Clapp]

Put another way, in 1 year 2 guys and US$71k almost finished a fairly major sounding commercial video game written in Go.

Perspective.  :)

-- L

[Dumitru Ungureanu]

Well, games can be made in Go, developers in Go are scares, this spells for developers "Go - A new market opportunity", which equals a pretty good PR.

[John Asmuth]

"Haunts' lead programmer was only contracted to work for Mob Rules for a year, said Mr Dakan, and having returned to Google has no spare time to keep working on the game."

I'd say that's the reason, right there.

On Friday, October 19, 2012 9:11:39 AM UTC-4, Donovan wrote:

[tomwilde]

Is the game open source?

If yes I would be willing to write unit tests and bugfixes for a free copy of the final game :)

Not that I'm much of a gamer but I'd like to dissipate these "obscure" rumors around Go and show that there's a community.

[Jesse McNelis]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 12:11 AM, Donovan Hide <donov...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Slightly bad PR day for Go:
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

Go might be obscure but it's so straight forward that learning Go
would take a good developer less time then it would to learn the
existing code base of the game.
Hardly a reason to stop development. I think they just ran out of money.


--
=====================
http://jessta.id.au

[Christoph Schunk]

You can find the source code here: https://github.com/runningwild/haunts

If he returns to google he can make Haunted house a 20% project ;)

[tomwilde]

Cool!

Can anyone get someone from the game studio onto this thread?

[Christoph Schunk]

Rick states that they plan to fully open source everything if it comes to the worst: http://www.mobrulesgames.com/blog/2012/10/19/better-morning.html

Am Freitag, 19. Oktober 2012 16:35:05 UTC+2 schrieb PeteT:

Is the game open source? 

https://github.com/runningwild/haunts

I don't see a license file.

[Harley Laue]

Hey Rick, I just thought I'd let you know, there's a thread on the Go mailing list.

On 10/19/2012 09:46 AM, tomwilde wrote:

Cool!

Can anyone get someone from the game studio onto this thread?

Yes, I'll try ;)

--
 
 

[Jim Whitehead II]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Donovan Hide <donov...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Slightly bad PR day for Go:
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

The language is so obscure that the project couldn't even post on the
easily found mailing list to see if there were developers who were
interested in coming onto the project.

- Jim

[tomwilde]

So as I understand, the game is pretty much complete - it only lacks testing and bugfixing, is this correct?

I had previously stated that I would be willing to invest some time in writing unit tests and maybe bugfixes for a free copy of the final game... 

Would this make sense to you? Maybe more people would also join this motion?

Cheers, Tom

Am Freitag, 19. Oktober 2012 17:47:11 UTC+2 schrieb Rick Dakan:

Hi!

I'm Rick Dakan, from Mob Rules Games. Harley pointed me towards this thread, so I wanted to introduce myself. Sorry to bring bad associations to Go!

Anyway, if you have any questions, I'll happily answer them. Here are links to the two blog posts where I explain things. 

http://www.mobrulesgames.com/blog/2012/10/18/desperate-times.html

http://www.mobrulesgames.com/blog/2012/10/19/better-morning.html

best,

Rick

[roger peppe]

On 19 October 2012 16:47, Rick Dakan <rick....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> I'm Rick Dakan, from Mob Rules Games. Harley pointed me towards this thread,
> so I wanted to introduce myself. Sorry to bring bad associations to Go!
>
> Anyway, if you have any questions, I'll happily answer them. Here are links
> to the two blog posts where I explain things.
>
> http://www.mobrulesgames.com/blog/2012/10/18/desperate-times.html
>
> http://www.mobrulesgames.com/blog/2012/10/19/better-morning.html
>
> best,
> Rick

I'd be interested to know how you found Go for this project.

In particular, do you think the choice of language affected
your development time adversely, and if so, was that because
of the language itself or because there's so little existing
graphics infrastructure in Go?

[Rick Dakan]

I've been really pleased and surprised with the offers to jump in and help do the programming work to get Haunts finished.

I'm going to talk through how we'd organize such an effort with some friends of mine who know a lot more about running that kind of open source project than I do. I want to figure out the path forward ASAP, including some way to compensate people, with free games being the very least we would do.

r

[Rick Dakan]

We went with Go because Jonathan was most comfortable with it and felt it would be the language he could most efficiently write the game in since he was the sole programmer. 

I can't measure how much time of Jonathan's was saved by him working in Go instead of some other language, but I believe him when he says he is fastest in Go. He did end up spending time on graphics-related functionality and a few times when changes to the kernel messed up what he was working on. I can't judge for sure, but I think the delays from those sources probably evened out the advantages to his base coding speed. 

The bigger source of delays was things turning out to be more complicated than anticipated, and with on programmer, when one thing slips the schedule, everything does.

[Patrick Mylund Nielsen]

I'd buy it if it were something like OCaml, Lisp or Haskell (but even for those there are very skilled programmers available that know those languages only because they thought it was interesting to teach it/them to themselves.) Go is extremely easy to learn for anyone who knows a C-like language, be it C, Python, Java or JavaScript. It's 1 day, 3 days maximum, to start using it.

Also, I don't recall seeing any "looking for a Go programmer for Haunts" post on the mailing list! I can think of several people I know personally who both know Go, and would jump at that.

Out of curiosity, has anyone on this list actually experienced problems hiring programmers for positions where Go was the language, or one of the languages, used?

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Donovan Hide <donov...@gmail.com> wrote:

Slightly bad PR day for Go:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

--

[Dan Cross]

The "obscure language" comment was more likely an artifact of the journalistic process, rather than someone consciously bashing Go.  Put another way, I doubt anyone affiliated with the game actually blames Go for their present difficulties, even if it got reported that way.

I've found it best to not judge too quickly based on what one reads in the press.

        - Dan C.

[stevewang]

It's obvious that the company is running a very high risk of lacking competent and sufficient programmers when it decide to use the go language to develop its products.

Of course, the go programming language itself is not to blame for this kind of setback. 

[Patrick Mylund Nielsen]

Most journalists (and especially at BBC, in Europe at least) let you read your comments/a draft so long as no other sources are cited. But yeah, I don't know what was said. The comments in this thread so far suggest that Go was perceived to be a significant problem after a while, though.

--
 
 

[Patrick Mylund Nielsen]

It's not obvious to me. The obscure languages tend to have a much higher ratio of highly skilled and passionate programmers who can't find jobs where they can use those languages because few companies use them. You could easily argue that the opposite is true; that obscure languages (as long as the languages themselves are intuitive and powerful) can be "secret weapons."

--
 
 

[Larry Clapp]

On Friday, October 19, 2012 1:04:32 PM UTC-4, Patrick Mylund Nielsen wrote:

Out of curiosity, has anyone on this list actually experienced problems hiring programmers for positions where Go was the language, or one of the languages, used?

I haven't actually tried to hire anyone that knows Go.  I hope that for my next new-hire, I can say "we use Go".  #hopeful-but-not-optimistic

-- L

[Paul]

I think the people who are claiming "obscure programming language" simply don't know where Go is coming from or what its heritage is, that it is based on C-language and that in many ways it is easier than C-language. 

I did just read Ricks blog post: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/331425 

<< Unfortunately, getting online play working took three times longer than estimated (instead of the twice as long as estimated I’d been counting on). It also required making adjustments to programming for all the levels, even when they’re not being played online. With no one left on the project who is capable of implementing those changes and debugging them during testing, the game is in a very patchwork state. In some cases, levels that once worked fine now have serious issues. Fixing those issues would require fixes both to the level programming and the core system programming, working in tandem. >>

The above paragraph made me think, especially this sentence: "In some cases levels that once worked fine now have serious issues". Were the requriements for the project changed in-flight? How can it be that you had significant components already working and then developed them into an unworking state? Normally when you have reached a milestone where you have something working to show for your work, you would do an intermediate release of that part.  I think whoever wants to jump in and try to fix things should talk first to the original developers. ... just my 3 Cents. 

Cheers. 

[si guy]

Hi,

I am currently working on a Go game as well. We're only using go for the multiplayer server however, approximately a year and a half in.

I would gladly lend a hand with testing and bugfixes, free of charge. Well not totally free, I count the experience with another go project as payment :).

-Simon Watt

[Harley Laue]

Things are still in the planning stage to get the infrastructure setup for it to be an open source project, but there's now a survey you can fill out if interested:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE1CVTVIOWJpSGZOX3plQURfV0ZzOVE6MQ

Here's the post on kickstarter with more information:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/334371