Been keeping my eye on EDI's stuff, looks like he's starting to tackle something similar to my Golem3D engine. Good stuff, good stuff. Hope he does better with his than I have with mine. I have all the discipline of a spoiled 4 year-old with ADD.
I was idly wondering the other day about something. I say idly, because I doubt it will ever come to fruition, given my general attitude of layaboutness and ne'er-do-wellness. But I thought about taking the Accidental Engine (or whatever weird, Frankensteinian thing it is slowly turning into), cleaning it up and making a full game with it, then dumping the game source code and all onto a community-oriented website. Provide documentation for extending the game via scripting and asset creation, docs for all the various file formats, scripts for the model and animation exports via Blender, etc... the whole shebang. As well as docs on the engine code itself. Open-source it under a decent license, and release the assets under a creative commons. Then provide a paypal donations link or something to that effect.
What would happen? Are there enough people in the world out there who would donate that it would be worth my while? I could provide community-based perks (somewhat like the GDNet++ perks) for donations, perhaps something like access to a small bit of hosting for personal projects, space in a mod showcase, something like that. I haven't thought too deeply on it.
But what I'm getting at, I guess, is attempting to build a business around the community of a game, rather than the product of the game itself. The product itself would in the long run leave my direct control, and growth would come from the community through mods and derived works.
It's probably a pipe dream. I seriously doubt I would ever be able to put it into play in the first place, and I'm skeptical whether voluntary donations (or even a subscription model, which might be another alternative) would ever provide enough of a financial incentive to keep such an effort afloat. But in my head, at least, it's a pretty neat idea. [grin]
