I completely agree.
He is really original in what he is doing and how he is doing it.
I recognize the same kind of enthusiasm that is present in David Braben.
Making space sims must be really fun.
I wish I could be as enthusiastic about my own job.
Parnell has many cool ideas and is able to implement them too.
I hope we will see variations of some of them implemented in ED.
Since Kickstarter and such you got a lot of devs who are making there own game ideas. Wich is a very rare thing in game commercial industry. They make there own decisions on every level, only with feedback if wanted from the community.
So they can sing " I did it my way "
This s very common in Crowed funded project. But there are 10000 of those and many fail. There are only a few on the top. And small part do deliver. Those we know best the failings are lost in those large waves of releases and most unkown.
This means they don't just have talent on specific field, but must be very skilled on every aspect what goes into making games. Because the smaller the team less specilisation. If doing on your own your skillset must be very broad. As master in all.
PG get a lot of mytical hype. But I think the true skill is making a rock solid game engine architecture that is very extensible and maintainable where every aspect got the needed attention. And PG is a crusial solution detail as part in this game architecture. So very talented programmer in many fields. But game designer is also a crusial part.
It very rare that one person has so many talents.
The problem that occure is that even in small teams of say 5 not all expertise is fullfilled. In commercial larger team its a matter of budged planning and hire expertise and often in those larger teams all task are filled in, with specialist.
We like space games so we seek out games in this genre. There are milions of people with there own great game idea. But only a small part are dev.s lot of them are just people who want to break into this industry. Often without any experience.
The difference is only a small group of dev can make there idea real.
It't not the idea that count but its execution that makes a difference.
How he doing it? well in a conventional way you need large art team to produce content. Because there is no art team but a sole programer. There is this huge depence on PG. It't more of a need then a choices. PG is a solution you highly depend on, to devolop a game of this scale, alone. Also that game is more pure PG then its rivals made by much larger teams.
Most studio avoid PG because they can as there game idea is not so content demanding and keep the look and feel simple so one or two artist are enough.
So in this LT is uniek. While it more known rivals are hybrids. PG and conventional mix. That is because there team is larger with a art team or team members.
Also the problem I have with current games is the limit in space ships.
24 or 64 is not much where with a few centuries of space faring you got in 10000 types and much more uniek big once. Also with wide varity of tech levels.
Using PG could yield lot of space ships.
Also I don't care much about looks space craft must be more funtional design then wild cool look that make physicaly no sense.
It great to know that in the near future we got a decent amount of choice in space open sandbox games.
