Our lead engineer happened to be a proponent of the language so he found others who were too. Forth was almost as much of a philosphy as it was a langauge. Very different from other programming languages. At least at the time.
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity. As some who was a huge SmallTalk advocate in school and early in my career I totally understand the language as philosophy thing.
When the Macintosh first came out, Forth was the first language that was released for it - I remember getting it. I bounced off it reasonably hard, so the fact that a shipping game was written in Forth is pretty impressive. The fact that it is an awesome game even more so!
I imagine just the RPN aspect would make it a tough language to get used to at first for anyone who hadn’t already spent a lot of time with a HP programmable calculator.
I’ve used or at least experimented with a ridiculous number of computer languages (I love old computer languages the way Brian Rubin loves old space games) but never had a chance to play with Forth. Though reading about it I can see in the days of C why it be so attractive. You’ve still got inline assembly for the critical bits so any language overhead can be overcome where needed.
I think Forth is kind of up there with Lisp as a mind warping programming experience.
Pfft, real onanists use Haskell.
Really, though, they may not be practical languages for most problems, but they’re useful for exploring other ways of doing them, and some of those ways become mainstream with different syntax and features.
I’m kind of concerned. Most campaigns star off strong, slow down, and then pick up near the deadline. Starflight seems to have started off slowly, only 19% of goal so far. And I have seen very little publicity about this. I hope I am wrong.
I haven’t seen any announcements pop up on news sites yet. Hopefully there will be an uptick in pledges.
I just found the email announcing the start of the campaign in my spam folder. If Google classified it as spam, when I have had plenty of email from Fig being previously cleared, it must have hurt their reach.
That has been my thinking on many fig campaigns, yet somehow the curve seems different in fig than in other crowdfunding platforms. I remain optimistic.
Oh man, I am going to end up bumping up my pledge, I can see it now. Well, it’s worth it for new Starflight.
Seems like more of the money is from Fig funds than pledges so far. Hopefully it will pick up. because I’d love to see this game made.
It is. This is my first time pledging to a fig campaign, so I don’t know the norm, but a kickstarter campaign run this way would go nowhere. Not enough info, not enough updates, not enough excitement.
I have to admit, I’m a bit concerned as well. Updates have been fairly infrequent. I’m trying to get them on my podcast but it seems very slow going. It’s worrying.
Hopefully they’re building up to something big for the final 2-week push?
Why wait for that though? These things need to be consistently marketed and updated throughout the entire campaign.
Yep, this has been a terribly run campaign. You really need to be relentless in your push and get your game out there. There have been only a couple of articles on game sites. There’s really been no publicity at all. I’ve backed a number of successful game campaigns on KS and Fig so I think I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to successfully hit your funding goal - and these guys are not doing it. Barring a miracle,this campaign is toast.
I sent an email to RPS to see if they are going to do an article about it. I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t shown up there.
That’s some really great armchair quarterbacking, guys. Hey, I have an idea, maybe try something like bumping up your pledge and talking to your friends about this run. I’m bumping up to $200 myself because fuck it, I want this game.
We’re probably gonna do that too. Sorry we’re having a discussion ON A DISCUSSION FORUM.
Apparently Greg is doing am AMA this Thursday.