But all the tropes are lifted straight from 80's action flicks with some irony thrown in so it's not surprising that they appear in a lot of these throwbacks.
Agreed, I was expecting this to be about late night/weekend calls of "everythings broken! help!". I don't know how you'd say you charge extra for normal office hours.
I don't know how you'd say you charge extra for normal office hours.
It's the same reason that as the operator of a small business you can't just walk into your accountant's or lawyer's or bank manager's office and expect to see them without making an appointment. You could probably have a dedicated account manager at those places, and they'll probably be happy to provide one as long as you're paying them some multiple of the corresponding employee's annual salary for doing so.
Remember, you're running a business. You're not a member of your client's staff. That means they're paying you for the product or service you're providing according to your contract, not for being a bum on a seat for some fixed hours. It also means you will have necessarily other commitments in terms of business administration and potentially other clients. Anything that reduces your flexibility to do these other things or particularly that requires a degree of exclusivity for a single client is a big commitment and should be charged accordingly.
Personally, I wouldn't accept a long-term gig with fixed hours or on-site working. I also value the freedom that comes from working independently, and I have no wish to go back to more of an employer-employee relationship. If a client wants to work that way for a sensible reason and over short period (a few days during a crucial period leading up to launching a product, for example) then I wouldn't turn it down automatically, but my rates would be much higher (several times the normal rate I work off for my time, and multiplied up again if the engagement might then be deemed disguised employment and taxed accordingly).
I don't think it's that you're charging extra for normal office hours, but you're charging extra for rapid response and for making house calls. I try harder than most programmer freelancers (IMHO) to simply answer my phone and answer my emails, but in the OP's situation I'd also try to charge extra for what his client is asking.
I was a huge fan of Loom too. There really aren't that many original and creative worlds in games and Loom definitely had one. Planescape Torment is another good example.
This, I hope is the end result of indie gaming. When your target market mostly consists of 16 year old boys, or people who have the same level of taste, it puts hard limits on what you can build. Add in risk-averse nature of high-budget AAA gaming, and the result could only be stale.
Oblivion sold much better than Morrowind, for example, despite Oblivion being one of the blandest gaming experiences I can remember. Many of the worlds developed for D&D Second edition were never renewed.
Right now, indie gaming seems to be oriented around recreating gaming experiences from their childhood. But, some games are showing the seeds of true creativity.
I haven't really played video games much the last couple of years, which in part is due to hardware, but when I listen to coworkers talk about the video games they play, I have no desire to do anything about my hardware situation.
I have the feeling that in video games, like in big blockbuster movies, the trend appears to be replacing substance with special effects / fancy graphics and recycling the same old ideas over and over. (I am probably overgeneralizing somewhat, but I do so to make a point. If there have been any games lately that really disprove my point, I would very much like to hear about them!)
I'm in the same boat as you, I have very little interest in modern games, certainly not the big blockbuster stuff anyway (sequels and FPSes, very little else). However, I have seen some promising games from indie developers. Haven't played it yet, but would like to play Journey...
Indie developers have a hard time, I think, competing with the level of "bling" big companies can afford, but at the same time they have the freedom to try out things large companies would not touch with a ten-mile pole, which is promising. Minecraft blew my mind, even though I stopped playing it much after I got scared of how addictive it is (on the other hand, "it is pretty addictive" is probably the highest praise one can give a game).
It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.
Even if it'd be viable, the traditional approach is much faster and easier on resources. You still want to retain a part of the GPU for physics, maybe. Or run on lower-end hardware, too. Using ray-tracing for accurate shadows or reflections in part of a scene may be viable, but I severely doubt games will just use ray-tracing for rendering. CAD and architecture stuff may benefit more from that, I guess.
It will probably need GPU's to at least slowly into ray/path tracing engines, like what Imagination is doing. I think we'll probably get there within 10 years. 100+ TeraFlops should do it.
