Employee 2-4601 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 28, 2018 7:30 pm
Perhaps when you release the code, the license should be free for non-commercial use, but contain some kind of provision for commercial use?
It probably should be one or more of the common open source licenses to lower the barrier to re-use.
Selling code is work on its own. No offence, but he'd likely have to put in a lot more work to make his code "commercial or other end user ready". And then it's still work to support the code, else there likely won't be any customers. I don't see a real business model there. Never mind he'd likely have to deal with people who think this game was just a scam funding the tech base for the business he actually had in mind.
IMO it is far more likely in a relative sense [absolute likelihood? no clue] that any possible community forming over any part of the released code would pay Josh to pitch in a bit on developing, say, a derivative UI toolkit or just the engine or whatever. But it'll still be a bunch of dollars on something like Patreon unless it really really hits a home run with some group of people, not a full-time job. And it's also not clear that Josh even wants continued involvement.
Triopalite wrote: ↑Fri Sep 28, 2018 7:03 pm
then having spent a great deal of it and knowing he couldn't really produce a game, started to panic
You can do this all without bad faith or low effort. You know how many project managers / engineers / ... got a high level of stress and panic from difficult projects with a lot of uncertainties and a time frame that is "supposed to be done already"? It's really taxing.
Having some well-rested management and more human resources that can be shifted around do wonders for these projects and make them a whole lot less about "weird decisions and poor work tired panicking people" - but even then difficult feats remain difficult feats and many a person won't manage to be entirely cool.
Triopalite wrote: ↑Fri Sep 28, 2018 7:03 pm
I obviously, are not as kind as you, or gullible.
I'll point out that you might have a chance to more objectively gauge the level of effort put into the project with the source code and assets as a yard stick.
Dunno if Josh will include past prototypes that were discarded -e.g. the entire git / hg / whatever history, or not. But if he did, the history would surely make it abundantly clear how much it takes to redo big fundamental parts of a game like 3+ times apart from redoing bits and pieces of code and assets as usual.