The term homebrew?

[Mr SQL]

On 4/8/2021 at 10:33 AM, DEBRO said:

If we were developing games / products and distributing them in ziplock baggies like we did in the 80s...would that really be considered homebrew? AtariAge is the publisher for most of our work. Albert, produces these games with boxes (on occasion), shells, and manuals. Albert ensures the production is top notch in my opinion. Would that not remove the homebrew term from our work as well? Why are we not considered say indie developers? There are people or teams considered as indie developers that work from their home and produce digital content...no box etc. Why are they considered indie developers and not homebrew authors?

 

It seems to me we are all indie developers since we don't work specifically for the publisher and AtariAge (if we choose that route) happens to be our publisher.

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Indie developer bears the connotation that the programmer was commercially active writing games during the timeframe of the target platform.

 

Folks who wrote commercial games in the 80's like Audacity can't be considered homebrewers.

 

There should be a 3rd category for programmers who throw personal insults at other programmers in discussion or while their games are being reviewed, that's always a jealous homebrewer and never an Indie, Indies like other peoples work too 

 

Close your mind miss the fun 

 

 

[Mr SQL]

^For anyone confused a homebrewer threw insults about my personality during a game review, and a game review is not a roast.

 

It's awesome folks write games like we did in the 80's but we didn't do that and some of us were busy doing a lot of other things.

 

I hope comments going forward during reviews are more friendly. I'll drop the subject now unless anyone has any questions about the game.

It was pretty cool and in development for several years, here's the rough original and the finished version from Gdansk.  

 

[Superkitten]

New to these forums, but not neither new to Atari not to game dev, I realize this topic might be old to many, but was very interesting to me, and I imagine to others who are discovering this community.  While I won't enter a debate out how Atari programmers should identify (taking a hint from the LGBT community to let people identify as they like), I can share my own experiences.

 

From a brief glance of what's going on now, I see a few things, but I won't draw any conclusions.
- Homebrews seem to have started after the Atari VCS / 2600 was discontinued and abandoned by it's parent company.  
- Many homebrews are done by fans for curiosity, challenge, or fun, and often an interest in the challenge of learning to do it, as opposed to being paid.

- The emulator, Stella, keeps getting better.  Replacement controllers and parts are more widely available in higher quality than last time I checked.

- A commercially available Atari console called Retron 77 became available in 2018, ending the gap

 from 1992-2018 (check my date) where we only had abandoned consoles and emulators.

My point is that it will be interesting to see how this classification grows or changes as the scenery changes around it - like many things, I expect it will be a spectrum of characteristics, never requiring all of them to be present.  If the term helps reach its target audience, then good!  But how can one reach the potential audience that hasn't realized to search for new atari games at all, thinking it's still dead?  I came to this site to figure out which roms I wanted, and to look up instructions, etc.  Frankly, I am blown away and astounded by what I found here. ❤️

Edited June 7, 2021 by Superkitten