Re: bgt mirror is back
It takes energy to keep telling people that you aren't maintaining a thing anymore, and camlorn_audio was much less popular than BGT. One day you may have a project that's popular enough that you try to leave behind that keeps following you as far as your personal e-mail, until then don't judge. Or maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't mind just being rude, who will actually ignore them instead of composing a polite reply to the effect of "I stopped maintaining this". But as usual when I make an unpopular point, people straw man me: I'm not saying "This, specifically, is why people take projects down", I'm giving an example of why leaving projects up isn't without cost to the people who wrote them. This community has lots of examples of someone abandoning something free and everyone getting outraged about it, even to the point of people trying to revive the game using stolen code, so it's not like that's the only reason someone might want to take something out from orbit.
And to be frank, sighted people have no problem learning all these languages that this community likes to claim are harder. You can only blame the language or the community, and the language (any of the languages) has literally hundreds of thousands of people proving it's not the language every day.
BGT went like this. "Yay! BGT!" followed by an army of newbie programmers, most of whom bounced off it, but it felt good because there was a .chm file, you didn't have to learn to use Google, and the tutorials were audiogame specific. Now people think it's special, because the people who still defend it never learned enough programming to understand why it's objectively bad. No one put the effort into making anything else mainstream easy, so obviously making something mainstream easy isn't possible and BGT is special. No one was willing to put in the effort to actually learn programming, just to hammer on the tiny, tiny subset in BGT's .chm, so now anyone arguing against it obviously doesn't have a clue about how important and mystical and powerful it is and why we all need to preserve it forever.
But seriously, look around. People here make newbie-quality games for 3, 4, 5 years sometimes. There's also hundreds of thousands of devs proving that you shouldn't be making newbie quality games for that long. I'm not talking about people using Unity, I'm talking about lots and lots of people who grab HTML or Pygame or SDL in C++ even, and surpass what most audiogame devs can do in 6 months in their free time, plus also they did graphics which is actually a really hard thing to do. I've got a sighted friend who just went from not knowing how to program 8 months ago, to knowing two programming languages and writing an app for both iOS and Android that has to be able to work offline because it's going to be used in places like the middle of Africa for rather a lot of money.
When you dive into a specialized tool using a specialized language used by no one else this is what happens, because all of the things that could enable you just aren't there. BGT isn't justifiable, objectively, and the evidence that it actually hurt the community and lowered the quality of audiogames is all around us. You exhaust what BGT will let you do, then you have to start over if you want to go further, and then either you grind out newbie games forever, be one of the like 5 people who stretch BGT way beyond what it was ever able to do through years of effort, or give up on programming.
As I've said a few times now: we should have had one shades of doom quality game every couple years. We don't actually have even that.
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