I believe a large part of the problem is a lack of time and a lack of motivated individuals to oversee a large creative project - you need to put a lot of effort into making sure the game design is consistent, and follows a vision. Everyone has a slightly different view on what a good game is, which ultimately makes it hard to gain contributors to create features.
Heh. Minetest Game does have project leaders, it still sucks. Leadership is not a predictor of success.
What I DO agree, however is that there must be a clearly stated vision and people do have to work together, not against each other.
The real problem is, Minetest Game devs simply have no clue what they're doing. There's no vision, no project goal, no design, absolutely nothing. It's absolutely no surprise why it's such a mess.
I also believe that a lack of sharing of basic features causes issues - MTG is a mess, and makes it hard to reuse stuff in a new game. This means that a lot of the initial effort is on defining initial boring nodes, which has been done before.
Yes, MTG sucks. Why is it still the default game?
Compared to modding, there isn't as much game help available. There are no bare basic games which provide you the bare minimum to start from - just nodes, player model, and inventory.
AHEM, AHEM!
Sorry. Did you say something? :D
There is a desperate lack of artists in this community.
More or less, yes. I think this is also a political problem, mostly. Many, many artists simply do
not share our values of freedom and just insist on their copyrights like everyone else.
It's much easier nowadays to find a programmer for a free software project than to find artists, especially
skilled artists.
Maybe this is also simply a “marketing fail” of free software, many people think this only affects programmers (which is of course completely false).
The idea of freedom simply is foreign to most artists. The problem is not that there are not good artists, the problem is to convince them to work with us. =)
A good game needs a team behind it.
No, this is completely false. I've seen many good games which were entirely or almost exclusively made by one person only.
The entire Touhou series is entirely made by just one person. There are tons of small freeware or free software games made by one person. A good game does not need to be large to be good.
Even if you use the work of other people, you do not need to work with them directly togehter.
Just adding more people to a project does not predict success, it's also how well they are coordinated.
Of course, for really big games, a team is obviously neccessary to finish it before you die of old age. :D
Yes, teams ARE a valid way to make a game, I just wanted to debunk your claim that a team is a neccessity.
But really, it depends. Do NOT underestimate the willpower of people with a lot of free time and no distractions.
pixture - has a good beginning but lacking polish and depth.
IMO it's pretty good and very enjoyable. Depth is really the main issue here (need MOAR ores!), but even although the game is extremely simple, it's well-made. I have spent many hours playing it. It is in some areas even simpler than Minetest Game but still managed to catch my attention for long.
My only issue is that I think the crafting system has been completely ruined, it takes forever to craft pretty much anything. It's worse than Minetest's default crafting system. This is partially my fault, because I suggested to change the crafting system. :-(
If crafting is fixed, I have no objections to ship Pixture with official Minetest.
As for other polishing issues: The scrollbars are still gray, but this is a limitation of Minetest. The map is a bit weird. Apart from that, I don't see major polishing issues.
You have to keep in mind this game is intended to be simple, I don't think there will be major gameplay changes in the future. IMO Pixture proofs that even a simple game can be enjoyable. Note that simplicity can be a good thing, I think it is a great game for complete newcomers.
Hades Revisited - nice idea with fertility, but needs more mechanics to be more interesting
Yes, I know! Just have patience. :D Not just more mechanics, but also more depth, very important. The whole concept of the game is still pretty bare bones, mind you.
Wasted land - similar to Hades, but post apocolyptic rather than alien. Mods could be shared between the two games
Both games are simply not advanced enough to share pretty much anything.
I think one of the greatest games we have WOULD be Inside The Box, but sadly, this is still just a server, so it doesn't count. I still don't get why a game which is
100% singleplayer forces you to play online. It's so stupid. I hope sofar releases it as a downloadable game before they disappear forever or their harddisks suddenly catch fire. It would be a major loss to our community.
What is preventing you from making a game with Minetest?
I think the answer for most people would be simply be: “Forced to work for a day job.”. This sucks out a lot of time and possibly willpower, too.