Installers

Indie game dev leads you to some dark and terrible places.

I so miss the App Store being an endless payout slot machine without spending $10M on advertising, and miss the 6-figure jobs for fixing peoples’ apps because nobody knew Objective-C (even less know it now, but they’re stupidly trying to rewrite code they don’t understand into Swift, which will break again in 6 months).

Now I’m a poor but honest pixel farmer, forced to shovel shit to get to market.

Making a Mac binary for Reaper’s Crypt was trivial (on a Mac, probably impossible elsewhere), and produced 1 file: “Reaper’s Crypt.app” (a Mac application bundle, hiding all the mess so you don’t see it).

Making a Linux binary was not much harder, and produced 17 files and directories, with libraries and data scattered all over, with the binary sitting in the middle where nobody could see it. So I’ll have to make a little script to go launch that untidy mess. When I did Linux, there were at least 3 standards for icons, and by now I’m sure there are 13 more, so they get a raw image file.

Making a Windows binary required me to install WINE with MacPorts, which took hours, and the binary is in the middle of a similar mess of 20 files and directories. So for this I need an installer to make a .msi file, which nobody I know has done this decade; I think I have a handle on this. But now I don’t know if I need 32-bit “win32” or 64-bit “win32” (what.); there’s no fat binaries in Windows, so it’s one or the other.

I am not Hercules, and these Augean stables are filthy.