although @MossRC has already written extensively on the topic of #macintosh #shareware , i love this little article by one of the former employees of Ambrosia Software - makers of Escape Velocity
it chronicles the ins and outs of first selling "nagware" and then "crippleware" when times got tougher for the company
https://tidbits.com/2002/03/11/the-plain-truth-about-casual-software-piracy/
inspired by the article, one of the goofy things i decided to do for the mac-like wildfire simulation game i'm working on is selling it as....... shareware!
... which of course requires a naggy splash screen, running in its own os 😆
here's a little test i did to see what it would play/look like
The foundations of the CSS, if you're interested, came from Bootstrap/386 (https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386). I modified a bunch of stuff and added a few new things, but it saved me *a lot* of time getting started.
I you wanted some tasty modern recreation fonts of the olden days of Apple, here's a chart with the old name on the left and its modern counterpart on the right (they are searchable and all free)
diving for a dead body in police quest ii is inexplicably one of the most relaxed and calming scenes in any sierra adventure game
so much love and effort was put into making this scene reward taking your time exploring and collecting evidence
Gamebase64 is an extremely important archive for the #Commodore64 , but is now at huge risk of losing its online presence due to the tragic loss of webmaster Steven Feurer. Please check our post for more details - but can anyone help or spread the word?
https://legacy.3drealms.com/index.html
https://www.kaser.com/home.html
http://www.zuggsoft.com/index.php
https://www.semicolon.com/index.html (sort of — it's all modern ports of his old shareware)
http://capnmagneto.com (RIP Al Evans)
http://www.sticksoftware.com/software.html
https://www.winograd.com/games.shtml
Wrote about some shareware game developers that still have websites
EDIT: I have added a list at the end of recommendations by other folks
https://virtualmoose.org/2023/09/18/shareware-game-developer-websites/
I think I've seen a few projects like that involving shareware games, and a couple of hacks of the same sort based on commercial titles too. It's amazing what talented Eastern European devs did to hone their skills.
@MossRC Приключения пионерки Ксении (The Adventures of Ksenia the Young Pioneer) was not, itself, shareware, but instead a total conversion of the shareware classic Captain Comic into an entirely new game, by a Ukrainian developer who reverse engineered the file formats and built (and published!) his own tools for editing its resources.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/59386/prigodi-pionerki-kseni/
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Priklyuchenia_Pionerki_Ksenii_shareware
@MossRC Alexis Janson, author of the ZZT-inspired MegaZeux game creation system, which was distributed as shareware for a while before being open sourced and which still has a shockingly active development scene
@MossRC Karen Chun of Redwood Games! Solo dev behind classics like Word Rescue and Pickle Wars, who was also apparently very active giving advice and helping out on the early internet and Compuserve gamedev community. Really wanted to get her for an interview her for http://fringe.games/ a few years back but it didn't work out at the time.
@MossRC related/unrelated - I just finished the book and found it a really good read. Felt like a great ride through it all, delving into detail just where it was needed to illustrate what was happening at the time. I found it a good balance between the broad brush strokes whilst telling loads of stories I never knew. Thanks! :-)