Voted. Hope you win, then you'll be famous and like uh you'll pretend you haven't ever seen my name before >.>

Still, good luck :)

I'm afraid that's a promise I can't make. Not without ditching indie game development entirely, which would rather defeat the point of this post in the first place. =)

(I did renew my membership earlier today. Does that count? =P )

I was highly active on BYOND for five years, which at the time I quit was about a quarter of my entire lifespan thus far. I should hope that counts for something. Don't get me wrong; I'm grateful for everything this place did for me and I don't regret the time I spent here. It just became time to move on, and no amount of extortion can change that.

If I did return under duress, it wouldn't exactly be what you want it to be, would it?

Now, I have actually considered ditching the indie game development business. It's hard and it's painful and it's depressing. But I have to believe it's more worthwhile, for me personally at this point, than continuing to mess around with BYOND.

At this point, the only way I would consider returning to BYOND is if it became a viable money-making platform for indies. I'd need to be able to pull in visitors from outside and have them run the game with no login screen, a Guest account, no visible pager, and no other BYOND branding. Oh, and I'd need to be able to distribute the BYOND package plus my game in my own self-contained .exe installer. I heard there have been some improvements in this area since I left, but I'm not yet convinced that it's good enough. Foomer is right; BYOND-the-platform needs to be separated from BYOND-the-website before it can break out of its niche. Not that this is ever likely to happen, since it completely breaks Tom's business model (which relies on the website itself being popular).

Even if that was accomplished, BYOND has more fundamental limitations which have never been resolved and likely never will be (its tile-based nature, the slow networking, the 10 FPS render loop, the slow running speed of the VM). Plus, it's always been a glitchy platform in general. I've used it enough to know.

The final nail in the coffin is that it still only runs on Windows (don't talk to me about Wine), which is not such a purely idealistic a complaint as it sounds. The Mac market is directly important to indies (people actually still use Mac download sites so they drive tons of traffic), and Linux support is important for reasons of publicity.

That's my position. I'm not asking you to agree or sympathise, but there it is.

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Thanks to everyone who did vote, and please keep 'em coming. =) This competition is historically extremely tight, so every vote really does count!

I’ve been following your game, as in viewing multiple game indie game forums and sites. I see that you’ve put a lot of hard work into your game so I voted for it. Hopefully you will get first place or at least the top five, although, I haven’t seen your competition.

Heh. Thanks Tib. :-)

Thanks Calus! I'm glad someone understands. ;-)

@Elation: Truth hurts? =P

You probably don't even recognise my name, but over the last 4 or 5 years you have taught me more about programming than all of my programming lecturers combined. I voted, and hope that my part has helped you. Good luck man.