Interview with Jonathan Prior of Gameolith.com

QuoteI'm Jonathan Prior, director of 736 Computing Services Limited, the company
that owns and operates Gameolith. It's a two-person operation at present -
me and Chris Soh, who I collaborate with when I need design work done.

QuoteI've been into Linux for the better part of 9 years now. I got into it when
I encountered a piece of software (honestly can't remember exactly what it
was) which was licenced with the GNU GPL, and after browsing the GNU site
for a while, I was introduced to Linux. My first distribution was Red Hat
Linux 9, which I used until Red Hat's free distribution became Fedora. Then
I tried many different distros and finally settled on Ubuntu.

I've come to prefer Linux, especially recently, because it's so easy to get
a system up and running and to just use it! All my favourite developer tools
are on the platform, and it's been good to me over the years.

QuoteIn recent years there has been less and less interest in Linux as a platform
for gaming, but that's had a resurgeance from indie developers - whose games
have only been getting better and better. But apart from the Humble Indie
Bundles, there's no reliable way for Linux games to get their games. On the
Windows front, I grew to love download stores like Steam. So I noticed a gap
in the market -- although there are plenty of game download stores for
Windows and Mac, there are almost none for Linux.

QuoteWe've had a great launch, but sales have slowed lately. However we have many
more games going up for sale soon, and we hope that will drive more
interest.

QuoteIt varies. We've reached out to a lot of developers, and we've been lucky in
that we haven't been outright rejected by a single one that has responded to
us. Unfortunately many simply haven't responded at all, which is a shame.
But the developers we do have on board have been great to work with.

QuoteNormally we approach developers over sales, and propose a discount. It's
entirely up to the developer whether they want to go ahead with the sale
though.

We've found sales do encourage more people to buy the game, as long as it's
coupled with strong promotion through all our outlets for information - not
just through the site, but also through the Facebook pages and Twitter
accounts of us and the developers.

QuotePayPal. Before launch, we had a rotten time trying to get PayPal to activate
the digital payments service on our account. It took so long that we had to
delay the launch by a week. Getting in contact with the right people was an
uphill struggle thanks to their clunky and disorganised website.

Even after it was activated we had plenty of last-minute problems that arose
as a result of their shoddily-designed API and confusing documentation. It
wasn't an especially fun week leading up to launch, but it's working quite
smoothly now.
Either way, we're working on adding Google Checkout and any other payment
providers we can find.

QuoteIt's not really a problem for us at all - the more customers we have, the
more people we can take on. In a business such as this, expansion can come
naturally.

QuoteThe next big project will be to automate our package building process.
Currently all deb/RPM packages are built manually with the assistance of
scripts, but as we get more games, that workload will increase.

QuoteThe entire site is written in Python using the Django framework, which has
sped up the development process hugely. It has taken around a year to build
the site, but without Django it would have taken at least another 6-12
months longer.

My code editor of choice is Geany. I tried both vi and emacs and although I
liked emacs more, I like Geany's UI design, and its flexibility in code
highlighting. We use Mercurial for version control.

QuoteGameolith is hosted by DotCloud <http://www.dotcloud.com/>, who have been
excellent, and have made code deployment ludicrously simple for us. We've
had no problems with them at all, and are great to work with.
In the event that a major disaster happens, we have backups of all the code,
data and game downloads in several locations around the world. We have a
server on standby which we can switch over to with a few hours of work. And
of course, we have our Facebook and Twitter pages which we use to inform
followers of any downtime.

QuoteI've been playing an awful lot of Steel Storm: Burning Retribution recently..
I love the feel of the controls, they've been perfectly fine-tuned to the
movements of a mouse, and it's great fun to play!
My favourite open-source game has to be Battle for Wesnoth. I've sunk
countless hours into that game and it never gets old. It's polished to a
shine, and it's one of those rare open-source games that has single-player
campaigns.

QuoteI'm glad to see Desura being ported to Linux. For us it affirms that we made
the right decision in going with a Linux download store as opposed to just
another Windows or Mac store. On top of that, Linux simply needs more
download stores, as it gives more choice to the community in where they want
to get their games.

QuoteWell, we mentioned before that we're working on an automated package
building system. This will let us remotely compile packages, so we'll be
able to build packages from anywhere, particularly over a connection with
limited bandwidth.

QuoteWell, I'd like to thank everyone who's supported us so far, and to stay
tuned, because we've got plenty more to come. If you want to see your
favourite Linux games on Gameolith, be sure to let the developers know of
us!