This thread is a follow up to the following comment. It didn't seem like an appropriate place to reply in that article's comments: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/02/simairport-getting-some-great-upgrades-ready-for-the-steam-deck/comment_id=219429

My business partner and I started Howling Moon Software in 2009. (The name seemed much more clever at the time >_>) We started out making Mac shareware apps, but have mostly ended up doing game and game adjacent contracting on other projects. Over the years we've worked with a lot of cool people, on everything from mobile and console games to... desktop Linux! Here's a few of the ones that stick out in my mind that support Linux natively.

• HyperDot by Tribe Games is a local developer we've worked with, and shared office space with. The game uses our 2D shadow middleware, and we had some advice for the game and did a lot of platform work on the XBox version. They're pretty committed to accessibility and have a Linux version available.



• Widget Satchel by Noble Robot are more local devs that shared our office. Though we didn't work on this game directly, they used our shadow middleware too. They also wanted to launch their game on as many platforms as possible, Linux included.



• Reassembly by by Anisoptera Games Is a really cool procedural space game. Build a ship and explore the universe. I didn't work on this game directly, but it uses my open source 2D physics library, and the developer helped support me with donations and bugfixes. I still play this game sometimes.



• Strata by Graveck Interactive While we didn't work on this game specifically, we've worked on a lot of other projects, game and otherwise, with Graveck. We currently are working with them on gamified software for mental health which is pretty neat.



• Waking Mars by Tiger Style They published a few award winning mobile games that used my physics library. They were organized more like a co-op, but the programmer that I knew supported me significantly financially, and with bug reports/fixes. A few of their games have native Linux versions, though Waking Mars feel most at home on a non-mobile device.



• Verdant Skies by Howling Moon Software This our game, the game my business partner has always wanted to make. We worked on this one too. :p

Surely I'm missing a lot of cool people we've worked with... sorry. Trying to compress over a decad into a post is hard. :-\

Proton compatible Linux games by cool folks I've worked with:

• Subnautica by Unknown Worlds Entertainment This is one of my all time favorite games. When the credits started to roll, I was shocked to see the name of the guy that ran Tiger Style. On the sequel (which is just as good) he was the creative director.



• Hot Brass by Walk with Kings Another game that used my lighting middleware, and they contracted me to make a bunch of extensions for various vision and visibility effects. A neat game, but in a genre that's not my favorite.
  

Since this is the programming subforum, I guess I might as well mention some of the open source projects I've worked on over the years:

• Chipmunk2D This is probably my biggest. A 2D rigid body library that as far as I can tell, has been used in many thousands of games. Not as popular as Box2D, but you've likely played some. :)



• Debugger.lua A staightforward, and trivially embedable Lua debugger. It's been used in a handful of games, but not the sort of thing players would see.



• Cocos2D-SpriteBuilder Largely an Apple focused, open source game framework. I got involved as it used Chipmunk2D, and got more and more involved to support those users. Eventually I ended up as the lead developer when the original developer stepped away to work on the C++ port. Apple liked Cocos2D so much they cloned the API nearly 1:1 and released it as SpriteKit. Sadly this original fork or Cocos2D didn't survive more than a few years after that.



• Super Fast Soft Shadows SFSS is "source accesible" (not fully OSS) as a Unity plugin, and I have a full explanation of how the algorithm works in that blog post with an open source example. We never open sourced SFSS itself because it seemed like that would most benefit Unity, and we got so fed up with their BS that we... didn't want to do that. >_>

Last edited by slembcke on 9 February 2022 at 6:17 pm UTC