Technology

I don’t doubt that there are professional game devs who love the art

I'm guessing all of them loved the art when they first went into the industry, but as with every job, capitalism turns it into a slog, draining all of the passion and creativity, alienating the workers, eventually laying them off regardless of their performance because the corporations want to inflate their quarter earnings with stock buybacks. However, the passion that game devs, especially professional, have for the craft is insane. They unjustly put up with so much abuse and yet many stay to make more games. I do agree the devs that develop open source clones of popular games tend to have more passion for open source philosophy than the craft of video games themselves. If open source games received more financial backing, however, we would probably see more passion and quality in both areas.

I do find joy in small games made by indie solo devs exploring interesting areas as a hobby. King's Crook is one of those games, built in C with no third-party libraries and avoids floating-point numbers, using only integers for triangle rasterization.