A
blog update announces that
tomorrow will see the
Steam
release of
Sportsfriends, "a compendium of award-winning local multiplayer games
for living rooms, parties, and even backyards."
This launch trailer
celebrates the news (thanks
Ars Technica). Sportsfriends was originally released for the PlayStation Network, and
word is one of the included games,
Johann
Sebastian Joust, will not work on Windows upon launch. The issue is that
this requires a PlayStation Move controller, and while they've been able to work
out support for this on OS X and Linux, this has proven trickier on Windows.
They are going to Open Source the game with hopes that this can help work things out.
Here's word:
He also spent time researching Bluetooth issues that prevent
the Move controller from reliably pairing to Windows machines. Unfortunately, it
seems like Windows is engineered in a way that makes it infeasible for us to get
pairing working robustly. We looked
for experts to help us, and even got in touch with an engineer at Microsoft,
who told us "this is NOT possible in any way shape or form." Yeah, we weren't
too thrilled either.
This means that, despite all our research, the Windows version of Sportsfriends
will not support JS Joust. However, anyone who buys Sportsfriends is also
entitled to the Mac and Linux versions of the game. We're also still looking
into creating a custom Linux "JS Joust distro" that you can boot into from your
Windows machine by USB stick. More on that later.
In the future, we're still looking to open source JS Joust. The game was built
on top of open source projects, and we feel some responsibility to give back to
the community. After we release this week and handle any support issues,
Jonathan is going to continue his work preparing the source.