Steam Machine: No more excuses

I've been dabbling in game development for a quarter of a century and I've shipped a total of zero games (if you exclude the 10 or so Tetris clones I've written). That hasn't been a problem; there's a lot of interesting technical puzzles in game development that are fun to reason about, and shipping a game is a whole other beast.

However, I made the mistake of showing my grade-school children some of my half-finished work, and now I have to repeatedly hear "when are you going to finish that game?!" Kids can be so cruel.

If I am going to ship an actual game, I have a few prerequisites:

• I'd like it to be playable from my living room couch. If I'm making a game for my kids, it's much easier to pick up and play a console than it is to sit them down at the PC.
• I want to write it in Rust. I love this language and find it a joy to use. This is a hobby project so I want to get some enjoyment from the development process.
• I want to stay in the Unix ecosystem. I've been using Linux/macOS for a long time and feel most comfortable developing in this environment. I know Xbox has good support for indie games, and Windows is probably better for living room PCs, but I just don't want to.

I have both Nintendo and Sony consoles, but both of those have a moderate-high barrier to entry for publishing games to their marketplace. Steam seems much more accessible, but setting up a Linux-based living room PC was death by a thousand paper cuts (e.g. inconsistent Bluetooth connectivity, stuttering audio, wonky screen resolutions).

There is one upcoming option that could be viable. The Steam Machine runs Arch and should solve the currently impossible problem of configuring a stable Linux living room PC. AFAIK there's no restriction on what tools/languages you can use to build a game for Steam, so Rust should be fine. And anyone can publish to their infrastructure if they pay a $100 fee.

I guess the only thing left is to make a game now.