http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

I like how the title totally solves the problem of, "So the player has decided to go to sleep... As the director, how am I supposed to represent the state of being asleep in a level editor?" Making Yume Nikki in 30 seconds is unreasonable.

Of course there were. Super Mario Bros. 3!

EDIT: Blaster Master! Super C!

Next gen graphics are stereotypically brown. Especially first person shooters. It's "realism". However, I think Skofo's picture should look more like it's been dipped in oil.

Heh, I think you interpreted my comment as referring to a different part than I was referring to. I was trying to say I never figured out what was so bad about having lots of little countries with their own governments.

One of the its important aspects is that the federal government has really limited control over what laws can be made. This has been repeatedly trampled on over the years (mainly because, if it's interpreted too strictly, it makes America more like an alliance of small countries than one big one)

I never figured out what was so bad about that. I'd like to see a lot more experimentation in governments here.

How should one iterate over a list of game objects, while simultaneously deleting some of those objects?

Depends on whether or not it's important that each of the objects has a fair chance of acting during that frame. If object A and object B are attacking each other at the same time but A acts first because it has a smaller index in the list, and A kills B, does B still have the opportunity to kill A at the same time or is B already gone?

If the answer is, "I do care about letting all objects act before removing them from the list," then a simple array/vector of objects with an "active" boolean property should suffice. After letting all objects act, prune out the ones marked as inactive.

If the answer is, "I don't care about low level fairness like that, and additionally it is important to me that the items are removed from the list while I'm iterating over it instead of removing them later," then my answer is: Use a doubly-linked list with handy spliceIn() and spliceOut() methods and maybe a dummy head and/or tail to simplify the splicing part.

As a fellow programmer, the hardest thing for me when I do art is avoiding the temptation to let Photoshop do all the work. Laziness is an important aspect of my productivity, but in art it shows.

At around 8:30 AM PST Feb 24 2010 (this morning):

My internet service provider indicated that forums.tigsource.com was not a recognized domain. I briefly panicked. Five minutes later I tried again and it worked.

Heat maps worked well for me when I made Peak. All of the code for Peak is over at wonderfl. Here's an example of an in-progress version of the game showing the heatmap explicitly.

Basically there were many many active entities in this game and it would be way too expensive to calculate paths for all of them, especially in the Flash virtual machine. However there's only three kinds of entities, and they just want to chase each other, so I built just one heatmap for each species, and every entity can just pick the appropriate heatmap to follow depending on which species it wants to chase.

And I've got some crazy hacks in there to optimize the maintenance of the heatmap by propagating changes in alternating directions...

EDIT: In the in-progress version, the blue heatmap represents the distance to the nearest green dot. Sometimes one of the green dots will survive the initial slaughter and you can watch the blue heightmap more closely.

Emphasis NOT mine:

"If you want to, you can design your games so that they will improve people's lives, but you will probably need to do this in secret... if you make a game that is really good for people, but no one likes it (the game version of a broccoli smoothie), you haven't helped anyone."

-Jesse Schell
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (2008)

Livejournal's system is also awesome. I didn't mention it because it's not a "forum" but I think I like it at least as much as the old Metroid forum I mentioned.

I don't like mailing lists.

Paul's example was good.

My favorite forum style I've ever used was for the original Metroid Database Messageboard, which isn't the same anymore but it used to look like this, minus the advertisement:

http://members3.boardhost.com/maniacmansion/msg/1498.html

People who had short comments would put their comment in the title of the post so that you didn't have to click on it to read it. Long comments got their own page. It lent itself to more deliberation and focus. If I had five comments I wanted to respond to, I'd have them open in five tabs.

I really really like sub-threaded forums. It might be nice to be sub-threaded, just to distinguish it from TIGS.

In the absence of context, Dragonmaw, you sound pretty rude there. As does tumblerz, but not banworthy.

I am glad that Paul can see that other perspectives are valid:

it also depends on what your goals are personally. if your goal is artistic expression or having fun making your kind of game or developing your style, most criticism is less useful. if your goal is to sell games or even to make a very popular freeware game that a lot of people love and which gets downloaded a ton of times, criticism is useful.

And perhaps Paul's side of the fence is underrepresented.

I still can't see Police Cop's rendition as a bird. Unless... unless that ear is actually an eye? Oh.  It is awesome though.

I still haven't gotten over how my androgynous business suit person was previously a dancer in shiny pants, who was previously a crippled girl, who was previously Hitler.

Hitler got thoroughly emasculated. By page 21, Hitler was just a footnote in the lower left corner, and then he was gone.

I am E.