I've heard that more than half of all big game development projects get canceled. And only a few ever make it to "hit" status. That's a lot of invested time that gets wasted, because it's so hard to predict whether a game will be good ahead of time. So basically, you should determine that your game is good as soon as possible, and then IF IT IS, spend the rest of your time trying very hard not to ruin whatever it was that made it fun in the first place (which is a non-trivial task).

I am not accusing you of lacking motivation. I am accusing you of planning to take nine months to do what should be done in one month, or less.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_01.shtml

Interactive Fiction is a game genre that happens to already exist. Although a lot of these games are in the form of dating sims from Japan, and most of the rest have no visuals. Maybe something should be done about that. Like Katawa Shoujo... which is a dating sim that's not from Japan.

Anyway, if you're designing a game with story readers in mind, why bother complicating it with gameplay that they're just gonna skip anyway? It's totally valid to make games without traditional "gameplay", though they likely won't find an audience among TIGers.

No one... won't get paid until we have investors and/or have a marketable product.

Oh, well in that case, you should put off having a marketable product as long as possible. 

tentative plan on having a basic game demo out June 1st next year.

Nine months until a demo, plus some indeterminate amount of time after that before the marketable product shows up sounds like a good start, but I think you can push it even further.

EDIT: Seriously, nine months with no pay working over the internet with strangers is too slow.

1.  [45] Metroid Prime
2.  [40] Super Metroid
3.  [32] The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
4.  [19] Mega Man X 2
5.  [16] Marathon 2: Durandal
6.  [10] Perfect Dark
7.  [8] Super Mario 64
8.  [5] Star Fox 64
9.  [4] Mischief Makers
10. [4] Beyond Good and Evil
11. [3] Cave Story
12. [3] Symphony of the Night
13. [2] Actraiser
14. [2] Wario Land 4
15. [2] Iji
16. [2] Wario's Woods
17. [2] Ikaruga
18. [1] R-Type III
19. [1] Castlevania IV
20. [1] Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
21. [1] Conker's Bad Fur Day
22. [1] U.N. Squadron
23. [1] Portal
24. [1] Metal Storm
25. [1] Contra III: The Alien Wars
26. [1] Out of this World (aka Another World)
27. [1] Shadow of the Colossus
28. [1] Abuse

I wanted to influence the results, so I gave a lot of points to my favorites at the top. On the other hand, I wanted to honor a lot of other games, but I didn't have enough points left over to granularly rank them, so some of them appear to be tied. Nevertheless, all of these are roughly ranked in order.

I'd also like to add a few honorable mentions... I don't play multiplayer games much, and they're really hard for me to compare to single player games anyway, so here's a separate list for multiplayer games:

Soul Calibur 2
Smash Bros Melee
Zone of Enders
Tron
Contra III again

1.  [45] Metroid Prime
2.  [39] Super Metroid
3.  [31] The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
4.  [19] Mega Man X 2
5.  [16] Marathon 2: Durandal
6.  [10] Perfect Dark
7.  [8] Super Mario 64
8.  [5] Star Fox 64
9.  [4] Mischief Makers
10. [4] Beyond Good and Evil
11. [3] Cave Story
12. [3] Symphony of the Night
13. [2] Actraiser
14. [2] Wario Land 4
15. [2] Jet Force Gemini
16. [2] Iji
17. [2] Wario's Woods
18. [2] Ikaruga
19. [1] R-Type III
20. [1] Castlevania IV
21. [1] Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
22. [1] Conker's Bad Fur Day
23. [1] U.N. Squadron
24. [1] Portal
25. [1] Metal Storm
26. [1] Contra III: The Alien Wars
27. [1] Out of this World (aka Another World)
28. [1] Shadow of the Colossus
29. [1] Abuse

Okay, someone explain Metal Slug to me.

I grew up with Contra instead. It's only within the past year that I decided to try out Metal Slug, so I bought the Metal Slug Anthology. I played the first game in the series then, and it seemed pretty awesome at first, especially the art, but I had too many lives so it didn't feel like dodging was particularly important, which made it significantly less fun than Contra. Maybe the original had fewer lives than the anthology edition?

And then I played the rest of them in the anthology and they were ALL THE SAME. Geeze. Give me my Contra back.

Supermarket automatic doors

When I was a kid one of those things broke my arm. I was leaning against the wall next to one of these doors when somebody walked through and the door opened and slid over my arm. It was a tight fit.

The problem, then, is not that Fire Emblem characters die, but rather that you are allowed to go back to a previous state when they do. Give players the opportunity to cheat and they will take it.

The second thing with the snout. I think you have to do it a few times to get the heat up enough to melt the metal.

Yes, but being able to retroactively explain why it works like that does not change the fact that, until it finished, I was left with the impression that the action was useless because it did not provide any feedback. Feedback is very important.

IF it turns out that large dirty rectangles are your bottleneck, then either:
1. redesign the animation to reduce dirty rectangle size, or
2. reduce the render complexity by caching stuff to bitmaps. In general, it's faster to draw one bitmap to the screen than it is to render the equivalent vector graphics.
3. Resign yourself to having a lower framerate. For a long time, the default framerate for Flash animations was something like 15 frames per second.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/BitmapData.html#draw()
 

If you're using the debug Flash Player, right click on the animation as it's playing and turn on "Show Redraw Regions". This will show you the "dirty rectangles" that the Flash Player needs to redraw. Assuming a uniform distribution of vector graphic complexity/detail, the render speed will be directly proportional to the area of the screen that is being redrawn. If nothing is moving, nothing is being redrawn and render time will drop to zero and the framerate will jump to the maximum.

Dunno. You'll probably have to post code and/or a demo.

Random tip 1: semitransparent things render slower than opaque things.

Random tip 2: curves render slower than lines.

Random tip 3: If you're not adding children to your Sprites, you can use Shapes instead, which are slightly more efficient:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/Shape.html
I lied when I said only Sprites had Graphics, Shapes have them too. (But I know of no other examples.)

Two things:
-The brick on the gas pedal. I tried it several times and it didn't work and it didn't give me any feedback so I figured I must be doing the wrong thing. Right before giving up I checked the walkthrough and realized I was doing the right thing and tried again and it worked, but there was definitely a fragile moment there.
-The very last task, with the snout and the furnace. I tried several times and nothing seemed to happen. I checked the walkthrough and it told me to do exactly what I had been doing.  I tried a few more times and suddenly something happened, but that was another fragile moment where I almost gave up.

Otherwise awesome.

Yes, you're looking for a Graphics object:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/Graphics.html
Graphics objects are only available as a property on Sprites and subclasses of Sprite (such as MovieClip):
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/Sprite.html

Once you've drawn vector graphics onto a Graphics object, you do not need to ever redraw those vector graphics if you do not intend to animate the graphics, or if the animation can be expressed as rotation, scaling, or other such transformations on the parent Sprite.

Irresponsibility. I have lost the ability to do nothing of value and still feel good about it.

And an innocent-looking shell. I have lost the ability to hang out with children all day and be accepted as a peer and not look like a pedophile.

Probably most of the rest of my childhood could be recreated today. I still have a child-like curiosity.

And an answer that's maybe closer to what you had in mind: The Marathon Aleph One modding community.

Yes. Yes it was. I think that falls under the "pro" category. 

Titan AE is a fantastic movie if you don't take it seriously.

First thing to consider: Are you using the debug player, and/or a debug build? These things will totally mess with profiling. Are you using vectors with hard length caps? Another thing to experiment with is various forms of casting:

Code:

Type(x/[i])
x/[i] as Type
var blah: Type = x[i]

It's very use-case specific, and maybe platform-specific. This person is having similar woes.

I really like that one too! Especially her face and hair. And torso, and pants. I am a sucker for girls with baggy pants. Her left ankle bothers me though.

Rubber Johnny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3far9oHZOsI

...And when I was a kid? Metroid. It's actually one of the only games I distinctly remember having a nightmare about.

EDIT: Abuse is a game that I still think is scary, as long as you play on an appropriate difficulty level.