One thing on wikipedia that confuses me is there's an entry for Nifflas, and there's an entry for Cave Story, but there's no entry for Nicalis.

There's also no entry for Pixel.

Soo... how 'bout them cafes?

It looks like you have the same model of folding stand as I do.

I like the idea of making the terminal looks like a hole in the desktop.

No system like this will ever replace owning your own machine, simply because not everyone lives in North America (or even Europe).

The internet will never become popular simply because not everyone lives in North America.

There are certainly technical challenges, but there always have been technical challenges. We'll see what happens.

And what will real programmers use when spinning media has become obsolete? Obsolete butterflies?

How about:

opcodes in nano

Now all you need to distribute your games is a server that's more powerful than Roadrunner and your own dedicated internet backbone (not that EA couldn't afford it).

Edit: Oh, I see. It's OnLive's servers. Still, if the service is popular, it's going to take a tremendous amount of computing power to handle all those games being played simultaneously.

Aaaaaaand... I still don't know if I need to go buy a 360 or not. Good trailer though. More Fez stuff is always good.

Actually, real men enter opcodes in nano.

I spent years in DarkBasic (shudder) and BlitzBasic. Don't think I'm a terrible coder now. In terms of game coding they definitely helped me to learn, especially when I only had occasional dial-up internet so I was mostly self taught, but really if you can learn to make global variables and functions in them, you can do the same in C++ (or indeed any language).

I don't understand what you're saying, are you promoting functions-and-globals as a good programming style, or are you saying you can make an ugly mess in any language?

This reminds me: whatever language you end up picking, stay away from global variables at all costs. If you start relying on global variables you'll end up regretting it in the form of hours of debugging.

As for a game making program, if you're willing to wait a little while, I believe there is a cross-platform program in development right now. I don't actually know how far away it is, but I got the impression that it was getting close. There should be a topic on it somewhere.

Mr. Dijkstra has been wrong in the past (specifically 1975):

FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

Unless you count a short time playing with if statements in FORTRAN, I had some exposure to VB before every learning to program and I turn out just fine.

I imagine it's easier to make games in C++ than in VB. VB is really just for making simple windows gui things.

The only reason to ever accept a language with no garbage collection is if you're trying to code something that runs incredibly fast. If your game is going to be 2D, this is unlikely.

IMO, this is an understatement. You'll more than likely never see the speed advantage of using C++ nowadays. Modern hardware is fast, and is only getting faster.

Sim Nuclear Transport Simulation
You might still be able to pull that off in Java if by "modern computers" you mean "supercomputers ten years from now." That was a joke.

Otherwise I guess my last arguments for C++ are that it's not nearly as hard to learn as everyone says it is (if I could learn it when I was 13 years old and only knew a little Visual Basic, then it can't possibly be that hard), and if you learn C++, you can spend the rest of your life looking down on the rubes and knaves who use all those inferior languages (actually, this is probably true for any religion language).

...probably better in general if you don't care about the fact that C++ is pretty much universal...

Yeah, cross-platform is stupid. Let's just go on maintaining Microsoft's monopoly. XNA is also perfect for weeding out the inferior Windows machines (an arbitrary, but important distinction).

No one has mentioned Lisp yet. OO isn't the only paradigm, you know.

I also suggest C++. It's not nearly as hard to learn as a lot of people make it out to be. The hardest part is probably learning how to use an IDE (stay away from VC++), and that's not a problem if you don't start with an IDE. You can learn C++ without knowing anything more complicated than g++ main.cpp -o out.exe. Plus if you have a linux machine or can connect to a linux machine, then you don't even have to install anything.

You might also find it easier to learn using a book. This is the one that I used, and it worked pretty well for me.

Python is also probably pretty good to learn on, but it's really slow and you're liable to learn some bad habits since it's not as strict as C++.

I was not taught in Java, and I have not done my best work in Java. What I can tell you is this: I don't see why anyone would waste precious vertical space by giving the opening brace main function its own line class. For the record, I believe strongly in opening brace rights including the right to a new line.

I voted for C# even though I'm not fond of XNA's compatibility issues, but if you really do like Java, then go ahead and use it. At least it's "cross-platform."

...if you perfect a platforming section before the boss, you do not have to repeat it, and offers a tangible subgoal to make the platforming a little more interesting the Nth time.

This is a really good idea, and it doesn't sacrifice any difficulty at all, only frustration.

I'm not very good, but I still try sometimes.

Nice.  It looks like you're generating edge tiles, but maybe it'd work better if you had a larger selection of tiles to draw from, and maybe expand it to checking a 3x3 array to determine what tile to put in a given spot?

I currently just start with an perfect 16x16 squares and then apply a variation of ChevyRay's map making algorithm and some smoothing.

I feel like it would be more fun and explorey if you could see less of the cave at any time, either with fog or something, or just using a smaller screen / bigger tiles.

I have played with lighting some in that past and will likely apply that to this.

I designed it to be used as an overhead means, but I guess with proper configuring it works both ways.

I've been working on a platformer cave generation algorithm for a while, but none has worked as well as yours.