Instinctively I tend to think like Paul Eres as I don't yet consider myself as being a "true indie" until I finally start selling something successfully. Ok that's even more hardcore definition than just having an audience, but that's also a way to set goals for me.

Anyway, through years of working alone on my project, I figured that the thing that motivates me the mosts are indeed related to the audience:
 1. when I meet someone who ask what I do, then what game I'm making and then when I try to describe it shortly, see the "AWESOMENESS DETECTED" spark in their eyes - priceless (they will certainly think the final result is less awesome though);
 2. when some friends ask me about an old game idea they still remember while I don't, but it marked them with that idea and they wish I make it one day - sometime they want to make it themselves;

When these events occur, it reassure me that, even if they really are thinking better than what I can produce, they are a potential audience for the potential true indie I want to be, and if I can make them dream without having finished a polished game alone yet, then there is a possibility I'm on the right path at least on the game concept side (which is not much but heh).

That give me enough motivation to continue as a "lone wolf" (I dont want to be lone wolf but you don't always choose).

Also, I avoid seeing none on my friends in more than 3 weeks. It's really unhealthy otherwise.

You can't take it.

;__;

I'm stuck on Anor Londo after those weird white gargoyles, can't get pass the 2 "sword archer" guys... can't get close to them without getting hit and falling...

Any tips?

It really depends on the kind of character/weapons you have.

I have a character with heavy armor/shield/weapon so I initially thought it was unfair.

Until I remarked that, if you face the two archer, the on on the left is a bit lower altitude than the one on the right, and the one on the right is close to a wall corner.

If you are attentive to the level design, you'll then remark that they can't see each other.

Which means you can do this: run up, then on the wall, turn left running until you reach the left knight. At this point, the right knight can't hit you with arrows because of the wall. Which mean you just have to beat the knight in front of you (and not fall) and then get back to the right knight before continuing exploration.

This all imply that you use shields and can survive being hit by at least one arrow in the back once you are running on the wall.
My character have a lot of stamina and defense so no problem.

I did this several times with success.

I never tried with another kind of character.

I'm stuck on Anor Londo after those weird white gargoyles, can't get pass the 2 "sword archer" guys... can't get close to them without getting hit and falling...

Any tips?

I know the situation you are in. I have questioned myself many times whether it is acceptable action-design or not. I mean if the game has a focus on acrobatic action then no problem but here you usually don't expect it to be aesthetic to run on thinnest edges and get attacked.

It's borderline acceptable design but there is a way to replicate the success. Just run towards the right guy on the building and block his attacks when you come close enough. Wait a little until he gets in your reach and attack him. The remaining enemies on the left side are less problematic.

I don't agree at all. As I said I did it with a "tank" kind of character, the kind that can't really be hurt easily but can't do anything acrobatic at all.

As other said, it just force you to think more.

You just killed my eyes.

Ok so it's more than a todo list shouldn't be taken as "absolute need" but it's still needed.

I believe a devlog being the reverse of a todolist, it's far more efficient because it don't kill hope in the egg by listing how much work you have to do but by listing how much work you did. Todo lists are really bad in the end. I mean, if you take them as things you have to absolutely do. I keep a list of things I thought at one point I should do, but I don't do everything, just keep them for later reminder of my thoughts. A shared todolist would immediately kill any motivation in a team I think.

I just program something, then run Valgrind on it and fix the leaks. Rinse and repeat

I actually do something like this (but on Windows so no valgrind) which is why I say I didn't have leaks for years. Only on long projects thought. I even sometime write leaks to make sure it's not the tool that don't work anymore for some reasons.

(actually there are leaks sometimes, mostly due to libraries not releasing automatically their resources, like protobuf, so you have to do it explicitely by calling some functions if you think it's necessary - I do because otherwise I can't catch mine)

Ajax actually exists because MicroSoft added non-standard functions in IE that allows it. It wasn't common at all before.

Memory leaks. Memory leaks everywhere.

C/C++?

You can memory leak with almost any language.

Yeah, but much more easily with C/C++. Avoiding memory leaks in C(++) is a trained skill in itself

If you don't program in C in a C++ program, no memory leak.
The problem is more that when you learn it most of the time you learn to manipulate pointers, which is the source of memory leaks. While if you learn it properly at the beginning, not using pointers util you have to, then no memory leaks appear. Like, I didn't have any for years once I learnt that I learnt it totally wrong. Now as soon as I see new and delete in a source code, I'm getting suspicious.

I wonder how a game with the same exact action/fighting mecanics than Dark Souls would be if it was massively multiplayer.

You know, with the whole community having to fight the game. And die. Again.

That might actually work in some languages...

Yeah you need strong types and operators and it's very helpful.

Exactly, this code have been modified a lot so I made the typo. But the compiler didn't point the fact that I wasn't using one of the arguments of the function...clang and gcc would have pointed this. Even PVS-Studio didnt point this to my great surprise.

Also, this more or less works when the debugger runs. I mean, I got no error, the id isn't null, while it should be (it's its default value) so I have no idea yet how I could have missed it.

I discovered the problem when the serialization code whas checking (in release too) that the id was invalid while it shouldn't be.

Just lost 4 hours hunting a double bug.
The initial bug was trigerring another bug that generated a deadlock (yeah I'm having "fun" with multiple threads and processes, quite the ride).
I fixed the deadlock after 2 hours, it was just a logic problem and missing functionality on error reporting.

The core bug was in the following code. Will you find it? It's easy but I missed it several time while reviewing the code.
It appeared only in Release/ReleaseDebug modes AND only if I execute it outside the debugger (which I still don't understand).

Code:

explicit ZoneElement( IdType id )
: m_id( std::move(m_id), static_cast<T&>(*this) ) // Augment the id object with a pointer to this.
{
NR_LOG_TRACE( "FROM explicit ZoneElement( IdType id )" );
check_validity();
}

I'm also unhappy that visual studio compiler didn't point the problem. I know clang and gcc would have.  

eh? i specifically said it's not important to make it public. just that it exists.

Sorry I wasn't clear: I was talking about your criteria

- there is no devlog, or the devlog is not active and hasn't been updated in months

But yeah it's not related to being public or not. What I meant is that, indeed, you can't know this criteria from outside the team most of the time. (because I thought you were talking about identifying a failing project from outside but it's not the case, misunderstanding again).

Yeah I already do this in a mercurial repository too. My friends have scripts on their computer to duplicate my work (in case of HD crash) which is executed each time they startup, so they see my work briefly without understanding it of course.

- most or all of the work so far has gone into the "engine" rather than actual game content

In my current project, this point is what preoccupies me the most. Almost all my current efforts is to get out of working only on the game-specific engine, work on the in-game editor and start putting stuffs in.

Ok, I totally misunderstood what you meant by devlog (I didn't check the log at first, sorry). You mean just reporting quickly what you did today. I have this on a paper notebook. Making it public would be interesting...

I don't know any other dev who publish this, so I guess you must consider a lot of developers bieng on the path to failure.

It has to work for android NDK too and for now I couldn't get, for example C++11x's std::function to work. (Since android NDK doesn't seem to support modern C++. Or it's my compiler. I wonder if there are any other)

I wasn't talking about c++11.

(Apparently the Android SDK isn't up to date with recent GCC version so you can use C++11 but only in limited ways; also it should be available in the std::tr1 namespace but I didn't check which header because I remember the old gcc header being non-standard for std TR1 stuffs. It that can help you, you'd better use boost if you want to use boost::function, you can just get the boost headers without compilation and boost::function -and may other libs- will work out of the box)


Modern C++ is just a way of saying "idiomatic c++" which is in mainly exploiting RAII. Unfortunately very hard to sum up here, and I don't know what you know to help you.

Memory leaks. Memory leaks everywhere.

C/C++?

Definitely.

I bet you are about to give me some cool memory-leaks detector program/technique right now. Am I right?

Not really, I use VLD on Visual Studio but no memory leak detector is perfect unfortunately.
I would recommand using "modern c++" to avoid memory leaks in the first place (if you use C++, not C).

Memory leaks. Memory leaks everywhere.

C/C++?

You can memory leak with almost any language.

Your point?  That has nothing to do with my question.

That "maybe not" C/C++. Nothing more.

I think a devlog is both a means of creating accountability for one's progress and a very good way of potentially marketing a game prior to release.  The material needs to be interesting, though, and a good devlog is a ton of work.  The payback can be awesome, though, as companies like Wolfire have shown us.

This is difficult to discuss because when you are talking about interesting progress, I don't know what it means. For example I achieve a lot of progress in the last months, but I can't show a screenshot because nothing I done was graphical, only game-specific code that need to exist before graphics. I am very tempted to talk about the technologies behind it, but in the same time I don't see anyone other than a programmer even understanding the posts.

So, to me it seems that you need to get to a first playable or something visual before starting the devlog routine, which can be early or not depending on the kind of game I guess (and if you have an artist working in parallel, which I don't).