I liked Fallout 2's ending. It just tells you the effects of things you did throughout the game. If you find a cure for drug addiction, they tell you in the game. Help a mob boss win over the city, and it tells you how that mob boss later influences the region. Do a bunch of quests that empower raiders or elitists, and the ending will tell you who those group massacred.

I guess it was fun in the sense that it wasn't really expected, and you see all the little quests and stuff you did throughout the game coming together.

Would use Ubuntu, but can't figure out how to change the new ugly default interface.

Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu are all just Ubuntus with the default interface changed to something else (LXDE, KDE and XFCE respectively). Maybe you could try one of those?

Ah, thanks. I was wondering what the difference was. I thought they were ubuntu with some fancy custom settings that would break everything I used.

There's conventions. There's university. Tbh I think this is the only point of going to university... you learn less there than from the internet these days, but meet with people in the same field with the same interests and do something awesome together.

Being better at the game defeats the point of a grind. The grind is there to artificially introduce tension and hard work into the game.

You could certainly speed it up (in single player games). IMO, movies are the best so far. If there's only 2 hours for the story, the grind limit is up to 1.5 hours or so.

Maybe games need to be designed with the length of gameplay in mind, instead of just adding on random content. Your average RPG Maker game has maybe 2 hours of deliberate grind built in arbitrarily for the first town, another 2 hours for the next town, and so on. With games like ADOM, you could still soften the experience curve and lower the dungeon levels, but then again, part of the appeal is that so few people get to the ending.

Unfortunately, we're used to games being a time sink; a game built to last less than a week is considered poor design, even if much of it is padding. The hardcore RPG players will want long lasting games, but this is what keeps RPGs a niche when too many people don't have time for them.

Heh, indie scene is really big. My little corner is influenced by Derek Yu, Rikus Kras, Tarn Adams, Mark Pay, Nifflas, Konjak, Jeff Vogel. I don't even play Cave Story. Don't play Minecraft either, but obviously Notch is a major influence in that he convinced a lot of people that it was possible to make a lot of money going indie.

Used to read up on a bunch of font theory and actually pick the 'perfect' font, but these days I just settle with Helvetica because nobody could tell the difference anyway. Making fonts is about as difficult as making sprites (for someone who makes neither) and nobody really realizes it.

Btw if you want some guides on fonts, PM your email address.

Win 7 > Ubuntu > Win Vista

Would use Ubuntu, but can't figure out how to change the new ugly default interface.

There's a good reason why. Most grind out there - especially in MMOs and MOBAs is complete garbage.

Eh, I've always liked the grind in MOBAs. Last hits and creep denying is actually a small, but significant skill... something like dribbling in soccer or basketball. It doesn't pad things unnecessarily, there can be a bit of drama early on during the early grind, and that phase is only about 20 minutes (far better than in most competitive games!).

MMOs are a different story. The players are competing against each other in effort - the person with the most devotion goes furthest. This could be easily implemented with things like capping skill gain to 5 minutes of grinding like Armageddon MUD or Cyber Nations. But even with in-game limitations, games like Cyber Nations involve some meta grind of people organizing alliances.

Never actually played Dark Souls, though.

Most people won't bother with spending over a year on a game. Heck, maybe even 3 months. I've got a crappy app with approx 3 months of development and it's ranked 2-5 on google play (in common search keywords), raking in about $300 worth in ads a month.

The question is how long this will actually stay at that level?

Also from a biz perspective, if it takes a developer and artist say even just 1.5 months each for a total of 3 months to push out a game, and if your actually doing normal pay rates your looking at somewhere around 15-20k invested. This is before sound, music, marketing, etc. At the current rate of 300 a month, even if it sustains your looking at over 5 years to just make development costs back.

Been working at it for over a year now. It's just $1k-$2k invested in wages (I live in a third world country).

Given a month or two, I could've improved a whole bunch of things that would've upped it significantly. Or given three months, I could redo it from scratch make something far superior that didn't require the costly back end. Nobody gets it right the first time, all that was feedback.

Given even more time, I could make business partnerships with a lot of people who wanted that kind of thing.

That was a year ago. Ever since, I've built 5 apps that were sold, and maybe around 5 or so other prototypes that nobody bought. The sales pay off quite a good deal, and every finished app was good portfolio and I've never had a few days off. As of today, I've got at least three people lined up trying to hire me full time, including a augmented reality android toy. And a Fortune Global 100 company which wants me to do an app for a massive, international event.

Well, you could say that I never ended up making games or finishing that crappy app. But in business terminology, that's what's called a 'pivot'. You do something. Someone else likes it but wants something else that is similar and is willing to make an offer I can't refuse.

You could say that it's luck that I managed to get so many projects. I'd say it's impossible without the first baby steps. On the grumpy programmers thread, you can see the teething pains I went through learning Java and debugging. But you just have to stick through it longer than everyone else. The nice thing about mobile apps is that it's really fast to learn, so it's easier to have more experience than everyone else in the field. Of course you're not going to make money from some crappy free apps, but quite often it's necessary to learn what market you'd need to break into.

wow guys thanks for the responses. So I have been playing with this and I have a move left and right and a sword button. Combat Wise I was thinking of doing something where instead of just hacking its looking for the correct time to attack the enemy. So I have a sword button that tapping will slash, and a holding will use a block. I am thinking that perhaps enemies will run at you and slash, you can block them but also parry their attacks by hitting it with your sword. I am also thinking that maybe projectiles can be blocked, but some magic ones can be countered back at the enemy with a parry

I love the idea of parrying.

Not sure if you've played the old Prince of Persia games. A block would prevent damage, but every hit blocked would knock you back a few steps... too many blocks would knock you off a ledge. So one of the finesse moves would be to hit the enemy at the same time the enemy tried to hit you. You'd then parry, which prevented damage but would also keep you from being knocked back.

The parry was a difficult skill to learn, but not mandatory for most of the game. It was still satisfying and still made the game easier to win once you've learned it, but the system was great in that it didn't force you to learn it.

I'm realizing that every market is very saturated today.

Yeah, I do mobile, and it's really not as bad as anyone says.

E.g. Android doesn't have an AGS or RPGMaker yet, so it's saturated at a certain skill level. Once some kind of Android RPGmaker comes out, the RPG genre gets saturated like it is on the PC. And yet, people will still buy RPG maker games for $15.

Most people won't bother with spending over a year on a game. Heck, maybe even 3 months. I've got a crappy app with approx 3 months of development and it's ranked 2-5 on google play (in common search keywords), raking in about $300 worth in ads a month.

But games have a much higher threshold than apps. If work on your game longer than anyone is willing to, you never need to worry about saturation. The problem with selling games is that there's just too many people who are willing to spend a decade improving a game, so the market will always be saturated. You'd either have to tackle it with more skill/intelligence (e.g. Dwarf Fortress), more effort (e.g. Spiderweb Software), or take an angle nobody wants to (e.g. eroges).

Decide what still needs to be done for those projects.

List the things you have to do. It doesn't have to be detailed, just things like "Program UI", "Set up server for online play", "Design database structure", "Prototype battle system", "Pixel art for different sets of clothing". Just brainstorm and write into a paper or txt file or something. Don't arrange it yet.

Now decide which bits are vital, which ones can be thrown out, which ones are too difficult and needs to be implemented in a later stage. Try to create a checklist from this... like a checklist to Version 1.0.

If you're too lazy to do this, scrap the project. It will never be done if you don't know what to do.

If you look at the checklist and think, "This isn't worth it", scrap the project.

If you get excited while writing up the checklist and later on think that "This isn't so bad", keep the project.

and the only website I can find that offers jobs for pixel artists is this one and there are much more qualified people than me that can take them.

https://www.elance.com/r/jobs/q-pixel%20art/
https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/browse/?q=pixel+art
http://www.freelancer.com/search/pixel+art/

There's plenty of jobs for pixel artists out there. Not as many as for programmers or writers, but it's out there. If you're not as good, just charge lower rates and ask for more time. Great for practice too.

Also check out some pixel art communities. Personally, I only hire people from communities because they don't have a mercenary attitude. You probably won't get a job because of the competition, but you should be able to improve your skills quickly. And some jobs are too low paying and too time consuming for the experts.

Heh, just make a forum and trick your customers into doing customer support.

Of course, having someone do it full time like refunds, shipping, etc is absolutely essential. I don't know anyone who you could outsource it to.

So I'm looking for some kind of library or framework to make games with in Android. AndEngine seems to be the norm, along with other multi-platform tools like Unity, Marmalade, etc.

I'm actually interested in making interactive fiction or most text based games for the phone. RPGs with limited animations are great too.

It's not too hard to build one from scratch, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. Anyone know any good suggestions? Recommendations for other kind of frameworks help too.

I saw Iron Man 3 recently. They put in the 'grind' in the first 10-20 minutes of the movie, where it shows how much work Tony Stark put into his suits and how they fail. Iron Man 1 actually did a better job of showing the grind... his early suits failed quite a bit and the show covered it for like 20-30 minutes.

A lot of the fun in RPG is in sitting back in suspense, following the hero as he goes from being a nobody into a hero. You see the hard work he puts into it, the suffering he goes through, the transformation. This is the grind. If you skip the grind and go straight into hero mode, you lose much of the tension that make RPGs so charming.

In many games, they only simulate the hard work and suffering with repetitive combat and dialogs. Now this is ok, it's worked so far. But after seeing Iron Man movie, I wonder if you can compress that grind into 20-30 minutes.

Iron Man movie isn't optimal either... you may empathize with the first suit he creates. But you won't feel the effort/suffering of him building 20 failed suits by the time he creates a Mk 20 suit or whatever. It works well enough for a two hour movie, but not a 15 hour game.

But playing boring bits in a game for 10+ hours before getting to the heroism part isn't that optimal either. Anyone know any other great examples or methods for grinding a character up without having to bore them?

Look at
The Clue!
Stolen in Sixty Seconds (despite the other Herocraft games, this one is a real gem when it comes to heist games)
The Sting!

First two games are better than Payday and The Art of Theft IMO. The Sting is great too, but it's too comical to get into the mood.

Actually, a cool meta mechanic could be that each job is linked to each other, like the way days pass in Papers Please. The more money you steal, the more the cops are alerted, and maybe there are sort of higher defenses against the tactic you use most often so there's incentive to switch it up.

The Clue actually implements this. Watch a location longer and you'll get better info of where the good stuff is, but people will notice you. Mess up too much and cops will figure out who you are. Use the same guys too often and some of them will get caught because of all the evidence you leave behind.

It becomes like kind of a resource which you have to manage between short term gain and keeping a low profile for the long run. E.g. explosives might get you some good stuff from bank vaults, but they pull the cops on you almost immediately. Even if you don't get caught, you'd get a lot of heat on you.

Stolen in Sixty Seconds seems to be directly inspired by The Clue, in that you have to plan everything, but the fun part is that you're controlling the character during the heist. You can tell your mates where to go and what to steal, but you'd have to keep your own orders in your mind and implement it yourself.

You could make money off games, but reality is that you need to be doing it longer and better than everyone else. Even if you wanted investor/kickstarter money to make games, you'd need to prove that you're capable of making the game in the first place (and freelancing is good for a portfolio as well).

By too big, I mean that it's not viable for most indie developers to try to imitate. It's probably the best business model for games if anyone could hit it, though - no need to worry about diluting the fun with microtransactions and DRM... just make the best possible game you could.

Also, I think we've strayed off my point a bit. I meant that games themselves are like a sports jersey. Something like how cinemas only just break even off the movies themselves, but make big money off popcorn. While some people buy movies off DVD, a lot of the revenue comes from people who pay premium for full immersion in a movie cinema. We just need to find the gamer's equivalent of popcorn and cinemas.

I wish I knew what was cool about Linux, I tried using Ubuntu a week ago and I just lagged on games and had to use that terminal thing forever.

WHATS SO COOL ABOUT IT?

Heh, had the exact opposite experience with Ubuntu a while back. Ubuntu emulators played games faster than Windows Vista did natively. Internet surfing was fun. Compiling code was really quick too. Facebook and browser games were just awesome on Ubuntu.

Sadly, there's not a lot of great apps for Linux. The music players suck, the pdf readers suck, the games built for linux are outdated.