I'm personally fond of episodic games. Give the first episode for free, ask them to pay for the next few episodes (like what Epic and Apogee games did).

It's great because if you're only paying for as much of the game as you're playing. I really hate paying $30 for a game which is only fun for a few hours and repetitive for the rest of the week.

But not much difference between $2 and $1 honestly, so just save them the trouble and charge $2 for the full app on iOS. Android supports microtransactions, so you can charge them per episode, or give them a discount for buying the whole thing at once.

I struggle to find the word for it, but I think 'emotions' comes closest to it. Maybe 'thought' is a suitable word too?

You can have really, really nice aesthetics, but if they hold no meaning, then it's not really art. Like for example, the default Windows XP background is a very beautiful photograph, but because it's the default background of every computer, it has lost any artistic appeal to most people.

Or there's a lot of beauty in the every day movement of curtains and dust, but are meaningless in the real world. Yet the exact same movements when put into a computer game are more meaningful and artistic.

Any attempt to bring 'art' into those things would try to instill emotions into it, like a poem or a photograph designed to highlight them.

Thanks for the quick response, man. I know a bit of each of those (CSS, HTML, and PHP) and the team knows a few others who are fairly proficient in at least one of them.

I'm currently looking into Wordpress. My only concern previously was whether or not such services allowed you to sell products, downloads, etc through their portals. Though I'm fairly sure that there is both a free and paid version of Wordpress so maybe that makes a difference.

I will report back when I read up on it a bit more.

Wordpress should be good enough for most sites. Heck unless you're making a media site or something, I don't think there's any reason not to. If you need a paid version to sell things, not really that much of an issue either as you're making money from it.

Failing that, there's tons of templates around. They're quite cheap, probably half a day's wage, so you could focus on making/selling games instead of design/building a site.

You can talk all you want about how "better" realism is but the fact is this: regen balances the challenge curve. The challenge curve is an important part of design. If you want to remove the regen then you need something comparably better in exchange, or a replacement for what originally handled the curve.

Personally, I hate regen because of the gameplay effects. Without regen, health is a limited resource. If I manage to ambush and get a few shots into a guy, his lower health now puts him at a disadvantage if we meet toe-to-toe again.

With regen, I can take shots at him, he'll just run away and regen. My ambush becomes a total waste of time and is unsatisfying.

Location based regen is maybe ok, if you want to do a conquest kind of thing. Time-based regen is really annoying. It forces people to avoid each other which is boring.

In single player, it forces the player char to hide and regen. This kills the flow of the game. Better to just have the health as a limited resource that the player has to manage from the start instead of a resource where losing health is punished by having to stand in the same spot for 40 seconds before moving again (e.g. Max Payne).

If you then go and slow down the player, or make them hop around on one foot, or whatever realism you layer on top of that, it will just be annoying.

Not necessarily. One of my favorite multiplayer games is Fallout Tactics, because of the cripple effect. But it has to work into the overall gameplay, and not just be there 'to be realistic'.

It fits in with the concept of medics well.. in that medics can reduce a 'crippling' penalty, but not restore health to full. It allows you to have lower bullet damage & longer firefights, by allowing every bullet to have a more interesting gameplay effect.

Let's say you have a game where limb shots are not fatal, where headshots may simply cause limited vision/concussions instead of outright killing. A shot to the arm by an AK47 might disable the arm and force the target to only use a pistol or melee weapon. A shot to the leg might make disable running, and force the target to hide or wait for backup. A close explosion might cause deafness and make the targets more vulnerable to sneak attacks.

The players are then forced to adapt to their crippled situation, and it increases the pleasure of victory if they manage to turn the tables. It will also increase the value of a healer... being down to 50% health is not so scary, but having a crippled arm and being limited to a pistol while under heavy fire is!

[reduce]

edit: I just want to add that I'm actually against headshots... I think they actually reduce skill required. The reasoning behind this is because people can just "spray and pray" and land a lucky headshot, getting an instant kill they didn't really earn. Sure it's great for the "pros" who can aim at little targets better, but "pros" should have enough advantage being pro that they don't need headshots to give them even more advantage. (and screw them over when a bad player gets lucky and nails them in the head)

I love the idea behind headshots. Heads are a really small target, very hard to hit while moving, and they're great as a 'bonus points' to excellent aimers.

Headshots are great when combined with sniper rifles, which in itself is a weapon used by players who love precision.

Headshots work great with low recoil, low damage weapons which are used by players who want to hit a small difficult target multiple times.

The spray and pray style is punished by games like Counter-Strike. If you miss on the first shot, the recoil makes the shots really inaccurate, and you're unlikely to score normal hits. You can also have headshots actually not be critical. Instead of making it a one hit kill, you can require 2-3 shots from a typical 'spray and pray' weapon to take them down, when the same weapon might need typically 6-10 body shots to kill.

Headshots also force another tactical decision in CS - helmets. Helmets don't save you from a headshot by a disadvantaged weapon (sniper, desert eagle, AK47). But they'll double the hits needed from weaker weapons like pistols and SMGs.

My definition of art is simply something that evokes a mindset of beauty, or other strong emotions that the viewer enjoys. Love songs/plays/movies are powerful art because it triggers the emotions and memories associated with love. The more the viewer relates to it, the more the user can spot the subtle hidden bits, the more of an art it is. My favorite work of art are war memorials... while they're rarely ever 'beautiful', many do a good job of capturing the pain, tragedy, sacrifice, devotion, relief, and comradeship of a specific war.

As with things like philosophy, management, and psychology, art has become too 'academical'. A lot of the people who specialize it have no fucking idea what they're doing, so they choose to make it inaccessible to make it seem like something complex and difficult.

But the people who don't play games simply have no emotional attachment to games. They don't get why there's nerdrage behind WoW or why people would cosplay as a moon elf. Gamers do get emotionally attached to it. But there's little overlap between people who spend thousands trading art and driving to galleries and the people who sit at home playing Spelunky.

Games are not defined as art because the people who define art don't view them as art, and the people who view them as art don't like what society defines as art.

Art is not supposed to be this mystical thing that nobody understands except the artist. You can design for it, just find proper associations. There are two pieces of modern art which have tons of design put into them: architecture and movies.

You find patterns to bring up the art form. Sometimes you take a piece of art, iterate off it, and improve on it. Sometimes you branch a piece of art and interpret it differently - e.g. turning a strategy game like Warcraft into a MMO. All this pattern recognition and association is art.

Creativity is freedom to think. It doesn't mean you have to always think outside the box; that in itself is not freedom and quite uncreative. There's a lot of tried and functional ideas within the box... but those who know the design 'rules' should know that they are guidelines, and when to break from them.

[RPG design patterns]

Thanks, bluej, though link doesn't seem to work. Not a huge fan of D&D though... while it's done well, I think most modern systems have surpassed it.

I would recommend just to inspire in RPGs and build your own system then. Most table top RPGs have systems rooted in fiction which might be an issue for videogame.

Here is quite decent study of RPG design patterns: http://folk.uio.no/gahegsvo/rpg/resources/design/RPG_Design_Patterns_9_26_05.pdf

Might be useful to other game designers too.

Wow, looks like a long, yet concise outline. I'm in love with the technical systems prose already Apparently there's a wiki too: http://rpg-design-patterns.speedykitty.com/doku.php/table_of_contents

Maybe I'll try and build an open source system later, first thing to do if I ever get back into game making

IMO, sounds like you're describing a Roguelike to me.  Perhaps have a look into some rougelike games? 

There are many RLs with the tile based detailed interaction simulations, even down to hunger -- or tiredness, not to mention standard things like weapon speed, movement costs, etc.

I don't think most of them really have the systems out in the open and need a bit of digging in to find. There are a few RLs with good systems to copy - Unreal World, Dwarf Fortress, URW, IVAN. But roguelikes are a great idea because they're almost purely prototypes with constantly added features, and one can easily see how well they work together.

I wonder if there's a RL where you can just swap in and out game mechanics to see how they do.

Titans of Steel. Started freeware and indie as hell before indie was the 'in' thing. Went commercial, but not mass market enough to make money. Back when I was still in school, it only had randomly generated levels and no missions, but didn't stop me from playing it for months.

It's still a great game with some extreme details, but with the realism that games like Unreal World and Dwarf Fortress offer, it no longer takes first place in gory details. Also very hardcore.

Reviews are written by people who've played a hell lot of games and are jaded with everything. You often need shinier graphics or some innovation to appeal to them and get high ratings.

Personally, I think that most people get their creative spark out in their first few games. There's a lot more 'spirit' and charm put into those things because they're more personal. The smaller the game, the easier it is to keep personal, though it doesn't mean that huge productions are not able to feel the same creative drive.

Not really so much about risks... AAAs can and do take plenty of risks. But usually more about not having too many cooks spoil the soup. What comes to mind is 5 star restaurant vs homecooked meals.

Most Android games are < $3. Pay what you want model won't help sales much in that most people will pay minimum anyway.

I mean, the fantasy would be to have someone who's willing to pay $500 for your game, but those kinds of people are doing it for the community more than for the game. If you've got a community up, you can just put a donation option there.

Everyone has different motivations. I was always at odds with my father (who's a serious MBA guy). His motivations were glory, power, money. But I get motivated by being able to build/invent new things and testing out theories. He never understood why I actually like making games, always thinking that a product is something to be sold.

If you don't want to make money, it's fine, it's what motivates you.

IMO, the highest compliment anyone can give is money. If someone is willing to pay for it, it means that it's improved their life in some way. The issue with games is that the most hardcore gamers - unemployed people and teenagers - don't actually have any money.

It's just bad to trick people into giving you money, with shady pricing schemes (e.g higher prices make people want it more!) or "freemium" models that lie to your face telling you that it's a free game.

Honestly don't mind a good free game killing off other games. That's how the software industry works these days; everything is going open source. But because there's no money in making games, I don't do it anymore... too many other profitable hobbies to go for.

I was rushing through testing a file output function. Not wanting to bother finding the folder of my app, I just copied it from another function. Also copied the file name too.

Turns out that I just overriden my main database file with some dummy text. It killed the whole app, but thankfully, it's recoverable. Would've been more amusing if the database was located in the root directory, since I overrode all the root protection stuff to debug faster.

Really, all of them are good. It's like learning to write... if you learn one language and one alphabet, it's a lot easier to grasp writing in other languages and alphabets as well. Don't start with the hardest possible, go for something moderate.

In my opinion, yes. The problem is that you can't have a "cartoony" depiction of sex like you do violence.

Have you seen Oglaf? It pulls off "cartoony" sex just right. Just because 99% of depictions of sex are horrible, it doesn't make it completely unapproachable territory.

I think the problem is in maintaining the proper inspiration to do it right. Someone who is animating gore or violent scenes is rarely in a 'bloodthirsty' mood. But someone who is animating sex will fluctuate between being 'horny' and 'not in the mood'. Probably why women have done so much better than men at sex scenes is because they can at least remain constant.

And there are plenty of ways to do violence... shots, stabbing, slicing, explosions, fire, drowning, freezing, soul sucking. Sex is much more limited... lying down, standing, consensual, nonconsensual. Sex is rarely ever competitive (which is a major feature in games). I think part of what makes games like Sengoku Rance good is because they build the competitive element into it (even if it's with the distasteful theme of rape). Then again, it's not like there's any consensual violence outside of Saturday morning cartoons.

Personally, the only FPS I've ever really enjoyed was Counter-Strike. While it could use more realistic additions (like peeking out of corners or crippling damage), IMO, it hit a good balance between tension and frustration.

I dislike FPSes where you have to shoot the guy several times ala Half-Life or Halo. Tracing your mouse over the opponent for a period of time in order to 'win' is lame. Counter-Strike wasn't quite one hit, one kill... there were plenty one hit kill weapons out there, but they were counter-balanced with things like high recoil, low ammo, low recovery times, loud sounds, and so on.

It had a bit of strategy as well.. you had the weaker damage wall-piercing rifle shots that netted a fun kill to person hiding. You had the very low damage, but almost no recoil, high ammo Glock, which required quite a bit of finesse to pull off. There were like 5 SMGs, and 3 of them were solid choices for different situations or play styles.

Was doing stuff with databases in my country. Apparently quite a few people legally registered their names with "Mrs" in front. I wonder if I can register my kid with the name of "Dr".

Yeah, just do both. Personally, I don't like Steam because there's nothing I like there.

Somewhere out there, there is a lecturer who is teaching a one hour class on how to change the color of the buttons in Android.

Er, LLCs cost about $8k to set up here.

But the simplest kind of business (forgot the english term, the one with full liability) costs about $20 to register with a trade name, half as much if you use your full name. Similar amount to renew every year IIRC.

Here we use the term 'business' to mean the simple one with full liability and 'company' for something like a LLC. Plus businesses come with some legal protection on things like IP and partnership problems so it's well worth it. Otherwise, if you have some informal agreement, good luck trying to claim your investment back if one of your partners dies.

Heh, Aurora is obviously going to attract the middle aged retro crowd. (damn, am i middle aged already?)

Also a lot of those games are suited to all console hardware, and the realistic 3D games lag a lot. I'm not a fan of pixel art, but I'd rather have consistent graphics and framerates over the ultrarealistic laggy type where I have to disable shadows.