further reading

That is the worst site ever made.

Generally, it's bad if it tries to sell itself as something by the same people. A parody is ok in most places, because it distinguishes itself strongly from the original.

A fangame is a legal minefield. Especially one that tries to sell off as some kind of sequel/alternate timeline... that's exactly what copyright laws are designed to protect against.

I'm a (paid) mobile developer, and I'd have to say that it's not easy. There's a fucking massive entry barrier. I see people trying to jump onto the mobile bandwagon all the time, and most of them fail. They're entirely different things. And they're really frustrating to work with those people when they apply techniques and experience from PC software into mobile.

Porting does not work. There is no fucking way you can design for one and port it to the other.

Controls cannot be ported. If you rely on controls at all, you're screwed. Mouse-based movement can't be ported - the biggest mistake most people make is that clicking on things to move doesn't work. A cursor is tiny. A finger is huge, and blocks whatever it is you click on. You have to design the UI in a way that can't be controlled via mice, unless it's pressing buttons.

There are no keys on a touchphone. D-pads don't work. Tilting the phone side to side doesn't count as a joystick.

Screens are tiny, but resolutions are deceptively high. You get less than a quarter of info displaying room compared to a laptop.

I am a minimalist; mobile is perfect for me because I thrive in a limited resource environment. If PC works for you, don't change, it will be a waste of time. If it compels you, then go for it.

I have to wonder what people are referencing when they say that casual games are easy.  One of the most ridiculously popular casual games right now is Angry Birds, and you'll often be stuck on certain levels for hours if not days in that game.

Lol, depends on your definition of "casual".

"hardcore" is usually used to define frustrating games like Mario, and games like Angry Birds and Diner Dash can fall into that category sometimes.

If you want to define 'casual' as something that's easy to learn, nearly all platformers and even Starcraft falls into that mold.

If you want to define it as something that can be won without effort, again, a lot of platformers, Prince of Persia, GTA can be won without thinking much. Even something like Where's My Water or Sudoku takes quite a bit of effort to win.

I'd say Angry Birds/Diner Dash falls more into "mainstream" than "casual".

Armageddon MUD is a permadeath MUD that actually functions on that system. There are flaws, of course, but overall, nobody has mentioned inflation being a major problem. Just that some characters get too rich after a while and end up not having money to spend it on.

Most characters in Armageddon die via NPCs and environment. The money is not lost, it's on the corpse until the next server reset (which can be within a week). Sometimes players find it and get rich instantly, sometimes other characters get killed by the same thing.

Multiple characters are forbidden, so no mules.

Banks do exist. But when a character dies, there's no inheritance; the bank keeps all the money. It's actually an unofficial part of the in-game lore that the bank doesn't make money from investments... they make money from characters storing money there, dying, and never withdrawing it.

A person with much more web and marketing experience than I once told me, "Over 90% of people who visit any web page don't bother scrolling down, so if you don't catch their eye at the top of a page, you'll lose most of the visitors".

http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/


My opinion as a web developer - If it's not something they're immediately looking for, put it elsewhere. Most websites are blogs/news, so putting blog on home makes sense if that's your thing. If your page is a sales page (i.e. few repeat visitors), put trailers, etc on home page. If it's a devlog, put the devlog on the front page.

The benefit of being a Limited company is the limited Liability. If your a sole trader and you get into debt your personal assets are at risk. If you have a Ltd your less at risk (unless you get a lot of debt and do very unscrupulous things and manage to get caught). The downside is you have to get a chartered accountant to do your accounts every year regardless of your income and this costs about £700-£1000 a year minimum

Yeah, pretty much this, but it's easy to get investors too. Easy to decide how to split the profits. With sole trader, you're either getting funds through kickstarter or asking for thousands from friends/family/fools and with the dodgy promise of 'paying them back later'. With shares, the legal system handles all that borrowing, repaying, and splitting profits. And don't have to worry about being cheated by someone.

adom is more complex than all the civ games being hailed as pinnacle of complexity in strategy games ITT for some reason. it was developed by one person.

lol, ADOM is not a good example. Just do everything from start to finish according to guides and you win.

If you want a strategic roguelike, Dungeon Crawl was actually designed that way.

I treat roguelikes sort of like light tactical games. You have a lot of resources to manage. The kind of resources that you get are random. Decide how often you want to use your potions before you get another. Decide whether you want to eat the food now or have it expire/burned/tentacle rape you later. Decide which skills to take based on what you expect to encounter. Decide the odds that the unknown scroll will save you vs odds of it killing you instantly vs odds of you escaping the monster in the room now vs odds of you not having the scroll when you face a bigger monster later.

I love dice/random games, but this is kind of.. unattached and too complicated to seem exciting to me. It feels more like a math problem than a game.

There is one RTS like that already - Stronghold.

Yeah, and it suffers from the problem of too many resources. Most Stronghold players just lay it heavy on the catapults.

The best Stronghold player I've faced simply created a lot of apple farms, sold all those apples, bought armor and swords, and sent a few dozen swordsmen on me within 5 minutes. He simply reduced the game into a few optimal resources and everything else was just noise.

Not everyone plays for the challenge. Jeff Vogel once said that some people play games for 'whittling', i.e. doing a low-mental state activity.

Most gamers start young, with too much time, too much mental energy, nothing to spend it on. That's why they go for games. It's nice to learn, nice to master, nice to show off to your friends when beating them.

After a certain age, you spend most of your time being mentally exhausted. This is the age where you stop picking up new skills, because it's just not fun anymore. You stick to games you're good at. You want a low mental state activity. For old gamers, it's a genre that they've already mastered.

If you've got an easy job, you have that energy you want to burn off somewhere, and probably pick up a difficult game.

also there's a probably huge cultural aspect as well. for instance, a lot of americans i know hate soccer because it's "boring" to watch and it takes "forever" to score a goal. or, to use an example relevant to this thread,  starcraft is a popular spectator sport in korea despite the supposed "pacing issues."

lol, most arguments involving soccer pace often have something to do with them falling down and not wearing body armor too. It's just an excuse to hate something. Most haven't reached the stage where they're used to the pace - you can detect this based on how often they blame the goalkeeper for letting in goals.

There's also a lot which casual soccer watchers don't understand.. to most, it's just passing around a ball and waiting for it to hit the goal. For a real fan, it's about loosening up the defense, getting them in a position where it's easy to score, distracting and catching key players when they're off guard.

Soccer's very similar to RTSes in that manner. Difference is that when you don't understand anything, soccer looks like nothing is happening, but Starcraft looks like people clicking all kinds of buttons.

SC has its 'silent' times too, when people are doing something completely anticipated.. this is similar to dribbling or passing the ball in sports terms.

A casual spectator can easily identify a pass in football; boring. A hardcore spectator can spot bad and good passes, and whether certain players were poorly marked/poorly positioned or what makes a bad tackle. They get frustrated on bad passes, and excited on good ones that lead to opportunities (which is why you don't see soccer fans getting off the seat even during the 'slow' moments).

A casual RTS spectator has no idea why he's making those troops. He's still trying to figure out what a Sword of the Last Starqueen does or learning that a Shotgunman does 20% extra damage on a Sniper. And by the time he's figured that out, the player's already bought a dozen other units. An experienced spectator has already expected him to buy that Sword or follow those build orders.


It's not really about pace, but more about learning curve. Depends on how fun it is to watch it in the early stages. Computer games are simply not fun to watch if you don't understand it. Games like football, poker, basketball are really easy to appreciate with no knowledge of the game, and even more impressive with full knowledge.

Designers are great to work with.
Idea guys are not.

Don't confuse the two. One actually reduces your workload and gives you insights on things you wouldn't have thought by yourself. He doesn't know how to do things but knows the limitations on what can be done and what kinds of technology can be pushed to the limit. He gets paid highly for this.

The other guy has really average ideas which nobody approaches because they're impossible, but thinks they're unique simply because nobody does it. He doesn't know how its done, that's your job. He gets paid even more, because he started the company.

I love the idea of something like this. My first 'real' game was something like an artificial life thing pasted onto a platformer-RTS.

MMOs are actually ideal for this. Single player games are boring if you just explore and react to the world.. maybe a rare exception of what works is Unreal World.

With MMOs, most of the fun is in the community. It doesn't have to be an advanced one, you can maybe pull it off with something like Faery Tale Online or a MUD.

Text based ones will also let you fully control what they sense. You can have a blind, deaf, no sense of smell worm that lives underground and can only sense vibrations. This would be really hard to communicate in a 3D game, but a lot easier with stuff like *You feel multiple vibrations of hard hooves hitting soil moving in your direction* (herd walking 300m away).

One of the problems with games like this is information overload. There too much to learn at once, too much to do. Huge worlds actually suck. I think what you're going for is limitless exploration, and you can do this without a huge world, by simply having more content in a smaller area.

You also seem to be going for emergent gameplay, as in someone else starts using a rock to hit the soil, makes the ground more fertile, and ends up accidentally inventing farming. I love the 'no chat' part too.. it means that players will need to develop an in-game communication system by themselves.


Here's something I did for my game - I limited gameplay to a few elements and assigned properties. Everything in the world was made of Red, Green, Blue.
Black = solid, high gravity, forms the core of planets
White = nothing
Red = heavy, liquidlike
Green = soft, grows on gray matter
Blue = light, almost gaseous, but sometimes falls as 'rain'

Since Red+Green+Blue = White, it meant death, so all creatures would avoid 'other' colors, and only stuck to two.

So, the creatures would take the properties of some of these. Some developed grayish shells and claws to protect them. The 'strong' regenerative creatures were red+green, but hid underground and developed underground colonies and shields to avoid the bluish rain. The 'glider' type creatures were often heavily blue, and you could develop blue-breathing dragons that could kill yellow creatures.

I wanted to do something like a 'human' race made out of gray, who didn't have color-spitting powers, but were equally vulnerable and resistant to all of them. And they would uncorrosive develop gray tools and weapons, eventually going for the solid black stuff that could cut through anything.

All these creatures had to 'eat' colors that they were made of. Creatures that grew too big had to eat smaller creatures, and if there were not enough around, they'd just fade out. The 'gray' creatures had the highest resource consumption, which forced them to learn to reproduce resources more efficiently, either by building things like aqueducts or farming/herding.

It split up resource management neatly, and limited the amount of rules the player had to learn before they could start inventing stuff. It lends itself well to things like reproduction too.

The resources also forced natural conflict or cooperation, and it was a 'soft' limitation on how much people can put into their creatures. Like I could make a huge, acid spitting titan with an invincible black exoskeleton, but it'd have to continually eat a lot of big creatures to keep surviving. There will be several sweet spots, and those creatures will start to populate the planet.

Some players will start trading or developing symbiotic relationships. Someone will start trolling and creating killer predators; the others will create a herd mentality to protect themselves, or this may trigger some kind of arms race.

Dwarf Fortress is a good example of this; it is probably the most detailed game in existence (game-wise, not graphics-wise, mind you) and it's a 1-2 person project.

Actually, Slaves to Armok, which was before Dwarf Fortress was a life sim at its core. In 3D even.

But you did nothing, except explore and use magic to teleport other creatures' lungs out of their bodies and watch them scream. Dwarf Fortress is, in heart, just a massive world simulator, with the Fortress part being some attempt at giving a context to it.

Look at this shit.  What is this shit?  Why are the tiles so big?  You don't need a 250px wide button to open your email.  You have a mouse, not a finger.  This is a desktop operating system.  For fuck's sake Microsoft, get your shit together.

Lol, reminds me of the MS Office interface. It was actually perfect at one point, but then they decided that people were too stupid to press menus and needed big buttons everywhere. Yahoo has big buttons and icons everywhere, and even computer semi-literates prefer Google's tabular system.

Some people decided while they were small that they wanted to grow up making games for a living. Then they ran the numbers, found out that movies or music were more money with less capital.

Which is why some of the best game developers I knew since I was a kid moved into filmmaking or music

Love keyboard shortcuts on IDEs 

Ugh, stuff like this is literally the main reason I refuse to buy an iPhone, and why iOS is losing popularity so quickly.

I think coffee has a reverse effect on me. Instead of making me more active it makes me even lazier.

Caffiene doesn't actually make you more productive. It's only good if the only productive alternative is sleep.

Glucose does make you more productive, though. But don't take too much; that stuff is bad for you.

True morality involves internal, not external motivation and rewards. I think it can successfully incorporated into game design, but not by distributing rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. Instead well-designed game should induce player to "feel" the morality of the decisions of his avatar - by music, slight changes in visuals or gameplay and so on.

Not quite sure what you mean by internal motivation.

You can't have guilt if nothing bad happens. Or feel the joy of charity if there's no sacrifice involved. And part of the fun of being evil is feeling that guilt and then ignoring it.

Maybe living with the guilt of doing something bad (like selling a companion to slavery) and hoping it doesn't bite you back. Or even having it bite you back, but surviving/laughing through it.

It's not really ideal to act upon it externally, but I think morality systems should be geared towards somehow creating those emotions.

As it is, it induces more guilt to play a game on low difficulty (because you're not supposed to) than to kill characters in game.. you just can't feel evil if what you do doesn't have any evil results. Even though Monopoly is a very evil game, it just doesn't feel evil because that's how the game is played.