Probalty because smartphones are made by people you think about what they are doing. Even animations are much smoother on a smartphone then on any high-end pc...

Well, the higher end smartphones do have a better screen than most good monitors. Both Android and iOS are messed up operating systems; far less pain to do anything on a PC.

Back on topic now?

I just tried out a line-segment-to-point distance test, and it worked first try. That's not supposed to happen.

There is something wrong with it and you'll never find out what.

Lol... everything that's ever worked without knowing how it works has an Achilles heel that shows itself a few years later.

Morality is something that causes personal disadvantage but gives an advantage to the world as a whole.

Stealing gives a strong personal advantage, but if everyone did it, it would be bad.

Similarly with murder, sex, alcohol, monopolization, environmentalism, socialism, abortion, gay rights, etc. People will disagree with morality when the personal advantages outweighs the social disadvantages, especially if they see no social disadvantage.

Religious morality is such a hot spot because people expect to be punished if "immoral things happen".

Morality doesn't work in games because the world is abstracted out. Kill monsters and the world gets better. Why would it be immoral to kill monsters? You'll never be put in a situation where the monsters actually take revenge on your family because of your rampant killing (since they've already done that).

Stealing in RPGs is a moral action because it helps the world as a whole. You stealing from others does not make them more likely to steal from you or your closest friends. There's no reason to be a role model and not steal.

Fallout morality works partially because there is retribution. Kill children, you get a bounty on your head. Become a slaver and people will refuse to deal with you. You'll actually see the results of your actions in the end game... if you help a mob boss, they'll pay you a lot but eventually take over the town, which inspires a little guilt. Sometimes you'll see the indirect results of helping criminals.

I made mods of Monopoly 

In my experience, help manuals are harder to read than just smashing buttons on the interface.

Would go with html, because you can just pop it into google.

PDF is actually really hard to read on a computer, only good for printed documents and short things like resumes. Would rather just read plaintext.

Don't like CHM. It's actually the best of those choices, but feels dirty.

Some guy designed something in Photoshop. Fucking Photoshop and asked me to recreate it in Android, with the hell of converting a cramped Photoshopped design to something half its resolution.

Spent the whole day on it.

Showed it to them, and they were like "whoa"

It's an awesome compliment when someone with high standards goes "whoa." It's better than if a really attractive girl says "I want to have sex with you now." I get a "good job" and "it looks good" every now and then, but nothing beats "whoa"

It's great how smartphones have really vibrant displays and actually look better than it does on any PC monitor. It feels good creating something prettier than Photoshop. To top it off, it actually runs really smoothly on a low end device.

Making a RTS is a huge amount of work, the programming side on a RTS is much bigger than a FPS for example.
Gemini Wars www.geminiwars.com is a Indie RTS game,and we did did in about 2 years, but as I said it was a huge amount of work and yes, balancing and playing every level 1000th times is boring, and without dedication and team work, I think it's complicated.

Yeah, I did make a RTS for a competition. Everyone else did other genres (platformers, puzzles, etc). I had to chop up lots of the design to fit it into two months. Spent one month actually working full time on design - units, damage, resources, resource requirements, etc.

Everyone else finished their games really quickly. I couldn't get mine done even with a team, a lot of discipline, forcing them through illness and offering a substantial cut of the prize.

I know plenty of smart people who could churn out a (good!) platformer in half a week, but spend years on RTS code, not even getting through the unit design. With most people who make strategy games, it's just hard to tell them that their game... kinda.. sucks. You normally have to build off someone else's design.

<color name="grey">#6D6D6D</color>
<color name="gray">#9B9B9B</color>

that's going to be fun to debug

Haha, a site dedicated to a free (and rather good) IDE:
http://www.ihateeclipse.com/

I remember something like this in C&C generals, where units can get upgraded by driving over destroyed tanks. Terrorist tanks were quite shitty if you didn't give them parts to steal.

Company of Heroes also did this more directly, in that you could upgrade your cheap infantry with weapons dropped by other units. Like you could turn your infantry into machine gunners by killing someone else's machine guns and taking it.

The biggest problem with doing stuff like this in any strategy game is keeping track of the resources. More so for a RTS, where you want to think fast and you don't want to juggle the number of resources in your head. You don't want lots of little resources like wheels, engine, transmission drives, oil, lasers, cannons, etc, etc.

If you want to keep on the theme, just stick to 2-6 resources. Or do something like CoH.. either you upgrade it or you don't. Maybe even drag the parts back somewhere.

Don't create a lot of resources. Unless you want to turn it into a management game.

neither a cs degree or a game dev degree will make you a better game developer or a better programmer

Whoa, that's a bit extreme now. I mean, I agree that CS degrees are BS, but they do teach you skills. If you haven't improved at all, then you've been ripped off.

And while most programming degrees don't really get as far as teaching OOP (properly), they do teach you things like how to set up your compiler or force you to learn how pointers work.

I'm a significantly better programmer because of formal education; it taught me how to break down difficult tasks, how to abstract out things, how to design a system to be easily debugged, how to isolate and test systems, proper project management, handling those horrible pointers, version control, work flow, optimization (and what isn't worth sacrificing for 'optimization'), multithreading, etc. And that was only a small part of a comp sci course. I would never have learned those things outside of uni.

Game design courses are useful too, if done right. For the most part, they're taught by people who don't actually design games, but those who want to analyze games. Without the proper tools. A good design course teaches you game theory, how people's pleasure part of the brain works, mechanisms for balance.


Of course, I do agree that there are better ways for breaking into the games industry. Electrical engineering is probably as good as a CS degree.. you do actual serious shit programming like image processing, robotics, AI, operating systems, security (and how people break them). I've seen people in EE outdo CS programmers.

Mathematics degrees are awesome. Toady One of Dwarf Fortress did math and it shows in how he designs the mechanics of DF. Math is a lot like philosophy, except that you break reality down into things that can be explained in formulas. Perfect for games. (well, a true mathematician would disagree in that there's just so much more depth to it than that, but if that's all you take out of it, you'll learn more than you need to know)

Other engineering degrees are good too. If you listen to Will Wright's lectures, he approaches everything from an engineering perspective, breaking everything down into mechanics. Chris Crawford did physics.

IMO, business degrees are even more overrated than CS degrees. My father did a MBA and degree in economics, wasn't worth it. You can pick up everything in business faster than you pick up C++.

OMG, ADOM with graphics!

http://www.indiegogo.com/resurrect-adom-development

huhhhh, repressing urge to donate..

Making games from the UK must be a bummer, with the really high living costs. $1000 a month where I live is middle class; students live on $500 a month.

You can't really improve it any more. There's too many games out there. There's too many blogs and sites and stuff. Even as an above average active gamer, I don't look at those sites and I don't look for those games.

There's basically just too much crap that takes 3 hours before you realize that it's crap. If you want to improve conversion rates, that's your main point.. sell it within those 3 hours.

It gets buried. Even if you have a good game (and I'm sure you do), it's really hard to tell it from all that other crap out there.

I'd say the the best method is going back to webrings. Hang out in sites similar to your game, talk about your game. If I made a strategy game now and told you guys about it, it would attract little interest because people here are just not that into strategy. But if I just went to the IRC of a strategy game community, like Paradox or Matrix Games, it would attract a ton of attention.

I'd do it for free. First games aren't really that good, they're a learning experience. Make something its own world and continually improve upon it as a spot to test/showcase new game designs. Then make something branch out from world and sell it.

Like, if it's an RPG, and there's a village which was destroyed by war, maybe the in-game context suggests that those real-cash donations will help rebuild this said village, and that village is where your next funded game takes place.

Lol, immersion at its most profitable.

Hunh? I don't do that. What are you talking about....

The double negative reverts to: programming takes focus, hence the alcohol benefit is situational. You have confused me sir.

I don't mean 'you' as in the 'person I quoted' 'you' but you as in the 'reader of this post' 'you'

Point was that some people program better drunk if they're the type who spend a hell lot of time thinking about how to do something or procrastinating and worrying rather than just doing it. If you've planned everything out in advance, it's usually easy to just follow it.

Alcohol is liquid confidence because it suppresses the smart part of your brain which instills doubt in your abilities.

Programming drunk wouldn't be too much difference than programming late at night, which a lot of people do. But you wake up with programmer's hangover, i.e. spending a week fixing bugs introduced in that 3 hour burst of productivity. But it's still a step ahead from doing nothing!

Sounds no different than typical donationware, except in this case, you actually have to make a game.

A better way would be to actually do a kickstarter and showcase that old game as part of your portfolio. Assuming you don't have money.

My business model when I go back to doing games would be to make a free game, then make the sequel pay to play. And then when I make a Cool Game III, I release Cool Game II for free or half price. It also keeps you on your toes to keep adding new things to every version, instead of following the Spiderweb Software trap of releasing the same game over and over again with just a different storyline.

On the downside, if your new game is worse than your old one, people will be very pissed off. And since a lot of people expect something similar to the game they played earlier, any change will piss off someone. The money makes them entitled to complain louder about it.

[life]

I love OOP because OOP is fun. It's like what Spore is meant to be.

Come again?

It's like life.

You get to just... mutate them from someone else's creations easily. Someone makes a one armed creature, you can add inherit and add extra arms and heads to it or make a human centipede or whatever. And once you're done messing your object up, just inherit from the same object all over again instead of throwing away that mess and starting from scratch. It's great for open source and collaborative indie stuff. And nice for abstraction.

C has its advantages, but C++/OOP is just fun. Probably the main advantage to it is that you can divide it more easily or work collaboratively. Don't have to understand everything to use something. And easier to clean up. Not all that useful if you're working solo.

Programming is definitely _not_ a task that doesn't depend on focus.

If you're one of those people who like to go "what do you think of my idea/drawing" for a few months, you'd probably be more productive with a little alcohol.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/9496/20120411/alcohol-solving-skills-analytical-thinking-creativity-study.htm

I highly suggest this book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Basically, people repress their instincts with active thinking. First few chapters point out why thinking can be blinding.

Alcohol represses this urge to thinking about it, leaving only the part of your brain that wants to do stuff. Someone who has manners and good grammar drilled into them becomes even more charming with alcohol. Someone who is instinctively crude will have their manners suppressed by alcohol.

So, it can make you more creative if you're already good enough at it that you can do it without thinking. A good writer becomes better under alcohol. A drunk 10 year old won't be able to write anything.