I've ranted over this already once, but Dwarf Fortress is an example of polish done wrong - ToadyOne is investing lots of time in features that have a really poor time-to-quality-payoff ratio. We have hippos in sewers but no mouse control, working vampires but broken crossbowmen, etc etc. "Irrelevant" is a very well-fitting word here... IMHO.

Depends on who you ask. Some people play it so that they could have the sewer zombies bite off their hand, resurrect the hand, and get punched to death by their own undead hand. You get to that level where the game offers things that no other game does, and the current fan base is happy to lose UI over that.

I spent months just polishing and doing 'final' touches to Little Dragon 3D before I thought it was ready for release,

after releasing it, the game got a few sales, but not even close to enough to what would be needed to justify spending months of my time and effort on it

Now I'm stuck in the dilemma; should I sink more time into polishing it? will it then pick up more sales and be worth it? or will I just be adding to the already massive amount if time I've spent that hasn't paid off?

I'm not sure it's ever possible to know the answer, so I'm going to continue polishing away regardless

It's too abstract to say what exactly polish accomplishes. We can't really tell if you're just refining textures, or tweaking the feel of the game to be more intuitive. Most of your game is probably in getting the feel just right, and you'd probably need a lot of time, categorized as polish, to achieve that.

Short answer:
Construct if you just want to jump straight to making games.
C++ if you want to make a career out of it.

I definitely understand the C over C++ for starting. But I don't understand what you mean by "hardline object orientation".

Right, I mean the academic/code monkey orthodoxy that has sprung up around OOP. The attitude that OOP remains dominant because it's totally the best way to program everything. Emphasis on designing around inheritance and virtuals (particularly interfaces) and data hiding etc., regardless of whether these are the best tools for the job.

I prefer using C++, because it's nice having some extra tools around. Not so for a noob.

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

Soft barriers are excellent, and they'll also measure how big the game is. You can maybe add instadeath hazards north, south, east, west.

E.g. early on, the forests to the east may be infested with spiders, which can only be accessible if the player base teams up and destroys them. Maybe the area to the south might have a lava sea, only accessible with enough in game tech to sail it (and still hazardous).

Explorers can still scout the area, have the joy of being the first in a deadly area. Armageddon MUD makes it very rewarding to explore.. sometimes you come across dead bodies of former explorers with tons of loot.

It also allows you to dynamically 'shrink' the world if the player base dwindles or loses interest in an area. Like spiders can reinfest a neglected area, baby dragons can hatch into a formerly cleared location, etc.

Eh, from what I know, you can get a better learning experience with your job than from a college. The trick is to get into a small studio that values every member rather than a huge one that tries to churn people through.

It's hard to tell most of the time, but you could usually figure it out from the interview. Interviews are two-sided; you're interviewing the company as well. There was a company that offered me a lot of money, but when they called me, they put me on hold immediately for 5 minutes before telling me coldly, "We're calling you for interview". It puts up a bad first impression of a company that doesn't appreciate its employees.

I've been offered jobs by Samsung and other similarly sized companies, but the way they were incredibly slow and poor at communication leads me to believe that it's how they function internally as well.

On the whole, a huge company/governments are usually bad to learn with, because they have too many resources and don't care if they're losing out a little.

On the other hand, if the CEO/COO directly interviews you, it's a good sign that you will be given a hell lot of training and attention, even if it's not first class. You'll probably rise up through the ranks very quickly and be able to move into a more senior position in another organization if you wish. Or get a reputation for a 'founding/key member' in the company if it booms, probably with a lot of bonuses and wage hikes and hefty shares of the profit.

You'll also want to work with rapidly growing companies. This usually means either a young company (1-5 years), but not recently founded. They have limited resources, so they'd want to train fresh graduates from scratch for key roles instead of hiring out experienced/expensive people, but you don't want to work with those who don't actually have the skills to train you.

My superior did game development in college, and he's now highly paid and well in demand. Game developers are either:
1. Really hardworking people who take on the most difficult form of programming.
2. Really lazy people who just want to play games all day.

Maybe not true, but that's what the degree says.

I did electrical + telecommunications engineering. I got in with barely an interview, because science and engineering people have a very high performance record in the software industry. A psychologist who takes a software job gets this "oh, this guy can't get a good job" look. A lawyer or biochemist who takes a software job gets an "oh wow" look.

It really doesn't matter what you take. If you're here, chances are you've got a lot of practical software dev experience under your belt and are automatically worth as much as a guy who did a degree + a year's experience.

Just take something as difficult as you can manage, preferably a little relevant.

Of course, this assumes that a proper computing person will be reviewing your application. HR can be fucking stupid and will shortlist people based on how many programming languages you put on your cover letter.

It's kept as separate integers, because that's the way Android's calendar works 

Looks to me like the only sane way to use that would be to manipulate it with get/setTimeInMillis(), and just convert to days/months/etc. for display purposes.

Yeah, but it's not really used extensively enough to do that. It's just letting someone click a date on a calendar and passing it on to the server, where it's kept for bureaucratic purposes (i.e. nobody reads it).


Anyway, on happy programmer stuff... I just love it when you plan something out and it works exactly as planned. And bug free!

Sometimes I don't even know why I don't bother to plan things. I think it's more of trying to pretend to work rather than actual work.

I drew up a development timeline. It was something like..
1 week: figure out what to do/how to do every component
2 weeks: prototype it
1 week: actual assembly and debugging

And people would be all "what the hell am I paying you 1 week to do nothing". Especially when everyone else's schedule looks more like "2 weeks: programming, 1 week: debugging". And they get to release demos to show progress.

But the system works. Everyone knows it's the best way to go about it, and no boss with programming experience would deny it. But nobody really likes to do it or see it being done because it's horribly inconvenient.

Yet I finished stuff on time, with way more aesthetics and special effects than the competition. One point for waterfall development model.

Your concept isn't exactly unique. I thought about doing something like this. Many others have too. Plenty are in production.

There is a good reason most MMO worlds are limited. If they get too big your finite player base will never find each other. Also unless it is procedurally generated every square foot of game space represents hours of hard work by level designers and artists. This is doubly true if you want each space to be unique and worth exploring. As a player you concept sounds fantastic, as a game developer your concept sounds like a nightmare.

Very strongly agree with this. I've played a lot of large worlds, and eventually hated that the world was so big.

A design I did like however, was that it became more costly to travel further away from the main content areas. Like some games require movement points, and surround the main area with deserts, swamps, evil lands.

Most games make it hazardous to explore from the main areas.. eventually you come across things like dragons, giants, haunted castles, infernal territory. Stuff nobody can actually take on, not after the fatigue of travelling so far kicks in.

It produces an interesting in game effect of people building cities deep in hostile territory too, which makes for some fun sieges, defenses, and natural training of elite forces.

I think we're saying the same thing. They're just people who have been looking around for a secret ingredient and found it in someone else's work.

Those 'inventor' types aren't exactly poor either, they're good at what they do and paid highly for it.


Nobody's really born a master.

There's the people who focus and specialize on one small thing and spend their lives perfecting it.

There's people who focus and specialize on one grand goal and spends his life gathering the parts to do it, normally taking a lot of them from different specialists.

There's people who are not at all motivated by what they're doing, but instead do it out of external motivation (money, fame, etc)...

.. some of those people slog through it and actually become good at it out of habit, but never understand why.

.. many of of them actually realize that what they're doing is fun and become 'late bloomers'.

.. some of those people chase one trend after the other, only later realizing that they were too late or that they couldn't get what people want.

.. the rest don't have passion and don't want to work, so they end up doing the easy boring monkey work on behalf of the people who love what they do. Then they complain about how the people doing hard work don't make any money.


And then, you've got the lucky one hit wonders, who were just monkeys at a typewriter and hit the right cheat code.

I wonder if games like Fallout were made this way.. I recall it wasn't very well planned, just a dungeon crawler in the FUTURE. And that the really high interaction that people loved was because they wanted to make something for whatever characters people made. It wasn't really a great design, but worked out ok in the end, and they built Fallout 2 on experience from the first.

I've seen microtransaction games work. They sell just like every other business - people buy it when they don't feel ripped off.

The Starbucks model works well... build a good place for people to sit down, chat, relax, and sell them coffee while they wait.

I like the idea of people making worlds with competing dungeons. Then again, that sounds a lot like Backyard Monsters. But I guess with more creativity.

The idea's a little too abstract to see what would make it stand out. I'd love to see something like a multiplayer Evil Genius kind of game, but not a Dungeon Keeper kind, because Dungeon Keeper keeps most of its charm single player.

Bug-free coding is a good policy, because bugs are a hell lot easier to fix when first introduced. As is designing software before you start coding, so that it would be bug free. Debugging eats up most of development time.

That said, it's impossible to be completely bug free with complex software. And even if it is bug free, it's not exploit free; someone will probably hack your variables in memory or something.

The only purpose of oop and modern languages is to serve lazy people and being disrespectful towards the nature of computation. In the end the ultimate truth is C and assembler.

If anything fuels my rage, it would be this. Unless you're an electrical engineer or you just have to work with low level stuff, you want to just get the computer to do stuff, rather than spending literally weeks of time trying to save nanoseconds on memory/disk/thread optimizations.

Ha, I found a bug that crashes the whole thing the second last day of every month. This was because I'd do a "today+2" to book reservations. Since 32nd Aug doesn't exist, it crashes the system.

I never would've found it if I didn't test that page today, because there are no more last days of the month right before the deadline. People would be pissed at some software that doesn't run for an entire day.

Umm... it should also fail on the last day of the month, right?

Also, seems to me you shouldn't be keeping year, month, and day as separate integers, but instead should be keeping days since some epoch.

Yeah, but 31st Aug was a national holiday, so I wouldn't be looking for it.

It's kept as separate integers, because that's the way Android's calendar works 

It's impossible to judge an idea. You lose much of the design during implementation.

The Mortal-God link needs some strong synergy, at this point looks like both are playing different games.

Don't see if there's a link between different God-worlds. Like could a God just drop tons of nice stuff on one world and have the mortals from that world use it to win other worlds?

Not really enough incentive to play a Mortal. And your 'economy' here is heavily based on Mortals. This is probably the weakest point.

Wary of the permadeath thing. I love the idea of buying back resurrections, but this will bring forth the problem of people purposely killing their mortals for resurrection money, probably by pulling them into addiction and throwing in subtle instadeath traps or something.

It's not really unlikely to make a million in a year, it's been done very often via buying and improving on someone else's design. But mostly with small products, which is why it's a good example. I once talked to a guy who made his first million from applying something from newspaper printing into toy manufacturing.

It's not stealing; it's just that some people are really good (and really obsessed) with specific ideas and lose the big picture of how to make good use of it. And it takes someone else to make use of that.

The way patents are designed means that the academics make money off it anyway, though not nearly as much as the people who discovered a use for the invention.

Being original requires looking at what ISN'T there. It's about putting yourself into the void and leaving everything else out of it. To be original you must see yourself as the way point between everything that has already come.

Lol, strongly disagree. If something came to you while you were in the void, chances are that it was subconsciously inspired by something else. But it's all about working away from the things that everyone knows and taking patterns people have never seen.

why not flash??

HTML5.

Not saying it's better, but it's an alternative.

Construct 1/2 is 500% better than flash/mmf2/gamemaker, so just use that.

http://www.scirra.com/

better as in more capable yes, but is it also better in the sense that it's easier to learn than those? i'm not sure

In my experience, yes. But I went to Construct after learning Flash/MMF2. Construct's really easy for a beginner, and it's actually very scaleable to larger projects. A lot of tutorials for Construct also teach you really nice, quick techniques, so you don't have to play with weird workarounds.

Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft aren't even finished. Can't make assumptions on polished based on them. Once all the features are done, they'll probably spend a few months/years on polish as well.

But something like DF already does polish on some features. Like spending significant time adding irrelevant animals, or getting blood flowing down streams right.

Some games are public beta, and that's fine if you have nothing to lose by showing your bare bones. Browser games are often public beta. Some businesses do it if they can make money while it's in beta, because it's really expensive to spend a few months fixing things, and nobody's going to leave just because the game is incomplete. DF certainly needs to go the public alpha model for fundraising.

oh fine, 'in a year' then, if you don't like hyperbole 

Depth comes from emergence.
Emergence comes from designing a game in such a way that you have to interpret the rules/mechanics in different ways.

Like Chess has a set rule about moving pawns only one square, or moving bishops only diagonally. But there's so many ways to interpret these rules, so it creates massive depth.

People will settle upon good strategies and bad strategies.

But you have to take care that there's not too many rules or it'll cause confusion from all the ways you can interpret them. IMO, chess is way too complicated for me. I'm happier with something like Battle for Wesnoth, because it has less interpretations.

Tetris is also a perfect example of emergence. Rules are really simple, but they create different situations all the time.

It's same as with anything else in life.

Disagree with the assessment. Inspiration always comes from somewhere. Nobody is an inventor. Inventors take inspiration from other small inventions.

The difference is how well you can sell that invention. An unknown invention may inspire a slightly known one.. the slightly known one may be iterated upon and create a really good design, which people consider an "Invention".

Like the iPhone - smartphones and touch screens existed long before it, but iPhone combined both. Samsung was already working on a touchphone at the same time. Or Friendster - networking is an ancient concept, and so were online photos and '6 degrees of separation'.

PhD candidates and academics are an excellent example of people who spend their whole lives inventing really difficult things that nobody sees. Then someone finds it, sees it as a solution to a problem they're thinking about, buys it, and becomes a millionaire overnight, while the 'true inventor' survives on royalties.

Sid Meier and his Civilization, 3 of course.

I think Civilization was heavily influenced by the board game of the same name.

I thought it was influenced by Empire.

Questions about "what makes a good (gameplay element)" are perfectly fine. But when people ask "what personality should my character have", I think they've lost the point. It's more inexperience than anything. If I wanted to draw something, the first thing I'd think is "what color should his clothes be" and such, because I don't actually know where to start.