Are the red and blue squares really pixel art?

That big monster reminds me of Out of This World though, I like that style.

I didn't mean to separate it. I meant something more like this: nobody expects someone's earliest games to look very professional. He mentioned earlier that he had only drawn his first sprite a week ago or something like that.

Back in the Ohrrpgce community, I knew a lot of people who would endlessly work on the tiles and graphics for their games and not actually make a game -- just making sprites and tiles for months until they were satisfied, and never getting to the point where they were put together in something interactive.

So my advice was equivalent to advising a writer not to spend too much time on word choice, and instead focus on getting the story written, because they'll never actually write their first story if they focus too much on the choice of words.

Or in other words, someone just learning to make games should focus on the whole first, and polish the parts later.

I used to play console games almost exclusively, and now play PC games almost exclusively. Mainly because they're less expensive, even mainstream commercial PC games from a year or two ago are only about $20, whereas console games still hover around the $50 range, not to mention the price of the consoles themselves. The last console I owned was the PS1, maybe I'll buy a PS2 eventually, there are a few PS2 games that look interesting (like Persona 3).

It also helps to have a 21" CRT monitor (70 lbs). Whenever I have to use a monitor smaller than that I hate it. I think LCD monitors (either for a desktop or a laptop) also ruin the color and make playing games less enjoyable, and I dislike that CRTs are becoming less common. Can't people even tell the difference in the quality of the colors?

Indie RPGS: Try Aveyond, Cute Knight, and Sword of Jade, as well as some other famous-in-the-community-but-unknown-outside-of-it Ohrrpgce RPGs like Wandering Hamster, The Black Crown of Horgoth, Walthros, Wingedmene (which I helped work on), the ARFENHOUSE series... there are tons of great ones, although a lot of them are unfinished, even the unfinished ones can be fun.

Indie Platformers & Shmups: Tim at http://indygamer.blogspot.com reviewed pretty much all of them ever, I suggest checking out the archives there.

World peace is too modest a goal! In addition should strive to cure every disease and obtain immortality and expand humanity to the stars with such a game!

I agree w/ your point about RTS games, although I did at one time show someone SC who had never played a RTS game before and he managed to figure it out. But Pikmin is much more new-user friendly as far as the RTS genre goes than SC is.

That's a good point about how to do it, I need to give more specifics.

I think one way in one area of this (exploration) is to have a game be neither linear nor non-linear, but rather have it be both: Fallout 1 and 2 do this well. There's a linear way you can play the game, people give you hints to the next area, but if you're a more advanced player also don't have to follow their directions and can explore in other directions too. This is a moderation between leaving the player completely in the dark and to make it totally nonlinear on the one hand (like some of the Ultima games where they just put you in the middle of nowhere without instructions) or having it be a jump through the hoops game on the other hand (like FFX where you had a big arrow and a map pointing out where to go next). This makes exploration fun to both experts in RPGs (finding out new ways to proceed through the game) and fun for people who are unfamiliar with RPGs (pointers to the next goal and a recommended path through it).

In characterization, one way to do it is to use characters which *are* recognizable as archetypes on the one hand, but also have some subtle characterization to them that makes them more complex when you explore them more deeply. This is a moderation between making completely strange characters that the player isn't likely to have seen their kind before or know how to interpret or relate with them on the one hand (like Camus' The Stranger or something) or on the other hand using total archetypes with no depth and who hardly even have a personality (like a lot of the Dragon Warrior games use). I think a good moderation between these two was in the Persona games: you had fairly archetypal characters (different archetypes of high school student), but they weren't *only* archetypal, they had enough unique features and interesting details to make them memorable (such as in Persona 1, Nate wasn't just a bossy rich kid, but also was mourning over the loss of his butler and secretly felt that the other kids didn't like him). This makes him both understandable to a younger person (spoiled rich kid) and interesting to a more experienced audience (not just a spoiled rich kid).

Or another way to put it is as a rule of thumb elements of a game should be understandable or achievable or doable in multiple ways: an easily understandable, obvious way and a more nuanced and sophisticated alternative set of ways.

I had to look that one up.

n.
A cloth or leather gaiter covering the shoe upper and the ankle and fastening under the shoe with a strap. Often used in the plural.

top hat flies off

This is copied from my LiveJournal, but I thought it might be interesting to some of you guys too. Feel free to agree / disagree / call me pretentious etc.

*

One thing Chris Crawford wrote that has stayed with me is that a sign of sophistication is smaller or more fine sensory or cognitive distinctions. For instance: kids like candy, adults like food that isn't as obviously sweet but where they can enjoy the interesting things about food tastes that kids would miss. Likewise, kids like cartoons and shows about clear archetypes, whereas adults like less obviously clear stories. This doesn't mean they're more compromising or more wishy-washy, just that they are better at seeing and knowing, so they appreciate ferreting out what isn't obvious to children. And this pattern is true of anything related to taste: the more mature your tastes, the more fine the distinctions and the more subtlety is appreciated.

This poses a dilemma to any artist: you have to create multiple levels of subtlety so that people with different levels of refinement in their tastes could all enjoy your work. There are of course works that appeal more to some than to others (and that's fine), but I think the best ones have multiple layers, where you can enjoy it as a kid and as an adult, not exclusively one or the other.

Unfortunately, artists also tend to be those with more refined tastes, simply through more exposure, so eventually they lose the ability to appeal to unrefined tastes. The better artists sometimes ignore it completely, and say things like 'well, it's not meant for beginners! only masters can appreciate my art!' (like "art-games" like The Marriage or Facade) which is an easy temptation. I think this is just as bad as the temptation to appeal only to unrefined tastes (like generic but flashy shumps or FPSs or whatever, where the focus is on clear black and whites and big explosions). Both can be done at once, through layering.

If done correctly, every element in a game should be interesting both to a 5 year old new to things like this and a 50 year old with refined tastes who has seen tens of thousands of works before yours. Every single element preferably (every character, every setting, everything that you can do), that may be impossible, but it's the goal. Classical games like Go or Chess are examples. It's fun for a kid to just move the pieces around but it also has higher levels of refinement. I know that just reflects rule-based gameplay though, in computer games this has to be done in every part of a game: the world, the characters, the graphics, the music, not just the rules.

For instance, Starcraft does this very well in terms of its rules: its rules are fun for a kid but there's enough refinement in them that people can spend years getting good at them; but that's the only part of the game that has that layering. The story is cliche, the graphics are clean but not that pretty, there's no extra-gameplay interaction worth the name, it's only the rules that are layered for the unrefined and for the refined, everything else about it is unrefined.

An alternative example is Ico: the rule-based gameplay is unrefined (basically like any other 3D platformer where you run around and hit things), but there is much more layered refinement in the story and setting and extra-gameplay interaction and all that.

My goal then would be to create something that is as layered in its gameplay as Starcraft while being as layered in the rest of it as Ico.

I think there's a big difference between a criticism/analysis and a review. Reviews let you know if you'll like the game and help you decide if you want to try it out or not. Criticisms go into the depths and explore the purpose of the work and help you understand it (and all other games) better. They're two completely different skills, good reviewers aren't necessarily good critics, and vice versa.

I agree that the style looks incoherent. I think the biggest problem for me is the over-usage of saturated colors, and relatively little usage of unsaturated colors. This works sometimes, but here it just looks clash-y.

However, if it's your first or even your second or third game, don't worry about it, there's time to make your games pretty after you've learned how to make them fun.

If we can add our own:

Alphasix - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVO-FupvVWI

For the Endless Forest I like this one too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgfE-eVqvwk

The graphics style reminds me of a 16-bit version of Guardian Legend, I like it. You wouldn't be interested in collaborating on a game, would you?

Sorry if there's a topic for this already, but I haven't seen one.

Forces - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7vIMr1qWDA
Gish - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WzGQQOIcp8
Rose & Camellia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOd4GlpTVnY
Seiklus - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojJnfx8ZJCM
Aquaria - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqY9mDOw-UI
Toribash - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr_8Bha75pk
Clean Asia - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if584BqlhD8
Cave Story - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr0CCkH49g0

Add more if you know of any other good ones.

Forgive me for asking a naive question, but how could you write an entire *book* on collision detection? It seems like such a minor part of most games (there may be some exceptions where physics is very important). When I think about or review a game, the last thing that comes to my mind is how good the collision detection is.

The Megami Tensei series are sorta-sci-fi (they deal with alternate dimensions and modern day Japan) and some of them have first-person dungeons.

The trouble I've always had with the whole idea of "lost sales" is, well, you're assuming someone's going to buy your game, OR pirate it.

This is ridiculous.

Casual piracy doesn't mean "easy to crack", it means they're playing it because it's there. They load up a torrent site, or check an IRC channel, and say, "Hey, that's new, I'll play that." And they do, for a week. Then it gets forgotten, and they're playing next week's releases. They were NEVER going to buy it. If it wasn't there, it simply wouldn't be played.

So if you're not going to use DRM as some kind of protection (because it is worthless and only serves to irritate folk who buy the game).. why use it?

To sum up: any kind of DRM or copy protection is dumb, it has never worked (even hardware DRM gets cracked), but it's your dev money to throw away. If you're really looking to secure some kind of money-loyalty, you should be looking at paid tech support or subscription forums; access to a server that you control.

Of course not all people who pirate a game would have bought it if they couldn't find a pirated version. But some percent of them would have, and it's not 0%. It's ridiculous to say that 'not everyone who pirates it would have bought it' leads to 'preventing piracy probably doesn't get you a single extra sale', but that's the argument I see people making all the time (on places like digg.com and the like).

If anyone bothers to read that, note that I didn't finish it -- there are a few sections that are just bare notes, and some of the references at the end were never filled in. I only know of about 5 or 6 people who actually bothered to read the whole thing to the end though, so it's O.K.

There's a few. One worked for Working Designs (he even game his own company's games bad ratings when he felt they deserved it) who I had a lot of respect for, although he's gone now.

I myself once wrote a 200 page critique of Xenogears, if that counts: http://studioeres.com/hero/episode/games/gamereview_xenogears_part1.html
http://studioeres.com/hero/episode/games/gamereview_xenogears_part2.html
http://studioeres.com/hero/episode/games/gamereview_xenogears_part3.html
http://studioeres.com/hero/episode/games/gamereview_xenogears_part4.html

(Okay, I was a bit obsessive about that game.)

Seconded. In fact I don't even think people should begin with tools as complex as GM or MMF -- begin modding, then move to engines. You can learn almost everything you need to know about game development through creating mods.