All in the plans! Movement patterns are something I'm working on now actually. I noticed that too about the corners and will try to get rid of that. Perhaps I will go with Guert's idea of making them 'move' when you do, as if the cursor generates a type of wind? I'll see.

Yep, it's very early so the randomness and such are expected. Though not being able to control anything except the initial click and watching the reactions after that one click is kind of the point of the game, to give the player more control would be in contradiction to that goal. Will post an update soon!

It's a Boomshine clone.



Download: http://studioeres.com/shine-v0.1.exe

You are the spark of life. Your job is to end all universes. The problem is you only have a limited number of clicks to do it in.

Click on a universe to destroy it. If a universe hits another universe as it's being destroyed, it'll destroy that universe as well. Destroy all universes on your screen to progress to the next level.

There are more than 10 levels, but after the 10th level clicking no longer works. There is no way to proceed after that, for now.

The game has 2 days of work in it, a few hours each day, so don't expect much. It'll last you perhaps 3 minutes. It's still very very early (v0.1).

I'll eventually make it more distinguishable from Boomshine (I have a lot of ideas how) but right now its gameplay is heavily derived from Boomshine.

I plan to later give you special abilities, to distinguish the types of universes (both in appearance and behavior), and all that.

I made it because I felt the desire to make something like Boomshine but with more depth (I'm not saying it's deeper right now, only that that's the goal by v1.0).

I'll be updating it here every few days as I make more of it. It's a Game Maker game so it requires Windows, Direct X 9.0 or later, and that's about it.

CHEATS: To skip a level, press F10.

I think the problem arises because, although females make and play and write about games, they tend not to make them as big a part of their lives as males do and don't go into them in as much depth (again, this is just a general rule, there are exceptions). There's also still much more of a stigma against playing games among females than among males. Females see it as much more of a waste of time than males do, and tend to hide that they like games from others.

So males appear disproportionately active in areas which require volunteering, like IGF judges (at least I think they're volunteers, I don't know if they're paid anything; Derek and Alec might know).

My father grew up in Brazil actually, though I've never been there.

What's Warsow?

EDIT: It's a FPS, I don't like those D:

I don't really know why more the audience of independent games is more female than the audience of mainstream games, I've heard a lot of different explanations for it. That independent games tend to be more quirky and original and females go for that, that they tend to be 2D (females get motion sickness from 3D games more than males do), that females often don't care about the latest and greatest computer, that females are often looking for short game experiences rather than dedicating hours and hours to learning a single game, etc. -- all or none of those could be true.

I was grouping most casual with independent, yeah. Most casual games are also independent games, at least by the criteria of entry in the IGF (no third party publishing money and so on).

The source for the numbers is many places really. Portal sales numbers (I know portals are horrible, but still). My own numbers that I see buying my game. Just the people I know, of the females I know who play games, they tend to play independent games and not mainstream games. That a lot of the people I see making independent games are female. I know that's a small sample. And it varies by the game. But I still think it's true that independent games are played by females more than males, in general.

Some of the most popular independent games have a mainly female audience -- Aveyond for example, or the games on hanakogames.com; even this game (Endless Forest) I think has a primarily female user base, and it's not an insignificant game, it has tens of thousands of users. Dofus, a fairly big but still independent MMORPG (it won an IGF award awhile back), also seemed to have a primarily female player base when I was into that game. I also read once that the average player of flash games on those flash games sites is something like 60% female. I think it may seem otherwise if you only hang around the TIGSource and indygamer type of thing, but that really is only a small part of the independent games community.

I hate games that don't work on the GeForce 4 MX. I know it's a horrible video card, and I know it's old, but a lot of people have them (including me and I think Tim W), for a time it was the most popular videocard on the market, so tons of people still have them, and cutting them out cuts out a big portion of your audience.

Part of the reason I originally got into playing independent games is because the modern mainstream ones don't work on my computer. Even Psychonauts doesn't work on my videocard, which I found out after buying it

I like the Game Architecture and Design book, I read it when it first came out, but it's only really useful for beginners.

I hate the Game Programming Gems series actually. I think 90% of the chapters in that series are uninteresting and useless to me, 5% are interesting but useless, and 5% are interesting and useful. I can understand that the series would be useful for people in professional game development or for people who are making really high-end independent games, but the articles are usually speed tricks or 3D graphics tricks irrelevant to independent game development.

I like Chris Crawford's books.

I like many of the articles on Gamedev.net -- especially the older ones from the 90s. Those are often pretty relevant to what independent developers do because they still deal with 2D games.

Maybe we should write a book on independent game development. I mean independent game developers in general. We could get each person to write an article about a part they're good at -- Nifflas on atmosphere or Derek Yu on pixel art and so on. That'd be an amazing book.

I think passive vs active is really habitual vs mindful. In the first, you're not thinking too hard about what you're doing, in the second, you're more aware and excited about it. In that sense I think the second is usually better.

I agree with you actually. But I also think she had an important point: the market for independent games in general is primarily female. That's one of the big factors separating the mainstream games from independent games, that there's more females playing independent games (probably for a number of reasons). Even my own tower defense game, which is composed of blasting and shooting, had a lot of females buying it.

Yet despite that, many parts of the indie games community are dominated by males, IGF being one. Just look at this forum for instance, I've been absent for awhile, but I don't remember seeing a single female member of this forum. Maybe there are a few more now.

I don't think it's necessarily our fault that females tend to play and enjoy the games, and a lot of them make the games, and yet are absent in the forums and in the IGF panel. There's no male conspiracy. But I can understand how I'd feel if I were a female, making games primarily played by other females, and had to compete in a contest with 38/40 male judges.

And of course male judges don't like exclusively male games, but there is still some real psychological differences between the sexes. How many males read romance novels for instance? How many of them look down on them? If I were entering a romance novel in a contest for novelists with virtually all male judges, I'd worry.

So I think it's wrong to think the IGF does it on purpose, but it's still understandable to be upset about it.

Well, that was Auriea, not Michael. I think she called it an abomination because it had like 2 females out of 40 judges, which is a lower proportion of male to female than females who actually work in the industry (either the mainstream or the independent one). I don't think she had anything against the 38 males in particular, just the selection process that ended up with that proportion.

I think the reason they separated the two sites is because of complaints (including a few on this forum) that the reviews they had for the games on their site were often too critical and in-depth and not aimed at selling games. They apparently agreed with that, but wanted to keep reviewing games in that in-depth critical fashion, so they started a separate site for it unconnected to Manifesto. I think it was a good idea.

The writer for Immortal Defense and I actually met Greg Costikyan and his family and another person who works for Manifesto (Bill Folstom) about two weeks ago, Greg lives in NYC near the WTC site and I live about half hour away so he invited us to dinner.

He's a pretty nice guy -- he seemed like he had drunk a little too much white wine by the end of the dinner ^_^ but he was a great host. He had walls stacked with books; I never met anyone who owned more books than I do until I met him, he easily has at least three times as many as I do.

If it helps, I consider Michael and Auriea friends.

It's true they don't really like rules, and goals, and violence, and 2D, and challenge, and gameplay, and plot, and 95% of the games I like, and call anyone who likes those things names, and are generally pessimistic about humanity, but I see those as just interesting quirks and agree with them a lot of the time after I think it over (I'm not being sarcastic anywhere).

I think good will between independent game developers should be unconditional. I also like the amazingly self-absorbed MDickie and that wacky guy in the Game Maker community who makes those constantly-being-released Johnny games and those people on the indiegamer.com boards who make games primarily for money. Those are just minor differences compared to the basic similarity of what we do.

Of those games I only have SC: Brood War and will be willing to play anyone in it, at any time

First way to get over this is not to make games alone if you can help it. Make games in 2 or 3 person teams of friends, and as long as everyone on the team cares about the project it will go through. It's easy to slack off if nobody else sees you doing it. In my experience, the easier it is to hide laziness, the more lazy someone is.

Second thing is to get playtesters early, so you'll want to keep working on it to show them what you've improved. Posting something in forum's feedback section is probably a good idea, even when it's very early. And putting up a new version every week or two after doing so.

Third thing to work on it every day that you have time, even one tiny improvement that takes 5 minutes if that's all you have time for. And keep a log of this, something like LiveJournal, and preferably a new screenshot each day of the change you made to it. Momentum is important, taking even one or two days off could be fatal to a project. There's a saying that goes "How does a project get delayed for a year? One day at a time."

Fourth thing is to realize that you don't *have* to work on it -- or anything else for that matter. The moment something feels like you have to do it, it stops being fun. So realize, each day as you sit down to work on something, that you can always not do it and do something less interesting if you want. In fact, do something else if you want, just to understand that that something else is less rewarding. See the things you normally do as procrastination as work, and see work as play and goofing off and taking a break from the more serious work of procrastination. Making that mental switch is pretty interesting.

I enjoy it. I've been selling games only for four months now (though making them for 10 years before that as a hobby), and on average make 300 a month from it. Not enough to survive, but enough to buy your own food and such if you live with your parents ^_^

Hopefully after a few more years of doing this and putting more games out it'll be enough to live on. Even if it isn't, I'll still make them, I just won't have as much time to do so.

I just did the "simply keeping the demo and full versions of your game separate" route because I thought the work wasn't really worth the hypothetical increase in sales I'd see. I have seen reports that copy protection increases sales of independent games by about 35%, but to me even a 35% increase at the cost of weeks of figuring these types of questions out and installing protection wasn't worth the time. Plus I think my sales/popularity are low enough (like 130 sales or something now) for this not to matter. I haven't seen a download of the full version on p2p networks yet, but with a game like Aquaria you probably would.

I think the best way to prevent piracy is shaming people out of it. Chris Crawford once posted a picture of him and his wife in one of his games, with the caption "we put our live savings into this game, please don't pirate it". Of course, some people are too heartless even for that, but I think most people are good at heart, they just need to be reminded that they are.

It's the slordig guy!

I have no middle mouse button so couldn't check what it does.

Is there any way to get more ammo? I couldn't figure that out.

I don't think you should let the player walk off the screen.

The leftover remains from the enemies should probably gradually disappear, otherwise it slows it.

I find the laser the most fun, especially before I figured out that the mouse aims (I was just trying to kill them all using the laser in a single direction, trying to get them to walk in the right spots for it).

I like the music.

Even in it's unfinished state it's the best arena shooter I've seen for the Game Maker.

Well, if Derek doesn't think we should discuss these types of things, I'll keep it to places like the tale-of-tales forum and my LiveJournal. But there seems to be a good number of people interested in the subject here, even if there are also people who don't care for the subject, so I'll leave it up to him.

Are you requesting that we stop talking about it?