wouldn't that be elevating one play style (playing for the levels) over the other (playing for the story)?

What's the job of a game designer if not to pick one type of play out of all the infinite possibilities and elevate that to a level where everyone can partake of it?  We make up rules to restrict the player's actions - nothing they do in a game they couldn't be doing anyway, but when it's restricted by rules it for some reason becomes more meaningful.

ah, virtualdub is the program i had before.  should do the trick, thanks.

Could anyone recommend good programs for converting a series of image files into a video, splicing a video file together out of pieces of other videos, adding a soundtrack?
I used to have a good tool for the first a reformat or two ago, but can't remember what it was called.

Thanks.

A better solution if there's no real choice because one path is optimal would be to BALANCE THE GAME.  Castrate the optimal choice, or make the other options better to bring them in line.  In most games (number-exposed or otherwise) there ISN'T an optimal choice; that's why it's a GAME (i.e. a series of interesting choices, leading to success or failure based on the choices of other players and possibly hidden or random information).  Perhaps there's an obviously more powerful choice, but if there's been any thought put into the design there'll be some kind of counter to it, and then once everyone's playing the counter it's not such an obvious choice anymore.

turns out that c++ function names get mangled with underscores and ats and other random crap to encode parameter and return types.  this makes names unique for overloaded functions, but makes them hard to extract by strings (the mangling is compiler dependent).  so the extern "C" stuff is required.

learning!

  could be an interesting way to make a modular design for my next game? 

that would be pretty...grotesque...

i know!  exciting.

so far my code only works if i extern "C" { } the function definitions in the dll.  otherwise GetProcAddress fails to find them.  not sure what's up with that.

now that you've gotten me thinking about dlls, i'm trying to make my own and use LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress to get functions out of them on the fly.  could be an interesting way to make a modular design for my next game?  it's entertaining to try anyway.
i haven't succeeded yet though.  not in much condition for doing anything today, probably something to do with getting home from a concert at 4am last night.

How about an installer which unpacks the dll files for most people, and a zipped version for the special cases who don't have write privileges?  Or is it really so important that everyone playing it not see dll files in the same directory?  (if so, could you tell us?  curiosity abounds!)

Depends what you mean by wanting to be a "game designer".

Want to go indie, do all the work making and marketing your own videogames?  Do a CS degree, programming is the most essential skill.  Also, never stop making stuff in your spare time, and make like-minded friends.

Want to work for a big videogame company, don't care doing what?  Programming or animation are probably your best bets.  (And in these roles, even though you don't have a say in the overall concept, you're still doing design work; your creativity has an effect on how the game feels, how the ideas are translated into reality.)

Or you could go to art school, become a concept artist, design the overall look of games.  Do an English degree, write scripts, design the stories for games.

But if you want to be literally a "game designer", and design game mechanics, I'd recommend studying maths.  Some of the best game designers (Richard Garfield, Reiner Knizia) have maths PhDs, it's a good background for thinking about the consequences of how different rules interact, balancing etc.  GregWS' advice is good too - design is design.  And definitely just start making some games (not just videogames, have a read of this and design some board games).

Quit.  You're working hard, being paid basically nothing.  Effectively, you're doing charity work.  Except not for a good cause, just for the profit of these guys who are taking advantage of you.  If you were getting a share of the profits, then maybe, if you really believe they'll actually finish the game (which is uncommon), but you're not.  So just leave now.

Because, you know, when you're playing a GAME, you want to try to WIN.

So, players always want to win a game? I don't think so. I don't want to win all the time, sometimes I just want to play, independent of what is a win or a fail.

Sure, you can set your own goals, or ignore them, but generally there is a prescribed goal, and using knowledge of the rules is how you work to achieve that.  If you're not prescribing a goal and giving players tools to work towards it, what you have is a TOY and not a GAME.  (Toys are perfectly respectable things, but this discussion refers to games.)

Because, you know, when you're playing a GAME, you want to try to WIN.  So you try to pick the option that gives you the best chance of WINNING.  And so it is often good to show numbers to help players to evaluate the chances of winning, rather than hiding things from the player so they don't really know what's going on and can't think clearly about what they're doing until they read a tutorial by someone who's reverse-engineered the game to figure out what the numbers actually are.  I wouldn't state this as a universal law, there are definitely times when things should be hidden from the players, but as a general principle it's better to tell people what the rules are that they're playing by.

will wright's definition of a game: a series of interesting choices.
so you need choices.  but make sure they're interesting!

Isn't that actually a Sid Meier quote?

You're right!
That was actually bothering me, because I'd been thinking "Sim City, Sims, Spore.. these are all sandbox-y games without many interesting choices", and it didn't seem to add up with that quote.  Makes a lot more sense coming from Meier, thanks for correcting me.

will wright's definition of a game: a series of interesting choices.
so you need choices.  but make sure they're interesting!

• Make something new - why waste your time remaking something that already exists?
  
  • Tarn Adams is already making Dwarf Fortress.  Let him do his job, and save your time to make something else.
• Stick with what you can do well.  Don't try to compete with EA.
  
  • Graphics do matter, and there are styles that you can make look good without needing a horde of artists and modellers.  Use one of these.  It's okay if this restricts the possible games you can make.
  • You can't craft as much content as a dedicated company, so design around this.  Make games that don't need much content, or that can use procedural content.
  • Avoid mainstream genres, or else invent a new take on them.
• Linear narrative is antithetical to game-ness.  Most things that are wrong about modern mainstream games (e.g. QTEs, linearity, saving) stem from this obsession with story, from game designers who want to be making movies instead.  Avoid this error (or else make a movie instead).
  
  • But people complain that they want stories.  Throw in some fluff to shut them up.
• Duration of a game should be fairly short.  This allows the player to see clearly the impact of his decisions on the outcome, and revise his strategy accordingly.  Also helps to avoid some common mistakes of mainstream games (e.g. abuse of savegames because players don't want to start from the beginning again).
• Board games have some awesome design going on, often way ahead of videogames.  Try to learn from them.
• In a single-player game, you don't need to use a symmetric design.  In fact, you're going to have to have asymmetry somewhere, because the AI won't be good enough for very long, so you may as well make it integral to the design.
  
  • Being zapped by a goblin with a wand of death is cute, but isn't actually fun play for most people (though they'd still like to have that wand themselves).
  • And you don't need to worry so much about balance.  It's good for there to be some slightly-broken combos for people to discover, if it's not going to ruin things for anyone else.
  • In a multiplayer game, you don't need to use a symmetric design either.  But it makes things easier.
• Make players use their brains.  It's good for them, even if they complain that things are hard.
• Emergent strategies that arise from unexpected interactions between game elements are awesome.  Throw in stuff that interacts in interesting ways on the assumption that something cool will come out.
• Time spent polishing is worthwhile.

First stage of hidden object game: find the game.

Hideous: Cambridge and Oxford are both much nicer places than London.  (Admittedly, I am biased by having lived in one of the least nice parts of London.)
And as Corpus says, it's pretty cheap to travel between them, so if you're over for Tigjuk there's no reason not to visit London before/after.

In Vertex Dispenser (not yet released - maybe in a month or two HAH), there are seven different energy types, used to power different abilities.  Seven's quite a few, so I've tried some things to counteract the complexity:
- Each ability uses up the full bar for its colour.
- There are only two abilities on each colour.
So you can't save powers up, there are only two states: "i can use this now" and "not ready yet", and when something's ready there's a binary choice, A or B (in addition to the question of timing and positioning).

There are actually four different abilities for each colour, but in a given game a player only has access to two (chosen before the game or selected randomly), to reduce complexity of the choices in the actual game.  I'm often tempted to add more abilities as I come up with new ideas, but 4*7=28 is already quite a few, so I only ever add one to replace something else, keeping myself to the rule of "four per colour".

So yeah, it's not a simple game overall, but I've kept some areas simple to counteract the complexity in others, making it (hopefully) manageable.

Name: Michael Brough
Games: Vertex Dispenser (unreleased), some small unimportant games

1001 nights / arabian nights.

djinns, dervishes, kings, princes, sultans, viziers, slaves, eunuchs, thieves, porters, barbers, sailors, merchants, sorcerors.. weird fantastic magic, religious conflicts, and lots and lots of sex.  what more could you ask for in a setting?

indiecomposable continua