The term 'indie' bothers me, when i look it up on Wikipedia this is the first definition

is the process of creating video games without the financial support of a video game publisher

But it seems there are many 'indie' games that do look for (and find) that support, does that mean they're not indie anymore, or is the term indie just a bit off ?
I understand peoples need to classify and group, and as such we are all 'indie' since we are on this forum....

So is it all just marketing and nice-words? , or does indie actually mean something new nowadays ?

As Melly said and I agree, being indie is about being in control of your game development and design decisions, not who's paying for it.

But the one who's paying for it obviously will have some control too, (think graphics, challenges, backend compatibilties, demographic choices, porting, marketing, localization, etc etc etc.)

I am all for people making money by doing what they love doing, but when they are dependant on others to be able to do that, I wouldn't want to call them 'independant'

Thanks for all the very cool links, ideas and search terms.
I am studying the Lua at the moment , and the sending of data between my own program and Lua.

@lansing

behind the scene it's not a new language thats graphical, it more c++ and Lua and a nice way to design a scriptfile, instad of a texteditor you can press a button with a mouse, type in some variables and have created a method()  .

The idea is to write/translate those graphical decisions back to a fresh .lua script, wich in its turn get read by the program. (atleast thats the theory )
 

this tickles my imagination 

little update:

I am in the process of rewriting the housebuilding program , i played the sims for a few days and decided to 'borrow' their GUI thoughtwork. 

Also some crazy-ass palette multilayered texture disco is visible ! , i hope you like it

I'll quickly get back to it !

Who cares if the dev of Shank is still technically indie? Just enjoy the damn game.

 

well that's the point of this post, as the OP cared enough to write a post about it...
And because many people care and disagree about alot of thing a forum such as this can exist,
and btw why are you even caring here?, and not out there enjoying the game ? 

I do agree with you about the hollownes of the term indie, and the need for enjoyable games

i think now he's not "Indie" anymore.
Now he's a profesional game-developer ! ( )

every boy's wet dream ~!

i don't think any great shifts in the interactive-computer based entertainment are coming from the 'indies'

A company such as Nintendo has a much greater impact and can actually create a new medium or interaction ways. The indies noted in that article are either making very personal ego-document kinda games, that play look and feel like things from the 80's , or decomposing existing games to a nerdy-arty way. Not something that will shape the new world to come, mere avant-gardist obscure stuff..
At the same time i have to admit, i don't really play industry games (i dont have an xbox/ps3 and wanna keep my work-pc clean) and i have really enjoyed some indie games as fun. (But more fun as in melancholic fun, as in just when i was 12 fun) not fresh fun


I don't agree with Lurk (the passiveness of movies vs the highly interactive games)
When anybody out there waches a movie , the actual experiece  depends alot on what that person knows and understand about the world we live in . That's why some people enjoy quality movies (they understand all the cultural remarks, an in-jokes) and some people don't enjoy them (there is no action, and it's boring) So movie-watching IS different for each person.

Anyway cool that such articles appear in normal newspapers..

@Ed thanks for that link, it was a good read.
Yesterday i started naively writing my own scripting language.... after i found myself defining tokens, getting them from a external script i quit.
That's not the way to go i believe, I'll probably use Lua (Since Blitzmax (my preferred language) has Lua communicating implementing.)

So then the problem turns to 2 smaller problems:

• writing a Lua script in a graphical way instead of plain text, or translating a graphic to a plain text lua file
• implement methods that can handle those Lua scripts in my blitzmax code.

I also tried to write down All the methods i'll be using, and it's not that many.
The thing i can't get my head around at this moment are the if statements.
how to script if-else statement (possibly nested), where the condition(s) and the result are to be filled in by the scripter.

edit: it's clear how to write a if statement, but how to create a higher abstraction out of this  (that's reuasble ) is unclear .



Thanks again Ed for the link cause now i atleast know of some terminology wich i can use to look further (domain specific language, visual scripting etc.)

i think i wasn't very clear, let's hope this one is better

I'd like to implement a scripting capability to my game.
In my game the user will be able to 'create' new objects and have an actor that can interact on them.
Because the object kan contain data that are actually if-else statements to work together with the actor methods, I thought to have the look and feel of flowcharts that a user can create and manage, and that will output to code that LUA could handle...

jees, it's still hard to write it down..

edit:




is the user end

and this kind of mumbo comes out...

Code:

type actor


type object
 
var actor:actor
method interact()
 if pathpossible(actor,self)= true
     actor.move(selfposition)
 else
     actor.playanimation(someconstant)

i want to implement a reasonably simple scripting engine, or rather use an existing one (lua) ,

i am looking for examples to make it appear graphically, like a flowchart, where the user connects boxes, and fills in values in the boxes.

Is there something like that out there ?
Or have you made such a thing a can point me in the right direction?

Not to sure if this is the answer your looking for but:

The real problem is getting the the coordinates of all joints after rotation, for instance, knowing where the bottom part of the arm is if the top part is rotated.

couldn't you use sin/cos for that ? you know the length and the angle...
You also know the parent-child relations, so you'd know wich bones to recalculatre if a parent moves.

I have once made a skeleton animation program, and just stored the start & endposition of every bone, might be wrong practice, but it worked like a charm

cool ! thanks.

yeah, i want it as sharp as possible thats why i want to be native 

Hi,

I want to make a program exclusively for a little beamer with the strange 858x600 Pixel native resolution .
Are some videocards better suited for this non-standard resolution?
Or can you force any old card into such resolution ?



it's the first time ive heard about this resolution, it seems to be native especially for pico-projectors, but how to send data to it that will fit that resolution nicely...

So he's selling it? You don't suppose that's just the cartridge and he has/will eventually have a rom that we can play in emulators?

eventually there surely be a rom on a torrentsite somewhere you can enjoy... (you nasty pirate )

I think this is a true indie, not bowing for the nasty big corporations and portals and i hope alot more people will buy his cardridge, you should have the NES anyway since most TIG-games are heavily inspired on the NES-era, and you can get them almost for free at any secondhand market.

Thanks for ideas!
Try however to be more specific, giving a more precise code snippets in a language of your choice/pseudocode/etc. As in "how would you do it"? Much appreciated!

From your first part i thought you are asking about the complexity in code because of the amount of 'different' enemies.
At the same time your talking alot about these graphical niceties, that are more extra fluff..
i believe its important to separate the content (animations,images,scripts,sounds) from the actual framework (the classes that you'll write) ,then you'll see the actual amount of end-bosses doesn't make that big a difference at all. (Apart from the tedious work of defining, drawing and animating a hundred endbosses)

In most basic programming books there is usually this chapter on CLASSES or OOP and it'l usually explain classes (inheritance, polimorphism, composition) with examples of vehicles or animals just read end-boss and your good to go!

But seriously, in what programming language you want to write this?, i might be able to write a little example.

As I said in the art game thread: Now that it's popular to bash art games I too have stopped making art games and instead started making games that bash art games.

good choice, lovely done, can't wait to see more, ^{here is where i would have wanted to name another art-game as a suggestion, i can't think of any....}

maybe a little help from inheritance ? 

and a sniff of Polymorphism 


If you would think of an abstract type or class named ENEMY
you'd see you could come up with very basic or abstract methods. move() for example.
by overriding such a  method move() you could simply give differnt enemies different ways of moving, like flying, like a slime, running towards you, seek player position etc etc etc.
member_variables could be used to keep track of speed, force, healt, attackstrength and much more.

I wouldn't let the way you want to graphically build up your enemies decide too much about the actual class. Either way if you choose to build up your enemies from sub-images or just from pre-drawn images. An enemy will have 1 or more image-frames. to be put in 1 place or more then 1 at the same time. I spotted an enemy on the youtube with an enemy with 2 very big hands, such an enemy obviously will need more then 1 image on screen ...

The actual enemy behavior is going to be scripted, each having a separate script file.

I think i get you, but i fear a little your going to be writing 100's of roughly the same scripts. try to write as high-level methods first, you'll see you can re-use everything.
and then you could just tell your desired new custom enemy to use a few of those methods, tell it its member-variables and feed it an array or 2 with images, and give it a scary latin-sounding name
 

i put this in the right feedback post too, but the biggest cheap-factor i see at this time with your game is the repetitive tileset.

the commercial successes look like crap too, but atleast there is some cutesy illustrative background, that fits the characters.

your game looks very flimsy, maybe you could make the black borders around everything alot bigger, maybe you could add some huds with colors transparancy etc.  or.. maybe some particles . i'd make the life bar a bit more interresting then simple rectangle too.

Now i think of it, your art looks like it had to be pixelart, but you couldn't handle the size of it. just too many pixels to do something with...

i had to think of this as an example (or a impossible goal..):


i don't want to be rude, but i wouldn't pay a cent for your game atm. (i suppose i'm not the targetgroup, but you know what i mean..)

maybe a little help from inheritance ?