No Hard Aether >_<

Probably because only 50% of the people that downloaded it could manage to run it.

When I was a kid, my brother and I would make up nonsensical dialog that sounded vaguely like the grunts from the characters in the game.

Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure what is being discussed here. Eskil is a comparatively weird guy who has some unusual and, to my mind, incorrect ideas about the roles of designers in game development. His "eccentricities" seem to make him a good and productive worker and a highly capable programmer; as for whether they make him a good game designer, that remains to be seen. Certainly, as cactus implied, that they make him what can be considered a "good" person - or, if that's too risky, a well-rounded person - seems doubtful.

That's pretty much what's being discussed. Kind of gossipy.

If Diddy and "Sims" creator Will Wright were somehow combined, the result would be Eskil Steenberg.

Diddy is legendary for working hard, promoting his labors and making connections. He's the best. Wright talks about technology with a command and foresight that suggest he's already seen the future and is just biding his time in our humble era.

You can kind of see what he's saying, but it still seems like an attempt for some super-hip MTV writer to sex up a somewhat troglodytic guy.

Game developers are all too level-headed.

I'd actually wager the opposite, sitting in front of the computer for days and days to push out a game does things to you and your ability to socialize.

A 360-degree 2D shmup set in space (think Subspace/Continuum) where you and other players online must cooperatively defeat hordes of weaker (or simply dumber) enemies, using one of several specialized fighter spacecraft. Acquire kills and/or resources to request more carriers, flak frigates, or other support capital ships and cooperatively take out enemy capital ships. All of the action in a given level / sector occurs in a long corridor of space, much like in a SHMUP, in order to condense the action and really make it feel like a cooperative push. The ultimate goal is for you and your fellow crusaders to retake Holy Terra from the heathens.

Kind of a "space crusade" where everyone cooperatively fights on the same level with a greater "overgame" goal that will reset once a week/month or so. Since all the technology is there, player-versus-player would be an option.

I'm currently working on this and hoping that I can cut it down to something manageable. Perhaps the first iteration of the game will be singleplayer and all your allies AI-controlled.

To be clear, I think Eskil has an ennormous amount of good things to offer, I certainly agree with much he is doing and saying, but at the same time it is hard to laugh it off when somebody is trying to tell you that your work is useless and you should get fired. Apparently Eskil's view of design is that they only offer "ideas" and that anybody can offer ideas, so why have designers in the first place?

I think it is a rubbish argument to begin with as it is based on a total misunderstanding of what design is and what designers do, but I don't take it personal.

My own experience with designers in the chipotle industry is negative but perhaps not comprehensive enough. I have had a bad experience or two with designers on hobby teams (but also some good ones!) who did not really understand that they need to do legwork as well, or at least not do such an impressive job at dictating the vast amount of work everyone else should be doing. In both cases it felt like the programmers and artists understood the feasibility of any given design idea but the designers didn't and loved to write checks for grandiose features that the rest of the team couldn't cash. I can see where his opinion is coming from, but it's a bit judgmental to take it to the harsh conclusion he has. Perhaps he has only had experiences where the "designers" were really just dead weight, which convinced him the role is poorly defined and really turned him off to design entirely.

When english fails, refer to exotic languages for name ideas!

Aavaapa

Interesting range of opinions here...

I think 'observer'-style events or message passing are indispensible to creating a separation of concerns in your code. I follow my own interpretation of the MVC pattern, in which the Model will dispatch game logic events for the rest of the system to pick up. The key to this system is that the Model does not need to know what is going to happen in an event like "bullet hits enemy", it just needs to dispatch the event with the correct parameters. This is where I find the power of events come in play: you can separate your code into smaller pieces which are easier to manage rather than deciding what everyone should be doing about a game event right when it happens, in a big blob of code and a heap of references to other subsystems. Any other object in the game can choose to push itself onto the Model's stack of event listeners and receive certain events, at which point each object immediately decides what to do about the event.

Of course, this creates a possible conflict in that you don't know the order in which objects will respond to the events, or the order is based on something obscure like the order in which they got pushed onto the event stack. As others have said, you should avoid this conflict by using events for things where the order doesn't matter; if a bullet hits an enemy I don't really care if it gets deleted before or after an explosion graphic is shown, or before or after a sound is played, so long as all these events occur before the next render cycle.

If you want to know what systems have responded to the event, you can simply make the event dispatcher compile a list of objects whose methods it has called or to whom it has sent messages for every event it sends. Honestly, I have not yet seen the need to know this bit of information but it's there if you need it.

How about a "fake sequel" competition, where you make a sequel to a game that never existed?

Like...the game assumes you already know what's going on, the player character is just a lame shadow of what he once was, and the story now somehow involves an ancient Egyptian curse*. Also, dead celebrity guest appearances.

There was an episode of the Venture Brothers that was "part 2" of a story that never had a part 1, and it was one of my favourites ever.

*Optional, but a timeless fallback.

This sounds pretty awesome, but it's perhaps a bit too narrative-oriented. Games with little or zero story wouldn't get much mileage out of this theme, unless there are some clever ways to highlight changes in gameplay in an amusing way that I can't think of.

The first time I saw a "press the button, see a chest appear, and perfectly time your jumps to get it or it will disappear and the button resets in 10 seconds" puzzle I put this game down. No thanks.

Half-Life lets you still have full control of your character during "cutscenes", though your choices of what to due are usually very limited to nil.

System Shock 2 has a cutscene or two, but the vast majority of the story is told through reconstructing events one-at-a-time, reading logfiles, finding corpses, seeing ghosts, and other indirect ways of finding out what happened.

I have half an idea to use an engine for a game I'm making and retool it to be a sort of shmup. The game scrolls upward like any other shmup but you may freely fly around the screen asteroids-style. This means it is much harder to dodge things than in a traditional shmup, where your movements are immediate. However, it allows you to attack things from any angle. Wonder if it would end up being a good idea or a failed experiment.

this game. it has brought be to tears. the quest of a mang to be free in his sweet monster truck. it is the story of all human. the american dream.

I liked the System Shock 2 GUI:





Not an example of perfection or anything, but it felt really natural after playing the game for quite awhile. Deus Ex, for example, felt more stifling because it took up the whole screen when you went into inventory mode.



However, I think Out of This World's GUI is the best.



See what I did there? The game felt a lot more cinematic because a) there was no GUI and b) there was no scrolling.

1st stage music is a great idea.

However, 1st stage music begs for a strong meldoic lead.... which I do poorly. Ah well, might find the time to do it anyways, as one of my games needs such a theme.

I work for a company that is currently localizing a game for the Korean market. We have to make dead bodies vanish immediately because it's considered offensive to keep corpses lying around, probably because of some kind of ancestor worship thing. Thought it was kind of interesting.

edit: oops, guess it is on. The Internet does not understand 10 minute delays.

Awesome, there's a game jam in the south just as I'm about to move up north!

To counter these issues I am writing a RPG/Sim/Strategy hybrid with a deep and involving industrial and skill economy, blended with Squad/Swarm based combat and a rich Sci-Fi world.

Wow, that's a mouthful. You and what army of devs? :D

Like you suspect, you can probably get away with generalizing the NPC interactions with other NPCs to calculate prices and availability within the area the player is in. Number crunching is relatively cheap, especially if you only need to update market prices or otherwise simulate the game economy only once in awhile.

Now I've got friendly and enemy fighters spawning regularly, it's almost like there's gameplay! Added more variation in stars... I think I will just use those with a three-layer parallax effect and it will be okay. I need to rewrite the collisions system to use something homegrown because Box2D with Python is just presenting too many problems when I'm just using it for collision detection and don't care about the advanced features.

Wow, looks really awesome. Good use of simple graphics.