It might not be that great for full-blown big games, but especially for any kind of prototypes it's just great

Not good with managing a bullet hell level of on screen objects?

The more stuff on the screen moving the slower it is ofc. You won't have a problem with a typical 2D game but if you want to have hundreds or thousands of moving objects on screen then you should probably use something else. For example PySFML.

It's perfectly usable for 2D games, unless you plan to create a bullet hell

Geti: apart from the grass it looks great

even if we see quite a lot of silhouette styled games

Nope.
Limbo, NightSky, Feist, the one-button flying furryballs game of which I can't remember the name, the game with cat jumping which was submitted to IGF last year or so, the upcoming Nifflas' game...
6-7 games in the last few years... Compare that to all the other indie games... It's nothing.

Btw, DiscoFish, good job on the game. It looks great

It made my Chrome freeze for a few seconds...

Pitch a game idea? Ok.

You're the captain of a small airship forging out into the world to make his fortune. You explore a world governed by warring city-states who you can ally, trade with, or betray. These city-states are separated by vast swaths of wilderness hundreds of miles across; infested with  organized pirates, pretenders, and rogue nations. The game world is about the same size as the pacific ocean.

Despite being a 'steampunk' setting, the combat revolves around hard science-fiction (fuck that exposed gear hipster shit), and each part of the airship has a function that will be disabled if it is damaged or destroyed. This can be used to your advantage in a scenario such as destroying an enemy's balloon pumps to restrict their altitude adjustments while battling in a small valley, essentially trapping them.

During your journey you can modify your airship for combat, trade, or even make it into a flying brothel. This game idea comes from my insatiable desire to run a literal mile high club in a video game.

Nice idea

Can I run a flying brothel in crimson skies?

Unfortunately, no...

All this info must be written in the contract. So OP has to carefully read from what his royalty will be calculated.

What Zenroth said. Don't worry about the royalty percentage and ask for an upfront payment as that's the only money you are ever going to see. Sadly, it's industry standard to never get any royalties from your retail sales.

Do you have any experience or proof to back this or do you just pull this info from thin air?

Sounds like a fun idea anyway

I just spent an hour tracking a bug that ended up being caused by the C preprocessor.

Why aren't you using an inline function instead?

Yeah, that's definitely an issue today. Mobile versions of sites are definitely a nice thing, especially on phones with small screens.

Two good choices and definite vote for both. Rivon has always been really helpful.

Thanks

Draw some "sparks" in the center of the image, use Radial Blur->Zoom in Photoshop (or something equivalent in whatever program you use). Experiment with sparks and the Zoom parameters to get the desired effect.

• Infinate runners
• Tower defence
• Breakout
• Artillery strategy (Worms etc)

These are so easy that I doubt that anyone would buy a game making system made specifically for these types of games.

what about a classic point and click adventure maker (Monkey Island etc)

There is already tons of p&c adventure makers, namely AGS, Wintermute... and AFAIK they are very good. I see no point in creating another one. A better thing would be to contribute to one of them (which I already did a bit with Wintermute 2).

a first person dungeon explorer RPG maker (Eye of the Beholder etc)?

They are so very niche that I doubt anyone would buy it. Apart from Grimrock, a dead genre.

Or a first person adventure game

You mean like Dear Esther, Amnesia/Penumbra, Portal etc? You can just create a few levels for UDK or something. No need to program anything already.

That might slightly possible, limited, but a fun experiment to do with procedural generation. Genre have definite structure, so has human, okay themes would be hard to pull. Clunky game generator for the wins?

Yeah, it is probably possible in some way but not for 1 person.

Idk, this would just create a bunch of really generic stuff, like with RPGMaker. It works with RPGM because RPGs are all about story, but why would I want a shmup that looks and plays the same as any other? What makes it special?

Or you can simply grab something like Game Maker or Construct and actually just build an engine that lets you drag and drop stuff in. But it would probably be easier to just make a really good shmup from scratch within Construct, and just drop in some parallax animation engines and stuff.

The thing is, you're supposed to put your own art in the game, tweak the effects, speeds, patterns/behaviours of the ships etc. It's not like you buy this system, hit Create Shmup!, wait a few seconds and then sell the resulting .zip file...

He's basically suggestion a open specification / format for a engine project file. Most engines ( such as Unity and Game Maker ) use a closed format, while for example ZGameEditor uses a open ( XML-based ) format. That way it's possible for programmers to write editors / tools that are compatible with each other.

No, that's not what he's talking about. All the art stuff today is already portable and the programming will never be portable (as long as the engines use different programming languages and have different APIs, which is probable).

moi is talking about this (probably a bit more complex though):

Code:

name: SuperCool Game
genre: 3D FPS
style: neo-noir scifi dystopia
main protagonist: a man in his thirties, always wearing a suit...
gameplay locations: desert, the capital, underwater city, space station
the main themes: exploration, revenge, detective work...

Now you put this in your engine of choice and it puts out your dream game
Or at least that's how I understood it.

* "developing your own compiler",

This, this and once more, this!

This isn't in fact so hard once you know the basics of automata, grammars and languages (you don't have to know any of it ofc, but it makes creating compilers quite easy and straight-forward).

motorherp: That sounds like it might be an impossible/very hard goal then.

Do you guys have any idea in what genre this system might be popular?

I have already talked about this a long time ago, but noone paid attention, but IMHO, the best thing that could be done would be a file format.
Something like word ".doc" or adobe ".PDF" ,but instead of describing a document it would describe a game in simple terms.
Then every coder could write their own implementation and (hopefully) game maker programs (Gm, construct, etc...) would propose their own implementations via plugins or decoder for the format.

The main idea would be to separate the implementatin from the description.
Someone would be able to describe their game using notepad for example (or a more complex, visual  editor) using simple concepts, and take the descriptive file and implement their own engine or insert it in an existing engine.

This sounds nice but I somehow can't imagine how the file format would look. Do you have any example or "design doc" about it?

I'm all for ThemsAllTook, but if you need another mod, I would be willing to. I'm admin of http://forum.metalgearsolid.cz/ and I've been doing it for a good few years (even though it's a small community compared to TIGS).

You know, I'm asking because if I went and worked on it hard, it would still take a few months and I don't even have time to work on it full time. I don't want to sink in it a year to get just a few sales.