LOL, I remember seeing screenshots of this when I was first learning Blitz3D around 5 or so years ago. Amazing how awful and gaudy it looks in retrospect, even though at the time I was amazed that a BASIC-esque language running on DirectX7 could do all of this.

Christ, Charlie is pretty much dominating this thread, and probably better than I could have done (too busy last few months to spend large chunks of time in topics like this). Great read.

As for the current topic, can we at least all agree that games that aestheticize a larger subset of reality (i.e. advanced gun physics and robots in a 3D recreation of New York City) are better than games that aestheticize a smaller one (i.e. gravity and brick arrangements in a void), and the larger this subset grows the closer you get to the spirit of so-called "procedurally generated stories" simply by the size and scope of the world's possibility space increasing? I'm using that word because saying "simulate" seems to confuse some people in this topic because, hey wait, robots with advanced guns don't actually really exist in New York City, huh what, how can you possibly simulate something that "doesn't exist".

I don't get it, what's the problem that needs to be discussed here? That creating a game takes more effort than writing and filming a movie takes more effort than writing a novel takes more effort than composing a song, relative scope being equal?

I know Cactus has tackled this problem in a presentation he made several years ago, and it shows in his games, his solution seems to be: don't care about the appearance of the game elements

And is this an actual serious proposal for a solution to this problem?

Gears of War for example has all this bullshit with sound effects and background and shooting animations.

All that bullshit?! Dude, without all that bullshit the game would be crap (hence it obviously isn't bullshit). The point is to get the player engaged in a world to the best of your ability and the current technology's ability ("maximalism") instead of just having him distantly playing around with colored cubes and seeing what happens when he presses the buttons ("minimalism"), so if I'm understanding this correctly I guess "minimalism" in game design is essentially a misguided effort by those who believe in things like "pure mechanics" (or "metaphor through mechanics" or whatever other dum thing). Either that, or a defense mechanism by those who don't have the time, resources, or talent to do any better.

Why is maximalism not a word? I'm inventing and using it now.

You are asking an Internet gaming forum about whether you should move to one country or another one on the opposite side of the world, and the only logistical concern you've explicitly noted is whether or not you can play English Nintendo games. Just putting this out there.

Also, I have never been to Japan but America is overall a pretty great place.

The fact that the name of this project is "Old School RPG" isn't exactly raising my hopes up here, nor the fact that as far as I know all the three main developers have spent the last half-decade or more making Facebook games, nor the ridiculous Kickstarter rewards (I can't wait to fight the ingame boss Luigifan5900). Also, why did the title change from Tom Hall and John Romero (what it apparently was before) to Brenda Brathwaite and Tom Hall?

My HS only had one computer science teacher and she was female, however she was kind of awful at teaching anything despite being a decently nice person. It wasn't so bad at the higher levels because at that point we were all smart people who learned and taught ourselves, but I felt sorry for the people who were just going in and had to take Comp Sci 1 without any prior experience in programming (this was a required class).

Whoops, might not have come across that I was totally joking. It does seem strange to me to want to work with a specific gender, though. Talent and skill are genderless.

Sausagefests get pretty awful to be in over time.

Probably looking for equal representation of the genders in the workplace.

Or a date for Friday night lol.

it should mean that whenever you design a game which relies on some sort of intelligence, it's always better to playtest it using real human intelligence. so, for example, instead of NPC's being controlled by an AI, you have a bunch of real players controlling them or a single player playing a role of a gamemaster/director/screenwriter. this way you get to focus on the rules of the game, on the rules that direct the behavior of the "main player" (the one for whom you're designing the game) and the "side players" (the ones who will eventually be replaced by an AI, unless you end up making an awesome game for them too).

How do you plan to account for level design within this? Most single-player games have level designs entirely based around how the AI behaves and which were probably developed concurrently with the AI itself -- if you start with human "NPCs" and then replace them with a stupid approximation of those human players then I can imagine a lot of the balancing you've already done going out of whack. And this isn't even to mention the massive amount of resources that would have to go into making every enemy NPC playable over a network, then having to scrap that functionality later on (not to mention that for many enemies it's even kind of dumb to have them as intelligent as human beings in testing -- what if your enemies are e.g. alien spiders?). Perhaps it could work for some particular cases (all of these would probably be advanced 3D FPSes/stealth games or something) but I don't see the idea working too well in the general case.

As for Facade it's undoubtedly a shitty game but still a decently cool tech demo, I'd like to see the concepts improved (probably going to happen in the academic/research arena?) and then used by actual game designers. I don't know about Prom Week but I really doubt I could take it seriously as a videogame judging from that article and the pictures either -- the entire point is evidently how your social interactions influence other characters, and yet those other characters' dialogue is shit like "you think after that time when you two-timed on Mave with that sexy three-time squash champion I'd be willing to go to the prom with you?" aka dump backstory exposition mid-sentence and hope no one notices that human beings don't talk like this. Also, pick-up lines as an actual mechanic wtf have these people ever actually talked to a female human being (in a high school, where everyone should ostensibly know each other, at that), and that isn't even mentioning the social compatibility meters I noticed, it's like something out of a bad online quiz.

It's been like this for months at this point I think, no clue what's going on. It's a shame because there was some really neat stuff on there that isn't anywhere else (or if it is, uploaded in a variety of disparate places and often in varying degrees of sound quality, e.g. .ftm files versus Youtube uploads).

if rob was really ADD he would have forgotten about this thread already right?
If he answer this post it will be clinical experimental proof that he is fake 

Ever seen Memento?

CS major is probably better both from the perspective of actually learning useful things and the perspective of being able to get a job after college, or at least that was my reasoning when choosing this route. I don't think the university I go to (UMD College Park) even offers any game dev courses anyway, however there is a "Digital Cultures and Creativity" program that teaches you about Facebook and "creative digital expression" (and also gives you a free iPad and better dorm so I should have enrolled in it instead.)

(snip)

Your art in these shots is pretty awesome, but that amount of zoom is kind of unbearable to my eyes.

Just curious, why are we still using power of 2 sizes for tiles? I can imagine there used to be constraints by the hardware, but it shouldn't be a problem anymore nowadays.

Cleanly divisible into many common resolutions e.g. 320x240, 640x480, etc. and half-divisible (i.e. divisible by 8) into many others. And also you can do bit shifting for some operations I guess?

This is why most neurosurgeons moonlighting as Latin professors generally watch movies instead of playing games.

A Flower player may find a great difficulty in quieting the mind

Dude should consider investing in some sleeping pills.

I think that difficulty is important in games for which difficulty is important.

I agree, and I'd also like to propose that games where difficulty is important are games that stress the importance of difficulty because in these games the importance of difficulty is stressed more than in, say, other games where difficulty is not important because it is not important that difficulty be important due to the lesser importance of the game's difficulty.

[despite]

There's more to games than overcoming a challenge, and the industry would be pretty stunted if it had to boil every game experience down to that. For example, there are games that deliver emotional experiences, whether through story or a rich aesthetic, that aren't served well by screwing up the pacing with difficult sections.

Also don't forget the games that deliver emotional experiences by pacing out difficult sections because emotions aren't just limited to sadness and nostalgia. That's not to say that there can't be a lot of value in stories and rich aesthetics but generally (with a few exceptions) the games that are only compelling due to that and nothing else don't offer much that most great movies wouldn't, since then I'd be getting great aesthetics throughout, a story that works better due to its being in a medium which is suited for a greater variety of predefined stories, and less filler (i.e. much better pacing, if your main goal is to tell a story.) At any rate, I personally believe that the entire concept of predefined "story" in games as we currently understand it (i.e. in the sense of movies and novels) is just due to current technical and algorithmic limitations, and as the artform (and the field of machine learning in general) evolves it's going to become increasingly obsolete.

This is interactivity that has nothing to do with challenge. Planescape Torment is a pretty easy game (in fact I think you can beat it without killing anyone) but it's a good game despite this.

I think this is his point! =P

Sounds like the concept might work better in a book than in a movie given how many times they're switching perspectives and how little overlap there seems to be between each one. If they pull it off though it'll probably be the best thing released this year (except The Hobbit.)