Oh, cool. Consider me a buyer for that Steam release.

This is great, pay-what-you-want is fitting for indie games and I like to see the model encouraged.

[Knights]

Several factions are featured in the game:

The Knights are a nonhierarchical group of hackers focusing on agile ships and laser weapons. They seem to have no single motive for fighting, although they claim to be reactionary.

The Markov faction is a kind of grassroots police, sworn to maintain peace across inhabited zones. After the resurgence of spaceship combat, they've become more corrupt and less focused on protection. Their ships are heavy and defensive, preferring to secure areas with mines and turrets rather than fight one-on-one.

The Ubi are a religious sect that was thought to have disappeared, but they had actually withdrawn underground to live in a virtual reality. Their ships are baroque and spam intricate bullet patterns that deal elemental damage and heal friendly ships.

Nobody really knows who the so-called Ravens are, despite their prominence in research. All the menus and consoles in the game bear their logo.

Some of you may not be familiar with cave fliers, so I think I'll namedrop a few of my favorite ones to kick things off: Tappo II (best ever, had tons of variety and good production values), KOPS (artsy, with great music), Rocket Chase, Wings (just played this at a LAN party, still hilarious!), Tunnels of the Underground. Go give them a shot while waiting for Veins of a Planet.

A few inspirational mockups from my post history:









(Damn, looking back at those, I can see a lot of potential improvements.)

And music pieces:
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/grudge
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/horizon (you can tell the samples are ripped from an old tracker file )
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/over

Anyway, there's a specific gritty, desolate aesthetic I want to capture. The graphical style will be rough and mostly hand-crafted, with large plain sections contrasted with detailed ones. The music should be kind of dark and ominous overall, sounding like battle anthems with melancholical melodies (the first piece is spot-on). A small palette of recognizable instruments and a tastefully lo-fi tracker feel.

This is a hex editor written in 16bit ASM.

I appreciate this.

Cool theme, I can already imagine a track in my head.

I implemented isometric depth sorting for a game recently. Looking at my code now, I think it's as simple as sorting by x + z for each object (assuming your coordinate system works like mine, where x runs diagonally down and to the right in screen space, and z runs diagonally down and to the left). I had some edge cases where I needed to cheat and put things in different layers, but x + z gets you most of the way there. Not familiar with MMF2, so you're on your own for actually implementing it, but there's the math at least.

I like how this ultimately avoids the question. From the way OP worded the post, I get the feeling they don't know how to do sorting in MMF (how objects could be moved around inside whatever container type there is).

I designed games on paper, drew characters/weapons/levels and even wrote "fanfic" revolving around them. Off the top of my head, my ideas included a Pokemon rip-off (with a zillion new monsters), a top-down shooter called "Blast" (with a zillion bizarre guns), and a cave flier (with a zillion ships complete with stats, history and such).

I probably don't have the old drawings left anymore, which is a shame. I even borrowed a book on C(?) from the local library to try programming some of them, but it went way over my head back then.

So I mostly just made custom content for other games, and became exceedingly efficient at it.

Compiling is trivial nowadays. And I don't get why people are even mentioning purely functional languages in this thread. It's simply about what programming language to start with. It's enough of a hurdle without people confusing you with esoterics and unnecessary details.

So yeah. Python with a good text editor (like Sublime Text) and running .py files from the command line is the way to go. An IDE is not needed.

[Caves.The veins of a planet.And you're the heroin,addicted to destruction.]

This is only loosely related to One Game a Month - I take it more as a guideline for scheduling anyway, rather than an obligation to push out crap every month. Realistically, this thing is going to take longer than a month if I want to be satisfied with it.

Caves.

The veins of a planet.

And you're the heroin,

addicted to destruction.

So. One thing that inspired me to make games was the Finnish shareware scene of the 90s. Arena cave fliers, in particular, were popular here but barely known elsewhere. It was almost as if every aspiring game developer had to make one of these as a rite of passage. Since the audience was specific, they got what they wanted, and the games felt personal.

The genre has stagnated nowadays. Local multiplayer went out of fashion, and there weren't enough gameplay innovations to keep the flame alive.

This is my attempt to revitalize the genre. It's not just a nostalgy trip; I have some fresh ideas that would bring cave flier fighting into the 2010s.

Current proof of concept in C++ with SFML:

Exaggerated shotgun kickback -> mak gam about flying with shotgun and breaking through walls

^Eventually you should know both, but start with Python.

I wonder if the character limit in signatures could be raised, if just by 100 or so. Kinda hate having to use bit.ly to link to threads in these very forums.

[What went right?]

Alright. I guess I'll have to admit failure for now, since this is taking time and headspace from other projects. What I can do, though, is try to take it constructively and sort out my thoughts in a post-mortem.

What went right?

• It had potential. A game about algorithmic solutions is something I've wanted to make for a while.
• A working development process. I worked pretty hard, it seemed to be on schedule for One Game a Month, and even after that, I didn't immediately call it quits. It wasn't because of distractions or procrastination that I failed, and I did learn a thing or two about parsers and game design. Pages of pen-and-paper design too that forced me to think about the fundamentals.
• It had some neat production values. I like to be a jack of all trades when it comes to game development, and I pulled it off adequately again. The graphics were good enough, it would've had some catchy music, and the neurotic humor gave me a few giggles.

What went wrong?

• It just wasn't fun! The in-game programming wasn't abstract enough not to be tedious. And save for a few that kept me going, the puzzles felt either forced or incomplete. Towards the end of the project, I just couldn't grasp the soul of the game anymore, since the mechanics were as if pieced together from different games because of all the redesigns and duct tape. There was a point where I had to go "this doesn't work". Every time I think about it now, my mind just starts to wander as if oversaturated.

Playing the aforementioned Manufactoria was like the final blow - it puts me to shame with the way it manages to do something really clever with simple rules. If I ever revisit the concept of Control Room again, it's going to be something abstract like that, a completely different game with the same name and some recycled assets.

Until then, it's time for me to move on.

I just cleared Touhou 6 without continues on Normal.

Had previously 1cc'd 7,8,10,12. I bet I could try some on Hard now, maybe give the extra stages a proper shot...

(But if I do get it right, I'll just disregard the whole One Game a Month thing and finish this anyway)

(And if I don't, I will eventually resurrect it because I can't stand losing a battle of wits to a friggin Flash game)

That's it you have 24 HOURS

TO BECOME A FUN GAME

OR I WILL USE THE RIP ICON

(AND I'M NOT AFRAID TO USE IT)

AND GO WORK ON MY FUN PROJECTS INSTEAD.

Perhaps the main "problem" making this tedious is that I'm trying to base the puzzles around one actor (the robot). It encourages specific solutions like most puzzle games do, only with the difference that you don't have real-time control. So I'm playing around with ideas like crates that live their own life. They could be programmed with simple rulesets that are supposed to create order from a chaotic startpoint after enough time. So you'd handle sets of objects rather than just one.

Whatever. My brain just locks up when I think of this nowadays. And if I ever finish it, it still won't be as good as Manufactoria.

the UNIQUE HORNED HORSE! 

Really psychedelic stuff again. The best thing about indie games is this sort of creativity, and your stuff stands miles above all the sugary pixel art mockups in that sense.

Hm, I wonder. What if this game was in a top-down, "turtle graphics" perspective after all? It'd eliminate some of the more tedious parts of movement, like falling and jumping, which are hard to represent as states. Also, it'd give you more options for using sensors.