I felt like the audio adds a lot to this. If it had typical "catchy" BGM, it'd be cartoonish, almost comical, like one of those exaggerated 90s shareware games about action heroes. With all the metallic screeches and alien noises, it has a kind of disturbing atmosphere.

Oh, and the spikes are bullshit.

why

I thought the point of mockups was to make concept art for non-existent games, not promote something that already has a devlog and is playable.

The lack of insta-dropping makes me HNNNNNNNG

Ah, okay. This seems unique and mind-bending.

They're just bouncing balls which leak color onto the pixel they're in. They will bounce off of "occupied" pixels and take on the color of the occupied pixel multiplied by their own color.

I love graphical effects like these, with simple rules that produce complex output.

Could you record a real-time render? I figure that would do the effect justice.

Sounds like a neat programming exercise, and perfectly feasible too. The .png format is very "general" for a reason, so you should manage to make a more specialized one with some practice.

Also, this made me think how difficult it is to actually introduce new file formats into everyday use. Pixel art images are already small and computers are fast, so whatever kilobytes you manage to crunch will make no difference in people's eyes, and nobody will bother supporting the format. And if nobody supports the format, people won't use it, even if it's technically superior. Kind of like what happened with animated PNGs. It's a nasty catch-22.

But yeah, if it's just for personal use, then cool. And it might just inspire some tangential innovation. For instance, if it can process an image as tiles like you hinted at, someone could make a tileset extractor out of it.

Dude, seriously. While you have some gorgeous palettes, those textures are super messy.

Actually, why I am writing, I am planning to make a devlog of my game that involves similar robot programming concepts. Though my language is based on a little bit different computational model, strangely, visually our languages looks quite similar. Convergent evolution works..

Ah, cool. I'd like to hear more about it, and exchanging ideas sounds good too. I'm actually hoping more people would make games inspired by programming concepts, because there's so much uncharted territory there.

Okay, here's the plan. I had released a new version of Hunter to Hunted in early January, which would qualify as January's One Game a Month entry without me having to swallow my pride. This means that Control Room was February's entry all along! You were all fooled! Including myself!

I'll wrap this game up in the first week, then do some serious work on that other game for the rest of February, and likely get started on March's entry (which I don't expect to finish in one month anyway).

The evolution simulator I had planned for February will be postponed, but it's not the sort of game I would've wanted to work on right now. I hope this sort of scheduling will help with quality control and keep me sane.

What do you guys think? You've been awfully silent recently.

WILLIAM, brings TV, back, in style!

This one really stands out from the stuff in this thread. It doesn't obey the rules of graphic design, but that's what makes it so surreal. It's like it's imported straight from someone's subconscious.

Dawn of The Final Day -24 Hours Remain-

Well, I haven't posted all that much. It's difficult for me to confirm details of the game, and some of the stuff I've posted about is already obsolete. My way of making games is by no means a linear process where I'd just stack new things on top of each other. I think about mechanics far more than content, but seems like most gamedevs do it the other way round, and maybe they're more productive because of that. I'm critical of my own work, and it takes a lot of wrong turns before I come up with something I'm happy with.

I figured if the game design principles I've worked to incorporate won't be obvious in the end result, spelling out the things in some puzzle that are supposed to "prioritize algorithmic thinking over specialized solutions" would only sound like a pretentious excuse. I want to become someone who shows rather than tells.

Anyway, the game is pretty close to completion. Several puzzles are playable already, a few are pretty clever - the "final boss" involves implementing a kind of sorting algorithm using conveyor belts, different sensors, teleports, and pretty much all the hacks you've been taught before. However, there's still incomplete features, and ones I'm not happy with. There's not enough in the way of polish either, and I don't think I've managed to illustrate the more unintuitive mechanics well enough.

So I'm seriously considering whether it would be worth it to take a few more days to make more levels, do further playtesting, fix bugs, and add more polish & feedback. The event itself is pretty loose about deadlines. Which is how it should be, since #onegameamonth ain't a jam, it's just a resolution to finish some damn games this year.

Basically, I can't give up on this now. If I were to release it as an unfinished package, that would feel more like giving up than pushing the deadline would. I'm starting to feel overworked, which is likely to lead to a result nobody's happy with.

flash is better if you want your game to be a browser game; game maker is better if you don't want to have to code things like collisions and a sprite animation engine yourself

That's not really a good argument for Game Maker, since Flash libraries like FlashPunk and Flixel already have working implementations of those things. Whatever the tools, no need to reinvent the wheel - though knowing how stuff works is necessary when you have to bend the rules.

I'm definitely interested in the topic of interactive music. As much as I love VGM, not all games benefit from constant background noise. My execution tends to be more in the Half-Life 2 vein, where music is triggered by events, but the tracks themselves are pre-recorded.

Now, interactive tracks are a different beast. I figure tracker modules would be ideal for that, since they're rendered on the fly. It takes understanding of tracker architecture and the skills to write a fitting player, but you can do more with them than with mp3s.

Code:

// TODO:
// -this todo

panic

It personally doesn't impress me when someone accumulates a lot of quantity work. May be it is a required quality for rapid flash-game development or something like that. But it doesn't proove one is capable of creating a competent game.

A-ha, but the developers that manage to create a dream game always have tons of experience beforehand. Typically includes a boatload of finished & unfinished smaller games, many of them unimpressive in isolation. And when we're talking about portfolios, playable things are more valuable than an unfinished "next Minecraft".

Rather than wondering about the signs of a failed project (which Paul Eres answered well already), my biggest question is why PythonBlue would feel pressure to attend GDC if he doesn't have anything to show.

Though more like this:

Even shoddily drawn stuff can look appealing with decent colors, shading, and composition.

Perfectionism is good and all, but I also like it when a piece leaves sharp corners intact, and doesn't try to hide that it's improvised. Something like "good bad art".

Move vertically first, check collision & correct vertically, then move horizontally & correct horizontally.

That seems likely to cause false positives when you're moving diagonally near the outer corners of blocks.

That's more of a feature than a bug: it gives you a slight protection from slipping off those pesky cliffs.