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

Spaces, space. Overlapping space. More space for me and my thoughts. They don't fit in this narrowly defined, narrowly defined space. Exclusive contingent narrowly defined, space. No space.

I played around with this for a while, it's legit. I have a feeling it's going to see a lot of use in my hands. FM synthesis is such an underappreciated technology.

My fingers are twitching to order an Oculus Rift devkit. I'd love to make a surreal exploration game for it. $300 is a trivial investment for something that might just become huge, and even if it flops, a Rift game decent enough to sell a few copies would pay itself back.

I'll be introducing devices such as 4-way moving platforms that the robot can pass functions on to. And they can pass code on to other devices with modifications, like some Olympic torch of burning autism, possibly even communicating somehow. That's going to open up whole new horizons, as your thinking won't be limited to one entity.

The more I do, the more I feel like this when trying to estimate the progress. Whatever is there works and could pass as a game as it is. Most of what's ahead should be plain design, but surely I haven't seen the worst bugs yet. Since the month's halfway through, I hope 40% won't be much of an exaggeration.

Posting a more refined build in the following days.

That's my primary pace of work, pretty much. Come across a problem, brainstorm some ways to solve it, then get my mind off it for a while before the actual implementation. It helps me to see it clearer if I let my internal garbage collector remove some traces of previous problems.

On making good gams, or something.

Haven't we, as programmers, collectively agreed that no design option should be dismissed as inherently flawed?

Carl Sagan's Contact and Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future travel firmly in my satchel.

They are beams of light. See how its snowing inside them and the middle of the standing stone where as there are flowers and grasses growing outside the light? It's because the standing stone leads into another world. At least that was the idea!

If the stone is the portal, where are the beams of light coming from? I still hold that it's unreadable.

So like I've said, I want the challenge to be about inventing algorithms, rather than doing automatable tasks by hand. For this, I figured there needs to be some element of uncertainty to encourage generalized solutions and discourage "brute force" ones.

For example, since the location of the robot is one typical thing to consider, there could be teleporters that connect to each other randomly. The players would need to understand branching logic like "if the robot's at point A and there's nothing left to do there, enter the teleport again until it's at point C", and try to implement that with the building blocks they have. Basically, once the players have gotten a hang of it, it becomes more a matter of using branching logic than just counting tiles and walking that many times.

One nice example of the clever solutions I'm aiming for: a warehouse with a pit that you have to fill with crates to cross. The robot's position has multiple possibilities after it's retrieved a crate, and it can't predict ledges when it does return near the pit; it can only sense when it's falling, and by then it's too late to do anything about it. The intended solution involves always leaving a crate on the edge of the pit (instead of throwing everything in mindlessly), because the robot can sense it's pushing a crate, and you can use that data to do conditionals.

The gameplay will be pretty autistic, so it could use some comic relief for balance. That's why you're being bossed around by a neurotic, incompetent executive who has bursts of megalomania and total incoherence. The monologues I've sketched out have a kind of "Portal meets Monty Python" vibe, and I like that.

I guess I'm approaching the so-called middle-age crisis of a game project. The point where I start doubting whether anything about the game is actually all that fun, and whether it will eventually devolve into one big mess of bugs. It usually results in looking back at what I want to achieve and re-evaluating the mechanics, accompanied by minor breakdowns.

Frankly, I feel like most people are going to hate the end result no matter how satisfied I am with it, as usual with my games. Innovation is alienation.

The stroke makes such a small, thin font look messy. Maybe it's made worse than it actually is by the screenshot being scaled down, but all I see is "Frogneas Bar".

You have to remember, it is NEVER the player's fault. It's just like in marketing.

I don't see why you're comparing games to marketing in particular. Marketing only exists to bring something to public attention, while games can have value regardless of their popularity. And the reaction to a game depends on its userbase, so sometimes it really is the player's "fault", so to say.

If nobody plays it long enough to understand the depth of it, it's because you don't let them. Maybe a basic tutorial would help.

I made the conscious decision to avoid tutorials and make a game where the mechanics and strategies are learned with enough repetitions. That's why I'm assuming people aren't trying hard enough before they give up and call it "unplayable". I guess it's the nature of Kongregate that games are expected to be quick and easy snacks.

Granted, I'm bad at assuming the role of players who stumble upon my games. And this one's pretty unusual, so maybe there's something more I could've done to aid the learning process. I wonder if it'd change anything to have written explanations complementing the animations.

Ooh, nice. I think I could profit from doing those sometimes.

Flipping between two worlds sounds like it could be an interesting take on interactive storytelling.

NO WE WON'T

Greenlit this a while back, good concept and neatly executed too. I understand the change in palette, but the new layers need more contrast.

I guess it's cleaner, but not quite as hip. You've given yourself more space to comment on games, but the comments aren't getting much longer, so I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off. It's just less space for the games, which is pretty counter-intuitive when you're doubling the release time.

Also, you said there's 19 games, but you only listed 15, and the image has 18.

All this gives me the impression you're busy with life. Don't overwork yourself by rushing things, consider getting someone else to help you out with the magazine.

It has pleasant colors and all, but it fucks with my head.

Why are there huge glass panels in the middle of nowhere? Are they attached to the rocks in the foreground? If so, how does the middle one not topple over with the slightest wind?