I went a little overboard on this one, probably because of my bias against anime. So I made a little lesson on posing and anatomy.

I assume she's casting a spell, but I guess she could be throwing a ball. There's not much energy there, and everything except the head is straight on in view.

So here's a stick with a motion line, it's a tall fit female (all important things to think about) doing a quick pivot and reaching out to shooting off a fairly powerful spell to her side, hips tilted away to keep feet firmly planted, arching her back a bit.

Then it gets complcated. You have a lot of floppy cloth and hair to deal with, leading to a lot of folds.

Refining shadows and details.

Uh that was not helpful commentary, and I almost completely ignored the current style. I'm sorry, I have a headache. But hopefully you can take something from the energy, foreshortening, pose, and more realistic cloth rather than starting with a school girl uniform and giving it a coat and hat and calling it a day. Think about what the witch would actually be wearing.

The dichotomies are not imaginary though. Yes game developers should be able to make whatever they want. Like Tom Sennett, he knows exactly what kind of games he wants to make and gets pretty defensive when people tell him what he should do.

But this article brings up a great point, for those who care about what other people think about games, that we should continue to strive for broader and broader genres, have strong works of narrative game, abstract games, whatever and that the immediate urge to remake and remix and pay homage to arcade and tetris games (getting score, building up speed, one gameplay mechanic repeating--almost completely about motor skills with no symbols, messages, explanations, or reflections of any kind) is limiting.

Its as if a painter saw a trend, as has happened, that everyone was only painting still lives of fruit and said "Hey guys why all the fruit" and they responded "SHUT UP WE LIKE FRUIT DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO PAINT BASTARD" so he retorts "Maybe we can use the medium to communicate some--" "FRUIT FRUIT FRUIT SOMETIMES VEGETABLES". It's an exaggeration, but just because you like something now doesn't mean that it's important or has meaning to other people. If you don't care about that then, like I said, this article wasn't for you in the first place.

I had this big speach about how games are art, defending interactivity and violence in context of religion and persuit of the traditional methods of art, expansion of a medium follow the purpose of the liberal arts, and as soon as I put my beret on they just said "Sure, put a game in your show". I didn't even show them any assets or running programs, So whatever.

The show I believe will be in two or three months at Hillsdale College, but I want to finish this by the end of this month if possible. I am back at school taking a minimal amount of credits, so I hope to devote an entire day or two to finishing this project.

Title screen is currently up, and the scenarios are being built up quickly. I promised a working build, and I think once the first day is set up I will release a version to anyone interested who PMs, posts, or emails me, so that I can get some much needed feedback about a project I feel the need to be so secretive about.

Agreeing with 404 and elaborating a bit, there does seem to be a serious negative view of plot twists in games these days, and I think it could be the fact that games aren't run by plot. Twists, or conflicts in understanding are wonderful and are a good step beyond just a representation of events, but I think the strength of the change is connected to the medium. Poetry has paradox and a range of rhetorical devices, painting has juxtoposition of color or form, prose has the plot twist, film has the perspective shift, music has dissonance.

For a game, if there's a change in plot there should also be a change in control, physics, goal, or something that makes it feel different. Bishock's twist was great for a film, but did little gameplaywise. So I guess you need to ask for your game what changes with the climax, and what all would that effect?

This is the friendliest competition ever.

Great game idea, work hard!

I really don't want to see the next TIG headline be "Compo Fails Because Game Designers Don't Have Friends".

There are probably some people at your school, office, apartment who would help test, heck that could be part of the competition is making it so appealing they'd want to play. Or we have a community for a reason, use Steam and IRC to set up times to play. And there's probably a few people like me who have slowly gotten their housemates interested in weird indie games who wouldn't mind getting together and testing them out for you guys.

augh

 

i'll be constructive later...

The chance thing is a cool idea, but it really depends on the plot because of the expectation everyone has about video games being algorithmic computer programs. Random chance I think is a good thing. I guess most people want games to let them escape to a land where they can achieve their sexy dreams or whatever so they demand "fairness" and "success". Like Helmeted said, you'd best not have a Win ending and a Lose ending, but a bunch of different endings.

Essentially I guess that's what your doing, putting out the same game with a bunch of predetermined different endings (kind of like that awesome catcus/podunk Dungeon game). Also like a choose your own adventure book... which actually sounds freedomless and bad now. The point is that I should sleep. The other point is, it would be difficult to balance player freedom and "the odds are against you", so maybe it's better to have it in game with chances to redeem yourself to a good ending, like a random difficulty spike than total predetermined fail-states.

Not sure what kind of game this will be, but I wait for your progress. 

Again, I truly appreciate the interest even with how little content I have actually shown. I have done a lot and things are looking really good, but I don't feel comfortable showing most of it quite yet. Just finished some important animation (I fixed the bounciness of the last one) and I am too, too tired to compile them, so I'll just finish the rest the just put them in a demo build to show them. Here's something though, a main character I haven't shown off yet.

I'll be happy to say where I go and show off my portfolio--when it's done and I get news on whether or not this will be allowed in my show... I'll make a big pretentious announcement to be sure. I feel bad being in the middle of making this game, building a portfolio, planning my show, and building my website (as well as other senior year life goals) because there's so much still in the air that can go wrong. I'll show more as soon as I can!

Image > Image Size > Resample Image > Nearest Neighbor

Oh okay. Helpful information. 

I had a thread about this a while back, could be worth a look.  http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9466.msg294463#msg294463

Abstraction is a fine idea and reminds me of FRACT. As to your question of revamping an old classic, it's risky as hell. Unless you are confident in your style being an homage to the original, or different enough to be amazing, best not mess with people's imagination. I mean, look at how the big names (Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Sonic, etc.) made the leap into higher resolution and you see who succeeds and fails.

  http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=15845.msg455660#

I know what I said about flexible rules, but how could you pass up Radium for an exploding cigar gag? 

Next person can do Radium, Gunpowder, or Dart Gun + whatever.

Things getting done all over the place, focusing on getting programming knowledge and animation out of the way, as illustration is more natural to me. This means of course nothing pretty to show off yet, except a linear perspective pixel tiled floor.

But I am asking for help now! There's a basic function which I am trying to understand, and getting close, but the deadline looms. Basically I'm just trying to program in AGS a "chargeshot"--like in Mega Man 4. I'm thinking three different options for what happens when you hold down a button for 1 second, 2 seconds, or 3 seconds. Honestly I think I'm very close, using a timer and a global variable... I may just go hunting through the AGS shmup modules or hopefully learn it out my own.

Again, any help or critque is appreciated, a functional build for testing should be up before the end of the week!

Great work, I hope you keep making games. The portals hurt my eyes and brain though--more unpleasant than challenging. Also maybe you could do more with the boundaries of the world, like having shapes or objects in the distance? Everything else was amazing.

Yeah this deserves some more feedback. Unfortunately I have nothing constructive to say, except that it gets me pumped for the 3DS's capabilities for AR, having a little dungeon or garden or whatever on my desk would be absolutely amazing.

A few issues that may get in your way. With Minecraft specifically, I don't know how you'd build things, because you have to climb on top of other blocks... and other games you'd have to have algorithms that build the world on the existing map. Which reminds me, I and my friends would love to test something like this I'm sure, but getting those AR points large enough so they could be seen and placed and kept around would be difficult and suspicious. Again, this wouldn't really be feasible for most places until phones have enough software and horsepower to digital recognize and map out and entire block or more.

Good to see it running smoothly though, and the online aspect of it is quite awesome.

You made a bad art game to show how much you don't like bad art games? Why?

I really like it, and I hope to participate if my game's in good shape by then. I honestly think people are warming up to indie games overall, most of my friends have played a few by now what through Steam and humblebundles and whatnot. Someone mentioned attempting Sleep Is Death as an example, and that's like asking someone to share a secrets with you... I think small games like Liero, Jump and Bump, Liquid War etc. have always been great "hey check this out" games and buckets of fun.

Besides, maybe if the end date is pushed back the compo could seep into/inspire some more TIGJams.