I'm still not sure I quite get it.

I'd say if you want food, buy it yourself

With what money? The people in the Studios will have to come into the office to make games every day, so they can't have other jobs. What little money they might earn (from some kind of government benefits? Donations from family members? Credit card debts?) is being paid into the Company. I'm not talking about food as in "snacks for the office", I'm talking about food as in "how do we avoid starving to death?".

- publishing costs are paid by all Studios as an equally divided tribute, just like any other Company's cost. It always works in the same way.

I still don't really understand this. Equally between studios? What if I'm a one-man Studio, and one of the other Studios has 10 people in it - will I pay 10 times as much into the Company as each of the people in the other Studio? What if my Studio is making artgames with a niche audience that probably won't sell very well, and another Studio is making a fortune with casual Facebook games - do both studios pay the same amount even though one is much more profitable than the other? Will the more profitable Studios be expected to subsidise the less profitable ones?

[I think all the marketing and stuff should be done after the game is done or almost done, as you're using the money from your workmates (the other Studios under your same roof) and you dont want them to waste their money.

This is a really bad marketing strategy, particularly for indie games. You need to be making as much noise as possible, as early as possible.

I think I might be missing the point completely, but right now I can't see why a Studio would join a Company like this. Umbrella companies might make sense for certain types of studios or developers (although generally speaking it seems to be more tax efficient for a studio to set up their own company), but Umbrella companies don't generally dictate that you have to work in a specific place, so that's a downside of this Company.
The Company doesn't seem to offer any help with publishing, either. Publishers pay the Studios to complete games, and then recoup their costs (plus profit) by taking a cut of the royalties, whereas this Company actually costs the Studios money during development, so the Studios will have to look elsewhere for funding to survive. The Company doesn't provide any budget for marketing, manufacture or distribution, aside from what the Studios themselves have paid into the Company.

Increpare's Home: I lost my grandmother shortly before and it really resonated with me.

Ooh, forgot about Home. I second the motion that it's amazing. My stepfather has Alzheimer's. I don't see him very often but I first played that as I was preparing to go and visit him in his care home for the first time. Powerful stuff. It felt a bit more "obvious" and direct than Passage, but it hits like an anvil.

I just read a bunch of his stuff at the quitesoulless.com blog. Made my guts twist up and my heart ache, because I've seen this before.

Assuming that's his actual blog (rather than some Alternative Reality Game thing posted in-character to promote his game), he's ill, and he needs help. That's some big-time paranoia he's got there, and I've no doubt that his daily life is terrifying for him, but he's chasing phantoms (or rather, thinking he's being chased by them). I hope wherever he ends up he gets good mental health care and the support of his family and friends.

Hmmm. I'm going to be horribly unfair and play Devil's Advocate, and poke holes in this - it sounds like that's what you want people to do...

So, it's a cross between a publisher (in that the Company publishes games) and an umbrella company (in that it handles the legal and tax work of a Studio, for a fee), although it also makes the rather unusual step of providing office space and demanding that Studios use it. So far, so weird. Questions:

- Publishing games costs money - a lot of it if you're going to be involved in marketing and distribution. Where does that money come from? It takes money from the Studios, but doesn't seem to take any cut of the royalties. How does it make a profit?

- Assuming that under some circumstances, the Studios do give up a percentage of a game's royalties to the Company, how can the company reconcile that with its policy of not having a say in the development process? If my Studio is going to pay its way by giving the Company a percentage of its profits, but I want to make something grossly offensive, or too large in scope to ever get finished, or just plain bad, how could the Company turn that into something profitable?

- The main reason an indie Studio would sign up to a publisher is because they're starving and can't pay the rent: they want some money upfront, in exchange for meeting agreed milestones, to fund the game's further development. Instead of offering funding, you're charging a fee for umbrella company type services. How do the Studios buy food during development? And if they have a means for buying food, why do they need you?

As a community, the idea of sharing code, tools and working practises is a good one (and is part of what various online communities such as TIGSource seem to be aiming to achieve). The moment you introduce money - particulary asking developers for money rather than offering it to them - it becomes a business, which is a totally different kettle of fish. From what you've described so far, I don't see how such a business could make a profit, or could offer anything substantial to the developers who pay for its services.

Ordered. Looks like it's probably not a great game, but an interesting resource. Always nice to find new ways of thinking about design.

 

It's a cliche now I guess, but Bioshock:

Meeting Andrew Ryan, realising how much you've been played ("Would you kindly") and then having no choice over beating Ryan to death.

The end of Passage. Haters gonna hate but for me it was a pretty profound and complex bag'o'mixed emotions the first time.

Dreamfall:

April dying. I'm aware that Dreamfall was a pretty ropey game, but I LOVED The Longest Journey, got really attached to April's character, and to see her changed so much in the sequel - I wanted to see some form of redemption for her, a happy ending.

Also: Every single second I have ever spent playing Defcon.

Disclaimer: Everything I know about Vasily is what I've read in this thread, although I have some experience with mental health issues.

What's Vasily's current situation? What has happened since the US officials found out he'd lied? Has he been given any psychological examination to see if he qualifies as mentally ill by US standards?

If the stories are true that he fell foul of political shenanigans in Russia then you'd hope that the officials would bear that in mind before deporting him. If he's tested and found to be well, then his detainment in Russia should be considered to have been political rather than psychological. If there are concerns for his mental health, then he should be diagnosed and treated, not deported. Paranoid Schizophrenia is no laughing matter - either to be falsely diagnosed with it, or to be accurately diagnosed but too ill to accept the diagnosis.

However, I fear that the above paragraph is likely written from a parallel universe I'd like to live in, rather than this one. Between the xenophobia of many American officials, an overly-keen-to-diagnose health care industry run by pharmaceutical companies, and a political and economic scenario that's likely to take a dim view on providing care for non-nationals, it looks pretty bleak

I'm probably missing the point completely, but for lines with thickness, isn't it more useful to just think of them as rectangles? So it'd go something like:

1 - Define the line you want with the two endpoints, X and Y. Work out the length, L from the distance between them, and the angle A from one to the other.

2 - Work out an angle that's perpendicular to A. Draw lines at that perpendicular angle (using whichever line drawing algorithm you happen to like) such that the centre points of those lines run through X and Y, respectively.

3 - Connect the endpoints of the lines you drew in step 2, so you have a rectangle.

4 - Flood fill the rectangle (you're about to implement that anyway, yes?)

Is that at all helpful, or have I completely misunderstood you?

I think stars rift is right. dont take this as insulting my friends, but i think the indie games commune should begin to stop thinking about political idealogy and start more thinking about just making Games.

I agree. Now, who was it that first mentioned politics in this thread again? 

Googling for "animated GIF library" comes up with some promising-looking leads, including stuff like this:

http://www.libgd.org/Main_Page
http://www.graphicsmagick.org/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/graphics/cximage.aspx

As a side-note, I once implemented an animated GIF exporter from scratch, armed with nothing but a description of the file format. If you do this, you are insane. It's a bloody fiddly file format and the exporter took me an obscene amount of time to get right. It's basically only worth doing if you have a lot of time on your hands and you're particularly interested in how the file format works (I was). Unless you need to create a very large number of GIFs, or unless it's crucial that your finished program be able to export GIFs then I'd stick with doing it manually, but failing that, use someone else's code.

This might be my favourite thread ever. Is this part of some amazing viral thing, the likes of which the world has never seen? Will you revisit the banana in a month or two, only to find that it has evolved into something that will blow the Worlds' collective minds?

I had Space Hulk too, yes, and all of its expansions. Both of those are sort of "gateway" games into the whole Games Workshop catalogue, which I got into for a few years in my early teens.

These days I'm all about the simple, German-style stuff: Lost Cities, Carcassonne, Ticket To Ride. I like a bit of Munchkin in the right company. I recently got embarrassingly heavily into the XBLA version of Magic: The Gathering (tried the actual card game version for the first time recently too - good fun, but it seems like something that quickly gets really expensive).

Hm, I think it's more enjoyable when the compression from lots of lines of moderately complex code turns into one line of very complex code rather than turning into one line of easy code. It makes you feel less like an idiot.

I disagree. The idiot is the guy who hasn't worked out that you can do it with one line of easy code. You're the smart one for figuring it out.

I had a copy too, so that makes three. Actually, a lot more than three - pretty much every nerd kid I knew when I was growing up had a copy. I have grown-up friends now who still play it.

Hehe, for a second there I got carried away in imagining designing (and writing the compiler for) a programming language specificially for generating boardgames

Then I realised that the joy of making boardgames is that you don't have to sit at a compiler at all. Making boardgames means sitting down with your friends playing with scraps of card you've squiggled words or numbers on, and if the words or numbers don't create fun, scribbling them out and writing new ones. No need to be sat at a computer on your own worrying about syntax errors.

Echoing the other peoples in here that recommend you learn about what debuggers can do for you. Compilers catch the syntax errors and link errors - debuggers catch everything else. Seriously, learn how to set a breakpoint, to single step, to read a callstack and to use a watch window and your life will become a million times easier.

I was one of those guys who didn't trust the mystic ways of the debugger and spent years falling back on good old trusty print statements. When I found out what I was missing I couldn't believe how I'd lived without proper debugging.

I loves me some board/card games, to the extent that I sometimes come dangerously close to sacking off the whole designing and programming videogames malarkey in favour of just trying to do boardgames exclusively. Although, so far, I've not been able to tear myself away from a compiler.

Can't stand Hackers. Now Wargames - there's a movie.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Out of interest, has anyone been back for another try at the game, and played it very differently? I played through first time as sort of chaotic-good: generally trying to be the reformed family man that Marston appears to be, but still aware that the West is a place where justice is pretty quick and brutal if you happen to get in the wrong guy's way (i.e. mine). Has anyone done that and then played through again as a ruthless stone-cold killer to see how things work out differently? I tried it but you're pretty much roped into playing nice with Bonnie and the Sheriff at the start so I figured that a lot of the game probably plays out the same way however evil you are.

SPOILER ALERT

Ending was a bit crazy. Ages hunting and eventually killing Dutch and then instead of Game Over, this weird change of pace back to family life, followed by the attack and then the final mission as Jack (yes, I killed Ross). Like a whole couple of hours of story after I thought the main part of it would be over but which actually seemed to tie the whole thing together. What it reminded me of most was the film "A History of Violence" - this idea that you can never put a past like that behind you. Marston tried to give up the outlaw life, but the Government hounded him to do the job in exchange for a pardon. Turns out that still wasn't enough to leave his old life behind and Ross enacted the Government's revenge despite what Marston had done for them. Then Jack came to realise that Ross also couldn't leave his past actions behind, and so caught up with him. Presumably Jack will spend the rest of his life running and killing and failing to escape as well.