I believe if you make any decent amount of business on donations you have to apply for a charity license too, which becomes more red tape and hassle. That's why every single company doesn't switch their business model to "gifts" and "donations" from their retail storefronts downtown.

I'd think that's more due to the fact that they aren't charities, not because of any extra tax hassle.

Nifty idea, but I, like Drogen, was annoyed by the fact that the game only allow specific lineups to make a connection. I don't like the invisible logic that isn't explained to the player. If there had been some visual indication that a connection wasn't allowed it would've been okay, although giving the player total freedom in how he crosses would be preferable (it could still be difficult). I stopped playing sometime after one more row was added, when I lined up two squares that did line up perfectly and jumped down and was respawned in the uh... screen (?) I tried to leave.

I didn't have a problem with lining up tiles. When it didn't work for me, I could always see that some part didn't match, so there is a form of visual logic to that. I agree that it would be good if they for example colored the borders of connected tiles green and others red. Or faded non connecting tiles to 50% opacity, or something similar.

At first, I thought the dude was just trolling as well (or purposely saying trollish stuff to drum up publicity for his game), but after what Cthulhu32 posted, I'd guess he's just very disappointed in his game not finding an audience and pretty desperate to get some cash to pay the money he owes his grandpa. Desperate people do stupid things.

Well, he borrowed $10,000 from his grandpa to pay the programmer. He did all the art/design himself.

Ouch. Never, ever borrow money from friends or family to develop a game. It's one thing if it's your own money you're spending, but owing money to relatives will just make you even more desperate for the game to sell. I think that desperation is pretty evident in that gmail chat you had with him -- he seems like the kind of guy that'd try to get you involved in a pyramid scheme type of deal.

[Passageway]

Passageway, duh.

Those 5 minutes were more emotional than my entire decade of gaming.

Is that the sequel?

DY: Yeah, it's true. Suffering, I think, definitely helps the kind of artistic side of things. [laughs] I do agree that a lot of good games and entertainment comes out of people just going through tough times.

Maybe we should all go do really mean things to derek so he can go through some tough times and make even better games!

That's actually an interesting comment. I agree that interesting stories will likely come from a developer's own personal hardships and experiences, but I also think that if that hardship is of a financial nature, the resulting game is likely to suffer and become too bland in an effort to make a "commercial" game. Without having ever played Flytrap, I get the feeling that this is what happened with that game; the developer had got laid off and had spent $10,000 on the game, so he probably needed it to make money, fast! All his talk about trying to appeal to women with having the weapon a super soaker and having the main character eat the enemies because women are apparently all about "consuming" just screams of trying to appeal as widely as possible. Bascially, if you make a game because you're strapped for cash, that game is more likely to be bland and uninteresting, I think.

Then again, Quite Soulless and Space Spy was made by a developer extremely strapped for cash, but I guess Vasily Zotov had seen enough hardship and suffering to balance that out -- those games are hardly bland!

I'd say go with antialias, but it's really hard to comment on without any knowledge of the art style you're going for...

It's really sad when indie developers decide to act like jerks just to drum up some attention for their games. It may work in the short run, but it's like pissing your pants to keep warm. You may get some attention for your game, but you get a lot more negative attention for yourself and lose any respect and credibility you may have had. See: Bob Pelloni or the JForce Games guys. Any publicity is not good publicity.

Seems to be how it works in Denmark as well. You're not an organization exempt from paying tax -- it's personal income like anything else, no matter what you call it.

Brilliant. Has this idea been done before?

Maybe use a mouse map like suggested at the end of this article?:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article747.asp

Didn't this dude start a thread awhile back asking for advice as to whether or not he should quit school to start making games -- and then completely ignored all the advice given?

I think that just depends very much on what you prefer: plot-driven versus character-driven. European movies are traditionally more character-driven than Hollywood films.

The American President and A Few Good Men were written by Aaron Sorkin.

EDIT: And Malice and Charlie Wilson's War, according to IMDb.

I think it's easier to use the old Russian formalist terms of fabula and syuzhet. Fabula is the story and syuzhet is the way it's told, i.e. how each piece of the story flows into the next. There are an infinite number of ways to tell any one story.

The only medium I can think of that usually deals with day to day stuff is video games, like Diner Dash, the Sims, and stuff like that.  But look at any movie or book, it's not about a dishwasher's mundane life, but rather how something shakes up that dishwasher's life.

I'd say television deals with day to day stuff as well. There are way too many reality tv shows -- half of the shows on MTV are people doing boring stuff and then talking about doing boring stuff with their boring friends.

Casablanca is often heralded as one of the best written (American) movies. The story isn't anything spectacular, I think, but the dialogue is amazing.

"Whoa. Deja vu."

Dogs see dichromatically, essentially, they see colours in the range of blue and yellow, not red blue and yellow, like humans. They also have a higher proportion to rods then cones when compaired to humans, meaning they have better night vision with lessened colour vividness.

EITHER WAY, if dogs could only see "black and white" they would still see shades of grey.

You just made my joke cry.

Tell that to a dog.