yeah i do think that of all the sub-categories technical excellence is what i expect minecraft to win

You forgot the audience award, sir. 

I might as well come out and say there are a lot of games that flip my trigger more than Minecraft does, having spent about 15-20 hours on it.

It's a matter of taste, yes, but I'd attribute its success to the way it lends itself to word-of-mouth advertising in conjunction with the fact that it's a compelling time-eater.  Living in a dorm, I've watched it spread between friends and housemates through the magic of "whatcha playing?"  It's fun to look at, easy to spend a lot of time on, and quite cheap to buy for one's self after growing tired of watching all one's friends playing.  But it's got a long way to go before it can beat my favorite indie games in terms of gameplay.

As a judge, I'd nominate it for technical excellence.


My two cents.

I'll vouch for Paul as someone who's laid back and quite easy to get along with.  I don't need to say anything about his skills, as they're up there speaking for themselves.

I use STLport under windows/cygwin to get wide-character support in the standard API.  It replaces pretty much everything in a fairly seamless way and, after building, I've had zero trouble with it.

My two cents.


Also, working (as in being on TIGsource instead of working) on an important update to my game.  Last night.  Two of the big items in my design for this update were not practical at all.  The first item, which was supposed to improve performance on the mapscreen by downsampling graphics, upped the number of GL draw calls and made the game lag horribly.  The second wasn't compatible with my existing player-generated data and would have torn triangular holes all over the world.

Basically, an evening's work reduced to ashes.

Around 440.  <_<

Much fewer, apparently, than expected.  The judges mentioned "many multiples" of 200 as their estimate.  Could Minecraft have something to do with this?

[EDIT:]

Oh hey, when did the front page move into the forums?  Gross.

What?

EDIT: Oh!  It didn't.  Still over at infiniteblank.com.  I just link to the topic for relevance.

EDIT 2: i am dumb

You know what, I take it back.  My first computer was a Sega Genesis.

Paul, quit making fucking excuses.


Also, another part of the reason I don't smoke.  My Mom said she'd beat me up if I did.

My Mom is awesome.

I did!  Infinite Blank is officially in over its buggy little head.


I made this crappy little screencap in a rush.  And yes, someone drew this guy is in the center of the planet:



As for "who entered" I was surprised to see that as an entrant I could see the folders for every other entrant.  I disapprove of the system, a little.  Smells insecure.

He shouldn't have been banned.  He needs to learn and grow; why not here?

Pardon me for being sickeningly positive.  Here's a picture of a sad kitten.

Okay, you do games that can't be beaten.  Do you do games without gameplay? 

I have a new version coming tomorrow.

The family had an old DOS at one point.  My dad would make graphs for me.

After that, there was a Windows 95 thinkpad laptop.  I remember making monochrome pixel backgrounds in the background tool; guess I got a start in low-fi art pretty early on, though I'm a programmer now.

My first two machines were identical Inspiron 1000s.  Pieces of shit; same parts came loose inside both and both died horribly.

Nope.  I've got two lung-cancer-dead grandparents and two who have health problems.  One of the dead ones continued the habit 'till the bitter end with an oxygen tube up her nose, though her ex-husband had quit fifteen years earlier and it still got him.

Neither of my parents ever picked up the habit, though.  And neither did I.  Haven't ever touched pot, either, though I don't have much against it.

Paul, don't fucking do it.  If you do, you're weak.  Don't let that shit be stronger.

I think NSIS deserves a mention under distribution.  It's a great free tool.

Regarding all of this: ugh.

If you had no further plans for the game and are okay "handing it over", then do so.  If you don't like the idea of losing intellectual property control, don't.

Sounds like you're in a position to agree, though.  50% is a hefty cut, but there are worse, and you won't have to do anything more to receive it.

Yeek.  People are making more and more flash games these days...  I'm assuming that's it.

That sounds reasonable.  XML is way too wordy.  The libraries on JSON's website should work for you, I should think.  (Not that I've used them)

Anyone know how well flash does at parsing binary?  
Never mind, I don't want to derail the topic.

[EDIT:]

OpenAL doesn't support panning audio directly, only spatial positioning of sound sources [which don't work for stereo sounds], so I had to hack panning support in by splitting a sound into left/right channels at load time and adjusting the volume manually based on the pan value passed in to my sound effect play function. I then proceeded to use this support to simulate spatial positioning of sound sources.

This is why abstraction is a bad thing sometimes.

EDIT: wait, I totally missed the thing about stereo sound.  Why not downmix to mono, or am I missing something?

I'm curious what usefulness you're finding in JSON.  Web interfacing?  Text serialization strikes me as entirely useless in game development, but I tend to work with largish pieces of data, myself.