It's actually a harmonic spectrum analyzer gone haywire.  That A# is its output.

OpenAL's really inconsistent between platforms.  Unfortunately most of the other stuff out there either costs money or isn't very portable, which was part of my motivation in making a library.  It'll be a while yet before it's mature, though.

SDL_Mixer is decent, if really really barebones.

Whoops.

I'm working on an opensource sound engine you can find in my sig.  It's good, but the release is a little old and has a few bugs and other annoying things about it.  (AudioClip class is broken, only codecs are for OGG and music modules, OGG codec has some debug code that you'll want to comment out.)  I should get around to making that patch...

Loving the aesthetic of lush minimalism.

Just make incompatible datatypes for orthogonal axes. 

Writing a map lookup routine in a Scheme variant for a class.

Code:

(if (equal? elem (car keys)) ...)

Lisp is hilarious.

If you aren't making the game yourself, you're depending on other people.  These people may not be as passionate about the game as you.  If they lose interest, your project fails.  You have no control over this.

To reiterate:  You cannot rely on teammates, especially inexperienced ones.

The reason to learn to make games yourself is this:  Above all others, you can rely on yourself.  If you want to do your ideas justice, you must make them with your own hands to the greatest extent of your abilities.

When you have exercised your abilities, you can demonstrate yourself as a reliable person and other reliable people will choose to work with you.  Even then it's best to do as much yourself as you can.

There are ways of representing angles so that they don't result in discontinuities.  In 3D, you use a quaternion.  In 2D, you use the equivalent of a complex number of magnitude one.

In practice this means storing the sine and cosine of the angle in question.  When you want to rotate a vector about that angle, the output is (cos*v.x - sin*v.y, sin*v.x + cos*v.y).  When you want to rotate an angle by another angle (resulting in the "sum" of those angles) you simply rotate one of the angles' sin and cos values as if it was a vector (cos, sin).  In my own system I simply use a vector inside all my angle objects, making sure its magnitude is always 1.0.

The complex-number representation might seem, well, complex.  But it's actually a very efficient way of doing things and common in systems like physics engines.  You only need to use trigonometry when converting from linear angles.  It's also very easy to interpolate between two angles along the shortest path, using slerp.  The major weakness to this approach is that angular velocities beyond pi in magnitude become ambiguous with other values -- the solution, simply enough, is to use a regular float for relative values like spin speeds.  This is analogous to the way quaternions and torque vectors are used together in 3D.

I think a devlog is both a means of creating accountability for one's progress and a very good way of potentially marketing a game prior to release.  The material needs to be interesting, though, and a good devlog is a ton of work.  The payback can be awesome, though, as companies like Wolfire have shown us.

Supertangent re: going to GDC, having things to show helps with starting conversations but little else.  It's perfectly justified to go without anything to your name, as long as you can engage with people.  Knowing someone who can introduce you to other people helps to get the ball rolling.  Failing that, be bold and introduce yourself to some other folks.  Find people with common interests.  Getting rolled up into groups of indies who walk around the town and conference together is also a great way to meet a ton of people fast.

Are the individuals whose contributions are critical to completion motivated to work?  How many critical individuals are there?  (Each adds risk.)  What about the features and content necessary for the game to be playable or complete?  (Each of these items adds risk.)  A game whose appeal stems from a wide variety of mechanics or a large volume of content is riskier than a game designed to do one thing very well.

Better start that devlog soon. 

[Split brain test]

Thought experiment:  Split brain test

Hypothetically, one half of your brain is only cognizant of gameplay details, and the other is only cognizant of storytelling details.

The amount of communication which is necessary for each of these to fully understand their subject is a measure of the intimacy of gameplay and storytelling.

Class D:  If each can be understood in isolation, without the help of the other, the game lacks ludonarrative cohesiveness entirely.  Gameplay and story reside in different spaces.

Class C:  If ignorance of the narrative severely impairs gameplay, but not vice versa, the gameplay is informed by the story but irrelevant to it.

Class B:  If ignorance of the gameplay impairs understanding of the story, but not vice versa, the story is communicated through gameplay but irrelevant to it.

Class A:  If both narrative and gameplay can only be understood in the context of the other, they are cohesive.  The deeper their codependence, the more intimate they are.


The lines between these categories are a little fuzzy, since a judgment call must be made about what constitutes a meaningful amount of communication from one side to the other.  Does a character telling the protagonist where the Wise Old Sage lives constitute gameplay being informed by story?  Does walking to his house constitute a story communicated through gameplay?  Or are these bars set higher?  Perhaps my attempt at categorization is futile.

But it seems to me the elevation of these concepts is the progressive merging of the logic of gameplay and narrative, to the point where they become effectively indistinguishable.  Which is to say a system where acting in-character is both the ideal means of experiencing the story and the most obvious way of playing the game.

I enjoyed To The Moon a lot.  My analysis: it uses gameplay as a vehicle for the story and a pace-regulator, but the story doesn't necessarily factor deeply into gameplay.  (That is, it doesn't affect gameplay to the extent where the logic and interestingness of the narrative are reflected in the interactions.)  With the story removed, it would be an awful game.  With the game removed, it would be perhaps a slightly less interesting story..?

It isn't a reinvention of narrative gaming, but it did feel like a little step forward to me.  Perhaps that's only because of the scoring and writing, though.


Oh and that slider puzzle was totally forgettable bullshit.  <_<

Slightly fewer syllables (maybe) and slightly clearer than "multi-directional" which creates a sort of ambiguity as to whether the game is 2D or 3D.

My game is a multi-directional space shooter in which you use the hulls of your defeated enemies as your only armor and weaponry.

I'd say "360 degree" rather than multidirectional.



...I should probably get around to writing my game pitch in here.  :I

I believe Game Maker has a function that draws text in a limited-width area.  Which is to say, RTFM. 

Xion:

With some effort, I imagine a given premise could be made to work with any medium.  But there's a distinction between a premise and a story.  To use an accessible example, the plot summary of Harry Potter is a premise which applies to both the film and the book, but the story differs quite a lot between the two.  There are a lot of scenes and details in the book which are unsuited to film and vice versa.

I ask those questions to make sure the story which I'm developing from my original premise -- lifted from a piece of writing -- is achieving a deep cohesiveness with my game mechanics.  If I could take the scenes of the game and place them into a film with the same effect, I'm not achieving intimacy with the medium.  If I fail at that, then why am I even making games?

To be sure, even if I do my work correctly it might be possible that the story could be adapted to another medium.  My metric is that no other form should do it justice -- that any such adaptation would necessarily tell a different story.

Xion told it well.

Here's a case study:  The culture in my fictional setting places a lot of value on terseness.  "Speak little, tell much."  Their names are brief, and places are named as minimal descriptions.  There is a forest whose leaves take on a red color in the autumn -- it is called Tuli Sah, the Red Forest.  A village lies within it -- it is known as Tuli Sah Aai, kin of the Red Forest.  Were there two villages, they might be "kin of the Red Forest's heart" and "kin of the Red Forest's edge".

Things like this are a wonderful opportunity to flesh out your world -- they give you reason to think about its people, and perhaps make up little stories.  Perhaps rather than telling those stories, which might not be very interesting, you simply keep the name.  That creates a mystery -- why is this cave so named?  Mysteries create a horizon and make the world feel bigger and older than what is seen.

Don't feel afraid to "mix" humor and seriousness -- just be consistent in your tone and style of writing.  If you're really trying to build a world, make sure all those little snippets of text contribute to the feeling of that world in a desirable way, as your Gate, Tent, Lumber and Pillar do.  The set of jokes I would make in the context of more serious writing, for example, would differ from the set I would make if everything was a crack.

Feel free to start another topic.  The writing forum tends to be a little dead for my taste and I wouldn't mind seeing it liven up.

I'm designing and writing a game right now that started as a short story.  The decision to make it a game instead felt like a terrible idea because, no, I don't think what works in one medium can work in another.  At least not unchanged.

It took me a while to design a system of mechanics that would work well for telling this story -- you're not in a hurry, there isn't any combat, there aren't dialogue trees, you aren't solving puzzles.  I made a system of mechanics that serve the kind of story I want to communicate and the emotions I want to evoke -- they are custom-made for their purpose.  However, even the perfect set of mechanics would be incapable of telling this story unchanged.

The narrative has reshaped itself in response to the game design as it has developed.  I observe that this would not have been possible had the story been more complete.  The game and story develop together so as to be intimate with one another.  The inseparability of mechanics and narrative is a measure of that intimacy, and should be bidirectional.  So I've been challenging myself with questions like -- Would this story work without being a game?  Would it work without these mechanics?  Would these mechanics work for a different kind of story?  Would they work for a different story?  Each of these is something I hope to answer in the negative, and each is a greater challenge than the last.  It is my hope to achieve at least the first three; the fourth challenges my sensibilities as a programmer and eludes my understanding.

The ideal result would be a deep and intimate cohesiveness.  To play the game and to learn the story would be one and the same in the mind of the player.  I believe this is possible.


...

The ultimate measure of my success will be this:  Someone must make a film adaptation of my game, and it must be awful.