You have to go to the lectures? Here, we can just skip the lectures and learn the needed stuff from PDF slides for the exams :D

I've had a professor take attendance and drop people's final grade if they had a lot of absences.

Also one of my profs right now gives us quizzes every single day to make sure we come to class. 

Not always the right idea. It's really cheap to register a business, like cheaper than getting a T shirt. It lets people quit their day jobs (if there's a salary). It gives accountability to everyone involved... which is probably the biggest reason to do so.

Don't do a LLC yet, it's a bunch of overhead (both time and money) for almost no gain.

Just a standard enterprise with a partnership agreement is good enough. There's overhead there too, but little more than keeping a domain name.

Cheaper than a T-Shirt? Must be nice to live where you are Here in the US I spent about $250 to get setup with an LLC, and the yearly cost is about $200. Honestly, that's still pretty damn cheap. I agree though that's an unnecessary cost this early if you don't have a finished game you're trying to sell.

Things get pretty messy once you want to start including things like joint ownership, IP, and taxes with an LLC too...

Discovered the library I'm using for mobile development has some crazy sound engine bugs, including making bad JNI calls on Android which cause the app to immediately crash on 2 of my 3 devices when trying to play sound, a memory leak when a sound is played multiple times, sound cannot be started from a position on Blackberry, and the inability to change the volume once the sound starts playing on any platform I've tried.

This is why people write their own engines

I don't like Java for desktop game development, mainly because having dependencies are annoying. Off the top of my head, Minecraft and Revenge of the Titans have been pretty successful going that route.

If you want to target mobile + desktop, Unity would be a good place to start. If you go with Java you could do Android + desktop.

I'd recommend LWJGL or something similar. At the very least, you should use a library which uses OpenGL so you can get hardware acceleration. There are a couple of other libraries you can use with Java for game development as well.

At the end of the day it's really just a developer's preference. If you don't ship Java with your game you might end up tearing out your hair with bugs or features that aren't supported between different Java versions. The same thing can happen if you expect the user to have the .NET redistributables, and even DirectX -- most of the big AAA titles come with them in the installer.

You need to have a physical location described as the place you do business. If you don't want to use your home address, you can't file as a home-based business. The solution would be to rent an office of some sort, but then you'd most likely have to get involved with all of the inspections bullshit.

OK I got the game and decided to write up a bunch of thoughts on it.

[ WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS TONS OF SPOILERS ]

Bugs demonstrated by pics:
There's a spot you can clip through the wall at the western point near the end of the game. This lets you skip like everything but the last room, maybe even the last room I forget: http://i.imgur.com/U28uktp.png

You also seem to have a filter that's not applied to the topmost pixel:
http://i.imgur.com/Zob9DM3.png

Bugs:

• When next to an object like a chest or enemy, you cannot jump
• Wolves can go up ladders? In fact most enemies ignore all collision types but walls which is kind of dumb -- they can go through gates, and chests etc.
• Where are two pyramids by the red cube that say the same thing, odd
• Wometimes jumping after you just died from falling will cause you to repeat the same death
• The wolves in the flamin hot area can clip through some of the walls
• Sometimes jumping between 2 areas with lots of floors you can fall down (e.g. getting the broom extend upgrade) you can actually get stuck in an infinite loop falling to your death. It seems that sometimes you can jump the moment you spawn so it's possible to make it back to solid ground without losing all life
• The wall boss's hand can push you into the wall
• There are a lot of small clipping bugs. E.g. bunnies walking on top of you, you and rats walking on top of the blue cubes

Thoughts on the game:
It was a pretty nice game. I had fun. It seemed a little odd that you required all cards to get to the endgame, but I guess you just didn't feel like going easy on the player. OK I've seen this one complained about a lot but, jumping fucking sucked. I mean the jumping itself was fine and dandy. Then you put in extremely challenging jumping puzzles, sometimes multiple in a row just screw with the player. Whyyyy. The story line was very confusing. I mean really. Most of what I was doing as a player didn't feel like I was progressing any  sort of story, other than collecting cards to get to the end. Some of the stuff was hilarious, some of the stuff was plain weird.

Graphics were lovely. Music and SFX seemed simple at times, but they both fit the game well. There were two songs in this game that made me orgasm, the main one being the song for the fields. Dear God.

Soo after the game. I've been hunting around and found a lot of interesting things... The extra cards I've found: orange guy, rank, killer ghosts, pyramids, suicidal things. Aside from the obvious challenges you've put a crapload of easter eggs in there. My favorite is the cube smokin' a joint.

It's hilarious that in those extra areas you disable the swap 

The items I've found: heart, golden dung [a binding of isaac tribute?] (do these require the swap or can they be found normally? I got the heart legitimately at least) OK now the heart chest was just disappointing, but it made me laugh.

Random screens from exploring with swap:
Smokey: http://i.imgur.com/MibqKDK.png
Gimme: http://i.imgur.com/EzDXYQq.png
Random doodle? Portal unreachable. http://i.imgur.com/O8iT5MZ.png
Random path that lead to nothing: http://i.imgur.com/tNqTpZj.png

I might try to do a much more thorough exploration later. I've got a good feel for how your mapping system works, so unless you tried REALLY hard to throw people off I think I'd be able to find most of the goods. Basically it seems that you always create a rectangular area of blank maps before working on an area. These seem to be created in rows/columns, so that if you walk on either axis and discover that the map became garbled, it's safe to stop looking for secrets in that direction. Well, that's still a theory I suppose.

That all depends on the scope of the project IMO. Saturated Dreamers is one hell of a project, so using scripts nearly exclusively makes sense for it. I use the execute code blocks a good bit myself, but my GM projects have all been relatively small and manageable. I mean, this goes in the same way that loading external sounds, images, and rooms would. I'd recommend doing it external for anything large, which is a shame really, but every tool has its limitations.

But yeah GM's windowing systems are abysmal.

Late last night I spent 2 and a half hours debugging why my code wasn't producing the expected result. It turns out, I have a variable named "nq" and also "nc" and I was using the wrong one. 

I'd say it's absolutely solely because they are HTML5. If all of my HTML5 games were made in Flash, they would be lucky to make $100 combined.

Why do HTML5 games make more money?  I can't really see any reason why...

He's just talking for the level of quality game that his current HTML5 games are. Would you expect even $100 for a flash game with no sound, music, or almost any visual effects? I'd be surprised if such a game got a bid.

I don't know what happened to the Playbook, but it's browser took a dive making GM's HTML5 worthless for me. Just today I created a simple animated e-card for my dad and it had a lot of graphical issues on the iPad. I imagine writing a complex game would require a ton of repetitive testing on device to sort out problems specific to the browsers. There seems to be sound in Android in 2.3+ and on the Playbook, but the support for mobile browsers for it is so different it's no surprise there's no sound -- what I found amazing was that there was still a seemingly large market for these games. You've piqued my interest at least, but I don't have the upfront money to afford ~2 more Android devices and an iPad that I'd think would be necessary to ensure uniform support.

It's really cool reading about a game made with HTML5 doing well.

Do you think your game would have monetized better if it was a Flash game? Or is the reason you're seeing this success is solely because it is HTML5?

I'd say it's absolutely solely because they are HTML5. If all of my HTML5 games were made in Flash, they would be lucky to make $100 combined.

Yeah really the two games I've seen you publish are very tiny. What devices do your publishers target? Seems like iOS and Android only. Compatibility issues also interest me, for instance your games have no sound, and GM's HTML5 is pretty damn slow.

Heh, normal elo is shared between 3's and 5's, so my brother who is around 1700-1800 in 3's queued with me in 5's and we got put with almost everyone in the game being 1800+. I just got to 1530 in solo last week heh. We lost.

Ha, I've been following your livejournal for months. I'd love to playtest it when it's ready.

a) Drawing outside the view and wondering why things aren't drawing
b) Ohgod why am I writing in C? What's a memory allocation? WHY ARE WEIRD THINGS HAPPENING

Trying to learn C by writing a game is a painful experience. Sidenote: I'm going to go setup version control for this project now, holy hell.

- pet peeve, but it's not "Gamemaker", it's "Game Maker" -- two separate words. "Gamemaker" is a completely different program, for the mac, not affiliated with GM or yoyo games

YYG are rebranding it as GameMaker. Check out their website, for example.