Figures.  Right when a security chief would have been useful, too.

It might be just the number of creepy unknowns in all of this have me spooked, but when I heard that a space-wrench was missing, all I could think was that I hope we don't have to play "space-clue" in real space-life.  You know, sit around some new body with its space-head staved in, and say things like "hmm.  I suspect it was [crewmember] that did it, in the space-foyer, with the space-wrench!"

I'm going to go back over our course logs, and see if I can coax any detail from the sensors on the anomaly the captain had is fly near.  The whole thing just seems like too much of a coincidence.  Captain: "Hey kids!  Lets fly by this strange space thing!  I wonder what it is?" ... later... "arrrrrr.  I be lacerated!"

I don't like this.  The fact that we have no answers means that we have no way of knowing if this is going to happen again.

Hey, security chief - is there any possibility we could have been boarded by something hostile without us noticing?  And if so, is there any way for us to track it down while it's on our ship?

Or anyone suspicious...

Ahh yeah.  That steering wheel?  I'm going to need that back soon, actually.

My point was more that the idea is not unprecedented.

Sadly, at this point, extremely few ideas are.

-Montoli

Course plotted, triple checked, and set, captain.  Looks like a milk run.

Fighting game with projectiles. bah. Have you never seen the Touhou fighting games?

Not that it's a bad idea, obviously. Those games are currently among my favorite games.

Personally, my complaint with those was that they were more on the fighting side than the bullet-dodging side.  There was some (non-official) one that I can't remember the name of, which looked closer to this, but the fighters seem more like projectile-heavy street-fighters than vs. shooters.

Adaptive Difficulty Adjustment (ADA)

Technical term makes it sound much better lol. Kinda remind me when I made my first visual novel and I didn't know how to program saving/loading so I call it a 'realistic path selection' feature

Heh.  Some of the old Touhou games even have that as an intentional option in the Options menu - Slowdown mode.  Makes the game go slower if there are lots of bullets on the screen.

Ah, I see. I used to make a bullet hell game in AS3 once but once the number of bullets hit 100 - 200 the fps starts to drop, but I was aiming at 60 FPS which is probably too high anyway D:. It was my first AS3 game so I'm pretty sure I didn't optimize stuffs enough for this kind of game. I didn't use vector graphic so that's probably another reason why it slows.

Yeah, I toyed with 60 fps as a target, but maintaining 60 looked like it would be a lot harder.  In the more exciting moments, it frequently dropped to 45-40 fps, even on my desktop.  (Which is a bit better than my laptop for specs.)  So I figured, let's set the framerate at a target that I can guaranteed will be rock solid.  30fps is still quite respectable, and if it stays there and doesn't waver, then excellent!

Yours seems to me much better that mine and I can't wait to play! :D

Well, you've got a new one that it looks like you're working on.  Which, based on the gameplay videos at least, is looking pretty polished and far along.  (I'm in abject envy of your art, and I love the concept!)

Nice!

As someone who has been spending a lot of time staring at bullet patterns lately, let me just say, I like your patterns a lot!  This looks like a lot of fun!

Right now, it runs at a solid 30fps (which is the target framerate) even on my 4-year-old laptop, so I'm generally happy with the performance.  (Disclaimer:  My laptop was a pretty decent machine 4 years ago, and is still not terrible.  It's quite capable of running TF2, LFD, if I don't mind turning the settings down a little...)

This has been my first project in ActionScript 3, (Before this I had only worked with AS2) and so far, I have to say, I've been pleasantly surprised by the performance improvements that Adobe has made.  It is worlds ahead of AS2 at least.

I can get it to slow down to 20fps if I enable Unicorn Mode and spam certain attacks, but I figure, Unicorn mode is sort of an unlockable bonus mode anyway, so if there are edge cases where unicorn mode causes slowdown, I'm not going to sweat it too much.

(Mostly I'm saved by the fact that all of my bullets have really really simple vector geometry, and so are fairly fast to render.  When they're all replaced with animating unicorns, they take slightly longer.  Not a huge amount longer, but enough that its noticeable if you're rendering a couple hundred of'em.

Bushido Blade was my favorite for this.  Get hit in the leg with a sword, and spend the rest of the match limping.  Get hit in the arm, and have to fight one-handed for a while.  Get hit in the face, and spend the rest of the game with an eye-patch.

It was neat!  Also, I don't think I ever made it to the end without bandages on the majority of my limbs, and only one eye...

I vote for mizukagex.

The style just looks much more organic.  Orchard's looks too much like "video game art" to me.  I mean, I realize this is art for a video game we're talking about, but it also looks like "art from an old 256-color, VGA Screen-Mode-12 video game.  Unless you're going for a specifically retro look.  (which I haven't been sure of, based on your trailers, but it didn't look like it, since you have alpha blended particles and such...)

With my sincerest apologies to Orchard-I, since it is still worlds above anything I could hope to make.  But really, I'm not a fan the "limited color palette + dithering" look.  So while I appreciate both, if I had to pick one, I'd go for the one that looks more like a painting.

Well, yeah. Movies, books, TV shows, comics, real life, toys, all sorts of things can be inspirational. From a gameplay design standpoint, it's tough to look at a movie though and use it to gain an understanding of what makes a level fun though, wouldn't you agree?

Actually, I disagree with this.  (Or at least - it may or may not be tough, but it's a very worthwhile goal)  There are game ideas all around us.  If you can look at something that is already fun to do, and distill it down to a fun game, then this is a wonderful skill.  Making games from things that are not games also tends to lead to far more original creations than making games from other things you play.  Consider things like metro rules of conduct.  Or even SimCity.  They are games that are basically what happened when someone said "I wonder if this non-game-thing I do sometimes could be represented as a game..."

Heck, Miyamoto's games frequently come from his non-gaming hobbies.  (Pikmin was when he started gardening.  Nintendogs was when he got a puppy.  WiiFit was when he started exercising.  Iwata has joked that he's going to have to start asking Miyamoto not to publicly mention his hobbies as part of his NDA...)  He has a talent to take things that he enjoys, and make a representation of these things that other people enjoy.  By most standards, his games are pretty good, too!

So yeah.  Don't be afraid to go do things that have nothing to do with games.  If your interest is games, it will find its way back into your game creation, one way or another.  And you'll probably have a more interesting game in the end than people who are getting their inspiration from existing games.

Nice!  I also want to throw my support into the ring for the "branching level paths, yay!" sentiment.  Yay!

Question:  Is the title (Onirius) a reference to the Oneiros/Oneiroi of Greek Mythology?  I realize this is a stupid nitpick, but I keep looking at the title and thinking it should be a reference, (given the obvious connection of dream game/mythological dream figure) and then thinking "if it's a reference, it looks misspelled, and should be 'Oneiros'"

Also:  Really digging the rainbow background on the map.  Bonus points if it animates!

We got two 4'x4' sheets of white panelling from Home Depot for like $14. We're still working on mounting them (having to get access to a power drill and a studfinder) but it's a heck of a lot cheaper than the commercial whiteboards.

Nice!  You're a bit more DIY than I was feeling.  I just bought the one pictured for $30 at Staples, and stuck it to the wall.  (Although as I recall, the process did, in fact, involve stud-sensors and power drills.)  (Protip:  The whiteboards at my local Staples were actually HALF the price for the equivalent whiteboard at Office Depot.  Crazy!  So comparison shopping pays off!)

I think that although they're often lumped together, you're actually talking about two completely separate mental processes here. One is the 'imagination' that takes words from a book and turns them into images in your head - basically following a formula to produce an idea. The other 'imagination' is that of actually writing a book - creating an entirely new idea.
In terms of videogames - the first kind of imagination comes into play when you look at    and imagine an actual Italian plumber. You're filling in the blanks and adding detail, but you're not creating anything from scratch.
The second kind of imagination would only apply to something like Gmod or Minecraft, where you're actively being creative.

Hmm.  That's an interesting (and good!) point you make.  I was largely focused on the first type.  ("visualization creativity")  Mostly because it was the only one I could think of someone complaining about.  (Books require more of it than gaems, etc.)

You're totally right though, many games require a whole different sort of creativity that is basically unique to games.  Things like Fantastic Contraption or Impossible Machine require creativity of a sort that (as far as I can think of) no other medium really requires.  ("Mechanical creativity")

i don't think games reduce imagination in children, if anything they increase it. the only thing i can think of that would reduce imagination would be a reduction of stimulus (repetitive chores, religious services, that sort of stuff). but children are pretty flexible, they can make anything imaginative. i remember taking a bunch of spare change and inventing a game of armies of heads vs tails using those coins.

Actually, you could easily argue that less stimulus = more imagination required, just because you have to provide more for yourself.  I mean, we're in danger here of having the argument derail if we try to quantify how much imagination game X required vs. game Y.  But I think you could certainly argue that as games become more sophisticated in their presentation, less imagination is required on the part of the user to experience them.

I'm deliberately staying away from making any claims of that making them "better" or "worse".  But in the same way that, say, a book requires more imagination to experience than a silent movie, which itself requires more imagination than a movie in an IMAX theater...  I think you could successfully argue that space invaders required more imagination than Halo.

I think a lot of it depends on the game, really.  Some games (especially interactive fiction) require a lot of imagination, where the user has to keep/provide a lot of the game-experience in their heads.  Other games pretty much provide everything for you on the screen, from stories, to high-resolution images of aliens for you to shoot.  Really depends on the game.


So - Summary:  Some games require more imagination than others.  Interactive fiction games > all.  Discuss! 

I think knowing what games have already tried is incredibly valuable.  As they say, "the clever man learns from his own mistakes, the wise man learns from the mistakes of others".

If nothing else, the more you've played, the more you can vet ideas quickly, since you can say "ok, this SOUNDS like a great idea on paper.... but game XXX did that, and it sucked and no one ever used it."  And hopefully you can then say "... hmm.  Why did no one ever use it?  Was the idea flawed, or was it just poorly implemented or overshadowed by other design choices?"  You have some perspective.  It's a great design tool!

That being said though, don't fall into the trap of forgetting that analyzing games is much more work than just playing them.  It's easy to justify to yourself "no, I'm not slacking off, I'm being productive by spending all weekend beating final fantasy XI and never going outside!"

Bottom line, while playing studying other peoples' games is a good way to learn design, an even better way is to actually make games of your own and see for yourself what is fun.

Your mileage may vary, but personally I find I get the most out of other peoples' games when I am thinking about making something similar.  If I'm making a tactics game, then going and playing Final Fantasy Tactics and Ogre Battle, etc, is extremely useful.  Ican look at game aspects and view them through the lens of improving my own game.  I find I get much less out of games if I just play them for fun as they come out.  I mean, they're fun, and if I'm lucky, maybe they might come up in some design discussion at some point, but otherwise they're largely just entertainment, and hard to justify as any kind of design lesson or productively spent time.

[B2 to D4]

Oh, right, B2 to D4

I second this!

I bet that was a cool moment though, where you looked at the number, and stared at it uncomprehendingly for a minute or two.

Here's to hoping it isn't a mixup!  :D