Wow, I didn't know Flash can load SVG, thx.

It can, and it can't. AS3 can't import SVGs the same way it can standard bitmap images. But the Flash IDE can import them. If you are using FlashDevelop, you can acquire similar functionality by embedding the SVGs in your project. If you want to load SVGs in a more dynamic fashion, you can embed them in a separate SWF, and then import that SWF into your project.

It's possible to do what you're describing. I've integrated vector graphics into Flixel games before. The problem is that actually doing this isn't always worth the trouble. You have to use Flash's draw function to render your vector graphics into a Bitmap object, and then integrate them into Flixel's standard raster blitting system.

The only situation I can imagine this being really beneficial is if you are trying to make a pixel-based Flixel game with scalable graphics for multiple resolutions. If all you want is to get vector drawings into a Flixel game, you would probably be better off exporting them as PNGs and assembling those PNGs into a sprite sheet.

why complicate things with Greenlight for those games?

Giving IGF finalists a free pass makes sense. They've already been critically appraised by some of the best in the business. At the same time, there is still a reason to have a program like Greenlight around. Greenlight gives the community and regular Steam players some degree of involvement in the process. It's not a bad idea, but certainly shouldn't be the ONLY idea for addressing the discoverability problem.

I imagine any finalists this year who are already on Greenlight will remove their games from Greenlight. They will already have Steam approval, so there's no more need for them to pitch their game on Greenlight.

But that's why they set up Greenlight...?

Yes, it is why they set up Greenlight. But Greenlight hasn't been the magic bullet that some people hoped it would be. And I don't think Valve ever expected to lean on Greenlight as the go-to solution for discovering new indie games.

Offering a deal like this to the IGF is a great solution for Valve. They will be able to offer distribution deals to a relatively fixed number of high-quality indie games every year. And they won't have to go out and discover any of them, the IGF will do that for them. There's no guarantee that any of the IGF finalists will actually opt to publish their games on Steam, or that any of those games will be published on Steam in that same year. All the same, it is a way for Valve to rope in a number of talented indie developers.

And of course, we all know the attitude that Valve often takes with talented indies and mod teams. You can expect several IGF finalists in the coming years to get "acquired" by Valve.

IGF finalists get a free pass for Steam

The Independent Game Festival has partnered with Valve to set another means of rewarding participants. All of the main competition finalists will automatically be given the option of publishing their titles on Steam. This is not a mandatory requirement, but it is a prime opportunity for bypassing the usual headache of getting "discovered" by Steam or going through Greenlight.

It makes sense from Valve's perspective. Curating the numerous game submissions they receive is a real problem for them. Coming to an agreement like this with the IGF will take much of that burden off their shoulders. The IGF is a critical competition run by developers. They are well suited for picking out some of the most promising and interesting titles. Since the IGF is not tied to a particular company, they are also considerably more impartial, and won't be accused of pushing a marketing agenda.

This is also a pretty good move for the IGF itself. One of the biggest issues its faced in recent years is the grant attached to its most prestigious award. There have been a lot of criticism of this practice, and the way that it has effected the judging process. A deal like this with valve should placate a lot of those critics. All finalists for the competition will now have an implicit publishing deal for Steam, if they choose to take advantage of it. This is a very real incentive for all of the participants. And having it applied to all of the finalists will lessen the disparity between prizes.

I think that it would improve this proposed bot considerably if it had strange and unexpected behavior.

If you had a "ghost" bot come in and start doing things that the player would normally do, that might be unexpected, but you will get over it really quickly. It would be far better for the bot to come into the game and start doing things the player would most likely not think of. This behavior could be menacing, or benign, or just random.

Perhaps one part of your game has a series of candles that aren't lit. Maybe when the ghost shows up, it just walks into that room, and starts lighting the candles, one at a time.

I think there is plenty of promise to adding a pre-defined "haunted" element to your game. Give it a try.

I tried it out last night on my laptop. It seems to work pretty well. Only a few of the games currently in my library are fully compatible. But I've always wanted to play Super Meat Boy on my big screen. I think I'll be able to get some decent use out of this.

The three most popular and open-source CMS systems are...

1. Wordpress
2. Joomla
3. Drupal

All three would be good solutions for turn-key website construction. They feature customizable theming, and most of the plugins that the average user would ever need. A decent understanding of PHP and/or CSS should be enough for most basic graphical customization.

Wordpress would probably be the easiest and most user-friendly. Joomla is the middle-of-the-road option. Drupal would be the most technically demanding, but would provide the most fine-tuning control, and would be better for custom-designed plugins and modules.

For a fairly basic presentation website, Wordpress would probably be fine for CMS software. Just make sure you handle the hosting yourself. Always better to have control of your own hosting.

Oh. Yeah, if you look at the gaming market in general that's true. But the market of casual/social/Wii/mobile games is quite separate from the market of... the rest of the games, however you'd call them.

Given the influence that casual/social/Wii/mobile games are having on the industry in general, I would argue that they are no longer separate. The people in charge of the money are certainly thinking of them in the same terms. And that means that sooner or later, developers will be forced to consider them as well. You also have to consider that a lot of independent developers have moved firmly into the mobile/casual/social space because of the opportunity those areas provide for smaller-scale development.

And there isn't much market-changing technological advancement in those, faster broadband maybe, which is related to the digital distribution you mention.

I'm surprised you would say that! The mobile space has been a hotbed of technological advancement. The power available in mobile phones and tablets is growing by leaps and bounds. The availability of more powerful and capable games has been a factor in the push for more capable smart-phones. And this trend is only going to continue. Less than a decade ago most phones could barely handle Tetris. Now they are running Unreal Engine 3.

Then there's also the incredible degree of hardware fragmentation in the mobile space. The game industry is splitting into even greater hardware diversity.

And on top of all of that, you can't just look at the hardware side of things either. Not when integrated on-line software features are becoming one of the primary selling points of some games.

This industry is a roiling cauldron of constant change.

I think things pretty much settled down about 10 years ago.

In between then and now we've seen the rise of the Wii as a dominant market console leader, the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, the explosion of casual-focused gaming, the development and increasing importance of digital distribution, and the rise in importance of social media in the gaming space. Now mobile gaming is fragmenting the game markets' hardware landscape more than ever before.

I'd say things are still very much in flux.

The game industry has been too short lived, and far too dynamic to clearly define any "ages" within it. In many ways, this industry is defined by its mutability. Everything is changing constantly, and there is no consistency or stability. Very few companies within this industry manage to cling to a coherent identity for more than a few years.

This is largely due to how closely the interactive entertainment industry has been tied to the technology that supports it, and the rapid development and advancement of that technology over the past few decades. Until things settle down and normalize a bit, we won't see any "ages" for the game industry.

There aren't really any direct comparisons between SDL and OpenGL. SDL is a general application framework, while OpenGL is a strictly rendering framework. There is also the fact that SDL has the coding hooks necessary to work hand-in-hand with OpenGL. So working with SDL and OpenGL isn't necessarily an "either-or" proposition.

If what you're referring to is their basic approach to rendering, that is easier to compare. SDL is focused primarily on 2D graphics using textures/pixels, while OpenGL is focused on 3D rendering. SDL would probably be better, and certainly easier, for 2D rendering and image manipulation. OpenGL is going to be much better for rendering 3D graphics and lighting. Some developers like to use OpenGL to render their main "scenes" and use SDL for rendering the 2D GUI and heads-up displays that appear on top of their scenes. It is also possible to use SDL to "construct" custom textures that are then stretched across 3D models in OpenGL.

A lot of people in this thread are making the exact same mistake that people that have never made computer games make. They think you just have to press a few buttons here and there to make a game. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just like making a movie is a lot more complicated than just pointing a camera at some people.

We're not talking about someone making "Avengers" in their garage. We're talking about someone recording their cat for five minutes with the camera on their cel-phone and putting it up on YouTube.

You want to make a full-length feature film with professional actors and crap-loads of special effects, of course its going to be difficult and challenging. Of course it is going to cost millions of dollars and take a good year. But then, if you want to make the latest Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Halo, or Call of Duty, you're going to need millions of dollars and hundreds of employees for that as well.

If you want to take a quick video in this day and age, you pull out your cel phone and point it at whatever your friends are doing. Congratulations, you have produced a video.

You want to make a game that eats up an equivalent amount of time, or is equally entertaining? Quite a bit more technical know-how is going to be necessary for that. A ten-minute video game takes far more skill and specialized knowledge than a comparable video.

Learning to program was a lot fucking easier than learning to draw. I taught myself the basics of programming within a couple of years and got lucky getting employed by a start-up making games in AS2.

Drawing I've been doing my entire life and I'm still struggling with it.

This is an example of what I was referring to.

Most programmers are not natural artists. Conversely, most artists are not natural programmers. For any one individual to encompass both disciplines capably is very rare. I've seen many artists and designers who balk at the very thought of coding. And I've seen many programmers who are lost when asked to illustrate.

But art, coding, music, layouts, and sound effects are all important to the overall experience in an interactive medium. I am always impressed when an individual manages to construct a complete game.

Out of all the things I have made, novels took the longest. It's not simply the time taken to write them but also redrafts and research. The idea that you can shit out a decent novel instantaneously is fucking ridiculous.

I don't think he meant that the writing of a novel itself is instantaneous, so much as getting everything ready for writing a novel is instantaneous. If you want to write a novel, what you really need is...

1. The ability to read and write.
2. $10 worth of office supplies from the nearest Staples
3. A dictionary, and possibly a thesaurus.

All of these elements together can usually be found in most peoples' homes already, and all of them cost less than $100 total. If you have any computer with an internet connection, it can replace the office supplies, the dictionary, and the thesaurus.

What you need to actually get cracking on a novel is immediately accessible. The novel itself can take 6-months to a year to right, depending. A light fiction novel for young adults is going to have considerably lower expectations than a historical dissertation. And of course, a lot of screenplays these days get crapped out in a week or less.

The real cost of game development is in learning. What you need to learn for most other creative disciplines pales in comparison to what you need to learn for game development. Game development encompasses so many fields that an ideal developer learns...everything they can. Everything from architecture to theatre to screenwriting to advanced mathematics. They all apply, and can be useful to game development.

Anyone who wants to create a game entirely on their own has to be ridiculously multi-talented.

Could the WiiU become the console of choice for indies? 

For established indie developers with a track record and industry connections? Sure.

For unknown individual developers and hobbyists? No.

Nintendo has no problem dealing with indie developers. They are simply leery of opening their platforms. While their SDKs and development hardware are fairly affordable and easy to work with, Nintendo maintains tight control over them. If you aren't already known within the industry, it will be very hard to get Nintendo's attention, or secure a development kit.

A better idea would be to pitch your idea to a company that already has a relationship with Nintendo. Even this would require some manner of capable prototype, but it would probably be a lot easier to get a hold of someone.

If you want to insure that your game will be easy to port to the Wii U, your best bet is to use Unity to develop it. Unity signed a deal with Nintendo to maintain compatibility for their engine on the Wii U. If your game is constructed in Unity, there is a good chance that porting it to the Wii U would be as painless a process as possible.

That said, there is no XBox Live Indie Channel for the Wii U e-shop. All indies currently being courted for Wii U development are well-known studios who have worked with Nintendo in the past. Development for the Wii U is still a closed system closely managed by Nintendo themselves. Targeting the Wii U exclusively as an indie is a bad idea at the moment. Better to make your own game, and drum up some popularity and recognition. With a few successful titles under your belt, Nintendo would be much more likely to take you seriously.

Sony's performance the last two generations isn't really a valid point of reference; last generation they had the best-selling console of all time (153.6 million total, Xbox had 24 million, Gamecube had 21.6 million, and Dreamcast had 10 million) and the generation before it they had the second best-selling console of all time (not counting handhelds: PSX sold 102.49 million against N64's 32.93 million, Saturn's 9.5 million and 3DO's 2 million).

This is exactly my point. The previous two console cycles helped to shape and define the current landscape of console gaming. And both of those cycles were completely overwhelmed by a single competitor. The current difference of 39% is minuscule by comparison. The PS2 outsold all of its competitors combined by almost 300%

Yes, it's true that the market has changed considerably since then. But that is part of why we have seen a much more evenly matched competition. The "game" of selling games has changed, and each of the competitors involved has learned how to sell their products effectively to their target audiences.

But there are still plenty of huge question marks for the future. A lot of the gaming-centric media seem convinced that the next Playstation and XBox are going to be released holiday 2013. But with no official announcements from either company, I find it unlikely that either will arrive on store shelves until holiday 2014. This could create a drastically extended and staggered console cycle, unlike any of the recent cycles from the past decade. How could this discrepancy effect the console market in coming years?

I picked one up at my local Walmart. Got the last one they had in stock. Because I was near the end of the line, I had to settle for a Basic Set. I picked up Nintendoland and Mario Wii U at Toys R Us. Haven't really gotten much of a chance to test it out yet, but I finished the basic set up.

i agree with moi, i think the console fanboy stuff and worrying about which company "wins" each generation is just hype / fuel to sell consoles

Actually, I wasn't trying to make a particular point. I was more interested in stirring up a conversation over the subject.

For me personally, I see this situation as a positive development. Healthy competition keeps companies on their toes, and drives down costs for the customer. A game industry with healthy, ongoing competition between three major competitors in the console space is great. I'm hoping we see a similar balance in mind-share in the comping console cycle. Better for all the competitors to have similar degrees of success and be forced to work hard for their slice of the pie.

The Wii is just shy of 100 mil according to wiki, so your numbers are really off (but the Wii has slowed down a lot and PS3/360 have at least another year of sorta-decent sales).

Even if taking that into account, we are still looking at a significantly different split. In the last two console cycles Sony walked away with commanding leads, while their competitors either bowed out or settled for a much smaller share. Even if the Wii ends up with a 10+ million edge over the PS3 and 360, it is still a much more even competition.

We've already addressed the difference in profit. It's common knowledge that Nintendo is sitting on a throne of money.