I've been unable to find any beehives so far. Underground jungles are so damn hard to traverse...

...my posts in this thread have been poorly thought out. Apologies for coming across as a selfish ignoramus. I remember reading an article earlier today saying that prison employees and certain others would be required to continue working, but wouldn't necessarily be paid...that sounds like a sure recipe for disaster if this continues for more than a few days.

Well, I'll just say that it is nice that you have privilege of shrugging something like this off, but it's a pretty self-centered position.

No one else I know is affected by it either. I'd care if they were, but I don't go out of my way to look for reasons to be indignant about this sort of thing. Why specifically does it matter to you?

Our government is pretty terrible, but it doesn't affect everyday life too heavily. I usually just ignore this stuff for the most part.

Forum Issues (subforum of Townhall) is probably the place for this. It might get buried here among all the game announcement noise...

btw (unrelated to your post) i'm bothered by this idea im seeing expressed sometimes that short & hard games use difficulty as "padding" and that long & easy is somehow the "superior" model & is a sign of how much videogame design has "evolved"

I may have accidentally implied this. While I suspect that some developers back in the day might have felt the need to make their games harder to pad them out, in most cases doing so only made the game better. This is pure speculation, and I don't know how often it happened, if at all.

I could see an argument for long & easy being a sign of evolution, in the sense of things getting worse in order to get better. You could think of it as an intermediate step along the path to long & hard (teehee). Even some mainstream games are starting to realize that long & easy isn't the best way to go. The Last of Us is an interesting example; I remember reading in an interview that said clickers weren't always a one-hit instant death, but the developers weren't seeing players using the stealth tactics they were provided. The change was made, and the game is much harder and better for it.

It's beautiful. So much new stuff it's mind-boggling, and I've only scratched the surface. This one will keep me occupied for a while!

Terraria 1.2 is AMAZING. The amount of new stuff is mind-boggling. It's like a totally new game.

...and I suck horribly at it. Did it get harder?

if it's any consolation, I get a lot of comparisons of my art and craft to terraria, a game I haven't played and that I think has very bad art.

Terraria doesn't make a great first impression, but if you play it and see things in motion you might change your mind. There's a lot of beauty in the environments, even if the character art is somewhat lackluster.

Any thoughts why? A counter culture movement against "hand holding" games?

Probably something like that. Speaking for myself, I played a lot of games when I was a kid and thought they were perfectly fine without hand holding. As I got older and hand holding became more prevalent, I started getting more aware of and more annoyed by it. Now that I'm developing games of my own, I have the baggage of that experience and make considerations for it. This might be a matter of other developers around the same age experiencing the same thing.

And how these modern difficult games differ from old retro titles?

Games of the past had two reasons for difficulty that aren't really applicable today: The need to extract quarters from arcade machine players, and the need to elongate gameplay by other means than having more game content, due to very limited storage capacity of the hardware of the time. With arcades all but dead and storage capacity many orders of magnitude higher, newer games can make difficulty purely a game design consideration (presumably with a little bit of marketing thrown in too for Demon's Souls and such).

Spelunky milestone reached: Hell cleared during a daily challenge. /flex

Going to be playing Terraria 1.2 in a few days. I can hardly wait.

There are 4 buttons on the grip you can use at once so I am not sure why you focus so much on circle pad buttons for that particular matter.

Ah, didn't think of using those. I suppose that's a possible solution.

Tommy's analysis was a good read. It sounds to me like the controller would work fine for Super Meat Boy with the modifications he suggested, but I still have concerns for Spelunky. If the right circle pad is set up to act like four face buttons, what does it feel like to press two buttons at once (for example, ascending with the jetpack and throwing a bomb at the same time)? There need to be distinctive, separate clicks for each button pressed, and if the entire pad is one physical button, I'm worried it won't feel good to press both the bottom and the right side of it at once. Haptic feedback might help, but I'd have to feel it to know how well it actually works. My suspicion is not well enough.

All that said, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to use completely different controllers for different games. It'll cost a bit more and you'll have some extra clutter around your house, but the experience will be better than trying to use a general purpose controller for everything.

It's hard to be sure without actually holding the thing, but that looks pretty unusable to me. Seems like it's made for a very narrow range of control schemes. As long as I can use a real gamepad for the games that work with them on the PC, I guess it's fine.

Do you mind if I ever end up PMing you later down the road if I ever need advise again?

Not at all! Happy to help in any way I can.

Am I reading you correctly?

Yep!

If so do you think I should really be starting off with my favorite (and most do-able) idea?

Probably not, honestly. There's a tough balance here, because you need a project that you care about enough to finish, but not so much that it'll be crushing if it fails. It's pretty hard to get a feel for the scope of a game project until you've completed one, so what is important is that it's something very small.

The first game I released was done for a 3-month game dev contest; it was a fairly basic 2D platformer, which I was able to get done pretty satisfactorily in time. The big thing that helped me focus was having a structure and a deadline. There was also a community aspect since I could talk to a lot of other developers who were in the competition alongside me, and we'd help each other out with ideas, testing, small code problems, and moral support. There was a larger project that I'd been working on outside the contest, and after having completed the platform game, I realized that it was way too ambitious. Completing a small game will give you some priceless experience that lets you gradually work your way up to something bigger, and possibly get to your dream project someday. You just can't take too many shortcuts, or you'll get stuck.

I think you have a lot of good potential. Looking forward to playing your games!

Or just start work, chronicle it, and note that you would love to have people work on it with you. If someone actually wants to join you on your quest and is inspired by your superawesomemagical ideas, they will.

Don't let the first part of this post fool you, this is sound advice. Game design is a field where the supply far outpaces demand, meaning there are many more aspiring game designers than there are other team members who feel they need a dedicated person for design. If you're already a well-known game designer with some notable titles already shipped, you'd probably be able to attract a competent team of people. With no history of game releases, unless you have some amazing blind luck or offer money up front, getting competent people to work with you is likely to be impossible.

Taking a C++ course is a great step in the right direction! The way to prove that you know what you're doing is to do the project yourself and show people. You may have to cut the scope back a lot for this to be possible, but it's the way forward. If you're waiting for a team to form before doing the project, you'll likely be waiting forever. I've seen it happen over and over; this is a remarkably common pattern. Almost every game developer starts this way.

If it helps, you don't have to be the best programmer, artist, musician, writer, sound designer, etc. to make a game where your design really shines. An unpolished game with a good enough design will still stand out. As long as you gain some basic competence in the other necessary areas, you'll do fine; just adjust your expectations accordingly.

I tried to install only SDL2.Framework and SDL2_image.Framework, still dont work.

Help us help you: http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html

I'm grumpy cause commandline video/audio converters tend to have horribly stupid interfaces and don't do as they should.

In case you're talking about ffmpeg, I had a similar issue a while back, and found the CLI pretty much impenetrable until I read these two pages: http://rodrigopolo.com/ffmpeg/cheats.php http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/277807-Useful-FFmpeg-Syntax-Examples

Art can be excruciatingly slow to learn, but is also highly rewarding. Stick with it, it'll be good!