[IMPORTANT LINKS:]

The 4th Wall



What lies beyond The 4th Wall?

The 4th Wall is a hard game to classify, but if you put a gun to my head I'd probably say "Abstract Horror Puzzler". This game is a major upgrade to a prior version of this game that is available for free, this new version having roughly 200% more content and improved graphics.

There is a trial version for PC and XBOX, and the full game costs $1 USD / 80 MSP. If you don't feel like spending money, you can download the full original version of the game free (less content / features, worse graphics).

IMPORTANT LINKS:

Game Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAOivdS_agM
PC Demo: http://gzstorm.com/the-4th-wall/The%204th%20Wall%20Demo%20Setup.exe

PC Purchase: http://indievania.com/games/4th-wall
XBOX Purchase: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/The-4th-Wall/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550ba6

PC Original Version (50% less content, unpolished, worse graphics): http://gzstorm.com/downloads/The4thWall.zip

C.O.Q. (Commonly Occurring Queries)

Q: How many "benjamins" will this set me back?
A: $1 USD on PC, 80 MSP on XBOX (roughly $1 USD).

Q: I do not have money / do not want to buy game / am named Jerry. What do you have to say about this?
A: There is a free demo of the game on both PC and XBOX. You can also get the full old version of the game free, which represents the basic game concept but has less content and is not very polished.

Q: What the hell is the original version?
A: The original version in the game was made in under a week as an experiment to see what people thought of the concept. Reception was pretty positive so I went ahead and made this new version with greatly upgraded features.

Since this is the closest thing to a 7DFPS megathread here, I guess I'll just post what I did:

http://gzstorm.com/the-4th-wall/download.php

It's probably best described as an abstract horror puzzle game.

Screenshot:



Some background: For some reason I did this project before 7DFPS started, I'm not sure why, because I didn't even remember the competition was going to start soon and kind of did this on a whim. In fact, I probably couldn't have participated in 7DFPS's official time anyway because my cooler died and took my computer out of commission during it. I very rarely do 3D games, but this was fun to do and it took 3-4 days to complete.

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COQs (COMMONLY OCCURRING QUERIES)

Q: will brain damage occur from playing game
A: possible / maybe / perhaps / mayhap / parshcatuche

Q: THIS GAME OFFENDS NMY RELIGFIon and murdered my family!!!!!!!
A: i am sorry please do not pursue legal action

Q: where do i send the bomb
A: http://gzstorm.com to blow up website or [email protected] to send virus

Q: norton antivirus 98 edition light version detect vidiot game as virus is it safe
A: play at you own risk

Q: do you want to meet gods match for you ? gor to christianmingle.com god will select your partenr IT IS NOT COMPUTER ALGORITHM SELECTING IT IS GOD
A: alright

Q: "how to afford vidiot game"
A: sell kideny on black market

Q: bad game or worst game ?
A: speak englishc you son of a b8tch

Q: buy bitcoin
A: ? ? ?

there are many such tools -- this one is probably the best: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=290449

I've seen and heard of these many times but never actually used them before. Have you ever used them for your games? These always seemed like something for beginning GM users to me, but they seem like they could be useful for anyone using GM.

If you externalize your level data (ie. using your own editor) this would just be a matter of reading the first however many segments of data from the next / previous room. If you are using the GM editor, you can get the object data by running a loop through all rooms in game using a persistent object. Then store the data and read from that to make the extra segments. You only need to do this once when your levels are finalized or updating, so the actual player would simply have the text files with the room data.

As mentioned by a lot of posters already, there's great graphics, presentation, and atmosphere here. Signed up for the newsletter, looking forward to more updates and a demo.

I didn't encounter any glitches or problems with the game myself. I'm guessing I got lucky, because it seems like quite a few people had random glitches. I played it on the website of the game, not on Newgrounds, if that makes a difference.

I played it in one session and I think it took a little over an hour to beat the game. There's just a ton of effort put into this, not only in terms of the sheer amount of content, but there's a extremely high presentation value as well. I'd say all around it's a really solid game, but there's 2 issues I have.

The first being, because this is an NES tribute, you get NES gameplay. It's not necessarily bad in that respect, but it means even with the gameplay switch ups you are generally playing really simple stuff.

The second issue has to do with being too familiar, I played most of the games to death and this intensified the first point. Playing Quickman's stage, or Zelda for instance, it got more repetitive for me faster because I've played this already numerous times.

These are obviously two things the game deliberately went for, so this is more to do with my taste and prior experiences playing these games to death.

This is still a game that everyone should not hesitate to check out.

Allow me to rephrase, the original question was solved with no disagreement from any of the members here. Credit was given.

You've made all the points you want to make and so have I. It's left to anyone reading this to make their own conclusions.

I have severe disagreements with your interpretation of the law and relevance of your points to the members of this forum. I don't think it's helpful to anyone, much in the same way you believe I give bad legal advice. There's no reason to go further because this topic isn't about the additional points added (ie. patents) and the original question was answered with no disagreement from any of the members here.

The one thing we both agree on is that you should contact a lawyer for legal advice.

This is horrible, horrible advice. On the first point, this is how software patents work. The most obvious way of coding a "thing" might be patented, leading to others infringing on it by accident. Depending on the algorithm used, it may require significant changes. Second, you can't just copy and paste someone else's code because its "partial use". That is just blatant infringement.
Its true even if you did, no one would probably find out and/or your game wouldn't be significant enough to make a big deal of it over, but it is still wrong. There is nothing "good faith" about taking someone else's work because you are lazy.

It's practical advice that applies to the members of this forum.

- As we speak the very idea of software patents is being debated and their actual usefulness is questionable.

- Software patents are almost exclusively at the enterprise level due to how expensive and difficult it is to obtain an effective patent.

- You won't find patented code by accident and I'd imagine almost none exists at the indie games level.

Unless you are making millions of dollars off some grand software you made, you won't encounter this. Even then, you'll still may get sued even without infringement because this is what big companies do to destroy competitors.

If you think someone is lazy because they copy code, then I guess we are all very lazy because the grand majority of all knowledge is taking other peoples word for truth, or as you would say, copying. You also seem to forget that a large chunk of programming is implementation, as copied code is nothing without how it's implemented, much in the same way a hammer can be used for more than just hitting nails.

Nope, this is absolutely not true.

It may be the case that it won't be noticed, or that if it is noticed it will be overlooked, but that's not the same as being legal.

Also, if a function is short enough for your argument to apply then it shouldn't be much trouble to just rewrite it, so there's really no excuse.

A license does not automatically uphold simply because the guy who wrote the license says any possible use of the code must follow the license. Much in the same way some EULA's are not considered to be legally valid. You're free to have your opinion on if it's legal or not, but you yourself even agree it won't be enforced.

It's common knowledge programmers borrow code. The concept that you should have to rewrite the code regardless makes no sense because all you are doing is fooling yourself. If you want to rewrite the code to suit your software better, great, but the idea that you should have to rewrite it is pointless if the code ends up being effectively the same.

If a member here asks for help, and someone provides code, does that mean they have to credit the person who helped them? What if, when a solution is provided, the user stipulates that credit must be given if they use the code? Then the person asking for help is forced to restructure code. Since it was derived from the solution, does that mean they still have to give credit anyway? What about the guy who wrote the code for the solution, what if his solution was identical to code someone else wrote earlier?

Forget that though, just continue to say I'm giving bad advice when none of what you are saying has any relevance here.

That is some bad advice.

There are two things you need to find out before you can use the code:
1) What is the license on the code?  Does it permit you to use the code?  Does it force licensing upon you?  What do you have to do to use the code (i.e. attribute the code, release your code, etc)?
2) Is there a patent on the code?  If there is, you will have to work out royalties with the patent holder.

In your case, I'm guessing the answer is that you can use the code with no/minimal fuss, but you should do your due diligence.

2 can be even stickier, because the patent might cover your own individually derived code even if you never used the other code.

It's not bad advice. The points you bring up don't apply to partial use.

First, the idea of patented code you present of where you write code completely different yet it is owned by the patent holder is obscene. I can't think of any realistic example of where someone would encounter this, beyond how it goes completely against the progression of programming.

Second, the license goes out the window when it's partial use. A debate can be made as to how much use of the code would require you to follow the license, and that's what this is about. As someone who has used Matt's engine as a whole and credited him, I know the code he's talking about and I wouldn't credit for such a small amount of code, but it's perfectly fine to do so.

Adding to that, I've never seen anyone exclusively accused of code theft. Identifying stolen code is nearly impossible, damages are impossible to determine, and it's not worth going after someone over it (or even possible for most indies). This part of programming is left to good faith alone.

I don't see a problem with this. There's a lot of things in programming that can only be done a certain way, or done in a manner which can be written several ways but essentially is the same. Think sorting algorithms, it's unlikely you'll make your own that would be effective. It's commonplace for programmers to "borrow" code.

The proper etiquette seems to be that any people who have helped the project substantially should be mentioned in the credits. If you gained a lot of knowledge from someone, be it by some source code they've put out there or just general helpfulness, just chuck their name in the credits somewhere. I'd say this is largely a personal thing. For instance, I put Mark Overmars (the creator of game maker) in quite a few of my game credits. Obviously, this is not required, but something I wanted to do.

There's the obvious exception if, as you have mentioned, you use something whole and credit is requested from the author. At the same time, if an author requests credit for something like 3 lines of code, then I wouldn't include them unless there were other instances where I used this authors help. In general though, people only ask for credit on substantial contributions.

There's 2 drawbacks I see with the internal save system:

1. You cannot retrieve data manually from the save file. Meaning if you want to display save information like a Zelda game would where you can see how many hearts you have / other info, you'd need to either use a custom save system or create an additional file when using the GM save function to store all that fancy stuff (hacky, but works).

2. It's not compatible with later versions of your game. If you release an update to fix bugs or add more content it won't work properly with the new version.

If you don't care about that stuff, go with the internal system. It works well and is easy to implement.

In regards to making a custom system, essentially what you need to do is save all values that need to be stored. As mentioned earlier, things like upgrades, player position, and so on. To save the coins, what I'd do is create 2 2D arrays and a counting array for every room to keep track of all gathered coins. When you collect a coin, it adds the xstart and ystart to the 2 2d arrays, specifying the room as the first index. Like so:

global.coinX[room, global.coinCount[room]] = xstart;
global.coinY[room, global.coinCount[room]] = ystart;
global.coinCount[room] += 1;

Rooms are actually just numbers, this is why you can pass it as an index. You can also make a script to handle this so it's less code and more neat, passing the room, and the xstart and ystart. Also, you'll want to initialize the first few hundred or so global.coinCount array indexes to 0 so your counters work. You then just save those arrays to your text file.

Then, every time you load a room you just cycle through this list and delete all coins at those positions in the room.

Those are some really cool looking roguelikes on that list. Haven't heard of about half of them, I'll probably check out a few later.

I went through the table after talking to them, so it was a cinema action. Basically, I'd talk to them, and for some reason the game rearranged my characters so that Corvallis got stuck in the table, and then the conversation played out. With the guy by Mouth Wreckers, I went through the wall instead and was on the opposite side of the collision boundary.

By the way, when I got the glitch where you can play after the demo length by skipping in Corvallis' scenario, I played for about 20 minutes just looking around and the game seems pretty big. Do you have a map of the game world? Might be a good idea to make one that the player can access. Beyond that, the game seems big enough to justify a map and I think maps are generally pretty cool to have.