The movement was fine for me, it's a slower paced game and everything felt pretty smooth.  The only thing I think is too slow is ladder climbing speed. I played in fullscreen but as a quick fix it would be nice to allow for 2x (or 4x) size windowed mode for people that can't or don't want to play in fullscreen.

(I'm leaning toward "swarms")

Nice, everyone that entered LD48 #8 can resubmit to this :D.

Sounds cool. So a monthly theme for games with a small scope?  It might be a good idea to actually define what "finished" is with a full feature list.  This might help people with getting out qualified games and polish aspects in general.

http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/platform/jump.bmx - from Arne
and http://madgarden.googlepages.com/jumpy.zip from Madgarden. 

Simple demos that may have been written earlier and maybe not directly related to the game. Sorry if you misunderstood, I didn't want to make you think someone was coding ahead of you.

[...] or small apps demonstrating chunks of gameplay (seems like this has already happened) [...]

Buh? 

Nothing complex...  Someone had some jumping demo or something?

But maybe a tutorial breaking down how it's made sometime?  That could be applied to many languages.

That'd be very nice.
Aah... just a little source code? Puh-leeeease?

I don't care too much about a tutorial, there is plenty of stuff out there like that. Unless you're gonna do something amazing beyond "this is how you write a basic platformer."

I guess in the best case you could hook up Lua or something and allow for some scripting. People have a ton of whacky gameplay ideas, and with talk about each level being a minigame in its own right, you'll either have to code a ton of special behavior for everyone designing levels, or expose some of the game to people that want to add custom behaviors. Or you could just keep the project simple and keep out crazy ideas that require a lot of custom code outside of the core game mechanics.

In the worst case someone could end up writing another game in parrellel with the same art, or small apps demonstrating chunks of gameplay (seems like this has already happened), but that is against the spirit of the project and clearly won't scale beyond the initial stages of development.

Oh goodness no! 

I'm sure its not that bad . Without source us coder types feel left out.  Really I wouldn't do anything with it.  Although I'm in the minority for some reason I'm a source code junkie, just like to read it.

[Re: Panties and Silliness]

Re: Panties and Silliness

No reason why we can't have some pop culture references in there as secrets!  This game began as a homage to the platformer, and I think people would appreciate the video game references, at least.  It's also a game about a middle aged bald guy who's looking for his lost game collection... can't we have a little fun with the theme?  I don't think Arne is suggesting that we throw a big pair of ZOMG PANTIES on the title screen, is he?

I volunteer for any pantie related artwork. Maybe the game should be about a middle age bald guy who's looking for his lost pantie collection?

I know its been mentioned before, but just for clarification, we won't be getting source code for this game anytime soon, right? Once a build is out it might be useful for the community to have, even just to prototype game mechanics, make mods or port to other platforms.

I'll be there, but I waited too long to get an Indie Summit Pass  .  I'll still trying to figure out some "alternative" means to get in the Indie game summit (trading passes, sneaking in, bribing CAs, etc.) I definitely will find some way to make it to innovation in indie games and a few other sessions I wanted to check out.

Nice to see some processing fans.  I have a few processing games, but none of them are really "of note" (like any of my games.)  Another tool that looks really good is Unity 3D.  If you own a Mac you should definitely check this out.

It gets no love and is perhaps not ideal for game development, but I really like Processing. Because its Java based it might not be quite as newb friendly as basic or python and definitely isn't as easy as the graphical game makers.

The API is very straightforward and there are libraries for about everything you'd want to do.  Even if an existing processing library doesn't work you can fall back on Java APIs. The IDE will easily export crossplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) applications and applets complete with a web page. Kenta Cho used it for a handful of web games, I'm sure that gets some mileage around here.

Other not mentioned yet are the XNA framework and Flash, which I'm sure everyone knows about.

PoV, I've always been extremely envious of your game programming book library, it puts most bookstores to shame.  I thought my library was pretty impressive, but you easily have everything I have and much more .

I'm not working on games, but I've worked (and am still working on) a variety of mobile applications for Symbian for my day job. Currently I'm working on Symbian 9 devices (UIQ3 and Nokia series 60) and many of the quirks and restrictions seem to be improved.  Working on UIQ2 apps sucked.  The painful thing about writing a 3D software renderer for any of these devices is dealing with all the fixed point math.  Do you have a decent fixed point library or are you writing that yourself also?

The joys of mobile device programming. I've been working with Symbian on and off for almost 2 years now. Good luck with your Symbian adventures, you'll need it.  I'm sure you get through it eventually.

As you may know, this forum was kind of created as an alternative to the Indiegamer forums, which have devolved into a morass of uncreative ideas and "me too" type thinking.

Amen. Not to bash indiegamer, but its got to a point where people post games that are clearly not targetting the casual market but get the standard laundry list of casual game design tips.  The advice you get on indie gamer can help improve a game's accesibility, but at the same time simply doesn't work for a large variety of game types.  This is coming from a man that is somewhat of a casual games developer.

I figure if we start discussing what being "independent" means to us from the get-go, we can avoid that pitfall.

This was always a huge debate on indiegamer. Now it's at the point where whenever the topic comes up moderators lock the topic. Clearly financially independent (running a sucessful games business) won out over artistically independent (making the games you really want to make.) There is nothing wrong with that, people have to eat after all, but indiegamer clearly has alienated a certain group of developers.

  Actually, the idea of independence is very simple to me.  As long as you create something that is personally meaningful to you, you are an "independent" as far as I'm concerned.

I like this attitude. Great post Derek.  Hopefully Tigsource forums will end up as kind of an "anti-indiegamer" with more of a focus on games and game development than business and marketing.  Once again, there is nothing wrong with what indiegamer is (imo), its just very nice to have something different.