Your game is bad and you should feel bad.

No, Derek, your game is the one that is bad.

naw. his name joe

[The more names we have for games, the more chance we have to bring in outsiders that are turned off by "games".]

Comics > graphic novel
Games > digital drama?

Literature does have MANY name for types of works, it's also older and significantly have better "navigation" in the type of work you can find.

I think this is pretty dead on. Some people like to use "graphic novel" when talking about longform comics and that's fine. It might feel weird but i'm guessing that name had something to do with opening up the medium to a larger audience.

The more names we have for games, the more chance we have to bring in outsiders that are turned off by "games". That's why "graphic novels" garnered more respect from people outside the comic-book world. At least to some degree. If some artsy types get involved in games because they hear about this emerging "interactive art" movement, then that's great! Let's add that to the pile. Every little bit helps.

I'm not going to stop calling them games, and having multiple names doesn't mean any of us has to decide on one. It simply offers more points of entry for more people. Too much fatalism going on here. The world is a messy place with lots of gray area and lots of names for the same thing.

[One thing though...]

Just saw it.

Good movie all in all. I think the environments were pretty godamn magical; on par with Princess Mononoke. Everything else was well done. Standard and safe but very well done.

One thing though... I don't see what all the fuss is about with the 3D. I'm talking about the stereoscopic 3D (not the 3D modeling/animation). I think all-in-all I'd wished I would have seen it in 2D for the first time. Often I felt like i had a cross-eyes headache and it detracted from focusing on the environment/story. I mean even if it didn't for some folks (or maybe most) but what does it really add? Immersion? Really? C'mon, it's film on a screen. No matter how good the polarized bullshit is, it's just bells and whistles.

I don't see it taking off and I really hope it doesn't...

unban superjoe

Quoting for truth and great righteousness.

i miss him.

unbanVote++

That's true. 

But what is also true is that if the only things you have to offer are crummy ideas and money, that's not gonna buy you a lot of street cred.  Any jerkbag with ten thousand bucks can pay some poor starving artist and coder to make a Galaga clone for them.

But of course, with crummy ideas you aren't worth a dime, but a guy with just good ideas can contribute a lot to the team. Especially in level design; Level design is right up in the ideas department.

@deadeye: agreed! with no stake in the actual work game dev becomes incredibly disconnected and lifeless.

@kyn: Level design is a lot of work work work. It's probably the hardest part of game development I've encountered and possibly the most time consuming. A "designer" is not just an "idea man", they are workhorses. Of course if a designer thinks they can get by with just doing ideas and docs well that's another thing entirely.

grrrr "Google Chrome extensions are not supported by Mac."

i'll subscribe with a couple really simple and cheap ramen mods.

1. add string cheese.
DIRECTIONS:
cube up string cheese (or mozzarella) and add in to the ramen just after it's cooked for stringy consistency. If you like them to keep the chunky integrity, let the ramen cool a bit first.

2. special sauce. this one is a bit more involved but since i have all this stuff for chinese food, it's pretty simple...
INGREDIENTS:
1pkg ramen
1-2 T xiaoshing wine (sub out rice wine vinegar, mirin and other asian-style acids)
1-2 T soy sauce
a few drops of sesame oil
1-2 T peanut oil
2-3 T sweet pepper sauce (usually advertised as "for chicken") you could use sugar + cock sauce (sriracha) if you don't have this.
red pepper flakes
extravagant options:
a few cloves of fresh chopped garlic
whole red peppers (dried) to sub for pepper flakes
2 tsp. fresh ginger (or paste)
you could sub garlic salt/powered ginger if you have those and are poor.
DIRECTIONS:
Heat wok/skillet and boil water.
When the water is boiling add your peanut oil to the wok/skillet.
Cook the ramen in boiling water or however you do it, but make sure to just get the noodles soft enough. This is a feel thing.
Leave the noodles in the strainer/collander and add in the red peppers, toss for 30 seconds, then add the garlic for another 30.
Add in ginger last second (if you have it), then toss in the noodles to stir-fry.
Continue to coat the noodles and cook them in this manner for a couple minutes.
Once noodles look a little firmer/tastier (again a feel thing) add in your sesame oil, soy sauce, xiaoshing and sweet pepper sauce.
Make sure to taste the noodles as you do this, these measurements are very rough and I change the proportions everytime i do it.
Continue to stir-fry for another couple minutes, adding any fresh vegetables/h-boiled eggs you would like.

Now eat that shit, it's good.

[Here's why:]

You want to know why the flytrap graphics are "meh"?

Here's why:

1. Overall they lack production value and are quite obviously done by an amateur or "beginner". Take a look at the "game box". The first graphics anyone sees, before they even decide to purchase the game or not are really poorly done. In fact, compared to the screenshots I've seen this is the worst of the lot. Not a great way to start a potential customer out when trying to imbue them with faith in your product.

1a. Aliasing and a "cut-out" look. Check out the character in the foreground. All around the edges of his body you can see inconsistent jagged pixels, sometimes black, sometimes not. It looks like a character cut out of construction paper rather than a real alien in a real world. Right off the bat you've jarred people out of the game-world with this poor attention to craft.
How-to Fix: Take more time to cut out the character, think about the edge of the character as a 3D object and use line thickness and even slight shading in the line to make the character pop out of the foreground in a good three dimensional way rather than prop him up flat-looking.

1b. Shading and Volume. Especially evident in the feet or "roots" of the character there is little to no volumetric shading which only adds to the problem of the character feeling like he's a 2D piece of paper. If that's the aesthetic you were going for, well that's alright, but it wasn't and that's clear. You attempted a realistic, slightly stylized approach and fell in between the cracks. More on that later.
How-to Fix: I'm guessing this was a problem that manifested early in the drawing process and it's a common mistake for inexperienced artists. It's important to start with large shapes, go from general to specific details and try and bring the character/drawing into focus together so no one element gets lost or exaggerated. By starting with the veins of the roots you painted yourself into a corner that you couldn't find your way out of so doing large swathes of shading over top of that probably felt like you would be losing detail, but it's a loss you should have afforded yourself for the good of the overall drawing.

1c. Color. You're using black to shade. While this can be effective, for the style that you've chosen (color BG as well) dark shades have a dirty feel over top of vibrant colors like the green of the dude's skin. Besides, even in the real world the sky is made of thousands of subtle changes in hue, so be aware of those. Nothing is ever one shade of anything.
How-to Fix: Try shading with neighboring colors of the color wheel and do some testing with tertiary colors to see how you can make something a little livelier by shading with HUE rather than BRIGHTNESS.

1d. Pose and Anatomy. Now, there's not skeletal record of whatever that thing is but your lack of knowledge and study on humanoid form as well as dynamic structure falls short of what it looks like you aimed for. To simply have a character standing there doesn't give off enough of the personality that you probably want to convey about your game. Is this a game about an alien with a squirt gun that stands there? Nobody really knows and this image doesn't help that.
How-to Fix: Apart from endlessly studying human anatomy you'd do well to do some sketches of the character in small thumbnail form. Even get a friend to pose and take pictures and use those to get a more interesting, dynamic pose.

1e.  Composition. This plays into the boring pose of the alien, but also there's not much else going on in the picture. It's just a guy on a barren landscape with some haphazardly placed text.

2. Poor Art Direction. This is my final point, as I am running late to the gym but overall the whole thing looks very disjointed without much focus. Choosing and developing an art style is the single most important visual choice you can make for you game. It communicates a vast amount of things to the player. Here, it seems that was completely circumvented in favor of the age-old amateur mistake of "whatever, i'll just start doing stuff." That's fine for the most part, but you declare this game to be a great game, so i'm holding it to those standards. Even sub-par games usually involve a system for creating a visual style whether it be through restraint, innovation or conscious will.
How-to Fix: Spend a good chunk of pre-production doing sketches and research. Play around when you have the freedom to think without the restraint of looming deadlines and feasibility.

Ok, I could go further, and maybe i'll edit this later, but I hope that helps shed some light on the "why".

Hey Adam,

I think what CAsinclair was getting at was that there's a lot more that makes a game successful than "no flaws". To be honest, I'm not sure what that even means: "no flaws". What's erupted due to your outrage over your game's troubles isn't exactly constructive and I don't think anyone here means you any harm.

If you could manage to take a step back from all of this and maybe recognize a few things about the shitty part of being creative.

1. When you're starting out, you're going to make terrible shit. It will be awful. People might tell you it's ok to avoid embarrassing you (the nice-n-easy way out) or just because they think you could use some encouragement. When you bring it into the public, that's when reality hits and it's always tough in the beginning. Do your best to weather the storm and if you have to lash out, try to do so privately or amongst close friends/family. Vent. It's healthy.

The one saving grace in all this is that hopefully there's some part of you that knows you can do a lot better. Listen to that and follow it.

2. Criticism might sting at first, but nobody got anywhere worthwhile by avoiding pain their whole life. Take criticism in all it's forms as positive thing, even when it's not. This whole thread is filled with what looks like insults to you and your game that you worked so hard on, but many of them can be turned into constructive ways to inform your future games so that they may be received better.

3. Revisit the reason you're doing this as often as possible. You've mentioned a few times around various sites that the game was "developed to reach a wide audience" (not verbatim) and such. It feels to me that perhaps your motives for game development are primarily monetary. That's probably a crass generalization from little-to-no-information but I think you'd do well to take stock of what's happened with FlyTrap, where you are as a developer and where you want to be.

I hope that helped. Shit gets rough, believe me, I know. Most people don't make it through.

is it only available in retail? where's the big "purchase" button? google search came up empty-handed as well.

I heard word earlier today that one of our own, Florian Hufsky (aka oneup), passed away recently. It's gut-wrenching to know a productive member of our community is no longer with us. I never met him, but I certainly remember his work. Puit Wars especially. http://72dpiarmy.com & http://geeq.at

I'm sure many of us have some things to share about Florian, his games and what they meant to us. I started this thread so we could all remember those moments and honor his memory. I was personally inspired after playing Puit Wars by its charm and lovingly hand-crafted pixels and it probably had a lot to do with the choice to make liferaft a chunky pixeled game.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends. I'll always remember his work and the joy they carried.

Oh yea, I put up some screenshots and stuff, get 'em here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aeiowu/sets/72157622871599121/

ALSO: We were recently informed Tetraform is a sweet smelling substance that can eat your liver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tetrachlorid so please don't be alarmed, this is only a game and cannot harm your liver or other internal organs.

Carry on.

[Borderlands]

I am loving Borderlands, Spelunky is definitely up there and I'll give a nod to Altitude.

looks great.

had an interesting experience at your website actually. At first it was all B&W and everything looked great, but then the cork BG popped in and I was all...  and then the grayish post BG rendered and I was:  then the logo! 

Anyway... point being: i liked the simple white bg on the site and the identity of your game is much more effective than the awoken entertainment logo/site. Not sure what you should do for that, but I guess my thinking would be to think of Wrapple as your brand and maybe play down Awoken Entertainment since i'm guessing Wrapple is going to bring in a lot more people than the name of your company at this point.

I'm really impressed and all I've seen is the game video.

A couple quibbles:

1. on the dialog in the beginning of the trailer, cut out the sound when the voice actor takes a breath. It's so quiet that it is pretty noticeable. I think the silence is really effective but because it's so minimal, you've gotta focus on the details that much more.

2. That image on the OP at the top has always bugged me. I think the lighting makes the image look like wavy/warped paper or something rather than give off the illusion sun-rays. I think the problem is that the bridge is a bit off-kilter as it is and the blurred rays of light just play that up into some kind of optical illusion gone wrong. I'd suggest, if you're going to do that, just have the light cast onto bridge or perhaps a different blending mode would do the trick... I'm not sure of the solution but I think with a little tinkering you could find something that is more effective.

Again, quibbles, but great work so far overall!

Just upgraded to ArtRage3 and tried out the new watercolor brush. I can't say i'm pleased completely but it was only $15 and it's nice to have the option of a faux-watercolor type look. So yea, have a hotdog fox! 

 

I got enough of a sense for the gameplay that the co-op is looking VERY promising, which is quickly becoming my favorite way to play games nowadays. Hope it gets into the IGF so I can play soon.

how long until we can get this stickied, finally?

Brick
 

[said]

hmm, for crows it's "a murder of crows".

I guess that would make it "a lawsuit of langdells".

I know it's a joke, but the one comment I see appear so often is the connection with Langdell and lawsuits, and that's really totally misleading (Not to mention is easy for the man to accurately deny).

Langdell's MO is to send cease and desist letters, and then companies cave in to avoid ever seeing a lawsuit. It's not even whether or not Langdell will win: a lawsuit that is easy to win is still a waste of time and money for any company with productivity to worry about. If Tim was just suing folks left and right, he'd have been put away years before now.

He didn't sue Mobigames. He didn't sue EA. He didn't sue Fuzzyeyes. He sent C&D letters or trademark registrations, and hoped somebody would just pay him off because it's way, way easier than dealing with the courts in any capacity.

-SirNiko

SirNiko,

Look. He said it's a lawsuit of Langdell's and that's that, OKAY!? It's written here and that's how it's going to be.

I insist you stop distorting the facts immediately or TIGSource will have to take legal action against your defamatory remarks.

Thank you,
aeiopoo