To be fair a lot of that stuff would probably wait until the proposal/design document draft was approved. There should be something about the overall aesthetic and gameplay style of the game in there though, and less about world-building. In fact, I think the only story that should be in the initial draft is major characters and a rough outline of the plot. Adding some concept art would be a really good idea if you want to pitch it to anyone as well; mockups are even better, and a prototype would be ideal.

Does !fun == boring?

Really? I loved the ending to HL2
"TIME, Mr Freeman?"
The actual final sequence didn't do much for me honestly, but the ending itself was ace.

One ending I'm especailly fond of is the second Monkey Island one, even though I highly expect it breaks against all rules, I love it.
It got this great, yeah, a weird game like this really shouldn't really have ended in another way -vibe.

I always thought that was a spoof of overly pretentious movies/games. It really works on both levels though, I think; as parody and as just a weird but satisfying ending.

A really good ending is one that couldn't work in any other story. If you can write an ending without having a pretty good idea what the rest of the story is like, then it's probably not a very good ending. Even if you think it's a bizarre and unexpected twist that no one will see coming, if it doesn't mesh with the rest of the story then it's just not a good ending.

There are two main things an ending can offer, I think; closure and recontextualization. Unfortunately, most games nowadays strongly favor the former, and even tend to gravitate to the most trite expressions of the former. I'm not sure if I'm really in favor of closure; sure, it FEELS good, but I think the acceptance of closure as necessity shuts out a lot of important statements about the actual structure of life. Still, generally you do want to offer closure in your ending unless you specifcally want to make one of those statements; unfortunately, games seem to be largely locked into only the most trite and cliche forms of closure.

The really amazing endings, though, change the context of what came before. Fight Club, Half-Life, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Silent Hill, and Braid might be good examples of this; the endings force you to look back and reexamine all the things you saw over the course of the story, and think about what they mean now in the context of the ending.

I didn't intend this post to be this long when I started it. I just all of a sudden found this subject really interesting.

OK, it's sort of a noobish way of doing this and probably could be solved way, way more elegantly, but this is what makes looping working for me (although I had to experiment around alot with the offset and it's still not quite right, so it probably really shouldn't be a permanent solution)

Code:

public class Main extends Sprite
{
[Embed(source = '../assets/test.mp3')]
private static var testMP3: Class;

private var test:Sound = new testMP3;
private var channel1:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();
private var channel2:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();
private var channel1_playing:Boolean = false;

private var timer:Timer;

public function Main()
{
timer = new Timer(test.length - 300); //The minus 300 was guessing, 250 or even something like 230 may work better
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, loopsound);
timer.start();
channel1 = test.play();
channel1_playing = true;
}

private function loopsound(e:TimerEvent):void
{
if (channel1_playing = true)
{
channel2 = test.play();
channel1_playing = false;
} else {
channel1 = test.play();
channel1_playing = true;
}
}

}

}

I had an idea a while back about embedding special playback information into your mp3's ID3 tags; IIRC Flash has the ability to read ID3 tags, so that might be a good way to approach modifying the length of mp3s to proper looping length without writing a bunch of weird unreusable special cases.

A few of the quests really distinguish themselves, but when you consider the amount more work that goes into a really detailed quest vs a fetch/kill (I'd guesstimate maybe 20 times as much) it's really not surprising that that's the majority. Usually you can do the grindy ones on your way to and from the more interesting ones. They also tend to all get a lot more interesting if you do them when they're orange; green quests are almost always boring just because they're so easy.

Ah, actually, it appears that my MP3 encoder helpfully adds a tiny silence to the start and end of the mp3... >_<

Yeah there was an article in Game Developer magazine talking about the limitations of different audio formats and it mentioned that. Frankly, I don't get how this limitation has survived as long as it has. It would take maybe a few bytes of data at the beginning of an mp3 files specifying the proper length to work around the problem, but it hasn't happened. I don't get it.

Tobasco is crazy overrated. It's vinegar and tomato juice with a hint of capsaicin.

Sriracha (aka "Cock Sauce")

If you hadn't made that post then I would have.

I think you can get the bytes and bytesLoaded info from the loader, though; if you compare them against each other it should know if it still has work to do or not.

I WIN THE JOB LOTTERY! ALL ACCESS PASS, BITCHES! 

You maybe should also check out the topic I linked earlier   

Okay, I agree, but they're also usually more complicated. I'd prefer non-trigonometric methods because they're easier to visualize as well as being faster.

(I knew someone was gonna say that  )

Whatever my company will spring for as soon as they make up their damn minds.

Kobel: DEFINITELY not indie. 

I want an object to move 'speed' pixels in direction 'direction'. How would I accomplish that?

This question (or, technically, just a very similar one) actually came up pretty recently in another topic on this forum. This actually presents a couple of different solutions, so it's definitely worth a look.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4519.0

Trig functions are great but they're relatively heavy. If you can avoid using them you should.

[16:50]   Cascade: Okay so playing an instrument is exactly like using a tracker yes?
[16:50]   Jrsquee: yes
[16:50]   Siiseli: shinygerbil, quite indubably so
[16:50]   Jrsquee: exactly
[16:50]   Cascade: Okay then I guess I am a p. good musician
[16:50]   Kobel: p.?
[16:50]   Jrsquee: p.
[16:50]   Kobel: pee?
[16:51]   Pepe ([email protected]) has joined

fun fact: the official name of the company is "polytron corporation inc." due to a burocratic fuck up.

I think that actually kind of makes it cooler

Rotation in flash uses degrees instead of radians

I believe Flash is set up not to be able to detect anything outside of its active area for security reasons...

... I don't think that counts as a trend if it lasts indefinitely.