can post info/pics/demo if it's of interest to anyone

Always good to see pics.

Didn't get to try all the temples since the Beta timed out on me after an hour.

Feedback on what I did try:

Game interface: Easy to use. Nice graphics. Nice sound.
Instructions: Good. Clear.

Temple 1 (Isis): Competently done. Nothing new here.
Temple 2 (Thot): Quite a neat puzzle idea. Not sure how the casual market will take it - might completely block some players from progressing?
Temple 3 (Anubis): As with temple 1 perfectly competent, but nothing of interest.
Temple 4 (Sobek): I unlocked this temple but the demo timed out before I was able to play it.

The first and third temples were both too random for my tastes. The first generated massive combos through no design of mine. The third would occasionally leave me helplessly waiting to get lucky with shuffles or spells.

The find-hidden-glyph bonus rounds are too easy. Better perhaps to give a much tighter time limit and award a variable bonus depending on how many glyphs are found. The little hint sparkles are completely unnecessary.

Speaking of which, the timers on most levels are badly calibrated. I was always either under no pressure at all, earning maximum time bonus, or left with almost no time at all.

On some board layouts the way in which pieces cascade down is highly unintuitive. This can be annoying because it's hard to plan ahead when you don't know what will fill spaces up.

Overall I have to say I don't consider this game to be at all indie in feel even if you are in fact an indie studio. It's nicely produced and hopefully you'll do well with it, but I personally don't feel it belongs here.

(Oh, a quick bug report: in the first temple it tells me that completing the fourth board will unlock the temple of Sobek. It doesn't, it unlocks the temple of Thot.)

Great link, grapefrukt!

Never ever, ever enable this for banners.

Did anyone else get an "Uh oh!" moment reading that?

Do you have any stats on how badly this hurts the compression? (Or does it even improve it in some cases?)

And are you envisioning the sleeves hanging downwards because they've been tagged to be physically simulated, or for some simpler reason?

Yes, physics. Although in a sense I see that as "simple". Increasingly I expect to see physics models (not necessarily realistic) becoming standard in games. Defining a few physical properties for an object should be about as easy as things get. (Obviously writing the physics engine is far less so, but that's a one-time-only job. Apart from minor game-specific tweaks.)

If it's simpler, how would it avoid interpenetration of cloth polygons?

Actually even with physics this would likely be a messy problem. I hadn't thought of it. I'm like that when I code stuff too. I implement 9/10 of something and then notice a huge problem I failed to anticipate.

Also, the way it's typically done is they define both the mesh, and the wireframe, and then the mesh vertex coordinates are represented as weighted averages of offsets from the wireframe. (Or something more complex, but let's say it's like that for now.)

That's pretty good in terms of efficiency vs quality tradeoff, but for all but the simplest cases it doesn't look all that good.

How much user control over the 'rules for placing polygons' would there be in your system?  Is the user experience different than in the standard pipeline?

Depends what you consider standard. Geometry-based modellers and 3D sculpting tools are already radically different.

For the most part I'd expect user control to be geometric/algorithmic in nature but without involving actual polygons at any point. So in the case of the sleeve example there would be some control points defined for the cuff relative to the bone, some curve rule for joining the control points smoothly and then some rule for building the cuff-to-sleeve surface from the curves at each end.

Actually one problem (which I've only just thought of) is that this would be a nightmare for texturing since the deformation of any given surface region at runtime would actually be undefined. Ho hum, it's not like I have the free time to actually try to implement this anyway!

I'm making all the graphics for my current game in Illustator, but alas, I can't show it off just yet.

What file format do you use for import into the game?

I'm an experienced Illustrator user (as an art tool) but it would never have occurred to me that I could import Illustrator artwork into a game directly.

Illustrator is way more powerful than Flash (though it too is quite expensive), but there's no way I'm going to write a PostScript parser for my games!

What possibilities are you talking about?

For example building a character as a wireframe skeleton and then generating all the actual polygon surfaces by having rules for placing polygons according to the positions of the wireframe stuff. So baggy sleeves hang downwards even when the character is upside down etc.

However, after saying all that, it's worth mentioning that general purpose rendering hardware might make raytraced voxels (in octrees) worthwhile, as we get to a point where typical triangle sizes are less than 1 pixel large.

Even if they aren't, the ability to process (or even preprocess) other ways of describing objects into set-of-triangles form opens up all sorts of possibilities. Because so many companies use Maya or Max for various reasons (such as because that's what their artists are used to) I don't think we'll see such approaches explored much in the near future, but the potential is there.

I would think if you found something that you liked to use, you'd spend more time writing games than if you are limping along with another language/library.

That may apply in this case, but it doesn't always.

For example, I used to spend ages playing around with things like OCaML. Hours of fun and a great way to improve your understanding of software, but terrible for writing games.

Very cool. Played the demo four times now (one Normal, three Hard) and I should be working.

Still can't complete Hard level 1 with more than half my life left, so from my perspective the difficulty is about right.
 

Personally I find lots to disagree with on that list, but I suppose tastes vary.

Still, no Armadillo Run at all whilst including that awful Space Hulk clone by teardown.se really can't be right, can it? Sure, I love Space Hulk - Richard Halliwell's original design was great. Then not only do they clone it (which should itself disqualify them from any top 100 ever) but they even make rules changes which harm the gameplay.

Oops, sorry, started ranting there.

The trouble with recommending text editors is that there's genuinely so much personal preference involved. A while back I had several people independently recommend UltraEdit to me. So I tried it out for a bit and really couldn't work out why they liked it. A few interrogrations later and it turned out that in all cases there was ultimately only one factor: ease of use.

And that's the thing about editors. Vim and Emacs are both enormously powerful. If you ever take the time to properly learn either one, you'll never look back. But for some people the last thing they want to get distracted by whilst learning to program is also learning a fiendishly complex text editor.

I used to be something of an advocate for emacs, but I've since learned to keep my mouth shut in most situations. I've watched colleagues spending as much as an hour on a task which would take only a few minutes in emacs. But what I've come to realise is that it doesn't really matter. What matters most is that your editor should not distract you from the business of programming.

So ultimately my recommendation is: try several editors and see what you like.

* Vim seems to be a popular choice amongst serious programmers who touch-type.
* Emacs is a good choice if all you care about is power and don't mind spending a day or two configuring the editor you'll use for the next sixty years. (I agree about the auto-indent incidentally, but then I run few defaults.)
* UltraEdit and TextPad seem to have a lot of fans amongst people who still want a good editor but also value ease of use.

Well, if you seriously mean that there's quite a few open source Flash projects.

A word of warning - you don't want to be reading things written in an earlier version of Actionscript than 3.0. There have been substantial changes to the language and even bigger changes to the Flash libraries since earlier versions.

Also, if you're familiar with Javascript... Actionscript is basically identical.

Ooh, an excuse to mess around with Potatoshop!



And the castle could shake the ground every time it lands! And there could be a little wizard too! And a dragon! And...

Oh dear, I appear to be in a very silly mood today.

Nice art style. I particularly love the effect with the falling seeds sprouting into things.

we realized it was too "real" [...] the tank really got going fast and hit a small object the treads would fly off

Because real tanks have this problem all the time. In my experience, at least.

All good points, thanks.

From my perspective it's a bizarre default choice because it makes the engine look bad. And I'm inclined to think bounce is good for gameplay...

...could be time to go and play with ideas!

What with physics engines being oh-so-fashionable at the moment quite a lot of them are getting written and are appearing around the web.

Looking at the behaviour of various 2D engines, I noticed a puzzling pattern: nothing ever bounces!

If a cube (well OK, a square) drops onto a flat surface from a great height it remains in contact with the surface from the moment it first touches it. Whereas (depending on the materials involved) I'd expect it to bounce up into the air a bit.

Is there some terribly good reason why every single developer opts to lose all kinetic energy during collision, or are all these engines copying some well known implementation which happened to do things that way?

(Personally I don't like it. Bouncing is fun!)

Mods should be considered indie

This isn't even controversial so long as you remember that "indie" is an adjective.

Mods are clearly "indie mods", the confusion only arises wondering if the resulting games are "indie games".

This cannot be!  I am just now joining TIGS??

Could be worse, I still haven't joined.

Oh. Wait.

Real reason I'm posting is to ask about the pic captioned "this thing was amazing". I fail at thing identification. What is that?!