In order for a game to scare me, I have to feel feel invested in it. I have to be strongly motivated to avoid losing. And the losing has to be infrequent, otherwise I'll expect it.

Quick-saves and checkpoints and unlimited retries all reduce my investment down to the few minutes that passed since the last time I saved. They make the game less scary.

The original Resident Evil tried something interesting with its save points: You could only save a limited number of times. Cute, but I think they got it wrong. What they should have done is limit how many times you can retry. As soon as you have finite lives, then your investment goes all the way back to the beginning of the game. That is how much you can lose. And that is why NES games are still some of the scariest games we have.

I still want to see a game inspired by Alien, where there's only a single enemy but it moves persistently offscreen and eats your crewmembers whenever it's hungry. Metroid Fusion is the closest I'm aware of, but the hunter in that game was totally scripted.

I think the run speed in, say, Knytt Stories is a good example of the application of flow. Juni is a tiny sprite on the screen, and would take a long time to cross from one side of the screen to the other if she ran at realistic speed relative to her size. By the time she crossed the screen, I would already have become bored of staring at the screen. Which is why Juni actually runs very fast.

Notably, Juni's fast run speed does not translate into momentum. She does not careen headfirst into walls. She behaves exactly like a normal person would if you record them walking and then press the fast-forward button. This preserves my expectations about how people move, but at the same time accelerates the action to a pace that is interesting to watch.

Which is one of the reasons why it's hard to get good physics if you use an off-the-shelf physics engine.

EDIT: I think I'm riffing off an earlier rant of mine.

There's a principle of game design that I like to use that I haven't really seen systematically defined anywhere.  I call it flow.

  I'm pretty sure you didn't invent it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/introduction.htm

I also really enjoy this so far. (And Metroid II!) I also missed the right-click feature for a long time.

I end up spending a lot of time with just 1 ship integrity point. Some part of my brain would rather retry when I make a mistake than spend resources to pretend I didn't make a mistake, so I try to get a perfect on levels and retry when I get hit. Similarly, I kept trying to get past hard sections without using stealth because stealth felt like cheating to me. After reading some comments from other people I realized that stealth was supposed to be used to get past certain sections.

Another thing I didn't figure out until reading comments was the exit in the top left of the marsh area near the middle of the map. I *found* the exit on my own, but I figured it didn't count as different from the entrance since it was on the same side of the level, so I collected the resources and then wandered somewhere else instead of going off the screen to exit.

The more general the tool is, the harder it is to learn. Programming languages are among the most general tools we have, but programming languages do not make level editors obsolete. 

I was interested in the theme but didn't make anything because:
1. Maker Faire was last weekend.
2. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was last weekend.
3. A weekend isn't really enough time to do justice to the theme anyway.

By making an editor where you put objects on a canvas, you are already restricting the genre. Every game editor, through its design, lends itself to a different sort of game.

People will give you feedback if they want to give you feedback. There is nothing you can do that will make people give you feedback. There is no natural balance here.

The people with 0 or 1 feedback replies on page 2 would probably appreciate getting a reply now, but if you give feedback, do it because you want to, not because you want them to reciprocate.

favorites:
NES, SNES, N64, GC

others I've played, some only briefly:
GB, GBA, NDS, Wii, PS, PS2, PS3, PSP, XB, XB360, DC, DC VMU, Atari, Jaguar, Genesis, Windows, Macintosh, Flash, Facebook, iPhone

EDIT: Forgot one.

I vote we start this thread again. And rename the old one.

Stopping my locker wank, you pass thread aggressively.

The passive aggressive wankery thread? Did you lose it?

Don't worry, I'm sure you'll find it when you least expect it. 

That sounds like great news, but it doesn't say anything about Apple's or Microsoft's support?

I really liked this idea of "Just-in-time refactoring":
http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/code-for-flexibility-a-manifesto/

The "About" page is blank:
http://www.tigsource.com/about/

Maybe I'm the only one, but the "About" page is usually the first link I click on when I visit a new site.

easy to use ... and perhaps obscure/unfinished or alpha tools

Those almost sound contradictory. 

In that first level, on the far right there's a balcony with a lip, and beyond the lip is a small floating island. It looks like the balcony and the island are the same height, but from the balcony I could shoot over the lip and from the island my shots hit the lip. That was a little weird.

I didn't play the first mode long because I have no friends. 

The second mode had a thing that looked really cool (long neck) but its head was embedded in a platform so it didn't actually do anything.

The third mode was cool, curious how you plan to extend that.

The other thing was inscrutable, but it looked awesome and it sounded awesome and eventually I got the homing thing and it seemed to get pretty easy after that. Did not encounter anything that was clearly a duck, but I did collect a bunch of tiny blue polar bears... 

they spent so much time, say, divulging the information of dissidents to the Chinese government

Do you have evidence supporting that this was intentional?

That's way too much power in the hands of a single develloper, and they are trying to become a distribution giant.

Isn't that what everybody is trying to do? Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Valve, Facebook. It doesn't usually bother me unless they're being anti-competitive.

Here's a related thread:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11189.0
But it's a technique that I think deserves more attention so carry on.

EDIT: I'd like to add squash-and-stretch to the feature wishlist.