most good gba games were snes games...

i did like lttp and the mario series a lot but most of the games I liked were gba originals...


advance wars series
wario ware series
fire emblem series
mother 3
zelda minish cap
metroid fusion
harvest moon friends of mineral town
drill dozer
dotstream


lots of those had games on the snes(mother, wars, fire emblem, etc.)but also original installments to the series on the GBA

There are, however, also a lot of people right now saying that they won't buy the games in the latest bundles because they haven't even had time to look at the games they bought in the previous bundles! Why would those people buy a new game for $20? Why would they even be interested in that new game when they still have dozens of games from previous bundles they haven't played yet?

(I'm really trying not to be too pessimistic about all this, honest!)

Yeah I'm not sure but my gut tells me that the people saying they won't buy the new bundles since they have so many games already are incorrect about why they buy things.  My guess is that if a new bundle came out with games they were interested in they would buy it.  People say all kinds of weird things compared to what their actions are especially on the internet.  Of course I could be way off on this part.

As for the 20$ price point for a new game thing myself (and I think most casual game players) were never really that interested in buying a new game at the 20$ price point.

As for the overload of games thing that's a tricky issue.  Your argument seems to be based on the fact that indie games are more or less interchangable though (I already have indie game A which I haven't played yet so why would I buy indie game B).  My guess is that most people don't treat indie games like that though, just because I own super meat boy already doesn't somehow mean I want desktop dungeons less. 

I think part of the problem is that most people here are in the minority that actually spends a significant amount of money on indie games.

For me (and my guess is that this is true for most people) I've spent way more money on indie games since this name your price thing started then I ever did before.  I don't make a lot of money and only really buy dirt cheap games (used games from the previous generations system mostly for ~5$).  This also meant I only ever bought 1 20$ indie game and 2 or 3 10$ ones in the 3 or so years I was into indie games before the name your price models started popping up.  Since then I've spent way more then 50$ on indie games, yes I have gotten more then 4 or 5 games for my money but that doesn't really seem to stop me buying a new bundle when it pops up with a game I want.

sleep less.  If I get a lot of sleep I always have trouble falling asleep the next night.

handhelds are my favorite way to play games as well.

My favorite handheld has to be the GBA, unless you count the DS as being able to play all the GBA back catologue to in which case I'd go with a DS.  DS has lots of good games but it never captured the magic of many GBA titles for me.  Part of that is the fact that all GBA games are 2d with normal controls where as lots of DS games have ugly 3D and tacked on touchscreen controls.

I'm not sure how I forgot the "cash winnings" factor. Of course, most people don't actually walk away with more money than they arrived with. The idea behind the "smart" slot machine would be that it would be able to identify a user via some kind of ID or payment card used to hold record of their winnings, after which, a proper experience could be created by slot machines to ensure that they would win just enough to keep playing and think they are "lucky", but never enough to significantly profit from the casino. Casinos give out all kinds of freebies because they always get more back then they put out. Even if a dozen or so people take home $100, they know they have just as many losing thousands.

ahh yeah I hadn't thought of taking a credit card, that would be pretty tricky, then you could do things like after the user has spent 5$ on the game make sure they win back 4$ so they think they are on a hot streak or something.  But you could also make sure they never walked away with more then they had put in.  I'm pretty sure this type of thing is illegal in slot machines but I'm not sure what the exact laws are.

These games are arguably worse than slot machines. Instead of just being addicted to winning and chasing after that, you're simply addicted to playing. The experience of the game is carefully designed to program you based on the amounts of time, real money, game money and other resources gained and lost. Similar principle behind giving away free addictive drugs before charging for them. Slot machines don't recognize new players and tilt the odds to make them win at first before lowering them to ensure the now addicted player only gets enough winnings to feel like they are still making "progress" that they have earned (or do they? are "smart" slot machines a thing?).

But slot machines do have another advantage over social games in that they can give out real money as a reward.  This helps quite a bit with the adictiveness factor.  Also, it pretty much rules out the possibility of "smart" slot machines as if there was any time when the odd's where in your favor people could abuse this to win money from them. 

As far as "smart" slot machines I know there was some work on slot machine type games that acted like they were video games (in that you could control them) but the the output was still random.  Otherwise they would have people getting good at the game and winning money.  The trick was getting people to think they're actions were what was causing the winning/losing even if it was really just random.  This kind of thing is actually seen in a lot of ticket games at arcades such as flaming finger and that stacker game.  Your actions do have some effect but the owner can still set how often they want the game to give out jackpots.

I'm with TameTick here, To me DD is much more a puzzle game with a dungeon crawling theme then it is a roguelike or dungeon crawler.  I can almost imagine it being a pencil and paper puzzle.

As far as this type of game as a whole, I don't really see it any different from slot machines.  It seems like they'll stick around for a while for that reason, the same way slot machines have stuck around for a while even though I have no idea why.

As far as zynga goes it seems like they are probably going to burst soon.  They're burning way to many bridges way to fast with all kinds of different people (players, programmers, etc.).  It seems like this is going to catch up to them soon.

OK, these last 2 posts have made it more clear what I should be doing to practice.  I'll get started working on this kind of thing.

Also, those pictures are very helpful, I understand what you mean much better now.

as for reading the book, yeah I'm actually reading it.  Reading (unlike drawing) is something I'm pretty good at/have a lot of practice with  

Unfortunately I think I read it a little to quickly.  I basically sat down and read up to pg. 59 (where it talks about anatomy) and then started drawing, when I got advice on this thread I kinda followed that along and forgot most of the stuff from the book.  then when I was going to go back to the book it was anatomy stuff which people on here had told me to wait on so I held off reading any more.

Skipping past the anatomy stuff up to pg. 72 it looks helpful.  I think what I'm going to do is start the book over working through the exercises that I wasn't really ready for when I tried them the first time, hopefully that will help and it will also give me stuff to work on when I'm away from my computer in the next couple days.

Yep, I'm still here, I haven't done any real "practice" in the last couple days as I have some stuff I'm trying to get done and also I'm kinda at a loss of where to go next.

The technical drawing thing feels weird, like it seems way closer to math then drawing.  I know enough about geometry/3D rendering to know what transformations are necessary to render 3D->2D so it seems like I'm not learning anything.  I guess it's just learning it with a different part of my brain though.

Also for ocedar I'm not to sure of what this means.  Should I buy one of those pose-able ocedar models and just draw it over and over again?  This seems like it would be useful but I just want to check before I buy anything, since I'm not real sure.

yeah it's still bad but it's still bad because you devalued the value of games *for other people*. so it's not win-win, it's win for you, lose for others

it's also not even sustainable for oneself, long-term, since not every game will be popular enough to sell a million copies at 10 cents; what if you want your next game to be niche, where an audience of one million people don't even exist for that type of game? etc.

Yep that makes sense, sorry I just misread your original post.  Also I'm curious as to what people's opinion on people releasing high quality free games is?  Does this devalue games as much as a very cheap but only available for free game?  Strange as it seems in my mind I feel like a very cheap game is going to devalue games as a whole more so then just a free one.

anyway, if you devalue something it means that people expect that thing cheaply, and are unwilling to pay more for it. it's not really that complicated

yeah i understand that people will be unwilling to pay more for it but from this part of your post...

if you sell 1 million copies of something at 10 cents each, you may make a lot of money

I thought your point was that by lowering your game price you may make more money but even if you are making more money and more people are playing your game (which seems like a win win to me) it's still bad.

Now I'm thinking you meant that you may make a lot by lowering your game price initially but it's still a bad move in the long run financially because it devalues it for later.  Is this a better interpretation of what you wrote?

The snooty art people part doesn't make any since if my initial reading of your post was wrong (which it seems like it now is) so I'll explain what I meant going off the initial reading.

From my original reading it seemed like what you were saying was not charging much for your game even if that meant making more money and having more people play your game was bad because it caused people to think of your game as "cheap".  This seems akin to various snooty art critic people who seem to view certain pieces as having of some type of inherit higher quality simply because they are restrictive in who can view/appreciate them.  As if anything that was widely available to the public was somehow soiled by it's physical accessibility.

Hope that makes sense.

i agree with moi; devaluation doesn't mean 'doesn't make money' it means 'seen as lower value to customers'. if you sell 1 million copies of something at 10 cents each, you may make a lot of money, but it's still seen as a low-value item by the customers

I don't really understand this viewpoint.  I can understand this view if the view is that by devalueing your game (by charging 10 cents)and then making a lot of money you've everyone else who comes later because they will be forced to charge 10 cents also, even though I'm not positive this is a real effect.

but if the view is just that you don't want people viewing your game as a low-value item who cares.  I want as many people as possible to play my game (in addition to earning a living and making a game I enjoy) who cares what they pay for it?  It seems to much like snooty art people who look down on art that isn't available in limited quantities to me.

wait, other people really think there are more coders then artists in the indie games community?  That seems crazy to me for a number of reasons...

1.  Just browsing here and flash gamelicense's forums I seem to see many more games with artists looking for coders then the other way around (although I admit I'm not looking for collaboration so I don't browse these parts of the boards heavily).  It also seems like in most cases it's viewed as the programmers game which the artist is working on not the artists game that the programmer is working on which seems to inicate there is a scarcity of programmers.

2.  In the jobs market in general programmers (and engineers in general I believe) are in a deficit and artists are in a surplus.  It seems like that would be reflected here as well. 

3.  From doing some amount of teaching at a college level students seem to find programming very very difficult to learn.  The school was at gives free tutoring to students taking classes which have the top 20% highest fail rates.  A ton of programming classes (it's mostly math, physics, engineering, and very writing intensive classes) always show up on this list while I'm not sure I've ever seen an art class on the list.  Not saying art is inherently easier then programming or anything but even though great programming tools have been developed it's still amazing how many people find programming ot be so difficult.

Hyper productivity mode engage!

Have this:

I am so excited for this game.

yay gorillaz also...

I wasn't joking with the anatomy stuff. Learning what the muscles are is very important to rending the body realistically. For example the lower legs are defined by the thigh bone and he calves attached to it. Take some time and draw out a skeleton and a full figure of muscles.

As for round objects, for the tops don't draw footballs with the sides coming to a point, circles in perspective are still circles, well, ellipses anyway.

Yeah, sorry I haven't worked on the anatomy stuff much, I had other things on my list to work on first.  I have the images you gave me and also a book on anatomy for drawing so I think I'll get started on that soon.  Thanks for the suggestion about the lower legs I'll try to look at that before drawing them again.

As for the circles in perspective, yeah I know they should be ellipses mathematically but it's sometimes hard to get my eyes/hands to know that

Some drawn from refrence stuff...


and some more refrence stuff, some interesections, a try at legs, and anothe try at a face.  The face isn't great but on the plus side, no zombie!



The upper legs are starting to look ok I think but the lower part is still weird/bad

Has anyone ever used mobile flash before?

I've earned a couple hundered from the kongregate mobile arcade app/website and also use it to play games on my phone, both things use mobile flash I'm pretty sure.