When I first released Space Folds several months ago it was ugly and hard to play. Now it comes with added shiny effects and slightly less uncontrollable controls . Admittedly it's not exactly innovative gameplay-wise but my intention was to learn more about OpenGL and GLSL. Still I think it's fun to waste a few minutes

Edit: added an easier control scheme. You can now also use arrow keys to turn and move forward/backwards and H to break.

Graphics-wise it is a beautiful game. I like the general aesthetics and effects. Untextured meshes are so much nicer than blurry textures. Controls are smooth and it feels consistent throughout (graphics, menu, music, etc.).

The gameplay has a few confusing aspects:

• Some explosions look like they emit dozens of bullets but you cannot shoot them and they don't seem to do damage. They use the same graphics as regular enemy shots.
• Sometimes I got hit by something I did not see; as if some shots snuck up behind me.
• Can the ring structure be destroyed? Occasionally parts of it blew up, but I couldn't figure out whether it was a scripted event or not. If you shoot it, there's no feedback, e.g. small impact explosions.
• There is a surprisingly huge increase in difficulty at the 10th wave (easy mode). Up to wave ten the number of enemies seems to increase slightly but wave 10 and 11 have a huge increase in numbers.

Also a version number in the download would be nice (readme file, archive name, etc.).

Its on the title screen, right under the works zompocalypse, with the words, beta, 0.15, how did you miss that?

I saw the in-game version number but it's incovenient. I was writing my feedback and wanted to check if I had the latest version. Since I had already deleted the extracted files, I had to extract and run it again to finish feedback.

Imagine you keep the archive around (e.g. to play later) and at some point you want to check for updates. You'll be forced to extract and run the game just to find out which version you already have.

BUGS FIXED:
-Controls appear to slow down or become unresponsive after playing for short periods, like the controls lock up and the player keeps sliding-something to do with rebinding controls to shift, ctrl or alt.

It's still not completely fixed. However it is less noticable than before. My keys are arrows for movement, left ctrl to shoot, left alt to reload. If I wildly press all keys (including several at a time), movement sometimes still locks up. During that time the walking animation plays continuously. Usually it's up and down movement that won't work anymore. In one occasion I could only walk right. This problem subsides if I don't press any keys at all for several seconds.

Another thing I noticed is that there is no walk animation while reloading. The character just slides around. One of your fixed bugs suggests it has been fixed, while another says otherwise.

Also a version number in the download would be nice (readme file, archive name, etc.).

I recently tried to play Spring and my experience was that it is extremely new-player-unfriendly. Everything screamed: YOU'RE NEW! DON'T EVEN BOTHER!

After looking at the homepage and trying to start it, I still didn't know what Spring actually is. Something with RTS, probably multiplayer and there are Mods or something along those lines.

After getting stuck in some sort of mod-list simulation AI-demo mode I found the multiplayer lobby which is intimidating. I didn't see any tutorial or introduction so I kind of gave up. Sure I could get through all of that and at some point actually play, but is it worth my time? What IS Spring?

The positive thing I noticed was that there seemed to be a lot of players, should I ever actually find out how to play :D

Looks very nice; good old-school side-scrolling zombie-shooting fun

Unfortunately I seem to have this bug:
-Controls appear to slow down or become unresponsive after playing for short periods.

I've changed P1 controls to up, down, left, control and alt. After a short period, controls go totally haywire. Pressing a movement key results in opposite movement, no movement at all or the char runs around on its own without pressing any movement key at all.

I'm playing on Win XP SP3.

Otherwise it runs smoothly. Pixels look very blurry but I'm undecided whether that's good or not :D

There are a few flaws in the mouse-mapping. The selected tile is off by one most of the time. Usually it's too high. It doesn't update properly at the top and right border, if you stay at the top half of squares.

Anyway I think trying to make a game in JS is ... bold :D. JS's support for large projects is ... well, is there any? Plus you'll most likely have to write a different version for each and every browser, e.g. IE 6 just shows a white screen. Normal websites are a pain to get to work and display the same way in different browsers. A whole game will probably drive you insane. Not to mention the bad performance.

The Path will be several hours long. But it will not offer much traditional gameplay. We're expecting extremely low review scores (if only because the usual categories for scoring games don't apply to The Path). One of the reasons for contemplating a low (initial) price is to reduce the risk for curious customers. Buying Bioshock or even Braid is more or less risk-free because you know what to expect. Price is fairly irrelevant then: people who want it will buy it. But if they don't know what to expect, it may be difficult for people to pay a high price just to satisfy their curiosity.

You may have to find a marketing strategy that supports this different kind of gameplay. If it's an artsy, horror, gothic game, go to these kind of non-gaming sites (literature, music, life-style, etc.) and ask/convince them to do a review. They might be more receptive to the game than the "It's a platformer/shmup! 10/10 points!" gaming sites.

With "normal" mainstream games you cannot expect what you will get, either. Call me paranoid but experience teaches that too many mainstream gaming sites and magazines report what publishers want to read. At best it's still only some individual's opinion. As a customer, I prefer a demo to reduce my risk over a low price. Unfortunately many mainstream publishers rely on nice reviews and no longer offer demos.

The way you phrase it, it sounds like it's going to be some cheap, artsy, non-fun game, that nobody will get. Why should I even buy it at a low price if it is no fun? I'm not asking as an insult but rather as constructive criticism. I don't think one should underestimate the suggestive power of a low price (depending on how low you plan to go) and statements like these.

In any case, in an ideal world, I think games should be as cheap as movies.

Why? A movie is only about 90 minutes. Even cheap games offer longer gameplay. Plus DVDs cost around 10-20€ (15-30 US$) around here anyway (more if you want HD). Games are something you can actively enjoy, movies are mere background noise.

Mount and Blade is actually an interesting example here as well -- they had a lower early adopter price ...

Nice idea. We've been thinking about something like that as well but discarded the idea because it felt like we would be asking people to pay for beta-testing. Then again, if they get the final game for free after having payed less for a beta, then perhaps it feels like they earned the full version by testing the game?

I like the way M&B and Cortex Command have done this. It doesn't feel as if I am paying for beta-testing. It's more like you're supporting development. You're basically investing into the game, rather than "earning" the lower price by beta testing. Plus it's not really beta-testing, when the game is far from being finished. What was important for me to preorder these games, was a demo/beta version. If that version is interesting enough to pay for, it can only get better, even if the developers do not implement all of their promises or even halt development alltogether.

Offering the game at an initially reduced price may be sensible for multiplayer games. It's hard to get enough players for indie multiplayer games. A multiplayer game without players won't attract more players. Chronic Logic did this with Zatikon recently. The first week you could buy it for half the price; probably to attract enough players to get more later on. Single player games don't need other players, so a lower initial price might actually hurt, since sales are highest at release. I cannot really think of a benefit of a lower initial price; if you have a large portfolio of similar games maybe, but otherwise I don't see what customers should get attracted to.

Another option is offering games at a reduced price via special events like Gamedujour's one-day deals. However most developers I've seen there, do this after the game has been around for a few weeks or months. It's always easier to lower the price than to raise it, I guess.

Games have to be priced according to their quality. If it's too high, people will not buy it or feel ripped off. If it's too low, it lowers the subjective feeling of quality. The Path looks very promising both in graphics and in theme, so I wouldn't go too low. There are a lot of games that look worse and that charge the usual 20$. Of course this depends on how good the gameplay and how long the game will be. "a short horror game" could be anything from 5 Minutes to several hours. If it's long and fun enough, even 30$ might be reasonable. Games priced higher than 30$ have to compete with mainstream games as far as quality of assets is concerned. Of course this is just my own personal opinion

I personally don't hold much stock in such rumours - I wonder how the two companies stack up together financially, indeed.
[...]

If you judge by the 2007 revenue given on Wikipedia, Valve (70 million US$) is a mere bacteria compared to Google (16.593 billion US$). Even compared to EA (4 billion US$) it is quite small.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts

I may be wrong but Valve seems to be mostly focused on the US market. It's much less of a global player than EA or even Google.

As for the validity of the rumor ... we'll never know until Valve will have been bought by anyone. It's not as if a marketing manager was a trustworthy source. If it helps during negotiations, he'll insist that Santa is real and the Tooth Fairy is coming for dinner

I tried to run the second download, but got the message "This application was configured to use a bundled Java Runtime Environment but the runtime is missing or corrupted."

If you want to bundle a specific JRE, you have to include it and give a relative path at "bundled JRE path" (e.g. ./jre1.6.0_07). However you might want to reduce its size because 60+ mb isn't very download friendly. No idea what license issues may or may not arise when including the JRE.

Alternatively just put nothing in "bundled JRE path" and specify a min/max version (e.g. 1.5.0) and let it search for an already installed one once the user runs it (notifying the user where to download one if he doesn't have one installed).

A user friendly and lightweight way would probably be to create an executable for every platform with the check box "Don't wrap, launch only" checked and no JRE included. This way you don't have to include the jar in every executable.

Must have most current version of Java runtime enviroment.
I will hopefully learn more reliable ways to export java programs in the future.

Launch4j is a nice tool that wraps Java applications in a platform-specific execution layer (e.g. .exe on Win). You can also bundle a JRE with the app, so the end user doesn't have to take care of getting one; or you can direct them to the Java download page if the installed JRE is too old.

Of course you'll have to manage different distributions for various platforms but you gain a little end-user friendliness. It works with Win, Mac and Linux and is easy to use.

http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/

Or you can just use .bat, .sh, etc shell scripts for people that don't know how to double click a .jar.

And Eclipse is pretty much the best IDE ever,... except the debugger.

Maybe Sun's Netbeans is more to your liking. I have to admit though, that I don't know much about the Visual Studio debugger and cannot compare it. However the Netbeans debugger is nice and switching from Eclipse to Netbeans was nothing short of an epiphany for me :D (not necessarily debugger-wise but generally)

Why the heck doesn't Java 6 bring any improvement to the language syntax?

That is a problem for many applications, languages, etc. People always expect changes, additions, new features and whatnot. Ultimately that is what kills something, excessive featuritis. On top of that, Java has to stay backward compatible to some extent. It is less focused on throw-away applications like games or one-shot desktop apps. On the other hand, Java 6 added a few useful libraries to the core JSE, e.g. the Desktop class, JAXB, etc (most, if not all of which can be supplied as seperate libraries to run on previous versions). I prefer a useful "standard" library over new syntax candy that allows for nifty coding stunts

C# is a modern language and consequently has all kinds of lovely features. Java was way ahead of its time in including many of these same features ages ago. Objectively, C# probably comes out very slightly ahead, but that doesn't matter at all because...

...as soon as you do non-trivial things it starts to matter not just what language you're using but what libraries you have access to. Java libraries were historically absolutely terrible. That's not an exaggeration. Things have improved dramatically over the last ten years, but still not to the point where I'd feel comfortable using Java for a graphics-intensive project.

Java is constantly evolving. It's not like the Java today is the same as Java 10 years ago.

As for the documentation, it really depends on what libraries you are talking about. The standard Java API from Sun is the best documented API I've ever seen. When I had to work with C#, I was very disappointed about the .Net API. It merely tells you in one sentences what a method does - but not how - which forced me to search various MSDN and external sites frequently.

3rd party libraries on the other hand are often badly documented, though that is a language independent "feature" and depends on the authors

And you just can't deny that C# has a lot of very useful features which Java simply doesn't have: anonymous functions, non-broken generics, LINQ, implicitly typed variables, anonymous types, partial classes, and so on. So, this is not religious at all, this is fact.

On the contrary, this is very religious. Additional features do not make a language better. For example I consider implicit types or anonymous types detrimental to the maintainability of the code. One extreme of this is duck-typing which Ruby uses. These features are convenient when you write code but it makes understanding it harder. Software design shouldn't be about coding something as fast as possible, but about having a good design and a maintainable code-base that can easily be understood by others (or yourself in a few months).

Now, things get more difficult when we consider the community, that's for sure. But at least on this forum I see way more C# games than Java games.

I agree, the community here is C- and Gamemaker-heavy.

... C# is the more powerful language all around, ...

That is the somewhat religious part of the discussion. I disagree and considering the widespread use of Java (not so much in games but in business software), there are probably a few other people who disagree, too. C++ for high-end games is another issue but C#/.Net is more or less Microsoft's Java copy in my opinion (which also means that Java is more like C# than C++).

You could use Mono to run .Net applications cross-platform but it's much less widespread than Java. You'll have to ask yourself if people will install Mono to play your games.

If you want to run Java programs from a web page, look at applets (embedded into web pages) and Java Web Start (automatic download, installation, execution and update of stand-alone Java apps).

No way! You have to extract the whole thingamajig whatchamacallit? And there I thought the readme.txt would be all I needed!

Seriously though, I extracted the whole archive. I even put it all in the same directory .

Java supports networking from basic TCP or UDP to higher level protocols like HTTP, SSL, TCP, SOAP and whatnot. I've never done anything below (in the OSI model) TCP/UDP but I guess there are libraries for that too. Java is one of the most prominent languages for backend systems and servers, so its networking capabilities are ... vast

Sun has good tutorials on most basic topics. A starting point for you might be:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/networking/TOC.html

Usually these kinds of shooters are pretty boring. But I like yours . The variety in weapons and the fact that you don't have to restart over and over again is nice. The effects are good, too.

A few things that struck me:

• Transistion between levels is very abrupt. The screen just fades out all of a sudden. I don't know if I had actually beaten the end boss or if it just stopped.
• It occassionally lags if there are a lot of enemies and effects; on an AMD 3700+, Geforce 8800GTS.
• The focused hammer shot seems to be less effective against single targets than the spreader. I'd expect the former to do more damage.
• Key layout is a bit inaccessible. If the various weapons where more in a straight line of keys than in different ones, it might be easier to use, e.g. a, s,d,f,g and q,w,e,r,t. Kudos for not using z/y and thus making it unplayable on QWERTZ keyboards, though.
• I occasionally hit "A" by accident. Maybe move the help screen to some place else and pause the game while showing it.

Unfortunately it crashes when I start it:

Code:

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Other Event: Game Start
for object object3:

Error defining an external function.