holy fuck

Ok, might as well post mine too. I'll leave VVVVVV for a while, since the feedback is riddled with spoilers, but here's Don't Look Back:

Don't Look Back scored best in:  Overall

And scored worst in:  Technical

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I have played this game many times through because of the simple yet harrowing experience. A good case of the whole being worth more than the sum of its parts. Great music; would not be the same experience with different tunes.

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I really appreciate how this game stays simple, true to itself, and most importantly, doesnt waste my time. It's refreshing to just sit down and have a short, pure game experience with no filler.  Great job!

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While the overall concept feels like it could be interesting, the lo-fi execution feels flat.  The color palette is nice, but the punishing mechanics and hurried artwork make the whole feel un-finished.

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I agree with the designer's statement on how the gameplay challenges resonate with the story (particularly if you're aware of the mythical foundation). Can be frustratingly tricky (but awesomely old school)

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I absolutely loved this game. As a veteran of the C64 era, the stylised visuals, uncompromising level design (lots of pixel perfect jumps) and idiosyncratic setting reminded me of games like Jet Set Willy and Forbidden Forest. But I also appreciated the programmer's wider aims - to look into the conflict between narrative and ludology - I think this is examination of the nature of gaming is a key role for independent game producers; this is the stuff that the big publishers never do. How successful the game is in conveying these aims is almost immaterial.

The minimal graphics and downbeat sound work wonderfully to convey atmosphere - not a pixel or note is wasted.

There are, of course, lots of retro-tinged indie games out there, but few have really mastered and conveyed the sheer brutalism of the old skool titles - and few have appreciated the philosophy that motivated eighties coders like Jeff Minter, Tony Crowther and Matthew Smith. Those games were filled with literary and cultural references - I think Terry Cavanagh gets that.

Wonderful.

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I LOVE THIS!!!  Congratulations, what a cool experience this was! So fun! Really does a great job being just abstract enough to have me painting the more vivid world in my mind as I'm playing. Music and ambiance add a lot here too. Really, really great experience.

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At first I was drawn in, and thought, cool, edgy, could be really fun, but it got very hard, very fast, and was so bare bones, it felt incomplete.  The missing terrain levels feel like something that should be far into the game, not presented to the player right away.  It makes the game confusing, and all that much harder.  The super simplistic style has great potential, but needs to have more polish to pull it off.  It also needs some fresh ideas, as it reminded me of Pitfall on the 2600 (in a good way).  I do like the fact that it doesn't track lives and I immediately get to start a level without any time overhead.  Lots of potential here.

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This game has a great backstory and shows that you can create a complex platformer without super fancy graphics and sound.

Also liked that there are endless lives, because there are times that the game is so impossible and you die over and over. It's at those times playing this game becomes more irritating than fun and challenging.

I'd ease up on the difficulty to give make DLB more palatable to a wider audience.

I really thought Eversion was a shoe in for Design Excellence. Genuinely shocked at that feedback.

And quote of the day:

Visually, I was really just responding to something Paul Eres said that annoyed me

Ah, "Annoyed" probably wasn't really the right word...

<3 Paul Eres

Thanks It's not the end of the world - I mean, it sucks, I would have loved to go to the IGF this year - but I...

hmm, can't remember how I was going to end that sentence

There is a specific command that can be fed to the command-line compiler that will open the flash player up to a local sandbox. This allows the swf, and the exe generated from the swf, to access local files. I believe it also disables the resulting file from accessing on-line files though, so there is a trade-off. This feature is especially valuable if you want to use a flash projector file as the autoexec file on a CD or DVD disc.

Is that so? Have you any more information about that?

:handshakeR:

Oh, cool Look forward to hearing this!

(Er, have any of you guys played VVVVVV yet?)

Quick, somebody in Ireland make a game where Xenu bangs the Virgin Mary. Mohammed videotapes.

Don't tempt me.

bollox to this

night!

Yeah, I settled on Fastspring in the end

Happy new year! I'm doing an all nighter to try and get the first release candidate ready for the morning!

 

Nearly there now!

I guess I'm not really looking at any SWF2EXE tools anymore, since the only one that's got a linux version doesn't work for me. grapefrukt, thanks for the offer! But I've already tried this with someone else and I still had the same problem...

Oh! Don't virus scanners all think that compressed EXEs are viruses, though?

[To get rid of the menu:]

Ok! I've made some interesting discoveries on this front! Here they are:

• Adobe AIR is too problematic to bother with in any form, including AIR2EXE tools like Shu and AirAveer, because of something called the Adobe AIR Runtime Distribution License Agreement, which would mean I'd have to subject the player to confusing AIR nonsense or at least make them read a EULA. Not worth it. This has more details on that.
  
  
• I'm fairly sure that Machinarium is just using a regular hacked/modified projector. What's more, I think I've found how they did it...
  
  
• Turns out there actually are commands in flash to disable nonsense projector stuff. You need to include the package "flash.system.fscommand", and then all of these things become available:
  
  
  • To get rid of the menu:
    
    fscommand("showmenu", "false");
    
    
  • To get rid of the projector keybindings, i.e. ESC to return to a window:
    
    fscommand("trapallkeys", "true");
    
    
  • To start in fullscreen mode: (there is an fscommand to do this too, but because of the whole flash security theatre thing you can't do it and the key binding thing at the same time)
    
    var swfStage:Stage = stage;
    swfStage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL;
    stage.displayState=StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
    
    
  • And finally, to quit the projector:
    
    fscommand("quit");
    
    
  More info on that here.
  
  
• Things like the program icon I can probably just change with a tool like ResHacker, at least in windows. But this doesn't really matter all that much.
  
  
• So, the remaining problem is basically just SWF security. There's not a whole lot I can really do here, except maybe make the assets external and use a code obfuscater. But all that'll probably do is slow things down, really.
  
  

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone

Seems like maybe you could build it as an AIR application and buy Shu light as a cheap projector.

I had a look at this, but couldn't get it to work! I'll try again tomorrow.

Though that option rules out a linux version, which I'd really prefer not to do...

I'm not very good at all of these hard things, but when you downloaded Meat Boy didn't you get an .exe? So maybe ask Edmund?

I think that was just the usual Flash projector as well

If the main issue is encryption, then maybe the solution is to encrypt the swf before turning it into a projector or to create an executable that wraps an encrypted version of the projector.

Yeah, I think so - unfortunately, I don't think any of those programs actually work for very long...

I was really hoping that there was some way to just compile an Actionscript Flex project to an EXE, but it looks like you can't do that. So it looks like I'm just going to have to port it. Which is... not that scary, really.

2. you could lock the swf to "localhost". I.E. look up the url, if it's not "localhost/........" then send them to a "fuck you" page.

I did that with the offline version of Don't Look Back, but I recently had someone decompile a game of mine and remove the sitelock. I don't think that's really secure if the person playing has incentive to hack it.

Ok, hang on - are you saying that I can make a single, standalone EXE with AIR? Because I haven't been able to do that, and I was under the impression that that's not how it works...

Played it for about half an hour so far and I'm loving it. Nice work guys.