Also, this link is germane to the topic:  http://sjbaker.org/steve/omniv/projection_abuse.html

["For the purpose of this article, we will consider avatar customization a convenient narrative cop-out"]

If you agree with the explicitly stated premise of the article: "For the purpose of this article, we will consider avatar customization a convenient narrative cop-out", then yes, avatar customization is a bad thing that hurts the narrative.


On an entirely different topic, I've come up with this rather clever proof.  Folks might be interested in it, as it kind of turns accepted mathematics onto its head:

Proof that 1 = 2:

For the purpose of this proof, we shall consider that 1 = 2 (Axiom 1)

Step 1.  1 = 2 (By axiom 1)
Step 2.  2 = 3 (Add 1 to both sides)
Step 3.  3 = 4 (Add 1 to both sides)
Step 4.  1 = 2 (Subtract 2 from both sides)
QED

Behold, unassailable proof that 1 equals 2!  I have rigorously proven my conjecture!   

I think the Monster Hunter Freedom games have pretty bad controls, but I think that's more of a side-effect of being on the PSP than a conscious design choice.

Being on the PSP was a conscious design choice, so it still counts.

Back in the old days, I used the nick "miu" in IRC, as a reference to Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, and Bach".  Over time, that changed to "mew", which sounded the same but required fewer explanations.  When Pokemon came out in the west, suddenly I became deluged by Pokemon fans who thought I must be a real die-hard fan that they could discuss strategies with (though I'd never actually played the game, being a penniless student at the time). 

A friend of mine used the nick "demos", and during the period that I was slowly switching from "miu" to "mew", he was switching from "demos" to "m00se" (probably for the same reason, as he wasn't involved in the demo scene;  he was more involved in the whole mp3 thing, which was also starting up at that time).  To hide from the Pokemon /msgs, I switched to "mewse", as a pun on his "m00se".. and it kind of stuck.

We lost touch when I left university and stopped hanging around in IRC.  I have since learned that in the time since then, he has also been using the name "mewse" for various things, and so it's quite possible that I'm misremembering events totally.  Maybe I shamelessly ripped off his nick, and then doctored my own memories so I didn't have to live with the guilt. 

Anyway, the story in Assassin's Creed is not really a weak point, it's better than most games. The writers really tried to include some depiction of morality that's more complex than the standard good and evil scale. OK, so they did it in a smug, ham-fisted manner, but at least they tried.

While the story in Assassin's Creed 2, was vastly improved over the previous one, it really reminded me of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy in that it was initially an interesting and reasonably well-written premise and build-up, which right near the end abruptly veered sharply to the left and became silly and disappointing.

At least the final challenge in this one didn't consist of repeatedly fighting waves of multiply-respawning bad guys in a small arena, as in the first one.  That was kind of embarrassing to watch.

when he talks about how in 100 billion years, the galaxies would be moving apart at faster than the speed of light and therefore there would be no more empirical evidence that galaxies outside the one we live in exist, and how they'd lose a lot of the information that helps

Our sun will burn out in only about another five billion years, taking most of the rest of our solar system with it when it goes.  I'd be interested to find out how much of the rest of our galaxy would still be around, a hundred billion years from now.

I mean, not being able to see our neighbors any more might be the least of our worries. 

But you do know "Apple" also got trouble with their own trademark when they started to do music related thing (from what I rembember first time was with the Apple IIGS due to the inclusion of Ensoniq synth chips).  And with whom? The Apple record label company mostly well know for The Beatles records.

They actually got in trouble before they started to do music related things, but they reached an agreement (with Apple paying Apple Records an undisclosed sum).

After that came the Apple //gs trouble you mentioned, then new trouble due to a particular sound sample they included with the Mac System 7 software (amusingly entitled "sosumi"), and then even yet more trouble from the iTunes music store (although Apple seems to have roundly won this last one, and now licenses use of the Apple trademark back to Apple Records, whereas previously it had been the other way around)

There's a good write-up of the whole sequence of events on WIkipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_Computer

There's an easy solve for this -- one which nobody ever uses.

It's simply this:  Instead of making a player more powerful as they do well, make them less powerful.  Instead of giving players new abilities for reaching higher levels, take away their best abilities, or make them more attractive targets in some game-specific manner.  (Perhaps make them larger or slower so that they're easier to hit, or take away some of their health, etc).  This approach automatically balances the game so that players of different skill levels can play together -- the players who do better will find the game scaling in difficulty for them, while the players who have trouble will find it becoming easier for them.

Of course, nobody does any of this -- it feels weird to punish a player for doing too well, and it's counterintuitive to start a player with everything, and slowly remove things over the course of a game.  But it actually would completely solve exactly this problem.

I find it really interesting that so many posts, in discussing video game stories, are completely focused on the storytelling, where "storytelling" apparently means voice acting, animation, and skin shaders, rather than the actual writing.

... they indicate a presence or lack of some desired quality in the thing being judged.

Obviously someone has to come up with what is a 'desired quality'.  Desired to who? Desired by the creator?  Or by the audience? 

Most of the time the creator sets those desired qualities implicitly by how the piece is created.   A portrait drawing is good by having a successful likeness to the subject -- not by having a pretty background.

Accuracy as a distinguisher of quality in portraits has been out of vogue for hundreds of years.

The 'desired quality' is selected by the person doing the judging;  this is why different people have different ideas about whether things are 'good' or 'bad', and is why what is "bad" is always going to be subjective.

Well, I've just found out the drawing engine I'm using has no concept of locked FPS. Best it can do is get around the general area. Ex: I set the max FPS to 60, the program will go from 58-63 fps. Unacceptable, because it's not constant and thus can be twitchy...

My game engine will do exactly this, if the display driver has been set to never allow programs to wait for vsync (which seems to be a popular option for people to set under Windows, sadly;  I blame FPS players). 

When we can't wait for vsync in order to lock the frame rate, all we can really do is perform some complicated timing and try to sleep between frames, and hope that the sleep function returns execution to us at approximately a good time. 

You could also make certain velocity ranges map to certain animation frames, so the animation will automatically match the jump arc whenever you tweak the jump velocity. And it will advance to the downward part if you collide with an overhead obstruction and start falling before the jump apex.

This is what I typically do.  When the jump starts, you record the initial vertical velocity upward.  While the player is moving upward, you do something like this:

animationFraction = (1.0 - (currentUpVelocity / initialUpVelocity)) * 0.5;

That gives you a value in the range [0 .. 0.5], for how far you should be through your animation, as your currentUpVelocity goes from "initialUpVelocity" to 0.

Once the player starts moving downward again, you have two options.  Usually, you want to keep using the same general idea;  as the up velocity reaches -initialUpVelocity, you reach the end of the animation, and hold there until the player hits the ground.

An alternate approach I've used on a few projects is to test how high the player is above the ground each frame while he's descending, and do some maths to figure out how long it would take for him to hit the ground, and update the animation fast enough so that it'll reach the end of the animation at the same time he hits the ground.  That's often useful if you want your character to do a mid-air flip and just barely land on his feet as he touches the ground, even if he's been jumping off a cliff.  Of course, it can lead to some weird animation discontinuities if the player moves over the edge of a cliff while descending (last frame he was 1000m from the ground and this frame he's only 5m from the ground.. or vice versa), so you have to be able to cope with those.

Could we say that ‘Good’ is when the Author successfully communicates that message to the Audience and ‘Bad’ is when they don’t (regardless of what that message is)?

According to the dictionaries I've checked, "Good" doesn't mean that an audience understood the latent meaning in the author's work, and "Bad" doesn't mean that the audience missed the underlying message in a work.  Rather, they indicate a presence or lack of some desired quality in the thing being judged.

Maybe for you "I figured out what the author was really trying to say" is the specific quality that you look for -- I certainly have a few friends who are like that (and they can be absolutely infuriating to talk to after watching a summer blockbuster movie).  Suffice to say that not everyone agrees that underlying meanings are the be-all and end-all determining factors of quality.

I have this vague feeling that what they've stumbled over is the issue of moral rights, which are slightly different in different countries.

As specified in the Berne Convention, moral rights are special rights which are held by the actual creators of a copyrighted work.  These rights include the right to declare yourself the creator of the work (or alternately to remain anonymous), and the right to protect the integrity of that work.  The original author maintains these rights even if he assigns the copyrights away to some other entity, and he keeps these rights until he dies, at which point the moral rights vanish -- they normally cannot be passed on to another person or corporate entity, even if the thing being created was a work for hire for that other person or entity.

In Canada, though, moral rights can be assigned away to corporations, and this is often done in employment contracts for people who are performing work for hire (such as, for example, video game developers).  (For what it's worth, the USA is even worse than Canada, in terms of its treatment of moral rights -- the USA got a waiver for most "moral rights" requirements when they signed the convention)

Now, I'm not aware of the precise situation in the Netherlands, but if the laws there don't allow assigning of moral rights, then while you're living under the laws of the Netherlands, your employment contract can't legally have you assign your moral rights to your employer, which means that your employer would have to take the risk that someday you might say "Wait, I don't approve of you using that image I drew in that way.  You can't do that."  And legally, they would have to stop, because you'd have the right to protect the integrity of the work.  The only real solution I can see would be to move to Canada (or the USA), or some other less author-friendly country where they'd allow you to assign away your moral rights to your employer.

Regardless, my advice is to check with a lawyer in your area, who knows the local laws.  They should be able to advise you.  

Also jesus I want a "Book to ACtion Game" compo so bad now.

Waiting for Godot:  The Game.

Vladimir and Estragon get tired of waiting, and go on an epic journey, fighting unhelpful messenger boys and collecting hats, to find the mysterious Godot and discover the truth about their oddly dystopian world.  Intense arcade action!  Elaborate physics puzzles!  Co-op multiplayer!  Rocket jumping!  All this and more, in Waiting for Godot:  The Game!

well, you don't need to show anyone the prototype, it's just for you

but i'd actually recommend making all the graphics before you make the game, or at least enough graphics to allow you to code a complete area/level/whatever in it, because it's really depressing to code using placeholders, it doesn't feel like you're really playing a videogame

Interesting -- I go entirely the other direction;  I never make graphics until after I've coded at least a whole level, so that I know for certain what context the graphics are going to be used within.

Although to be fair, my placeholder vector lines and boxes automatically get Geometry Wars-style bloom on them, which makes them look an awful lot nicer than most placeholder programmer art, so maybe it doesn't count as not making graphics.

You mean textures that don't move with the geometry, like if you used a floodfill on the character with a specific pattern in a still image?

I'd stand on my head to make you a deal!

[fully assignable (including the right to grant the right to third parties)]

Extract from the Mo'Minis EULA:

6.  Grant of Commercialization Rights to Company. You hereby grant Company full commercialization rights in the Content, on a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, free of charge (subject to Section 7) fully assignable (including the right to grant the right to third parties) basis, including without limitation the right to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, enhance, create derivatives, digitize, adapt, publish and publicize, translate and transcribe, embody, transmit and broadcast, publicly perform and publicly display the Content by itself or through third parties either as free (promotional or ad-supported) or paid-for content, or to incorporate Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed (the 'Commercialization Rights'). Notwithstanding the abovementioned, the grant of Commercialization Rights in the Content in connection with the Mobile Applications, or within the Mobile Market shall be on an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, free of charge (subject to Section 7) fully assignable (including the right to grant the right to third parties) basis. For the purpose of this section the term 'Mobile Market' shall mean any cellular phones, smart phones, PDAs, hand held computers and any other mobile devices now known or developed in the future. Please be aware that once you create Mobile Applications using the Software, Company has the sole and complete discretion as to its use (including without limitation with respect to its further development, marketing and overall commercialization), and Company may remove it or use it on its web properties (such as, but not limited to: site, widgets, co-branded sites) for other applications and/or on other web properties, services and/or products or any other means in any format or medium now known or later developed by Company and/or its affiliates.


Pretty sweet deal.  Somebody creates the next Super Mario Brothers or Digger and leaves an impression on the casual gaming world, and Mo'Minis gets perpetual, royalty-free, exclusive rights to it on all mobile platforms, non-exclusive rights on all non-mobile platforms, and they only have to pay the developer $4000 for the privilege.  And then only if they declare that person the "winner";  non-winners don't get paid at all, but Mo'Minis still gets perpetual rights to anything the losers create.  Deal of the century, from Mo'Minis Ltd's point of view.

I wonder why that little gotcha about Mo'Minis getting complete perpetual royalty-free rights to all entries wasn't mentioned anywhere in the original contest description, or in the contest rules on the website, but was only buried deep in the middle of a giant wall of text in a EULA for "the software". 

I'm sure it was just an oversight, and Mo'Minis wasn't trying to hoodwink anyone.   

I especially like how paragraph 5 of the EULA has the end user waiving their moral rights over what they create, so that Mo'Minis can freely modify their newly-owned entries without being obligated to get approval from the original author.  Classy.

My general opinion is that for a single-player game, I'm not going to do anything special to try to stop players from tweaking the game in any way that they can think of, but I'm also ordinarily not going to go out of my way to make it easy for them, such as by integrating a scripting language (unless I need one myself), writing documentation for file formats, or etc.

However, for competitive multiplayer games, I can totally understand wanting to completely lock things down, so that player A can't get an advantage by increasing his FOV or boosting his car's engine or increasing the damage that his gun can do.

Last time I played, I found a pretty neat Dead Space remake game (remarkably faithful -- hit all the major plot points), a few really impressive vehicle-demo levels, some neat no-input-required Rube Goldberg contraptions (which seem to be quite popular, these days), and a couple of interesting roller coasters (which are popular but rare, as they can be tricky to make)

There's still lots of neat content, but it takes more searching to find it, amid dull levels which are a part of somebody's "Heart 4 Heart" scheme to collect the level-creation trophies.  Think it was a mistake to award achievements for creating levels that get hearted by other players;  just opened it up for abuse that'd lead to a lower overall level of quality to the user-generated content.