WOAH immediate reply from my #1 (and only) fan!

I'm a fan also.

WTF is CBC Competition?

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation competition, the CBCC. You have to write a game that looks like a low-budget Canadian TV show or movie.

I prefer line drawings pretty much above everything else. There is something about doing more with less that really appeals to me. Sketch and NPR techniques are great because it is making something look less hyperreal. Even photographs don't do much for me, but I do appreciate a good pixel here and there.

For the most part, I like abstracts. Things where you have to fill in the gaps (like the graphics for my competition entry) or let your brain just work with what you have. Probably one reason I like Thing Thing as an artistic style.

But, line drawings are the best for me.

How boring and easy, dmoonfire.

I'm only on the beta announce list until I get my precious profanity pack.

Oh, and the Linux version.

The World of Goo Mac beta runs nicer though.

That is very sexy.

Stage Ideas:

I'm going with seven stages right now. For the first part, they really won't change around that much, but if I continue this, there is a bit of time travel going on that lets you mess around with the stages.

1. Cavemen
2. Harvest Festival/Agricultural
3. Middle Ages city
4. Renaissance city
5. Industrial age factory city
6. Modern day city
7. Cthulhu convention (probably the same city)

The entire point of the first stage is to drive enough people insane. Everyone will have a sanity meter (well, a fraction). As a baby squid god, you drive people insane by your very looks, but its slow. You can also scare them which gets more of an impact. Your score for a stage is equal to the sum of all the insanity you inflict. If you do it fast enough (< 1 second), you get a bonus. If you do more than one at a time, you also get a bonus.

You'll be able to go back and forth between the stages. Some of it will be a "gather the power spheres" quest where you need certain powers to get more powers. In specific, BSG's don't climb very well, but later they'll get the ability to teleport on top of items. There will also be things for lasting longer in a stage, hiding in shadows (for the surprise bonus), and even later decreasing the impact of the insanity on sight. Naturally, there will also be things for increasing the rate of insanity inflicted (on sight or from the boost). The eventual goal is that the player can run around safely and manipulate the people into doing things (part 2).

I decided to go with a grayscale game, except when insanity or otherworldly stuff is shown. That will be in color which should make it nice and contrasting. Everything is also going to be in fractions, so your health will start off as 31/31 but you'll take damage in 1/37 increments.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3407.0

Speaking of music requests. I think I would love to have a bit of help on the musical side of things. I'm only focusing on the first two stages right now, but I'm trying to find some caveman-like music and music appropriate for early settlers (well, before the middle ages, but close enough. Anyone willing to donate a bit of music?

I like it when sites give you a set of options for licenses. Also donating things to public domain. Just one of those things I happen to look for. Mainly because I want to know exactly what it can be used for since Debian has strict limitations on what is allowed (CC sa/3.0+ is pretty much is it for the CC licenses).

Also, I would include format. I like SVG sprites (I know, I'm weird), but I think there is at least one other person out there would wouldn't mind a collection of them.

Meh, this comes a bit late but thank you all for such nice comments!

ChevyRay: Yes, that needs to be in a game. It weeps for it.

Actually, showing how you built it made me thing of the Grow games (Grow RPG in specific).

IS IT FOR MACINTOSH?
IS IT SHADOWGATE?

It is shadowgate. There are games for the mac, you wankers. Like Dark Castle and Enchanted Scepters, and Crystal Quest. And Deja Vu.

Moi wins. Moi's turn.

Don't forget Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, those two games basically destroyed many work hours for me and my boss.

Toilet paper? That's easy, leaves work well enough.

But, as I learned in boy scouts, you REALLY, REALLY should learn how to identify poison ivy and oak before you attempt it.

...I think that kid screamed for days.

On a completely unrelated note, apparently I don't have an allergy to poison ivy.

Bah, I like too many of those ideas. Though, I was telling a co-worker about my idea of the GNM competition and she hurt herself laughing. So, I'd be just as happy with that one. But, steampunk fits better with my long range goals of developing my steampunk world, so I had to go with that.

I suspect that is one reason why my web comic didn't do so well. That and the writing, I still need to work on "humor" when it comes to comics. But, the Thing Thing style is fairly abstract. For some, it really looks wrong, but it appeals to me in its simplicity. Now, I hate Thing Thing 4's graphic style with the hands--those things scare me. I also know there are some things I struggle to do (like snakes and tentacles and mouths).

If I had a bit more time to really iron it out, I would consider doing something similar to Keychain of Creation or Order of the Stick, or even find a new graphical style. But, at this point in time, I know this style better. And, given my tragedy with Lethe's Yarn, I think I need to stick with something I'm familiar with instead of teaching myself how to do new graphics AND program the damn thing. You know, instead of learning an entirely new skill set every TIG contest. Once I actually *finish* one...

I also already have bits of code for assembling and animating this style. I also know how to do the paperdoll for these, which is related to the later parts. And the color changing, which is also going to be used to represent the various forms of insanity (I'm considering making most of the game grayscale except for the insanity bits).

The things I like about Kingdom of Loathing. Mainly it is a relatively simple interface, but has a fair amount of detail. There are always little things that pop up that change the flow. Like the strange leaflet adventure which is basically a mini-IF game in the middle of a web game. And while a lot of the quests are "go find item X", sometimes it isn't that direct of a quest. And they are rolling out new content at a fairly good clip, one advantage of it being your full-time job, that there is usually something new to check out (plus the ascension stuff has a fair amount of mutual exclusivity). There is also a fair amount for the completionist (recipes, collecting stuff, hardcore-perming skills which is my own personal enjoyment). The crafting bits are pretty fun too, and relatively varied. You have meat-pasting (gluing), smithing, cooking, mixing (booze), pixels (think making pixel potions), and balloon sculptures (there is a lot more). I just happen to really like the variety of different combinations.

I also like it for the sense of humor. My latest ascension had a cotton candy familiar who occasionally tore off parts of their body to heal me. Many of the jokes are topical (like the borg holiday thing) while others are just generally part of the indie culture (the entire stage related to mocking JRPG's). You can easily just enjoy reading the messages and descriptions, the people who write KoL have a large repository of popular culture knowledge and a snarky sense of humor.

I also like that it is basically a massively single player game. You have this culture going on (Hobopolis, the malls, clans, etc), but you have your own private instance and don't have to worry about camping or kill-stealing.

There is a bit of grind in places, more so if you are doing fast runs (I'm trying to ascend in 30 days for the last five ascensions). And there are some other front ends (kolmafia for example) which help, but basically its a nice 30-50 minutes a day for me.

Obsessive need for learning things. I have a tendency to middle-click on any link that seems interesting and Wikipedia isn't your friend. Plus, I have a few tutorials for doing SVG graphics, some stuff for my homework (working on my masters), some essays that I wanted to write about, BoingBoing, web comics I haven't quite read, some programming lookups for OpenGL, Tao, C#, and MSDN (language and libraries I'm using for this game), and the general cruft you pick up. Oh, and the pixel tutorials since I tried pixel squids first.

I think I was okay until I hit the image board looking for squid examples.

I'm fond of Kingdom of Loathing. well, I've played it for 1.25 years and I'm still enjoying it.

I knew there was a chance that 97% of the browsers wouldn't be able to see it, but I don't play with Chrome until it shows up on Linux. (Though, last night, I could seriously have used it when my Firefox hit 1.8 GB of RAM used because of a measly 112 tabs open).

On the other hand, Chrome will probably support web fonts a hell of a lot sooner than Firefox.

EDIT: But the first PNG frame shows up, right?

At the point, this isn't quite using one of the Commonplace ideas, though it probably will at the end. But, when I first heard about the contest, I came up with this idea and I really want to try implementing it. I'll see how far I can go with this, I keep dialing back my expectations and hopes with each contest entry; hopefully I'll figure out what I can do in the timeframe and not get burned out by trying too hard.

The game is going to be called Baby Squid God, named after one of my friend's favorite t-shirts of a baby cthulhu in diapers. The entire idea of the game is to drive people insane, because that is what elder gods do, but you don't have the awesome power of driving people insane by your very sight. Instead, as you start, you have to scare them from the shadows. There will be power-ups scattered around which will make it easier to hide in shadows, be more terrifying, or even change how you drive people insane. Some of the power-ups require you do to specific types of insanity to get people to do specific things.

There is a part two, if I can pull off the first one. A lot of that depends on the procedural world development (because I love that bit) and getting the time travel bits working.

• Chronon
• Knytt Stories
• Art of Theft
• Thing Thing

I'm going to try using my web comic style again and see if I can use the code I started with for a game called Ponies Among Us to use the graphics. It won't be pixels (sorry), but I have a decent library of SVG graphics which I'm hoping to use. I've been working on the graphic style for the game, mainly the characters.



This is my current version of the baby squid god. I learned that Firefox 3 can do APNGs, so I animated them using that. It probably won't show up on IE properly (well, the first image should), but the animation is just a sketch version.

Enjoy haiku now,
Without season words in there,
Or the cutting words