White definitely looks better with the darker inner shirt.

I think a beatmup would be a rhythm-based beat-em up. Which could be cool.

I just realized why the combat in SoR3 didn't feel as powerful as it did in SoR2 -- they sped it up massively. What used to be punch, punch, crosspunch, kick-kick became pupucrokikick -- at least twice as fast. Which means less anticipation for each incoming hit, less impact after the hit is delivered, less time leaving the grunts stunned before you knock them into the air...SoR3 might have had more room for demanding reactions and quick in-and-out raids, but the act of beating the stuffing out of goons just wasn't as satisfying.

Heh. As a dvorak user I'm often annoyed by this as well. It's usually not an issue as you can switch the layout with a keystroke, but sometimes games seem to continue using the incorrect layout and you need to restart the game with the layout set beforehand.

This. Computers can be really bad sometimes about handling different default keyboard layouts. I've had some games that end up binding the same letter to multiple keys, which renders other letters inaccessible! Bizarre. And while you can switch back to QWERTY easily enough, it's still jarring switching back and forth.

Using arrow and modifier keys is nice because they never get remapped, but being right handed, I'd rather have the action keys and not the movement keys on the hand with better reflexes.

Odd, I prefer to have movement on the right hand for the same reason. And yes, using arrow keys and meta keys is good, not just because they don't get remapped, but also because you're much less likely to run into the "key limit" with meta keys, since they're designed with the assumption that many of them may be held down at the same time.

I actually think the light coat has better visibility; the dark coat seems like it would blend into the sword too easily when it's being used. But they're both good!

Yep, and I like if after I finished the training stuff I got rewarded like in Parasite Eve 2. Well, now to think about it, I finished all the training just for the prizes

Ehh, I don't know that I'd encourage that. On the one hand, yes it means that players who play the tutorial (who are likely to be players who are new to the game) get some bonus stuff to help them deal with the first level or so...on the other hand, players are natural hoarders, and if they know that there's "free" gear available if they just sit through the tutorial, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them would opt to play the tutorial even though they've seen it a million times before, just for the gear.

Heck, I remember spending ages in the tutorial level in Taskmaker (an old game that I'd describe as a sort of turn-based Zelda), largely because you can't die in it but you can summon monsters using a secret spell. That, and by putting a weight on the keyboard you could run your character into the wall over and over again and level up his Spirit stat...

I had to solve a somewhat more complex version of this for my project. I have a 2D array of "open/occupied" that I wanted to turn into a terrain with a nice-looking surface, like this. What I did was come up with 20 different tile variants to use depending on which of the 8 tiles adjacent to a given tile are occupied, and then write an algorithm that would pick the preferred tile based on the observed adjacencies. I made a bunch of arrays like this:

Code:

    ((2, 0, 2),
     (1, 1, 1),
     (2, 1, 2)) : 'up',
    ((2, 1, 2),
     (1, 1, 0),
     (2, 1, 2)) : 'right',
    ((2, 1, 2),
     (1, 1, 1),
     (2, 0, 2)) : 'down',
    ((2, 1, 2),
     (0, 1, 1),
     (2, 1, 2)) : 'left',

Here 0 means unoccupied, 1 means occupied, and 2 means that it doesn't matter if the tile is occupied or not.

Then I wrote a function to parse through those 3x3 grids and come up with a hash for each combination of tiles that could match a given array. I assigned a power of two to each of the 8 tiles (so there's 256 possible tile configurations). Then when it comes time to actually assign the tile, I just calculate the local terrain signature and look it up in the precomputed hashmap.

I realize this is rather more complex than the solutions other people are suggesting, but if you ever do plan on switching your rendering mode, I don't think image filtering is going to cut it.

Sometimes it's just buckling down and getting something done that I don't really want to do. I spent a ridiculously long time roadblocked by font rendering, for example -- I was switching from SDL to OpenGL for my rendering process, and OpenGL doesn't have a built-in way to handle fonts. So I spent some time looking around for an existing font library that met my standards, couldn't find one, found one, couldn't get it to work, and gave up in frustration*.

Finally last Saturday I just sat down and prototyped out my own mini-font library. It didn't take all that long, really (mostly since I tossed all of the complicated parts of font rendering; instead I just constrain everything to be fixed-width with no special formatting or accented characters), and now I have font rendering again I can move on with the more interesting parts of game development! But I was blocked for over a month on something that was not very interesting to work on, didn't have a premade solution, and seemed (at first glance) to be complicated.

* I'm working in Python here, so while FTGL would be a good solution for C/C++ programmers, it wasn't an option for me. PyFTGL is the library I found and couldn't get to work; it doesn't seem to want to build in OSX.

Okay, fine, between that and any other portrayal before the end of the Matrix arc. :p

Some games will do something similar by having multiple characters available. In this case, it's not that the game supports multiple simultaneous genres, but that the same game can be played through with different idiosyncracies that create subtle or not-so-subtle differences in how the player has to approach problems.

This can be as simple as having a "Mario" all-rounder character, a character that's fast but weak, etc. etc. or can branch out to having different characters take entirely different routes through the same set of levels. Bunny Must Die / Chelsea and the Seven Devils is an example of the latter; Bunny plays aggressively but is limited mobility-wise; Chelsea is less of a powerhouse but has much more versatility in her spells.

I haven't played Henry Hatsworth, but while I like the aesthetic style I feel like the puzzle aspects were tacked on. You don't play both the puzzle and the platforming at the same time; the puzzle mode is simply something to do to make the platforming mode a bit easier by giving you access to some powerups. If you had to juggle both constantly then I'd find it more interesting due to the split-brain requirement.

An example of that latter that I think works well is Puzzle Pirates. As a crewmember aboard a ship, you have to perform one of several different kinds of puzzles to keep the ship running -- carpentry, sailing, bilge pumping, etc. If you're also the captain of the ship, then you may need to do one of these puzzles while also navigating the ship in battle (which requires inputting a series of movements and signaling when to fire the cannons). You have to be able to split your focus between the normal puzzle and the ship combat "puzzle", which is a great exercise in multitasking.

Heck, I've tried running an entire ship on my own...that is hard.

Sure, but the lack of lip-sync is consistent between that portrayal and any other of Hex. The voice shift from AndrAIa to Hex just adds a bit more creep.

Underwater levels in a lot of games disturb me.

I hear ya. The sound effect that accompanies the countdown to Sonic drowning still brings me out in a cold sweat. Or even the anticipation of that sound as you drag through the water, not quite sure of how far you are from the surface.

Reminds me of a dream I had where I was navigating an underwater labyrinth, in the dark. The tunnels kept getting narrower and narrower, and I knew there was air somewhere ahead of me, but I didn't know if I was taking the right path and I'd gone too far forward to turn back. I'm an excellent swimmer, but...yeegh.

I dunno if this qualifies as "art", but I made it and it's shiny!



All images are public domain, courtesy of NASA and other groups working with NASA. NASA.

Click it for a bigger version. I have an even huger version (18000x18000 pixels!) that I'm getting printed to 25 square feet of canvas.

A friend of mine gets really squicked out by the original Prince of Persia, when you lure guards into the guillotine traps. Something about the color choice of the bright red blood that gets squirted everywhere, I think.

I got a bit disturbed in Half-Life 2 when I found a sawblade embedded in the wall with half a corpse resting on top of it.

School isn't there to teach you; it's there to make it easier for you to teach yourself.

(In other words, the teacher can explain things six ways to Sunday and you still won't learn anything unless you're paying attention and trying to learn)

I taught myself too, while learning to create and rig models in Blender. 3D modeling can be a pain to get started in, but its great advantage is that you can massively change the animations without having to redraw anything. This allows you to focus more on the motion and less on the pixels (heretical as that might sound).

I definitely agree with getting a stick-figure in there so you can see how his not-actually-visible limbs are moving. Also if you can, get the book The Animator's Survival Kit, which has excellent guides to making walk cycles in all sorts of funny ways.

Your main issue, I think, is that your character is constrained to hold his hands out to the sides in a particular pose, which means he can't swing them properly -- and without that, it's really hard to read how his invisible body is supposed to be moving.

(This is part of why I favored keeping your game concept abstract...though I do dig the "head walking")

Browsers seem to have limits on how quickly they update animations. If I recall correctly, in my browser a delay between frames of less than 6ms or so just didn't have any effect.

Urgh, the character design challenge was hard. Sign of a good challenge, I guess. I must have started and tossed a half-dozen doodles. Finally I just bulled through and came up with something, though I think my enthusiasm suffered and thus it's not really as good as it could have been.



Apologies for the wonky line thicknesses. My first profile drawing was horribly not-to-scale, so I redid it quickly with the wrong brush size. 

Anyway, this guy is intentionally oddly-proportioned. I have him pegged as the mad-scientist type trying to make up for physical deformities. Mind, he's supposed to have one of those huge collars but it just looks like he's wearing a hoodie.

Congrats on finishing first, Iamthejuggler!

You pretty much have to have an in-game tutorial these days (nobody appears to be willing to read the manual any more), which means you'll have to tell your players what buttons do what. I do think that showing them to the user on the controller is overkill, though. What I'd prefer is little popup messages that appear at appropriate junctures. E.g. you put the player in a closed room, so they naturally walk towards the door. When they get close, a (non-interrupting) message appears that says "Press [square] to open doors".

The non-interrupting is important, since it lets the user read the thing at their own pace, or ignore it outright if they already know what they're doing.

I'm gonna work on it tonight, I swear! I'm just dealing with performance anxiety since everyone else here is so much more practiced than I am. Plus I'm used to doing my greebling (fine detail work) in Blender...

How long do we have before we get shitlisted? The character study is giving me fits...I'm half-considering just making a character that's a hand molded to a foot so I at least have an excuse for it being drawn crappily!