In platforming games, doing any of the following rarely:

 * Levels with icy floors that greatly reduce your traction
 * Levels with variable winds that push you around (particularly if this means that it's impossible to stand still)
 * Levels that reduce your ability to jump, e.g. by requiring you to carry something heavy

The problem with doing these rarely is that they muck with your muscle memory, and every time one of them shows up you have to spend some time (and often some lives) re-learning how to play the game. If you integrate them as part of the gameplay, though, then this is less of a problem; each time you see one of the themed levels you're still more or less "trained" in how to handle it.

Of course, this is also less of an issue if your platforming tends to be forgiving during these themed levels.

Sketchfighter is sort of the logical extreme of this approach; the entire aesthetic is "bored kids doodling fights on a piece of paper". It works quite well, though granted it doesn't have especially complicated lines or color to deal with.

Monitor gamma settings are going to be weird from one computer to another pretty much no matter what. One thing I've noticed, for example, is that Macs tend to have consistently brighter screens than Windows computers do (they ship with lower gamma settings). So I don't know what to tell you here except that you should probably consider including a brightness knob in your game's configuration screen.

A quick pixel art piece I just did.

I dig! We need more of this semi-surrealist approach to landscaping.

RTS + (Soccer, Basketball, Water Polo, etc.)

Build a team, and send them into the field to score goals! But units can attack and destroy each other, so you'll need to be continually churning out replacements in your fieldside factories and barracks, or else prime your team with some medics and mechanics. Turtle up your goal line with a massive goalie unit, or rely on a field of fast strikers.

I have two extra input devices for my computer beyond my keyboard and mouse. They are...a PS2 controller and a DDR dance pad, both of which plug into a PS2-to-USB converter.

Go figure.

More drawings? I must comply!

Action pose based on Parkour_1.jpg

Hands based on ClassicalHand04.jpg

Hands are hard.  

I think not having lots of incentives is better, so that each individual incentive has more meaning. You could change what you award each week, though, if you feel variety is called for.

As for what next week's challenges should be, personally I feel like what I really need is more practice with reality before I start working on trying to distort it much. But I'm game for whatever you decide we should try.

Guys, note that johngate2100 bumped this thread (with a rather pointless post, too). It's almost a year old...

Hokay, "finished" the first one. I don't know exactly how long I spent on it, but more than the half hour you specified.

That's okay.
Overall head to body ratio is quite good (Closer than mine!) The head also isn't too narrow? It's slightly offset to the right, but looks the right width.

Maybe I was just imagining things. My initial head circle was certainly way too big (or rather, after drawing it, I drew the torso too small and then drew a new head circle). I never know where to start with these things...it's not like a line of action is going to be much help with a neutral pose!

It looks like you didn't undo any lines, which is a good habit, but your stroke economy's suffered as a result! You're gonna have to either resist the urge to redraw the same line several times, or start erasing, to get a clean drawing.

Yep! Definite problem for me. I draw a line wrong, and then correct it, and to make certain I remember the corrected one instead of the wrong one, I draw the corrected one darker, and then that causes problems down the road.

(And I did erase...but don't tell anyone! Mostly it was just for guide lines for the legs that turned out way wrong)

Beyond that, breasts are too low, and the shoulders... Mm, in skinny people, with visible collar bones, the arm forms a 90 degree angle with the collar bone, and the curve up in to the neck starts a little inward from there. Bleh, having trouble explaining that; if you want I can create a diagram.

I can't really look at the reference drawing right now since I'm at work, but I'll take a look at this when I get home. No need to create a diagram; I'm sure I can figure it out.

You did a really good on the legs, especially from the knees to the feet. 

Aww, thanks! While drawing this I realized that my usual drawings of peoples' lower bodies are posed unnaturally -- I usually draw with the outer edge of the legs going straight down or even away from the center line, and then the inner edge tapering towards the knees/ankles. But people don't usually stand like they're doing half-splits! Heels together, or close together, is much more common.

Thanks for the detailed C&C! I'll try to get another drawing done tonight.

It is true that most fighting games seem to match what he said, modulo a little hyperbole. Certainly the AI in fighting games is letting you win. Perfect fighting game AIs (that always perfectly counterattack anything, know exactly what range to be at to use each technique, have perfect timing, etc.) are easily achievable, so for purposes of gameplay the developers generally just take one of those and then insert the occasional delay or non-optimal movement. It's up to the player to try to bait them into that "mistake" and then capitalize on it as much as possible. But if the AI doesn't feel like making mistakes, then it won't -- and there's nothing the player can do to win. This is what leads to the "SNK Boss" trope.

Hokay, "finished" the first one. I don't know exactly how long I spent on it, but more than the half hour you specified. Then again I'm way out of practice (and even when I was in practice, I never got all that good).

Link to drawing (reference: Challenge1/NSFW/Female/001.JPG)

This was drawn with an Intuous tablet and Photoshop. I do have paper and pencils and so on, and even a scanner...somewhere...that might still work...but I want to get used to using the tablet.

The Disgaea series of tactical RPGs occasionally invokes the Unwinnable Boss Fight trope, but since it also includes a new-game+ mode (as well as access to a randomly-generated dungeon that scales with your level), the fights are only generally unwinnable the first time you encounter them. You can win -- in which case the plot basically ignores the fight and the characters make up some excuse to do what they were going to do anyway.

So basically, any time that characters in Disgaea are doing something against their will, it's not because the person forcing them has bigger numbers in their stat sheet; it's because of the machinations and intrigues of the plot.

What's the due date? Next Monday?

Man, I haven't done any serious drawing in ages. This'll be good practice. Heck, I could try using myself as a photo reference! 

Clearly a good speedrun is going to demand intimate knowledge of both the level design and the game mechanics. You need the latter to know what the best ways of moving are, how to access areas you aren't meant to reach, how to efficiently dispose of obstacles, and so on. You need the former to know when to best apply each technique you learn from knowing the game mechanics. So, to put it broadly, a game that is well-suited to speedrunning will reward knowledge of both to a large extent.

No matter what you do or where you go in an RPG the monsters in the next zone are just a few levels higher than the ones in the last. You always happen to live in the town in the lowest level zone.

-SirNiko

But would you really want to build a city in a place with lv100 monsters?

There's plenty of other cities in the world that are surrounded by badass monsters, and everyone seems to do fine (though nobody ever seems to leave town except for adventurers, either). You just happen to always come from an area with weak mobs.

I found JetBlade, and I wanted to try it out... but there were too many steps to get it running Is there an easy way you can compile it to a standalone EXE?

I'm glad you found it interesting; sorry about the roadblocks to getting it up and running. That's kinda how it is with open-source though -- you get to see it early, in exchange for having more work to do to get to see it at all.

Once I get the game to something that actually resembles gameplay (remaining steps: finish OpenGL port; implement a lock and associated powerup; implement 1 enemy), there'll be some value in providing prebuilt versions for download. py2app and py2exe are Python programs for generating standalone executables for OSX and Windows, respectively, that should work well here.

Heck, why not? I could stand to get more drawing practice myself. What kind of challenges are we going to be talking about here, though?

From what I've seen, Zero Mission gets less attention from fans than Super Metroid does, largely because since the sequence breaks were built into the game, they're less fun. You get a nice little thrill of "I'm doing something the developers didn't intend!" when you break sequence in Super Metroid. Now, Super Metroid had mechanics that were obviously capable of producing sequence breaks -- most notably walljumping, bomb jumping, and the speed booster -- but it didn't go out of its way to put in secret side passages that let you bypass otherwise-powerup-requiring obstacles. It just designed those obstacles in such a way that you could navigate them with some cleverness instead of with the required powerup.

For example, there's a path leading to the Wrecked Ship sector that requires you to use the grappling beam to swing from one platform to another. In fact, the grappling beam is not required. The Zero Mission way to handle this would be to have a morph ball tunnel that lets you roll past the entire segment. Super Metroid instead has the platforms spaced carefully so that you can jump from one to the next if you know exactly what you're doing (with some leeway if you're good at walljumping). Or you can build up a speed charge on the shoreline in a space that looks too short for it, and then fly past the entire thing.

In other words, if you're going to design a game with the intent that its sequence be breakable, be subtle about it. If you hand the breaks to your audience on a silver platter, they're less interesting. Sequence breaks are meant to be hunted for.

Timered sections where you can lose enough time to be unable to make the deadline, yet be forced to wait for the timer to run out before you can retry (or else commit suicide, when possible). Relatedly, scored sections where you can "use up" enough available points that you can't make the target, but still be forced to play through to the end (for example, a target practice game where you shoot too many "wrong" targets).

Thanks! Everything's pre-rendered, hence the textured quads comment. It's just as well; I have practically no experience in low-poly modeling, and very little in UV texturing.

Jetblade is a 2D platforming game.

Edit: have a more dynamically-posed large render (the earlier one is just the rest position):