cool concept, reminds me of
...Syndicate screenshot...

You know, I haven't realised this, but I was unconsciously channeling Syndicate when I was making the game.  There are many differences, but the "small team against the world" feeling is something I've been aiming for.

I'm still getting creamed by the game.  I haven't even been able to complete one line yet  .  Do you have a video of you playing or something?  Maybe I just don't have the Tetris mojo that's required for the game.

[boring]

I believe that good games have interesting choices in them.  One interesting thing about RPGs is the resource management aspect - maximizing the power of your hero with limited resources.  The grind is the boring part; nobody likes killing 1000 boars in a row.

How is your proposal different from a virtual slot machine?  What is your audience going to be interested in?

Hi JMickle,

I tried out your game.  I even beat it; whee!  Here are my thoughts:

• I thought that the slot system was something interesting.  It didn't quite work in the game, but I think that you could tighten it up to be a compelling mechanic.  It reminded me of card games.
• The coin gathering mechanic is evil and gives players RSI.  Is there a point in making the player wiggle the mouse back and forth?  It's not challenging either intellectually nor manually, so it's just tiring.
• The game was too easy.  It's all too simple to hoard tons of coins and max everything out.  A game is a sequence of interesting choices - what interesting choices do you want you game to present?
• You probably should implement a main menu to take the player back to if he loses.  Kicking them out to desktop is not nice.
• There should be an in-game help system.  You have plenty of screen space to display all of the information.  Making the player look at a .PNG file in the game directory is not a good solution.
• I had black boxes around all of the enemies and targeting rings.  Is this a bug?
• Pressing F1 takes you to a black screen with "GAME PAUSED" written in a windings font.  I'm pretty sure no human can actually read windings, so it's just confusing.

I just finished "On Writing" by Stephen King.  It's a curious blend of memoir and creative writing manual.  I'm not a King fan - I've never read any of his other books, but the book is written with a lot of humanity.  King manages to take mundane things and make them exciting, just by telling them in the right way.  I think that game designers have something to learn from this book, but not in a direct way.



The book I'm currently chomping upon is "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters".  I wanted a break from fuzzy memoir stuff, so I picked a science book.  Biology and genetics have always been interests of mine.  At one point, I entertained thoughts of setting up a garage-bioengineering lab.

i agree. but what should i do to solve this problem ? do you have any idea ?

Well, here's an idea.  What if the player could manipulate the movement of the puzzle by inserting new objects, Incredible Machine style?  You'd need to loosen up the drawing recognition, but that would add a new layer of challenge.

By the way, I forgot to mention that what you're trying to do is really neat.  Most people don't consider games to be a valid medium for political expression, so any work in the area is laudable.  if you keep up what you're doing, I think that we'll see some really interesting stuff in the future.

@Alex: Whooah. And all that I was gonna do was go "Huzzah!" and raise my beer mug to the OP ( Australian here and missing out on things, how'd ya guess?).

Oh, by all means "Huzzah!"  I just think that it would be irresponsible to stop there.  I find the wanton censorship vile and distasteful, but that's disconnected from my critique of the game.  If the game was about holocaust denial, I would make the same points.  The question is not whether people like us agree with the game, but whether it achieves its goals.

Firstly, detailed and accurate social-issue games are invariably boring. Government simulators, eco-games, feed-the-world games, they're all rubbish games and nobody plays them unless they have to (ie students forced to play them in the classroom, or people who already work in the field).

It's true that games that set out to specifically be "educational" usually fail.  I think that this is a consequence of the makers being polemicists first and game designers second.  A game has to be compelling before it can be educational.

Secondly, the impact of a social-issue game is not a result of people playing it, it is a result of people talking about it. My experience with Harpooned is that while many people hear about such games, very few actually play them. Harpooned's trailers have had about 85,000 views on YouTube, and it was shown on G4 TV (I'm guessing another 100,000 viewers right there) and featured on NineMSN's news frontpage (perhaps 50,000 thousand more hits) however, it has only been downloaded 20,000 times, and in the last year only 2,000 new high scores have been submitted.

That's a good point.  After my post, I was thinking about Harpooned and how it compared to the current game.  I think that it's effective primarily because of the novely and shock factor.  I expect that this will decline as interactive media become more mainstream.

At the same time, you can get the game's entire message by just watching a video of it.  There's no reason to actually play the game.  It would be interesting if you'd see different numbers for a game that actually examines the issue closely.  Maybe not.

Having learned that lesson I am making this a much simpler game. My objective here is really to expose this issue to the public who weren't aware of it, not to make a brilliant game. While it may seem cynical to manipulate the media like this, I think it's an effective tactic. I'm quite capable of making a good game (I made Go Beryllium) but that takes a LONG time, and making this game more detailed/accurate isn't necessarily going to make it more effective as an information broadcasting tool.

In that case, I think that it would be better to judge this as a media manipulation effort than a game.  What I have to say in this case is pretty irrelevant, since the future will show its success pretty clearly.  One difference between this and Harpooned is that Harpooned had a much more jarring visual style - with all the blood and whale giblets.  I wonder if this will affect how well it's picked up by the media.

It took Dwarf Fortress YEARS to get to the current donation level. You should have seen earlier iterations.

I know. That was my point. Don't bet on donations.

Actually, my theory is that Tarn Adams runs an underground dwarf slavery ring to fund the game.  There's just no other rational explanation for that level of donation consistency.

If you're dead-set against VS, you should consider CodeLite (there's also Eclipse CDT and Netbeans).  Code::Blocks is a bit weak on code completion.  I'm actually considering switching to CodeLite.  I can keep the MinGW backend and enjoy better CC.

In your experiences, what have been the biggest technical hurdle to fast iteration on a game? I don't mean all the fiddly vertex buffer, entity management, audio channels, all that stuff - but just say you sat down with your current tools and code of choice, and wanted to crank out a new level from scratch, perhaps with a few new different types of entities (bad guys, physics toys, whatever), what takes the most time? Conversely, what have you found that helps with those things?

AI is the spawn of the devil, as far as I'm concerned.  If you have a game with any significant AI component then the design cycle changes to:

1. Add feature
2. Write AI for it
3. Think about the results

I find that step 2 really drags things down.  I can see 2 solutions to this:

1. Use flexible AI algorithms - I've seen neural nets used pretty succesfully in some CCGs
2. Code in multiplayer and play with a friend


As far as the engineering side of things goes, I have different phases.  When I'm making games, it's hack hack hack time!  When the project is completed, I take the lessons that I've learned and improve my personal engine.  Slowly but surely, I've accumulated reusable classes like spacial data structures and handle managers.

By the way, VS allows you to use other compilers in it.  I'm not sure how good the integration is, but you may not need code::blocks.

I've switched to code:blocks and g++ a while ago because I hate Microsoft's DLL system.  In truth, VS is a superior IDE is every way, but I'm willing to suffer so that my audience doesn't have to.  Besides, it makes porting to Mac easier.

Here are some answers for you:

1) If I recall, code::blocks has two types of installations.  One with MinGW included, and one without.  Read this for more info: http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=Mingw

2) MinGW (that's the windows version of gcc) should have all the c++ standard libraries and windows headers with it.

3) This depends on the library.  Box2d is something you can build manually, so it's fine.  I think that I had to re-build other things myself.


Why are you switching, I'm curious?  VS is really the best windows IDE around.  If I could use the 2005 version standard library, I'd switch back in an instant.  Unfortunately, the only way to do that is crazy voodoo with the driver dvelopment kit.

My approach is to make very rough prototypes of features that I want.  For example, let's say that I want to put a minefield into a strategy game to see how it changes things.  One approach is to spend a bunch of time on code that lays out the mines individually.  Another is to create one single giant entity that deals damage to stuff around it.

Basically, by using quick and dirty hacks that approximate the ideal solution, I save a ton of time.  If the idea is good, it will be visible with the 90% solution and I can polish it later.  I also don't worry about optimization or graphics until the very end.  All of my games are made with rectangles, circles and a good dose of imagination.

Paul is right, by the way.  Give yourself permission to write the fugliest code you've ever made.  You can always tighen it up later if you hit upon something awesome.  Think of it as painting.  Capture the large shapes first and then work on the details.

The other reason that you want to loosen up your coding standards, besides efficiency, is that nobody gives a damn about how good your code is.  Indies have only one advantage over the AAA dinosaurs - imaginative design.  Do you think that you can make anything nearly as impressive as EA alone, production-wise?  They'll have one guy whose entire job will be to code particle systems in their game.  You just can't beat that sort of thing head-on.

What we CAN kick ass in is amazing game design.  Our turnaround times are a hundred times faster than theirs, so we can experiment.  The point is that you should take advantage of that strength.  Put your game first and how you implement it second.  If the best way to do that is in Flash or GM, then go for it!  What matters is the game that you made, not how you did it.

You could revolutionize the entire industry with Game Maker, if you were a brilliant designer - you don't need anything else.  If you want a good kick in the butt, make a bunch of games like Petri, each in one week.  I did it for a while and it's great at focusing the mind.  Knocks the perfectionist coder right out of ya.

Also, I'm going to throw in a piece of advice while I'm in here.  I know that you're not looking for it, but I've seen too many ambitious projects fall apart to stay silent.  I could be wrong, and you could be an awesome game producer with decades of industry experience, but my hunch is that you've never completed a game of this size.  If you really want this thing to be finished, keep in mind that the mortality rate of these hobby projects is awfully high.  I've been in some that have fallen apart, so I know what I'm talking about.

The more you can slim down the game, the higher are the chances that it will be complete.  If it drags on for too long, then there are more chances of people leaving the team to do other things.  Working on a side-project is unpredictable and people get jobs, move or get married.  Ask yourself the question "What is absolutely essential to my vision of the game?"  Do you really need to make it 3d?  That adds a lot of pain to programming.

At the very least, you should build a development timeline for the project.  As a non-programmer, it will be hard for you to control the flow of the project.  At least if you have a clear plan, you can get buy-in from whomever you find.  Try to find someone who you can easily communicate with - there's nothing worse than your programmer disappearing for weeks at a time.  If you can find someone who's in the same city as you are, it will make things a lot easier (or failing that, same timezone.  I once worked with someone in Germany, ack!).  The best thing, of course, is to learn some programming yourself.  Look at Derek Yu, for example - he's an artist who's made an awesome game in Game Maker.  Yes, it's not as sexy as Unreal, but finished games are better than abandoned games.

I know that this is not what you want to hear, but it's better to get it from some grumpy guy on a forum than to waste a year of your life.  Maybe I'm wrong, an you can power through on pure enthusiasm and determination, but you should at least think about what I've said.

Good luck, whatever you decide.

[comments]

If you're indeed planning on funding the game through donations, I would advise you to re-think your plan.  I have below 0.5% conversion rate for comments about my games.  If you can reach that for donations, you're damn good.  If you get to Dwarf Fortress level, you're a god among men.

I would certainly be happy to have more options for music, but I wonder if you can sell game music non-exclusively at all.  Take Braid, for example.  Jon Blow used tracks from Magnatune - a lot of Jami Sieber's amazing cello songs.  Can anyone re-use those same tracks for something else?

I don't know if song re-cycling can really work.  Music is assiciated very strongly with concepts and feelings in out minds.  I will forever think of Braid's opening when I hear the slow cello buildup that it used, for example.  It would be the same as trying to re-use 3d models or sprites.

hahaha @ "solve one of the last uncracked problems of games design".

I thought the last uncracked problem in game design was to figure out a way to make the players watch 3 hours of cutscenes without them falling asleep.  Shows how much I know.

Yeah, the journalism was pretty clueless both with regard to state of the art in dramatic technology and game design.  The bright side is that technology and science columns are always uninformed, so how are we special?

That sounds interesting, I'm going to keep an eye on it.

My gut tells me, however, that it'll be a gimmicky flop.  Who pushes out a revolutionary technology like that on a web-based movie tie in?  In all probability, it'll be a hack where the NPCs zoom in on certain key words, like Eliza or Facade.  Still, maybe cynical and grumpy old me will be surprised and we'll see a revolution in conversation engines.

I never understood why Bioware et al. never invested in R&D in that direction.  Breakthroughs were very possible in the Baldur's Gate days.  Now they're too tied up by the neccesity of voiced dialog.  They'll never let go their dialog trees until speech synthesis is at game level.

I'm putting the finishing touches on an RTS:



The game involves the player holding out against humongous waves of opponents.  It doesn't use any of the modern RTS conventions like resource gathering or unit construction.  It's just 5 guys with guns against thousands of zombies.  Maybe I should call it an RTT instead.