In particular, I find the lack of attention paid to indie RPGs on the site (other than a few games produced in RPG Maker) a bit disheartening, though I'm sure other genres have suffered as well.

I've been waiting for some improvements to an RPG I found last year back in October: SilverTree. Maybe if I front page them, it'll give them the encouragement to release an updated version.

If the games I like are popular, they'll get plenty of votes without mine.

I'm so indie all the games I like are unpopular

Kill me please

You're ok. You've done nothing wrong, and I'll defend you from any popularity onslaughts or assassination attempts from the majority. As many have written and quoted before, "democracy is the tyranny of the majority."

[Music Class Time: Some Basics]

What I want to play are music games that allow every song to create a different level, world, or experience instead of merely a different degree of difficulty.

With all the money that goes into mainstream music games, why are they so simplistic in terms of their analysis and implementation of music. There are so many variables to music. Most ms games (ms is my new abbreviation for mainstream, which nicely resembles MS and M$) only focus on limited number of parts of music: rhythm, timing, bpm, the length of sounds, silence, (maybe) how melodic the song is, and/or (maybe) the style of the song. And a lot of ms music gaming seems to be heavy handed programming designed to be in sync with the music with little to no musical or sound analysis. I think the focus on synchronization is part of the problem.

Did you read that last bit? Realtime syncing is the lazy company's (or the I-don't understand-music-company's) method to making a music game. Most Audio Visual Software (such as your favorite audio player is able to do with its visualization options) is more advanced than ms music games.

Now, since I can only discuss this from a Western music perspective, I apologize to those with culture and musical backgrounds that incorporate more than half steps for notes or any other musical ideas that don't exist in Western music, but if you can enlighten us, please do.

Music Class Time: Some Basics

Music is so full of variables. There are 8 notes in an octave (CDEFGABC [also know as DoReMiFaSoLaTiDo] is an example) with the first and last note being the same note but an octave apart, so music actually has audio loops that repeat and begin again after 7 cycles have been completed and the new cycle's ending is the same as the last cycle's ending. Between these 8 notes, there are 12 half steps. In other words, if you press every note on a piano from one note to the next octave up you will have pressed 13 keys. There are specific Hz frequencies for each note. The human ear has a limited range of hearing: there are sound frequencies above and below that range. The average piano itself has only 88 notes; there's a lot one could do with 88 variables. Greek mathematicians were intrigued with the relationships between music and numbers. Also, in contemporary academics, there is some interest in music, analysis of it, and experiments with it.

With this in sight, ms music games really seem to be designed with a middle schooler's or high schooler's enjoyment and understanding of music. Not only are they too pop-ish in their focus but also ignorant or stupid toward what they are trying to tackle.

Here is one simplistic way to comprehend at what I'm pointing toward in term of better analysis and implementation:

A song is analyzed and a spherical world is rendered from the data gathered. The song's length determines the distance between the poles of the sphere. The elevations of its terrain are based on volume. The north can be the beginning of the song the the south the end. Notes in the song create entities (passive or aggressive). If one limits the game to 7 notes, the octave, duration, and how frequently the note occurs, one could use this data for variations in behavior and/or generation of entities on the world.

Build such a game from an album, and you have a solar system. And a playlist of songs and albums creates a galaxy to explore. This could even be revisioned into levels and worlds of a 2D game.

If you want to make things more complex, add analysis of chords, chord progression/changes, thematic/movement shifts, dissonance, resonance, sounds that can't be heard or are hard to hear, the "genre/style" of the music, and finally rhythm and tempo (yes, some of the simplest parts of music can be used to enhance a very musical game too).

Although there are even more ways to look at and listen to music than this handful of examples for expanding analyzing and playing with music, I hope I've provided enough food for thought.

Melly,

You should be able to use sticky head jumping to climb up. The sticky head tricks were bugs I decided to keep and design around, but I didn't make that clear enough. Especially, since it must be known about and mastered to get through the game.

I've finished working on the boss (except for its sounds), and there are enough other features that have been added to move this on to alpha, which I will soon put the latest version online.

[Early-90's Crappy Corporate Cash-In Games]

The Early-90's Crappy Corporate Cash-In Games competition!

Everyone chooses a large corporation, and makes a game based on them. If said corporation has a mascot or logo that can be used as the main character, all well and good, but if not, why not just make one up? It worked for McDonald's in Global Gladiators (Read: Didn't work)! Genre is entirely up to you, but pretty much all early-90's corporate tie-ins were platformers, so why bother putting any thought into it?

Reference: Mobygames' list of Product Tie-in.

EDIT: What the crap?

That sounds like a platformer encouraging competition with a concise, non-game focus, and a non-game focus is one way to help everyone to easily adapt their ideas and experience to a theme that won't overly alter their aspirations while maybe providing inspiration in the process.

In other words, maybe we should eventually pick something like past competitions that let everyone have enough room to work with the genre, theme, idea on their minds while sticking with, manipulating, or gaming the theme? The theme shouldn't effect the method of game creating too much.

There are so many websites and forums that are too focused on niches and genres. Do you think people come to TIGSource looking for specific niches and genres? I know I'm here because there is so much variety from the past gaming (etc.), but it is a past of creation, learning, and adaptation within it's nascentcy. Since we all adapt by default, I'm here to reflect, create, and learn (which are also helpful steps for adapting).

No matter what the theme, I'm going to try to make a game that will try to tackle goallessness and maybe also goals.

Disclaimer: I don't watch TV any more. Alright, sometimes: I watched a little less than 30 minutes of news a few weeks ago, but we finally disconnected the cable since then. I also haven't read more than half the posts in this thread.

[Reversed roles]

A moderately novel idea: Reversed roles

That would be interesting. There are so many ways to reverse or play with dichotomy (dualism).

I look at shmups as the equivalent of Japanese, giant-monster movies and TV shows: creative responses to, criticisms of, and the offspring of America's genocide of the Japanese people who lived in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (sorry about using Wikipedia without providing cross-references). Japan even did one test on a nuclear bomb of their own before surrendering (according to a documentary I once watched on Discovery Asia or one of the other educational TV channels with which I use to kill time). This might be one reason why Godzilla eventually fought off other monsters in the series of films.

Disclaimer: I was born in and grew up in America. I haven't spoken with an expatriate who claimed the country they are from is perfect (some plan to go back). And all people and nations are trying to learn (right?).

I started with some language when had on our Macintosh II lab in middle school. We used numbered lines, so a line might look like this:

100 goto 20

In high school, we used QBasic, and I had a class on Visual C++ in college. Then I took a long break from coding.

Writing ZExpressions in ZGameEditor or fiddling around with MML for MCK is the closing thing to coding I can do now.

[Paradigm shift competition]

Every time I read the term "goal-less" I think of people playing soccer without any nets

Speaking of sports, Robert Frost once said to Wallace Stevens that poetry without form is like playing tennis with the net down (form, in this context, means traditional methods for structuring poems based on rhythm and rhyme), but freeverse (which is formless) is now the norm. Also, it is possible to play tennis without a net: the rules simply need a little changing (and I've done so on a tennis court with a broken net). It doesn't matter how many times the ball bounces as long as one can return it. I was a young teenager when it happened, and it was such a simple fix to what we thought was a problem at the time. That experience is an example what I am trying to encourage: remove a "fundamental" standard and see how much we can learn, discover, and invent with part_x out of the way.

With that said, I would be totally up for a theme of Paradigm Shifts.

It seems to me that we don't specifically want "goal-less" or "0-player" or "play it with your teeth", these are just ways we're trying to get at originality and art.  Why not just have an art-game competition?

This could be, but some people don't like the idea of games as art. So, I present an alternative:

Paradigm shift competition

- Goal-less games (I prefer 'no enforced goal games')
- Zero player (or 'optional input') games
- Genre upturning (shoot'em up without shooting, etc.)
- Very short games (under a minute or so)
- Textless games
- Sound-only games

All of these are possible in such a context. The idea would simply to make a game that rethinks that which is taken for granted in video games today. The advantage of this is that the game maker is allowed to interpret the topic of the competition to fit their own ideas of what games should or could be, instead of simply enforcing a gameplay limitation, or an ideal ('art').

The list of examples should only be taken as suggestions, and there certainly could be a few more examples in such a list.

As for the one minute games, I think it wouldn't be a bad limitation with which to work.

Nice improvements. It's almost like a late night walk in the park (enhanced with flying). And the music and fxs are very nice.

It is a word I made up to express the idea of maximizing the use of goal(s) in a game.

However, I'm more interested in the openness of allowing different takes how to use or not use goal than using a dichotomy of 2 extremely different takes that the first suggestion (vs) would have.

We could have a Goalless vs. Hypergoal Competition. You could pick one, the other, or both. It would be like having 2 competitions in 1. The voting could even be split into 3 (or 4) categories: one for each theme and an overall vote.

Another way of appeasing both sides would just to make the theme Games about Goals, and entrants could interpret the use of goal any way they like.

Here's some old sounds and a song I once made using MCK and MML. They've all been converted from NSF files to waves.

The song was supposed to represent wind, the the low sound resolution of the volume envelopes was much rougher than I wanted. I'll have to redo it with consistent volumes, and the edit it in Audacity to get what I want.

Wind

The bird chirping probably wouldn't be fitting for the play (I like to imagine it as a silent protagonist that only has faint flapping and walking sounds), but the chirps could be used for another or other birds.

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[Description]

This is some of the best uses of Processing I've yet seen, but I am by no means an expert.

Description:
This inaugural entry to the Advanced Beauty series is about creating audio/visual sculptures that are akin to synaesthesia. There's a new one every Monday, so you shouldn't be surprise if it's down at the beginning of the week. If it is down, you could head over to Flight404's (Robert Hodgin's) blog and watch his "Weird Fishes" and "Solar" videos to get a taste of what his work is like.

Backstory:
I've been checking in to Flight404's blog off and on for a while, and after I found out about the trailer for the Advanced Beauty project I went over to the website and was happy to find their videos were available are available for viewing/downloading. Quicktime and VLC can both play them, but I'm sure there might be one or more niffty video players that can use *.m4v files.

to a god unknown makes experimental, psychedelic post-rock. Two of the members are my co-workers, and they've been talking about changing the name. Their song "dimetrodon" makes me think of early Pink Floyd albums.

Maybe we could call it an Underdog Competition and allow entries from all the genres that don't get enough attention. I guess hybrids would be acceptable: e.g. a 0 Player Shmup, a goalless RPG.

But I'm guessing we're probably not going to vote the next theme until Lovecraft competition is over, and even better ideas could come up between now and then.

Another point about having a 0 Player competition (besides agreeing with the possibility of trying out scores of them might not be as fun as the results of other comps), a 0 Player game is always an option one could consider using as an entry for almost any contest. It actually would have made a good demake or two. It could even be used for the Lovecraft theme or maybe any future comp. It also would work very well as a No Goal game.

With that in mind, the same can be said of the No Goal theme. One could probably make a goalless game for any competition.

This (using a competition theme within another competition) also goes for other themes we've had. A demake using procedural generation: my demake entry actually has more procedural content than my PGC entry, since it's only code, text files, and numbers smashed together by ZGE. So, in the future I could use ZGE to create a procedural, demake, goalless game.

With that said, I'm far more interested in making a game with a No Goal theme than a 0 Player one, and I'm far more interested in playing goalless games. For a WIP example of a goalless game, you could check out Enjoying the view in the Feedback section. (Yes, I instigated some of this goalless gaming discussion, but this isn't the first time I was a proponent of goalless games. This is also why there has been some mentioning about narcissism.)

there are so many ideas now, we should just sell some of them to other websites.

That gave me the hardest whisper-laugh I've had in a long time. (It's nap time, and my daughter is fighting sleep.)

Witty simplicity.

Sounds nice, but the time will reduce dramatically if you take in account the time difference.. 

Actually, I think the internationalism of an online TIGJam would allow it to start earlier and end later if local time of the contributors is taken into account. Each participant should limit oneself to a suitable 72 hour time frame based on one's timezone.

I'm also interested in possibly participating in this, but I'm not too sure what usefulness I could contribute. In a pinch, I could do sound and simple music. I actually studied music a little during my high school and university education just for the fun of it, and I've used some sound software (Audacity, sfxr, and a few minor others) and once programmed a short song using MML with MCK.

Maybe those interested in participating should mention what they would like to work on, contribute, etc. Also, I would suggest that Terry change the heading of the thread to something along the lines of "Just throwing this out there: an international online TIGJam 2008."

After the announcement of TIGJam 2008, I originally thought it would be nice of us outsiders to contribute to the Phoenix, AZ, USA TIGJam 2008 through the internet; I'm now more interested in us outsiders doing our own thing than and/or contributing. Doing either or both certainly should be more fitting for the TIGSource community.

I'm still working on this, and I've made a little progress. I'm going to play around with the sound more and work more on the "boss." If you want to follow the process during the competition or if you can't wait until the voting is over to experience such upgrades as lava, you can follow this link to Retroid's thread at the ZGameEditor's forums.

This is a ss of one of the bad versions of the "boss" failing to shoot at the player:



Thanks.