I really want to. As soon as I level up my skills sufficiently, I'll take a crack at it. Not nearly enough 3D platform games in the world.

A 3rd person steampunk air combat game. Two massive fleets of zeppelins are slowly crawling through the sky, each bent on destroying the other. Fly your biplane to the other side, then eject and watch your plane take out a set of anti-aircraft guns! Plant a bomb on top of an enemy zeppelin, then jump to one below as it explodes! Use a grappling hook to swing into the gondola, then fight the pilot and take the controls!

Citizens run for cover in the city below as the flaming zeppelins crash to the ground and glider-equipped crew members come in for a landing next to their destroyed craft. They run and jump from rooftop to rooftop, trying to get their grappling hooks within range of a low flying biplane.

Yes.

My favourite type of combat system are Quick Time Events, you get to see them in the latest action games! It's a lot more fun than the usual battles, you can perform incredible stunts and its relatively simple to do.

You're being sarcastic, right?

QTEs wouldn't bother me so much if it were actually possible to perform half the things that happen in them in normal gameplay. Random button mashing QTEs in the middle of Sonic Unleashed? That doesn't even make sense! Though the new Prince of Persia game had a sort of partial QTE battle system that I thought worked pretty well; wasn't so much control sacrificed as to make it feel like I was watching a movie while pressing random button combinations. It was also supposedly a throwback to the old PoP DOS games, which is cool.

Some Microsoft products have fancy installers that will go out and grab stuff like DirectX updates if they detect you don't have them. How hard would it be to do that? Or even just have a page in the installer with text like "I pity the fool who plays without this gamepad driver. Get it here!"

Of course, there are also a ton of PC gamers who don't have gamepads.

My laptop is also 1280x800

The one recent trend I have noticed is the increasing number of netbooks out there.
I looked at my friends netbook the other day and it could not do above 1024x576 such a low resolution makes a common 800x600 resolution seen in many games a problem

To be fair, until Ion becomes common, most netbooks aren't going to be able to render 3D stuff at high resolutions. Though it does cut out several 2D games.

I really want to play this game. 

Are the triggers on the Xbox 360 pressure sensitive? Because you could have varying levels of acceleration depending on how much the trigger is held down, with the maximum level of trigger press activating the boost powerup. Left button eliminated!

That sort of thing seemed to work really well in Super Mario Sunshine on GameCube. That's the only game I've played that takes advantage of that sort of thing, though. The Xbox controller might not be as well suited for it?

http://twitter.com/Droqen

that was the most terrifying experience of my life thank you very much

Perhaps something a little more verbose would be more to your fancy. http://woofertime.com/

So it looks like you can jump all the way through the world with that big shaft on the map. Is it actually going to be like that in the final game? Because that would be neat.

we're out

Aww. I saw this without noticing the date and got all excited. 

FWIW, I think an emote system would have been neat. Like, you'd hit enter and type ">", and the character would point right. Or type "..." and the character would tap his foot.

The ability to interact with other players from a gameplay standpoint would have also been neat. Like, have one player be able to carry another player piggyback so they could both get past a challenging obstacle. Or something like Final Fantasy Advent Children, with the ability to jump to another player in midair and throw them higher. (Who cares about real physics? )

I've got a Dell Vostro 1500. It's the business version of the Latitude. Had it a year so far. The keyboard feels pretty cheap compared to my old Toshiba, but it's held up quite decently. The laptop is snappy overall and has ~4 hours battery life, too. Now my sister got an older Vostro 1000 something at the same time, and that hasn't held up nearly as well. Her touchpad buttons stopped working, as did a USB port or two.

I specced the machine out so that it was almost identical to the (now) last gen MacBooks, then added two coupons to it. Total cost? $550.

I've just got an Intel card. If you get a discrete video card, it'll cost you more and you'll need a bigger battery to get the same battery time.

@Theta: Game Maker's OS X open beta started today. 

If you go with a Mac, definitely get some good virtualization software. I use VirtualBox (free!); there are other commercial products which may do 3D acceleration better. It's definitely worth it. It's not emulation, so the performance hit is very low, and application compatibility is pretty close to 100%, perhaps with the exception of a few games. Use the operating system you want and still have those few nagging apps that don't have native versions. I worked a development job with Ubuntu in VirtualBox all summer, and the convenience and coolness levels of a VM are pretty much through the roof.

[2. do you finish them?]

I would define myself as an indie game developer...

1. do you make games?

2. do you finish them?

3. do you have all the rights to those games?

Crap! I knew something was missing.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. On the first level the bird just sat there jerking on and down in the same spot. The plus and minus keys didn't do anything. On the other two levels, there were more actions on the sidebar, but the bird just flew upwards and got stuck. Clicking on stuff didn't do anything either.

Flash 10 64-bit alpha on Ubuntu 9.10.

Yeah, on the run I'm just seeing the straight leg and the 90 degree angle of the knee. Usually both at the same time.

admIt it. Now you're Definitely stretching things waY too far.

40%? This is an awful quiz.

61%, but that test is really biased, and some of the questions don't make any sense. For example:

Ben Croshaw?

Yes.
What?
I've heard of him.

What does that mean? Does it mean that being indifferent to him is indie. Does it mean to you have to love zero punctuation? Does it refer to his games somehow?

No wonder why you only got 61%, Ben Croshaw also made the Chzo mythos series among other indie games.

Oh, Yahtzee. I know who he is, I just didn't know his real name. Mostly because I could care less about his horror games and crass-tastic show. I'm apparently less indie because of it.
He also raves about Sands of Time while hating Super Smash Bros. Indie or not, I just can't take someone like that seriously.

The first post was giving off a "Vertical Megaman Zero" type vibe. Which is cool. The only vertical platformers I can think of off the top of my head are Super Mario Bros 2/USA and Vectorman. Also Icy Tower, but that sort of lacks fleshed out level design and enemies.

I've been thinking about this idea for awhile:  Take the ideas behind Readymade art, and apply it to games, i.e. try to make a game "your own" while doing very little that is your own work.  This could allow game designers to shed a new light on an already existing game idea (though the game itself might not be composed of things that are original, the game designer would be looking to implement an original idea - I know this is complicated, but this is what Readymade art is all about, taking existing objects and extracting new ideas from them).

I don't think games submitted for this competition should be "literal" Readymades (this would just mean that the game designer has stolen another person's work verbatim).  Rather, they should be "assisted" Readymades, where the game designer has put his/her own mark on them.  Games could maybe be composed of ripped graphics, or borrowed code (in the public domain, of course), or perhaps be a near-perfect clone of an existing program (with slight modifications, of course).  All material used for such Readymade games should be in the public domain (no using others' non-public-domain work without permission).  In fact, anything could be used as the component(s) of such a "Readymade" game.

The idea of a Readymade is to say something different than what the original object says.  This would be paramount to the competition; otherwise it would be a clone games compo (and we have enough of those on the GMC).

The code part would be interesting, just because so many people work with different languages/tools, and so many algorithms are already publicly available and reasonably trivial to program. Though an open source "wiki" type contest where in-progress games are randomly developed and warped by people other than the original developer might be interesting. People might not be willing to participate in that though, I dunno.

Welcome to the forums!

You need to check in here. :-)

[HAPPINESS COMPO]

Also, HAPPINESS COMPO. Create a really, really happy game. Like, seriously. Almost overwhelmingly happy. Something that will put a smile on every player's face.

This would be an amazing contest. Especially for the happy to the point of creepy game(s) which would inevitably get produced.

YES. It's a ninja-guy with a sword jumping around in tight quarters. In the dark. Can he wall jump?