Well, unlike Cave Story, La-Mulana was never known for its smooth controls and gameplay.

If anything, there is even more at risk when they port it.  La Mulana tried very hard (successfully, I might add) to look, sound, and feel like an MSX game.  Almost everything in the game was built around this concept.  Hopefully the Wii version tries for the same aesthetic. 

i actually kind of reject the idea that ideas *can* be good or bad. (so in that sense, i'd go further than he went). i don't think an idea can be good or bad, only the execution of an idea can be good or bad.

This is interesting and I kind of agree with this one. However, is there ideas which inherently lead to bad outcome (ie. bad execution)? Or is it just that ideas have different difficulty of execution but would still have possible good execution? Philosophical  

There several games where my gut reaction to the concept would be to reject it, because the idea sounds bad...

- Roll a ball around (Katamari Damacy).
- Do household chores in a virtual environment (The Sims).

And these turned out to be immensely enjoyable and unique experiences.  I think this shows that none of the ideas were ever flawed - just the immediate mental model I conjured up from them was boring.  The genius of the developers was in how they creatively executed on these ideas.  You can make anything fun with enough skill.

*Your character can carry a couple hundred pounds of stuff, but if he picks up so much as a feather over his carrying capacity he will have to drop something. He can carry an infinite amount of heavy shiny coins though.

*999999999 shiny coins. And no more.

Way back when, the MMO Asheron's Call used to count the weight of pyreals (the in-game currency).  Oftentimes when you sold an incredibly expensive item your character would become immediately encumbered with all the extra weight.  They actually had in game paper money in addition to coins to overcome this.

Apparently Lord of the Rings Online is going free to play now.  I've never played it, but its probably worth a shot.

All this talk of elegance in programming has got me thinking.

Do you think there will ever be awards for programming?  As in, a game would be recognized not just for its design but also for what it accomplished technically?  I suppose this has already happened with engines (Source and Crysis come to mind) and a few programmers (Carmack, Newell).  But since programming is an art as well as a science, it would be nice to see awards for elegance in software design.

La Mulana was weird, though, in that the combat bits got progressively easier as you got further in. Especially if you were careful to search everywhere and get all the weapons and life upgrades.

The puzzles were mostly of the "what do I do?" variety. If you read a hintbook or got a walkthrough you could solve many of them easily. That's a far cry from something like Tetris where you have to think on your feet and the puzzles are randomly generated so a walkthough does you no good.

-SirNiko

Except for the last "bonus" area of the game, you're right.  But I'd think that La Mulana is fairly atypical.  Has anyone ever really played it successfully without a guide / readme?

I guess a rating system would have to take into account that there are two kinds of difficulty - thinking / puzzle solving (slow twitch) difficulty and hand-eye-coordination (fast twitch) difficulty.

Great game!  Short but fun.

- I loved the music and art style.
- Very, very polished.  Extremely professional.
- This was a fairly difficult game.  Nothing wrong with that, although it was frustrating when I learned I would have to restart the whole game from the beginning.
- Tutorial was effective at conveying the control scheme.  However, I wasn't sure if the game was going to be a platformer or something different until it started.  This is OK though, as you kind of invented your own subgenre.

Overall excellent work! 

What's difficulty? In a puzzle game, i suck. Hard. In a fighting game i kick everyone's ass. It's kinda hard to quantify.

Agree.  How difficult a game is depends, to a certain degree, on how familiar a person is with that genre.

Of course, there are a few games (La Mulana, I Want To Be the Guy), which are difficult no matter who is playing.  But there it is the community who tags them as difficult - so maybe it is the responsibility of reviewers to make it known when a game is hard.

I think I'm with the "execution" camp.  I'm more likely to keep playing an incredibly polished game (i.e. clean UI, controls, physics multiplayer, bug-free, effective graphics and sound) than one with a good idea.  A good idea is intriguing for a while and might get me to download a game, but not keep playing it.  The ones I keep coming back to for more (TF2, Warcraft 3, Castle Crashers) are the ones that ooze style.

Effective execution (polish) requires lots of little good ideas and endurance to implement them instead of needing one great idea.

For me it was the other way 'round actually. I got into GW's boardgames via Warhammer 40K which I played for a short time but then lost interest because painting miniatures and building terrain isn't really my thing. Was hella expensive too.

I always wanted to get involved with Warhammer but the price was prohibitive.  Of course, when I was younger I had other ways to burn through money.

Although not technically on a board, did anyone else here get involved with CCGs?  This might have been my first experience with game design, actually.  I made up my own cards and tried to mix and match them with the official ones.

Seems like a field where automation would definitely be appreciated.   

For me this varies greatly by game, as others have noted.  Two examples in particular:

KOTOR - Because the game itself lets me choose how I interact with the world (i.e. will I be an evil Sith or an honorable Jedi), I found myself identifying with the main character more.  Not that I was necessarily playing as myself, but I had a definite vision for how I wanted the main character to act and I stuck with it.

Star Wars Galaxies - I found myself acting as I would act in most situations.  The game itself (pre-CU) was mostly a social experiment, so my in-game avatar had roughly the same morals as I do.  I tried to trade fairly and form social relationships with others in the game (of course, in real life I don't hunt wampa rats  ).  I really wasn't roleplaying so much as I was acting normally in a virtual world.

Since networked games can be awfully hard to debug I recommend using a telnet program set to raw protocol (PuTTY works well).  This lets you build the server first, then simulate a client using telnet.  It's sometimes much simpler to debug this way as you can slow down the speed of data.  Of course, this only works if your game is using a text based protocol.

For those of us who grew up with the Genesis, there was Landstalker.  I absolutely loved this game (even going so far as to name my dog after the protagonist, Nigel).

It had an isometric perspective and brilliant puzzles (notably the Mercator crypt sequence).  You can download it on Wii VC, and I highly recommend doing so.

I'll second freesound.  It's an entire community of people who use both make sounds electronically and run around with tape recorders getting sound effects "in the wild."  I've found great samples for general background noise, fires, explosions, and more.

For those of you using Python / Pygame, some members of the community have put together additions to the basic Pygame module to help fill in the gaps.  One module in particular I've found to be helpful is Phil's Pygame Utilities.

Pygame doesn't have any native GUI support, but PGU adds it in.  It also has helpful classes/functions for path finding and keeping track of game state.

Main Website(s):  Google Code Homepage,  PGU Pygame Module Homepage
Community:  Posting a reply in the comments section of the Pygame module homepage would be the best I think.
Tutorials:  Contains several source code tutorials built into the download package.
Cost:  Free    Open source
Programming Required:  Python and Pygame

I love the syntax - it's great for rapid prototyping.

Definitely!

I use Python, C++ or C, mostly depending on the size of the project.  But Python for prototyping regardless of the main language.  I also use it for writing tools, such as the character animation/model editor I’m working on.  A fantastic language.

Great to see more Pythonistas on here.  Hopefully with Pygame getting enhancements soon the community will continue to grow.

I'll only keep working on a game as long as the concept is still interesting to me.  I've had a few projects in the past where I just wanted to stop working on them and do something else.  For me, this was a good sign that the concept wasn't very interesting in the first place.  When I get truly excited about an idea I have a lot less of a problem following it through.

But sometimes you just need to take a break, play someone else's game, and come back to your project later.

Glad to see this happen.  La-Mulana and Cave Story were two of my first indie games.  I hope they do well.

Hm, I think it's more enjoyable when the compression from lots of lines of moderately complex code turns into one line of very complex code rather than turning into one line of easy code. It makes you feel less like an idiot.

I disagree. The idiot is the guy who hasn't worked out that you can do it with one line of easy code. You're the smart one for figuring it out.

Provided, of course, that the one line of code is surrounded by a few lines of comments.