Not sure why the vision has to be that narrowminded. Multiplayer is not always necessary for a strategy game, see Jagged Alliance. Balancing issues are present in countless other scenarios aswell. I am creating real-time combat systems. And the difficulty to balance out things there is probably even higher than in discrete strategy rule-sets.

balancing continuous things is easier than discrete things; you can just finetune parameters exactly how you want them.  with discrete rules you have a limited range of possibilities none of which are exactly right and you have to be clever to work around this.

multiplayer isn't compulsory, it's just better for a lot of strategy games.
this may be personal taste; all the big singleplayer strategy games i find kind of awful, you just build up and up in a tedious exponential power trip with no real opposition and it takes bloody hours.  lots of people like them though, those people are kind of wrong but what can you do really.  not saying it can't be done right, but you're looking at a small niche in a small niche in a small niche.

strategy's kind of a niche genre as it is.  most people don't like them because they're challenging; they want easy stateless games that they can grind through and not have to think much about.  so probably most developers don't like them either.

lot of strategy games work best multiplayer; and multiplayer's a really bad place for indies - it adds more dev time and it's really hard to get a community going.  people are used to games where there's hundreds of servers going all the time, so if there's none or very few they'll just piss off somewhere else.

lot of work to balance a strategy game.

very hard to sell.

speaking from experience here.

still, there are a few around.  there's blendo games, cryptic comet, positech.  and my stuff.

also, the tigsource population tends to be platformer focused, it's not an even cross-section of all gamemakers.

first game I saw with gravity variation was Captain Comic - had a low-G moonbase area.

first game I saw with reverse gravity was Crystal Caves - had a temporary rev-G powerup and some full rev-G levels.  Also had low-G areas.

Finished mine: http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/7drl-zaga-33.html

Didn't have time to put in an end-goal so I just made it be to try and get as far as you can.

Wow, you guys are... super quick. I'm using this roguebasin article and I'm up ready to begin step 4. Everybody else looks slightly more advanced than that  

When you've done a bunch of game-jams it's easier to know what to leave out, what to do a quick and dirty hack of, what to cannibalise from old code, and what to do properly.  Plus you just can get a lot faster with practice!  My first 7DRL I got nowhere, and I was totally astonished at what others could accomplish.

That article seems to me more like how to do it in a proper structured way, not necessarily how best to do it quickly.  I'd say:
- Focus on getting player and monsters moving and hitting each other ASAP.  This is the bit where it's actually a game!
- Keep the map very basic, just walls and floor.
- Keep equipment and experience very basic, if you need them at all.  I'm just going with single-use items and no stats, no leveling.
- Don't bother with loading/saving, datafiles, etc.

Haven't made as much progress on this as I'd have liked this weekend, some other stuff came up.
Basically it's going to be very tactical, each level is a tactical puzzle to solve, to figure out how best to get to the exit while maybe grabbing some items and taking as few risks as possible.  Low hp, almost no regeneration, no benefit to killing monsters other than them being out of your way.  No backtracking through previously visited levels or anything.

Thinking about maybe having a political element, bribing different groups of monsters to fight each other instead of you.  That might overcomplicate things, we'll see how time is and how it fits once I have the base game working.

That said would he have done the same without all the pressure? Maybe yes, maybe not.

Who the hell cares?  The guy's acted with grace.  He's apologised.  Accept it.  You can't ask for anything more than that.  If you're going to hold everyone to everything they've ever done wrong you're making the world a pretty awful place.

Pick a game you like and clone it.  Seriously.
Make Contra, but draw your own heroes, different monsters, different weapons and powerups.  And design levels for it.  Suddenly it's a new game!

Working from something that you know already works is a great place to start for your first game.  Maybe you'll come up with some cool idea along the way that ends up making it very different to the original, but it doesn't matter if not.  I think the best ideas are usually ones that you discover when you're already exploring something, rather than grand visions you pursue from the start.

or just make a straight-up fangame

or this, definitely.

Pick a game you like and clone it.  Seriously.
Make Contra, but draw your own heroes, different monsters, different weapons and powerups.  And design levels for it.  Suddenly it's a new game!

Working from something that you know already works is a great place to start for your first game.  Maybe you'll come up with some cool idea along the way that ends up making it very different to the original, but it doesn't matter if not.  I think the best ideas are usually ones that you discover when you're already exploring something, rather than grand visions you pursue from the start.

Paul:

@ortoslon: "i hadn't volunteered to judge igf because i can't stand certain game mechanics and entire genres #toopicky"

Email Brandon and offer your services. I'm not saying you'll be accepted but, you know, walk the walk. The more judges there are, the less burden on each there will be.

Good idea.

I put up the zelda game I was working on on the train on trainwrecks: http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2258

Number Quality
download (windows only)
Theme: poor signal quality, numbers.

Cube Gallery
download (windows only)

From the themes "massively multiplayer" and "unity cubes".  (Not made in unity.)
Concept is a gallery piece; massively many people walk past, interact, and have an influence on what those after them see.
Cube structures are generated by a random string, e.g. "fcWxcMncgsGnmjcmxm0ccccgnxM", interpreted as an algorithm "move forward, place a cube, shift colours towards white, rotate around X axis, etc."
Structures fade in and out, and are replaced by new structures.  Strings for the new structures are generated based on what you spent most time looking at.

screenshots:

Me too.

3 nights: Friday to Monday

I've only just got into iOS dev myself so I can't answer much, but: I just have an iPad, someone testing had some problems on an iPod that I couldn't figure out, so I just released on iPad for the moment (which probably isn't ideal, more people have phones so you can sell more copies).  I'm planning to try and find out what the problem was there once I can afford to get a phone or pod too.  So there are maybe some differences, you'd ideally want one of each to test, but do I think this was just a matter of CPU speed (it was an older model).

Pad can run all the phone stuff, but it's not ideal; it runs in a smaller subscreen inside - it's better to target both if you can.

there are plenty of niche games that i did not hear about through any news media. i feel that niche indie games are best promoted through word of mouth and social media (forums, twitter, etc.) rather than news media

You're probably quite right - but bear in mind that as a developer you're personally involved in the "indie games" community, and most people who play games are not so might not hear about things through the same channels.  It would make sense to use all possible means of communication, even if word of mouth is the best.

I don't think I have anything more to add, thank you for a congenial discussion.

By "press" I mean news media, journalists, blogs, game websites, magazines, whatever.  This is how you connect games to players; by giving them publicity through whichever channels you can.  This is why the IGF succeeds in connecting games to players; all the games journalists/bloggers/enthusiasts pay attention to it and report on the finalists.  If you start a contest with no publicity, it won't introduce anybody to the games.  More players follows from more news-mentions, and conversely I don't see how you'd get more players without more news-mentions.  Am I misunderstanding something?

Yeah, measuring popularity with the market omits free stuff, but apart from that it's a good approximation of how many people liked a thing.  And you're right, it doesn't measure *how much* they liked it, or how much they should have liked it, how much they would have liked it if they'd known about it or given it a proper chance.. it mostly measures how much advertising a product got.  But a public vote would do the same (and so does the IGF to some extent, but the "panel of experts" approach is definitely the right model in my opinion).

Achkas: Make games however you like!  Nobody's going to judge you based on what tools you use.  I went to one of these and folk were using flash, java, gamemaker at least, but probably many others I didn't see.

(Might be able to make this, it's pretty soon after I'll have gotten back home from Bit of Alright etc., but I'll check train prices.)

This game is fantastic and you should all play it (assuming you have the requisite devices).

@brog - that does sound similar but that one doesn't seem to have any prizes, and doesn't seem to be very organized in its judging process, since the selections are more arbitrary by the award organizers rather than by a larger pool of judges (or even a public vote; that may work best for this sort of thing)

Ad hoc is better, because you don't know what's going to be released in a year.  What most interests me is stuff that doesn't fit into any existing category, so if you have too-specific categories you're excluding it.  There's already pressure against creative invention because it's harder to explain and so harder to sell, I'd rather have less of that than more.

Prizes would be nice, but press is better.  Sure, I'd love the 20k igf prize, it's more money than I'm likely to make from any of my games, but a game that wins it also gets way more than $20k value in terms of positive coverage and recognition.  This is the main challenge in starting up a new award system - you need to get that recognition.

A public vote would be redundant, there's already a public vote with financial prizes; it's called the market.