I'm really curious where that piece of equipment came from.

As for your problem, I'd say limit the binaural audio to atmospheric elements that don't necessarily need to be found in 3d space. For example, crickets chirping would be good, but not the sound of a river (if the river is part of the game environment). I'd say use 3d sound for those elements.

I am looking forward to seeing where this goes

Just came to say, Koalas are not bears. I simply cannot support a game that promotes such a misconception.

Joking aside, this is looking very good. How do they controls feel? The texture on the different environmental elements like trees and blocks read more as noise, they stand out too much, especially when they are the same color as the outline of the object (i'm speaking of the tree in this example). I understand it's WIP but I just wanted to point it out!

Good luck.

but I seem to have solved everything and I am super happy 

Been working on this for a couple of months now but I'm not sure where it's going at the moment...

This looks shockingly similar to a dream I had recently.

Perhaps we are on the same Plane.

Artwork in games is important to me, because I am interested in games that depict certain moods and feelings. Artwork certainly plays a role in conveying these.

There are games that are fun regardless of their artwork, however. Quake III would be fun to play, for me, even if the artwork was not present. The driving force behind playing is in the competitiveness. A game like NetHack is very graphically minimal, but fun to play because of it's expansiveness.

Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games. It's fun to play, but I probably would not have been compelled to beat it if the game were all textureless polygons. (I would also say that I would not play it if the audio was terrible or non-existant). The art and sound are integral because they give mood and atmosphere to what to player is experiencing on the gameplay-level.

Video games are unique in that they combine input from the player, but can also use different media such art and sound to create a "whole" experience. I used to play Tribes II a lot, and the artwork wasn't really important. The hours that I poured into Tribes II were not as valuable as the hours I poured into Shadow of the Colossus.

Artwork is not a necessity, but I think that games which ignore artwork (and sound) cannot give the same "experience" as those that use them to their advantage.

Here is a good book for you to read: http://www.amazon.com/Aesthetic-Theory-Video-Graeme-Kirkpatrick/dp/0719077176

tell us more

It's a followup to my game Foam, which you can find here:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=26526.0

I will start a devlog soon.  

edit:

More scenery...

Another weird game about dreams.
Another game about weird dreams.
Another weird about weird?

snip

I was thinking a lot about Yume Nikki while making this. I'm glad you replayed it, and I'm sorry to have disappointed you with such a lousy reward for your hard work! I was really cramming to finish this game just to get my motivation up - consequently, 90% of the game was done during the final 10 days or so.

It sounds like to found mostly everything, I will say that there is a slightly alternative route you can take with the cloud form, but it's not very exciting. The "dead ends" (either literal dead-ends or characters that do nothing) are simply stuff I had ideas for but couldn't get around to because of my deadline!

I just made my first tweet: https://twitter.com/stwelin

I don't like to keep a dev log or anything, but I'll tweet my next game when it's done. It's in the works!

Thanks for playing!

This won't be a game.

Reading books

i lol'd at that one

Why? Books are the most versatile tool for inspiration, I think. I have my best ideas when I'm reading something I'm really interested in.

Today I made a title screen.
This should be animated, but seems to not be looping when embedded. Click it to open in a new tab if it's stuck for you too.

Depth Deception? I agree that the colors are working well.

Thanks for the positive responses, everyone. A new build is available. Arrow keys can now be used to control the player, keys J and K rotate the camera. (Though, a dual-analog gamepad is still ideal!)

New screenshots in the OP as well.

Have a good week.

by any chance were you inspired by yume nikki or LSD when made this

Yeah. I love

of LSD. And Yume Nikki was a big inspiration as well. I'm glad you caught both!
Oh, and You can choose to take the umbrella or not. The girl being there depends on visiting the three locations.

i had to do the spikey mushroom step 5-10 times for example.

Good to know. I really wanted to release this before I let it roll into the mass grave of unfinished games I have, thus very little playtesting got done by anyone but me.

Thanks for playing.

Upload it somewhere else, box.net won't let me download it.

Alright. I'm hosting it with Dropbox now. Let's see if their bandwidth limit is a little higher.

I will have a new build out by the weekend.

I'm really enjoying this game so far.  The world is bizarre and colorful enough to keep me wanting to explore and find out what's down each path, and I like the lines of dialogue the characters have.  Haven't made that much progress solving the puzzles yet, but I'll probably come back to the game later (speaking of which, as save feature would be nice.).

I thought about a save feature, but in the end I didn't feel the game lent itself to being put down and picked up later in the middle. I never enjoyed this aspect of long RPGs. I always come back after a break and forget what I was supposed to be doing.

Request: I want to share this with some people, if you could possibly do an update where the arrow keys control the character (very counter-intuitive that the huge buttons with arrows on them do not move the dude on screen) then that'd be awesome!

I'll put it in the next build. Thanks.

I was kind of put off by not being able to tell how things were meant to look. Regardless, well done on your first game.

Things are meant to look how they look. If they were meant to look differently, I would have made them so! Thank you.

Thanks to all for playing.

- There was no music on the very first locations, was this intended?
- Some sound effects were way too loud (in my opinion). Like the creatures shooting lightning.
- I didn't know I could rotate my view. Only found that out by reading the other comments here. Maybe squeeze in the key bindings before the game?
- I don't agree with the addition of a map. Would spoil some of the fun...

There wasn't supposed to be music for the first section, no. I am thinking about adding some light tune there. Thanks for your feedback. I will incorporate info for the control scheme in the next build.

And yes, there are a few different endings and death sequences.

i turned gamepad on in the menu but it wasn't mapped correctly (it's a Logitech Precision btw) so the camera kept rotating counterclockwise while i walked around with the d-pad. i've played like that for 10 minutes thinking that was intended, then nauseaquit

This happened with my controller once as well. I found that re-plugging it seemed to fix the calibration. Thanks for playing.

So I delivered three eggs and turned into a Moon and went to space... and "Two out of three"
So I guess there's more, but i don't know where.

The cosmic squiggles are not enumerating your eggs. That's all I will say for now!

b) the grass texture is too noisy so the lack of AA makes it very annoying

Thanks, my monitor is probably out of whack.

[Download:]

Download: FOAM (v0.1)

Controls:
Gamepad: Left stick to move, right stick to rotate camera.
Keyboard: WASD to move, J+K to rotate camera.

I am so lazy about making games, there was a thread made about it. This is my first game. Dear god, what have I done?










Sorry to you folks who like inverted camera rotation.


I take criticism well, so tear this thing apart. (Be constructive).

edit: Also sorry to Linux and Mac gamers. This is a GAME MAKER CLASSIC™.

edit2: New build available.

Fixes:
Arrow keys control the character as well
Grass texture less noisy
Misc bug fixes

Note: keys J and K now rotate the camera.