online competitive TBS games take forever and often someone leaves in the middle of one. even something as simple as playing wesnoth with someone online can take 2-3 hours for a *small* map

That's a fault of Wesnoth, not the genre of TBS it falls into. A good TBS like say Dominion has good pacing and games are resolved in a reasonable amount of time, in favor of playing often, playing different, rather than protruded epic sessions more fitting for an RPG.

What kind of stuff requires unlocking?

Almost everything; Characters, levels, items... What you see when you start a fresh copy is a surprisingly small portion of the game's whole content, from what I could tell.

When you are learning the basics of the game, being bombarded with everything the game has to offer isn't so great. There are more quirks to using the unlockable characters and some of the unlockable bosses would have no doubt killed me had I faced them on my first playthrough. I also predict it will help keep the game fresh when I get to the point where I can reach the end regularly. I personally agree with the decision.

I don't. Having played Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup which is a real roguelike, I can say with confidence that having all the content available from the get go is far superior. It means that even if you die often (which you should given the genre) your next game will be completely, unpredictably different - that is what true replayability is, not this slowly unlocking crap. You could say Isaac is dumbed down, and you could even argue that it's to its benefit; But a rich, deep and highly replayable game it is not, and does not deserve the title of 'roguelike' in my opinion.

throw new Exception();

I'm trying to remember the name of a mac game from the 90's. It was a 2d side view of a field and you played as a frog that had to eat all the bugs on the screen to progress. You had to dodge a snake, mole with dynamite, car and lightening. There was also a wasp that would switch between being red and yellow and you could only eat it in it's yellow/calm state. I think you could also shoot water drops but I can't really remember... I think it was called something like "Kojo the Frog" but I can't find anything called that. 

I remember that game! I used to play it when I was a kid; I want to know what it's called as well.

From a technical standpoint, the game's a disaster. It takes way too long to load and the performance is abysmal.

Otherwise, I'm actually pleasantry surprised. It's got a couple annoying quirks (mostly it's hard to judge where your hit box or enemy projectiles are and whether they're about to collide) but it's actually not that bad of a game. However, the gradual unlocking of content severely undermines the replayability aspect of the random generation. If you're gonna make a game about replayability, it's absolutely counterproductive to then proceed to lock most of its content.

30 FPS is distinctly choppy from 60 FPS. Movies get away with 25 FPS because they have motion blur. Real-time video games have no such luxury and must run at at least 60 FPS to appear smooth to most humans.

Then there's the problem of missing frames... If you run at 60 FPS with double-buffered vsync (which you shouldn't, because triple buffering is superior) and miss a frame, your effective FPS temporarily dips down to 30.

this thread made me consider allowing the user to select their max frame rate. does anyone think this is a good idea?

Not only is it a good idea, to do it any other way is a bad one. Everyone's system has different timings. Your game must be able to cope with virtually any rate.

You cannot always use integers and maintain the necessary flexibility in movement. For example sometimes you want that a character translates at 2 units per frame, another character at 2.5.

Yes you can. In fact there are only few scientific applications in which you'd want to use floating point math. Even a 32-bit integer has 4,294,967,296 distinct values. If your game world is 10 km wide, this gives you a precision of ~2.32 micrometers. For reference, micrometers are used in the measurement of the wavelength of infrared radiation. For your game, it's plenty.

Floats are used mostly out of laziness - they're more convenient to work with than funny fixed-point systems (2 meters / 0.000002 meters is simpler to grasp than 2,000,000 micrometers / 2 micrometers).

Well, how do you define procedurally-generated attacks? Warning Forever has bosses that are just procedurally-generated agglomerations of modules with various guns, lasers, missile launchers, etc. on them that fire at semi-random intervals while moving about hinge joints.

Warning Forever would indeed be a good example. Though, it's kind of a special case, since it's not a game with bosses, but a game solely about them.

I can't imagine any website looking good on a widescreen monitor. Most of it ends up being just background, right?

The point is not the amount of background (that's inevitable unless you zoom), but the alignment of the content. Since people generally position their monitors directly in front of them, having the content on the left forces one to read at an uncomfortable angle (imagine reading a book from the side).

C-Dogs (Cyberdogs)?

What? There's no reptilian dinosaur guy there. In fact I believe it has a pretty extensive character customization feature where you can select head/torso/legs and the color of each separately - all human though.

I would like to listen to it  the dragon age 2 one was great 

Noted, but I just don't care enough about it to get my panties in a twist. I may do more designer reviews in the future though.

My game can now record the player input from a gameplay session, save it to a file, and subsequently load that file and play it back perfectly. Not bad for only an hour and a half's work!

Did you use any floating point math? Because if you did, the simulation is non-deterministic and dependent on system hardware and/or software - i.e. the replay will desync on another OS or CPU.

Most Metroid games don't have pattern bosses. It happened in the Metroid Prime series, and a few scattered bosses in other games (e.g. Metroid Queen in the second game), but for the most part Metroid bosses involve the player and the boss slinging attacks at each other, the player dodging as best they can, and one side eventually falling over.

Ah yes, my apologies. I recently watched Metroid Prime let's plays which is coloring my memory. Super Metroid and so on did not indeed have so predictable bosses.

I would generally classify a pattern boss as a boss who would be unbeatable if he didn't use a specific move that lets you hurt him. Changing the context of that move is good for keeping the fight fresh, but the concept is the same. In that sense K.Rool of DKC is a pattern boss. He slings a few attacks at you, then gives you a cannonball which you use to hurt him.

The ambiguity of the term 'pattern' is becoming problematic. There's two things we seem to be discussing:

• Bosses that are invulnerable except for specific timings (you dodge while I shoot; ok now it's your turn)
  
• Bosses that have a distinct 'attack' pattern which they repeat until beaten. May have more than one; Often switch patterns as the fight progresses.

Now that I've enumerated it like that, you are absolutely correct. K. Rool fits both criteria. Each of his patterns is different which helps to mask the fact, and you can only take 1-2 hits, so what would often transpire is not seeing the same pattern more than once, twice at most. He's a pretty well-designed boss from this standpoint.

Of course, every boss ever made satisfies the second point due to the way game systems work... Somebody had to program the bosses' attacks, and their variety is finite, apart from procedural and emergent behavior.

I suppose then what we're looking for is a boss that fits neither - a boss whose behavior is procedurally generated and can be arbitrarily damaged, given appropriate skill.

Everything Core XIII just said!

Man would you please spell my name right for change?

It's kind of weird that there's not another row of legs on the other side, in opposite cycle.

Oh, one more good example! Crystal Caves by Apogee had a nice "world map". You were venturing over the level selection like in the game (those doors are maps).

That's more of a hub world, really, than an overworld map.

Your site is aligned to the left. On a modern widescreen monitor, this is highly annoying:



What you want to do is put the contents in a containing <div> and give it width:X; margin:0 auto; style where X is some absolute value (like 800px). This centers the content nicely.

Also, a convention is to make the header a link that takes you back to the home page (even if you provide a separate menu item for it).

I don't think your background image is a gradient, is it?



If not, you could make it 1 pixel high to save a ton of bandwidth.

My opinions were my own, but I certainly agree with the article.

To a certain extent you could say Mirror's Edge is a plat former, obviously with flaws, but a 3d platformer nonetheless.

Yet, entertainingly enough, Mirror's Edge is about as blocky as you can get. All of the rooftops and the geometry within is orthogonal. It might as well be built from blocks.

No, Flash doesn't work that way.

Are you sure? For example Battlefield 2 seems to have a Flash-powered interface on top of its normal, hardware-accelerated graphics engine.

Okay, the final bosses in the DKC games -are- the 3-patterns-of-3-attacks formula incarnate. In fact, every boss from any DKC is. I thought that was a sarcastic reply to the 3-patterns-of-3-attacks Zelda formula that the OP was hoping to get around...

But the patterns are unpredictable. The 'pattern' there is to throw the cannonball into his blunderbuss when he does the hoover thing... But the conditions for this change constantly. Sometimes there's spiked balls in your way. Sometimes the cannonball comes in a barrel. Sometimes the barrel has weird motion. Sometimes he teleports around the room making it more difficult to hit him. It's not the "repeat the same thing thrice" pattern that Zelda and Metroid games seem to have.