somebody on the IGDA forums checked the header and said that it WAS sent by a member...while more professionalism would have been appropriate, if it WAS sent by a member does the director have any grounds for that kind of...retraction?

i shave my nipples

EDIT

this is the weirdest thread on this whole forum by a long shot

I emailed him this:

Hey!  After watching some sexy HD videos on gametrailers.com I downloaded Shatter.  I thought I would send you my impressions after Anthony Flack refused to pester you with them personally, DESPITE being a fellow Kiwi game dev.  So, here we go:

1 - Awesome music!  Listened to the whole soundtrack on loop for like 3 hours the other day on that bandcamp site.  I feel weird about paying $10 for the soundtrack to an $8 game that I already own, which is dumb but true

2 - The puns are DELICIOUS.  Maneuveraball?  excellent.  BLOCTOPUS??  SENSATIONAL.  Pretty much made my week.  I would propose naming the game BLOCTOPUS instead of SHATTER for all future releases.  Bloctopus bloctopus bloctopus.

3 - You've made an old thing (Breakout) new and accessible and pretty without it feeling exploitative, and that is not a particularly easy thing to do.  Rolling in the physical stuff and the varied level shapes is nice, but the suck/blow mechanic pretty much turns it into a completely different game.  Very cool!

4 - Clock o Block is a bitch from hell and I hope it dies.  The boss where you have to like blow the shield out of the way was really badass though!

5 - While I think you guys do it the BEST of anyone so far, Shatter made me realize that there is like...a PSN aesthetic?  Blast Factor and Droplitz both have a kind of similar look (tho inferior gameplay!)...small, instanced, shader-heavy little "sprite" models making up the foreground, and a big field with some kind of enormous untextured 3d model in the background...I can definitely see all sorts of good reasons to do this from performance/budget perspective of course!

6 - The main reason I am writing to you is I think you guys made a wonderful game, and there are not many of these available on PSN.  Fat Princess won't even CONNECT TO A SINGLE GAME ONLINE ARRRGGHH.  However...I have a...nagging feeling about something.  I can't help but feel like the game spews BUCKETS AND BUCKETS of 1Ups at every possible opportunity to make up for the fact that it's quite hard to get the paddle where I want it; most situations result in me overshooting my destination by quite a bit.  There are also strange moments where I "hit" the ball, but it goes fully sideways, bounces off the level wall and out, or makes the hit sound but really just passes through the paddle cuz I kinda moved over the ball after it went past.  My first sitdown with the game I think I had been playing for like 75 minutes and I still hadn't run out of continues!  I really felt like the game was compensating heavily for the paddle being a bit tricky to control.

Anyways, I do not have any illusions of Sidhe patching a game just to play the way *I* want it, I'm not quite that egotistical!  I thought I would mainly write to let you know what I thought of it, to plead helplessly for some tweaks (or at the very least a game options menu where I could change the paddle speed and 1up frequency!), and also to say Hi!

s/paddle/bat/g

Also as I understand it Shatter is something of a special thing, a pseudo-major game release from New Zealand, yea?  If so I think some congratulations are in order!  Best of luck on your future projects, and I hope that Shatter is selling well and that you'll consider at least exposing the option to tweak some of those settings   Thanks!

Adam

PS - If the paddle/^h bat is actually EASY to control and I am just being a terrible player definitely let me know (but if that is the case then I would be bound to have about 50 lives after the first half hour of play)

So probably he thinks I'm retarded!  Oh well.  Now all I wanna do is play Shatter but I know that I will just be gradually annoyed by my inability to succeed OR die.

Tell 'em yourself! Email [email protected]

I SO AM

PREPARE TO GET NUCLEAR, NEW ZEALAND

i like how he says they HAVE to defend their trademark...but his "defense" involves extorting money from the other developers?  so miserable.

It's wonderful in almost every regard, but they definitely swapped paddle control and accuracy for buckets of 1ups.  Tell em to patch that biz!!  I love EVERYTHING else about the game.

i do not know what that dog is doing but i love him anyways

yea the big parties are thursday night usually, and free liquor is always fun!  the parties themselves usually suck, unless you got yourself a nice indie runnin' crew (last year me, tommunism and robin & alex from beatnik caroused for hours before stumbling into cabs).  We stole a BUNCH of sushi from Sony which was pretty rad.

ANYWAYS, the indie content this year is going to be pretty hot (this is basically the first year, and it's definitely going to be great).  Offworld is helping to put on some kind of indie-friendly party one of those nights, but I haven't heard a specific date for it yet.  I'm secretly hoping for wednesday!

(also I'm putting on a flixel workshop that wednesday evening, but I haven't announced it yet.  Hopefully it doesn't overlap the indie stuff too close!  I'm gonna have to bail an hour early maybe)

Flixel does use full alpha blending on everything pretty much...the reason my alpha seems fast/cheap is because its color-transformed just once, when the animation changes, instead of transforming every frame or dropping out to the vector renderer (which is hella slow).

From what I can tell, flash performance depends almost 100% on ducking the vector renderer at every possible occasion.  Thankfully, between .colorTransform(), .copyPixels() and .draw() it's very easy to bake very complex elements to a BitmapData object that can be blitted at lightspeed with .copyPixels().  NOTE: draw() itself is not particularly fast, it is only useful in that it can use the vector renderer once to creat a BitmapData that can AVOID using draw() or the vector renderer again in the future!

This is the first I've heard of alpha being slow on mac/linux, not sure what that is about!

Adam_Atomic

I am creating a Sonic fangame

 

nooks you are a badass

Interesting!  Well if you see them at the next farmer's meeting ask them to slow the paddle down a bit so they don't have to flood that shit with 1ups and continues to compensate   Cuz otherwise that game is far more rad than it deserves to be, and their penchant for puns tickles my fancy

I messed with it for a few chapters as well, and am definitely intrigued...will play more later tonight!

looks great, it's professional with two Ss though...

amature!

haha, anyone can design any shirt they want as far as I'm concerned, but for the workshop I really need something pretty simple and direct, and #3 is a very likely print (though hopefully I can get it in some different color shirts/shadows, gotta talk to my printer tomorrow!)

Lol yea colorful logo is my pref too, but it's 5 colors

[SHIRT #1:]

SHIRT #1:


SHIRT #2:


SHIRT #3:


Slowly cobbling together relevant details for the workshop, it looks like probably the evening of September 14th, 2009, here in downtown Austin.  I wanted to get some input on what shirts you guys thought were the most rad though!

hehe yea i got both   when I am shopping on PSN, I usually have gametrailers.com open on my laptop on the coffee table for exactly all the reasons you just said!

Also I haven't turned it back on to check but if it has options to modify number of 1ups/continues, and speed of the paddle, then I'm going to retract most of my complaints about it (except about it looking exactly like Blast Factor)

Flashbang is definitely considering/implementing a subscription system for their Unity Games release system, and they want to include games by other people too.  I dunno if they're considering having flash content on there or not?

I think having a lightweight, app-store like purchasing system that displays badges would encourage a kind of competition from users to be the most supportive in a way that subscriptions wouldn't?  Maybe that is just vile commercialism tho