Here's the site for Gateways. I played the demo and it was interesting. It kept my attention, but I can't remember if it was fun or not.

I suggest you guys make mention of these in the vote thread.

You haven't been playing enough games on your backlog! Shame on you! Remedy that by voting /participating in TIGS Game Club for once in your life (or whatever number of times you have so far + 1). Vote for the two games you most want to play, but keep in mind that if the game you pick is free, people are probably more likely to jump on your bandwagon. Here are my votes:

1) Seiken Densetsu 3 (SNES)
2) Romancing SaGa 3 (SNES)

And here are the current standings since the last time I checked this thread:

5 - Romancing SaGa 3
3 - Ogre Battle
2 - Drakkhen
1 - Seiken Densetsu 3
1 - Umihara Kawase
1 - Planescape: Torment
1 - Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song
1 - Gateways
1 - Vindictus
1 - Dark Cloud
1 - MegaMari

Yeah, but you don't have to complete or even play any game in the club. I'll start another vote thread and if it doesn't garner support, it'll just be a smaller run I guess.

I was contemplating the idea of making your number one choice count for two votes instead of just one; what do you think?

Is this what became of the game I saw at the GGJ in NYC? Looks pretty cool now, glad to see something came of it

Made a logo I think I finally like.

I thought it was really cool, sort of Dali-esque. It took me a bit, though, to realize it said "bones" and not "one".

http://www.wimp.com/samemap/

This guy has been building and evolving a map for 50 years. Thought it might be inspirational for worldbuilders or anyone else who's having trouble creating settings. He explains different aspects of it throughout the video, so it might be worth a full watch.

[troll]

Obviously, there would be different classes - Artist, writer, programmer, designer, composer, troll, moderator... or something...

and then there's antymattar

This is probably the most helpful thing I've found on this subforum.

I eventually figured out that you basically just change into something else to bypass a previously locked "gate", but after a while I didn't really have any motivation to go on. At one point I was an egg, but I fell in the water and it was gone. I don't know if I needed to be that egg for something... 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.

BOOM!

Code:

void GameLoop()
{
Update();
Draw();
}

That's it. Seriously. I like my code clean

Code:

void Update()
{
// Change states, if necessary
SwitchStates();

// Update clock variables
elapsedTime = clock.getElapsedTime();
clock.restart();

// Relent control to the current GameState and retrieve the next GameState to move to.
nextStateName = currentState->Update(mainWindow, elapsedTime);
}

void Draw()
{
if(IsExiting())
return;
mainWindow.clear(sf::Color(155,110,50));

currentState->Draw(mainWindow);

mainWindow.display();
}

By chunks I meant syllables, words, or sometimes small groups of small words. I'm not speaking about chunks in terms of speed-reading but of perception. Like if you look at the 'B' at the beginning of this paragraph, you can see the entire paragraph (it's in your range of vision), but your brain will only allow you to recognize a small field around it as letters. If I focus on the B, I can only make out letters up until the 'm' in meant. The size of this field varies from person to person, and people with larger fields tend to read faster. To break this up breaks up the reading process.

@Muz I've had the same thought about showing off dialog engines. It does look fancy, but it's hard to say if it matters.

It seems that it's also there sometimes to emulate speech, but of course we don't listen the same way we read. I don't know if emulating speech is a practical reason when in doing so, you counter what's intended at the core: to present text (or at least the ideas being conveyed by it, spoken or written).

I'm in Italy for the next couple of months and I don't really know anyone here. Anyone else around and wanna hang out?

@Paul I don't like to speedread books or games. Also, people who read faster tend to read in larger "chunks", which letter-at-a-time goes against.

As I think about this, I realize that it is very heavily a jrpg thing, and I wonder if it is related to that. Japanese speak 1 mora at a time, which is pretty much 1 character at a time. Kind of if we read one syllable at a time, I think. So maybe it would be good to have a one-syllable-at-a-time display.

Either way, it seems like choice is the option to go with.

Does anyone here ever slow down the text?

Most RPGs and pretty much any game that displays dialogue between characters has it appear letter by letter across the Panel o' Text. Whenever there's an option to change the speed, I always set it to instant or as fast as possible. Is there some reason that games do this? I want to draw up a pros and cons list for whether to put text scroll in a game. Here's what I have so far:

PRO:
Can create a sense of pacing.
Nostalgia.
Can be less intimidating than a wall of text.
More capable of inserting pauses.

CON:
Can destroy pacing.
Can be frustrating to fast readers.

Other:
Fairly common/standard.
Makes little noises.

Anything else?

nah, i don't think that's it. this was a very simplistic game with very minimal graphics. mightve been CGA or EGA graphics. probably only 2 or 3 colors. i'm pretty sure all there was to it was to collect these three things and then get around the dragon to that cell.

e: and by cell, i just mean a rectangle in the upper corner of the screen.
e2: now that i think on it more, it may have been three cells

There was this old computer game I played in around '92, although it's certainly from earlier than that. The graphics were very blocky, like an Apple ][ (although it may have been a DOS machine); they could've been done with those ASCII blocks. And the only thing I remember about it is that you had to collect three keys in this castle or maze, and then go to this room that had a dragon and three locks on a cell in the upper right hand corner. It could've been the upper left though.

And it wasn't Adventure.

Code:

#ifndef SOMEHEADER_G

don't know why, but i bol'd when i made this typo.

I'm liking the look of this. Following now.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jchaffin/the-horror-in-clay-cthulhu-tiki-mug-production-run

My friend's got a pretty cool cthulhu tiki mug thing he's making. He's almost funded!

Looking at the location, I wonder if they could do props for the Dad's Garage theatre company. Paste, you wouldn't happen to go there, would you?

Not sure what you mean by "would you", but either way, I haven't been to Atlanta in quite a while. I keep meaning to go visit again, but things keep coming up.