Me: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Vino
My game: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Digitanks

Okay demo's up now.

There's also a new forum for those interested in such things and in case you hadn't noticed them before there is a Steam group and Facebook group for Digitanks.

Oops, sorry. Thanks.

Now that is great feedback, thank you. The camera is a significant improvement from the last demo, but I've still been hearing people say they want more control so I suppose I have more work to do. The GUI is all coder art as well, your points are good, I'll keep them in mind when I do the art for that. And yes, there will be online multiplayer.

Question: What exactly about the story did you find out of place? Part of the atmosphere of this game is supposed to be silly and fun with a digital theme, and that's what I was going for with the story. However you say it's inappropriate. Did I get it wrong?

Thanks very much for giving it a spin, I hope to see more of this kind of feedback.

I feel like engaging someone else in a political discussion about the merits of communism versus capitalism so I will try to provoke a discussion.

Blast! I do think we need a real alternative to capitalism but Communism does not have a great track record, either.

When you say an alternative to capitalism do you mean a replacement or an improvement? Communists generally favor a complete destruction of the capitalist economy and replacement with one more to their liking (read: communism) which sounds like what you are suggesting. If so, then would you label the current economies of the major developed countries all failures? They aren't true capitalist economies but they have enough capitalist aspects that you could make the argument with them.

I posted a beta of the demo over in the feedback forum. It has the base-building stuff in it. Nobody's said anything yet so if someone here hasn't seen it yet I'd appreciate you giving it a shot and letting me know if it sucks or not.

I took down the demo, skip to later in this page. I'm trying to get crits on my trailer.

Screenshots:

The threat of limbo is that you're stuck there until there's a kick, or your body wakes up on its own, which could be a very very very long time. That's why you can forget whether or not you're in a dream. Ariadne wasn't in there very long.

Oh. I suppose since you never see their face you don't realize they age.

It could be a mental projection of their own internal self image, Cobb was a clean slate, so he had no prior baggage in that part. Watanabi no doubt lived thousands of years in Limbo, lost. It could also be explaned that the exponential nature of how

Watanabe entered limbo after DiCaprio, so DiCaprio should be much older, I think. As for mental projection, I don't think that's mentioned anywhere else in the movie. Everybody always appears the way they are in real life aside for clothes.

* kids didn't grow old

They did, though the motions of the children mimicked what Cobb had remembered in his mind.

They looked like they were the same age the whole time to me. Kids grow kinda fast, if DiCaprio was out even a year his kids would have grown a lot. If the kids were just projections then that'd be okay if the whole thing was just a dream, but if this is reality then it doesn't matter what's in his mind.

* what happens if you die in limbo?

According to the story of Cob and his wife, you kick out to the real world.

That would make sense. Limbo's the only place that you can leave by dying even with the strong sedative. This is all getting so complicated!

* no zero gravity in snow land or limbo when the van drives off the cliff

The Zero Gravity thing was because they had an increased susceptibility to inner ear movement, on the lower levels, there wasn't any explicit mention of a different type of cocktail, so the changes might have been suppressed.

That's a good point.

I didn't see those.

Saw it last night. Loved it. I enjoyed how nicely everything got tied up in a neat little bow at the end of the movie. Putting the events on a flight helped a lot -- when he had completed his goal, he just stepped off the damn plane and was home, didn't even have to take an extra flight.

Only a couple plot holes:

* dicaprio wasn't old even though watanabi was
* kids didn't grow old
* what happens if you die in limbo?
* no zero gravity in snow land or limbo when the van drives off the cliff

That's a phenominally small number for such a mindfuck movie, and they get partially explained if the whole thing is a dream anyway.

Also, the first film I've ever seen with Leonardo DiCapro in without making me want to vomit all over his face without punching it. I don't know why, but I have a visceral hatred of him.

That is understandable given the whole Titanic thing, but if this is the first role of his that you like then you must have missed Blood Diamond and The Departed. I used to hate him too but he's really spread his acting wings.

Maybe "casual" is the wrong word.

This is a topic that I'm quite interested in but I don't have time to watch two hour long videos. Can someone provide the cliff's notes?

You look awful young to have such an incredible job title.

Perhaps mileage varies due to type of game and timing and so on. Steam sales aren't what they used to be anymore, not everything gets in the splash page.

For inception yeah I suppose. It's a pretty effective method of providing exposition, it's just so easy to spot by now.

Audience Surrogate is a very nice tool on explaining why and how things work without giving the player a lecture about it.

It's also a lame, overused one. So many games movies and books have audience surrogates, the neophyte who asks questions just for the sake of the audience, that when it happens it's obvious. There's better ways of doing this. In one of my games that didn't pan out I was going to have an audience surrogate character ask a question but instead of getting explained to, he gets given a PDA, with a snarky comment about how nobody has time to sit around and explain things to the newbie. Then everything in the world has data discs associated with it that the player could pick up to learn about things. Now the players who care about the story have a new disc-finding minigame and the other ones can just go around killing stuff.

Holy shit there's a cape in LTTP?

Sort of the feeling you get when you realize that newts in Shadow of the Colossus give you move stamina.

Only the glowy tail ones. And forget the garden, it helps you fight the colossi, and that's the best way to get EXPLODING ARROWS!!!

Anyway, to contribute some actual substance to this thread: The problem with this is that you need to have a good game first. That means putting a lot of time into designing the gameplay. An already immersive world and gameplay experience is essential or nobody will even want to look around and find this stuff. Once you have that in place then it's time to worry about hiding extra goodies for your players to find, and I view that as really the easy part.

Really? I thought there was another God of War game coming out on PSP.

It has had a good run though, look at Chains of Olympus, Portable Ops, Dissidia which dropped only about a year ago, Crisis Core, and of course all the silly casual games like Patapon and Loco Roco. And I think a Katamari game was released on PSP although I don't know if it's any good. And those are just the games I liked, there's probably more good ones I never got in to.