Played it for a couple of minutes and it's great! Definitely keep up the cool work here. The only thing I can say is, perhaps give a little more indication about the air pockets when swimming.

I'm a noob, but I didn't realize that they were air pockets initially.

I found the rope physics fine, and didn't experience any slow downs on my machine which is a i7 2600 on Win7 64-bit pro.

This looks really, really awesome. Keep up the great work.

It was great to finally meet you all. I was definitely a newbie with all the cool and exciting parties to go to. But I think next year is going to be even cooler.

Get down here Xion! Even I'm here, and I'm all the way from New Zealand!

I'm flying in from New Zealand, arriving on the 27th of Feb leaving on the 6th of March. I'm going to wear shorts and jandals because that's what we wear in New Zealand, ALL THE TIME.

See you guys there!

Just reading the last couple of posts, why are we (as game designers?) dictating how people should play and enjoy the games we create? I mean, in MineCraft because it's flexible enough to do what you want it does allow you to extract a certain level of fun with it.

Want to make an animal launcher so you can send your pig/cow/sheep into the stars and beyond? MineCraft let's you do that.

Want to make a bacon factory? MineCraft let's you do that.

Want to create phallus shaped objects all over the world? MineCraft let's you do that.

Besides, not all of us like having end goals that are set by the game designer.

A lot of people find enjoyment when they play a game that isn't intended in a certain way. Some people liked self chain sawing themselves in Gears of War, some people like barrier leaping in Gears of War. Those are bugs, yes, but even a game like that people are able to extract fun and enjoyment that is inherently programmed into the game.

On the note of The Sims, I spent most of my time trying to kill my Sims in the weirdest, funniest way possible. I think the best one I remember, was when my Sim got into a fight with the ultra sad clown.

This is why I've been enjoying a lot of board games in the last few months, especially those with very relaxed rules and conditions to win. Settlers of Catan is one such one. While it does have an end goal, how you do it is ultimately up to you.

[tried]

To be fair on me, I tried to play his game so that I could give him some fair comments, but it didn't work on my machine then. From there he just said,

The game isn't for you

I tried to be helpful about discussing his website and giving (what I thought valid points) suggestions, but all I ever got was.

Friends, family, young children all love my website

So at the end of the day, I tried to comment fairly on his game and website; I was trying to be helpful... but I suppose not everyone wants it.

I think it's mostly because they don't offer a lot of the newer things that people want or expect these days.

Things such as decent multiplayer, replayability, decent story lines (this may or may not be needed depending on the game style). Most of them it seems just hash out tired old games with the same game design ideas that were done way back then.

I just don't think the HD part is going to entice people enough.

I don't know the sale numbers for Shank, but that's probably a title to get some information on.

We seem to be doing pretty well with scamming people.

But this is pretty funny none the less.

[Website]

I think I better explain some of my comments.

Website
To me, I still feel that the site is quite cluttered. My comments about the visitor counter, awards, ads and general weird flow of his site still stand I feel. I mean, I did visitor counters in the 90's too (1995-1997) but now no one does them. After all, imagine if Google did it . As for the awards, I explained why they're a little pointless. Lots of awards that bear little meaning and influence to the web visitor, but add to the general clutter of the website. As for the ads, well, I don't know about you but placing ads on your company website shows ... shows, well either the web host is free/cheap or you just want to find as many ways as possible to made money (while simultaenously pissing people off). It works well enough for the sites that offer free content to you, but when you also have to pay for the content, it barely makes sense. And lastly, it takes far too long to get to the good stuff.

Game
The game didn't work full stop on my laptop. All I got was a garbled mess. I asked for a fix/patch but he said "The game is not for you [or , NO GAME FOR YOU]". Seems a little unfair that he should tell a customer what he/she should like or enjoy. Besides it also doubles on the "compatibility" awards. It didn't work on my machine. Seems like a problem with compatibility if you ask me.

At the end of the day, due to the medium of text it can be a little hard to tell exactly what tone this all said in. But I still think that my comments were quite fair and not in any way harsh.

I suppose at the end of the day, he was really looking for praise. When he didn't get it among the peers that he wanted to be with ... he just got really upset. I suppose when people get upset they start doing irrational things (such as making a blog post such as that). A great thing I've learnt while doing all this stuff is that sometimes you just have to keep your damn mouth shut.

Also, I think the feds on are onto us! 

It looks absolutely damn fantastic.

The art is great, but the only thing that bothers me is the number of fingers inconsistency. Some of the images have him with three fingers and a thumb, and others with four fingers and a thumb! One image even has his left hand with three fingers and his right hand with four fingers!

This has got to be the most absurd threads I've read in a while.

Given that we've decided that D&D is considered to be emergent, what happens if someone was to make a D&D game where a human being is the game master and gets to make all the key decisions? [Oh wait! Someone has already done this, they happen to be a small company called BioWare who made Never Winter Nights in which humans can play the role of the game master].

I suppose, you'd then say that it wasn't a computer game and rather it was just a tool on a computer to simulate a table top game.

Otherwise this thread has been pretty pointless; because we're not even arguing about the same thing. You've already declined to accept the general opinion of what emergent game play means, so all you're doing now is trying to convince people that you're definition is correct? If so, you're failing pretty hard.

After all, I can argue that a dog isn't a dog and that it is a cat. All I have to do is stick fingers in my ears and go "La la la la la la". You can deny the second part, but the first part is more or less what's going on.

There is also Trac and Pivotal Tracker. We used Pivotal Tracker while working on The Ball and it was really useful!

Nice trailer!

The music in that one is really good.

So I've been playing with this a bit,

First of all, well done on making this game! It certainly exudes a certain amount of polish and hard work.

I like the general look of the whole game, although it looks like you guys tried to use a faux stencil outline look? Perhaps it's better to do this properly using shaders.

Moving on, the sound effects for the weapons make sense but the machine gun sort of overrides everything. All I kept hearing most of the time was the machine gun, and hardly anything else (say the blue projectile shooting weapon or the missiles). The repair sound doesn't really make a lot of sense to me ... it just doesn't sound right to me?

Music is really good. Nice job on that!

I'm not sure what the crystals do? They just seem to give you points or something?

The ultimate response that you probably want to hear is whether I would buy this game or not? To be completely honest, probably not. At this point, the game play while very good, doesn't offer me much beyond what I've played before in the past. There isn't really a story to follow, or many game mechanics that I can do to have a laugh with. But this is just me ... so don't take it heart or anything. Younger players (who haven't played arcade shoot em ups) could probably pick this up though.

All in all, it's a pretty basic game and very straight forward. Good stuff!

I'll be trying it out soon and will be reporting back to you.

I would really like to avoid using Game Maker due to is proprietary license it has. I would love to just use DirectX or SDL to make my 2D games.

I don't really want to do TONS of hard work on my own, but I'd like to be able to call it mine without having some pain in the butt license to deal with.

That doesn't quite go hand in hand. Research some options.

Perhaps Flash can do what you want? Perhaps some other game development software?

What do I plan to do overall? Well I'd like to make a fun game that can get me some money. After getting some funding I'd like to get deeper into game design and maybe hire on some additional staff.

Funding from who? Your customers? From the government? Probably thinking too far ahead unless you've got some cash now and will do this full time.

Asking where to start is always sounds like a good question, but rather you may want to ask yourself what you want to do and within what time frame.

If you want to develop a game, if you know what sort of game you want to develop have a look around and see if people have already solved all the hard problems for you. For example, if you wanted to make a 3D game of some sort, does Unity/Unreal Development Kit/Quake solve most of the problems for you? If you wanted to make a 2D game of some sort does Flash+Flixel/Flash+Flashpunk/GameMaker solve most of the problems for you? If they do, then perhaps using them is a good idea.

However, if you really want to make tools and engines (hopefully for the right reasons [there are very few valid reasons]) then it's really a matter of choose some libraries, compiling them, using them and modifying them a bit to see if they will work with you or not. People have different coding styles and ways of thinking, so it'll depend if a library follows those for you personally or not.

Lastly, what do you plan to do over all? Do you want to make money from this? Do you want to make a living from this? Do you want to do this for fun?

The worst mistake you can make however, is to simply start writing code.

By simply giving players options on how he/she wants to complete the objectives. Typically, awful games tend to force players into a situation where it becomes "Do what the designer was thinking or you will lose". I suppose for some games this is necessary (such as some adventure games) but I don't often replay adventure games since the story line is fixed anyways.

Anyways, the way I've always approached it was to simply give players some generic tools (a tool that can unlock doors easily, a tool that can hack the nearby turrets, etc) and then present them with a situation. That way when players come up with an interesting way to solve a situation they get their own reward.