Bought!!!!!!!!!!

http://thelettervsixtim.es/

Website has changed!! Wot is goin' onnnn??!?!

Awesome, fun and original puzzle game.

The puzzles seem very complicated at first but you gradually realize that you only have a few "branches". I.e., I do a little bit of lookahead and see what my next few moves are, then I realize that in sequence my first choice is really at the purple snake, etc.

The shapes and colors are just perfect, I love it!

*** EDIT ***

Ok additional suggestions. The difficulty curve is probably too high for many players. What makes the game so satisfying however is being able to execute a long "inevitable" sequence (e.g., I know my bird has to go right here because it's on the left hand side of the map).

So my thinking is, to make satisfying puzzles that are easy, and also train the player to see the map in terms of choices they can make (rather than a confusing array of lines and curves), is:

- Early puzzles have maybe only 1 or 2 "choices" in them, total, but lots of medium-length sequences.

- Gradually, add more "choices" (defined by requiring more than a one-move lookahead) and shorter sequences.

- Eventually make choices require two-move lookaheads, etc.

- Make the patterns that you DO trace out through the sequences fun.

I guess the perfect example level of this kind would be the "SNAKES!" level, since you really have only a few choices in the entire level but very long and fun sequences. This ends up being a really fun level because you get to trace out such an interesting pattern. So... more levels like this please!

What is a traveling merchant game? I'm intrigued...

it's gonna suck when I don't manage to get this out until the 11th, huh

Nah, get it done when it's done. It's not like Jesus was born on December 25, eh?

Hey everybody. You know, we don't have a holiday for celebrating indie games. I hereby nominate January 10 of each year to be our sacred holiday, VVVVVVery TTTTTTerry Day!

I made a picture to commemorate it:



(PS: It's not too surprising I guess but I am really stoked for VVVVVV, more than really any other game I can think of since maybe Ocarina of Time. I hope I get a gold cartridge this time, hmn...)

Megaman is made in 200X. Therefore, Megaman has to happen by MIDNIGHT 12/31/2009.

I feel crushed about this. But happy new year!

I like the slope example, the one where the girl walks around a town and sees her dog, and the "neurotic". I think you should finish neurotic, so many opportunities there!

Maybe the key here is to just work with RPG maker, instead of against it. What do you think?

There are a lot of good arguments in this thread, both for and against. It's really an interesting concept to me. The idea that once you are competent to make a good game WITH RPGMaker, you are probably competent to make one WITHOUT it seems true.

Lately I became interested in this whole scene so I recently tried out a few RPG maker games. I don't want to name them but they ranged from pretty lacklustre to terrible.

Melolune was great though! =)

There must be a lot of value for people to just be able to so easily experiment, terrible outcome or no. I guess gamemaker offers that too, but I haven't actually messed with gamemaker or rpgmaker.

Awesome, great read. I think this kind of wraps back to an important point, which is not to be too motivated by greed, but be practical!

Interesting, I ran into this exact tradeoff about 2 hours ago. Basically I had a sequence where the player gets an item, returns it to the character who needed it, and then there is some machinery that's going to get fixed.

Holy cow that sounds like a really boring RPG. Ahem, anyways.

What I was going to do was have a cutscene where the machinery was repaired. But I realized that it wasn't really very interesting, and also coordinating these things are a lot of work.

So instead I went ahead and had the character explain to the player how to fix the machine in question, and I'll just let the player go solo on it.

But!

There are other places where I've put cutscenes in that are absolutely worthwhile. For the most part, if the cutscene is both snappy and entertaining then I'm happy. I.e., it functions as a reward more than anything. But if I can avoid them, I do.

It's more game-like to let the player uncover and understand whatever story there is through game interactions, than to remove them from the game entirely. As a designer it's tempting to hand-hold but that's often the wrong approach.

Having done both, I can say: go for lua. In fact, as I move forward I am relegating less and less to C++. The next game I do (that isn't flash) will basically have C++ as a really basic rendering/audio/physics engine that knows nothing about game logic.

Mapping between C++ and LUA is some overhead. That's actually the reason for me to move more and more to LUA; that way the C++ has a very simplified interface (e.g., to add renderable objects, set movement parameters, that kind of thing) which reduces the overhead.

In the case of enums, what I normally do is store them as strings in lua. If you don't like this, you can always do something like:

walk_states = { still = 1, walking = 2, jumping = 3 }

And then reference them like walk_states.still. However I find just doing if (self.cur_state == "still") is just easier to manage.

How to map them between C++ and LUA, well, you have to have overhead somewhere. Since I handle enums as strings in LUA, for those enums that have to be known across boundaries I make a function in C++ that maps enums to strings and vice versa. Yep, it's annoying!

Why thanku! These take basically one full day to put together, crazy...

Hooray! I have made another episode of Let's Talk. I'm not sure if this is funny or not, but I try... At any rate it's got some info and gameplay video on how I do explosions in The Real Texas. Let me know what you think.

Yeah I got an email from Laurie that I had to set that on my profile. This is going to be so much fun!

Woot! I'm all signed up on the GGJ website and on Creative Calgary. I got a nice phone message from Laurie and email reminding me to sign up on GGJ. This will be great!

Hey I just noticed that the Global Game Jam has a sponsor listed as "EDGE"? Is this the bad and evil Edge of Tim Langdell Infamy, or some other Edge?

I like this one a bit better, but it's still really hard! I absolutely can't get past that first pizza boss, it just seems impossible. As well, even if I've got the respawn glow effect, if I run into him, I get destroyed. =) I think making the enemies grey is good, it makes them hard to see but not in a way that feels unfair, just a bit mean.

I really like the concept of this. Graphics are great but it does need to be a bit better distinguished what you can/can't eat.

I think the game introduces too many elements all at once. You could probably fix the difficulty a fair bit just by introducing the different elements one at a time for each subsequent level.

I did make it to the second level, once, but generally found it too hard to enjoy properly.

Great potential for a really fun game, I think. I love the colors/graphics, too. Keep at it!

I'll be at the Calgary one, this will be awesome! Hooray!