The release control DRM doesn't appear to be similar to secuROM at all though; according to the description it will just check the date and then delete itself.  I don't see the objection to that.

But what if I want to take my game with me through a time portal? THEN WHAT?

A few sales setups have insanely high refund rates because the refund button is made really obvious and 'helpful' to the customer, so people who wouldn't normally think about demanding a refund see that 'refund' button sitting there and think of it just like thumbs-downing the product. After all, why not?

ISTR hearing there was some game system that was having something like 75% refund rates for a while because not only was there a huge refund button popping up over the game when you played it after buying it, the control sensitivity was such that you could end up hitting it on purpose, and no confirmation required... But don't quote me on that, I don't have a source for it.

Basically, how obvious you make the 'request refund' button can have a huge impact on consumer behavior. If it takes any effort at all, or requires contacting an individual (many people don't want to look rude by asking), only a few people will bother doing it. If the option is dangled in their faces, many will see no reason not to.

Hello,

Casual "rape jokes" make this forum an unpleasant place to visit.  Please refrain.

[rhetoricalQuestion] Maybe that's why those Indies have vanished? [/rhetoricalQuestion]

But casual murder jokes are okay because it is much better to murder a person than rape them.

No, frankly, I was more upset by the murder reference. Since I barely read this forum and would have no idea if such a thing were true, for a brief confused moment I had the normal human reaction to hearing that someone that other people might actually give a shit about had been murdered.

The change made it clear that instead of reporting on something bad happening to someone, the poster was in fact intentionally being an ass.

Yes. Surprise, surprise, intentionally being an ass can make your company a pretty unpleasant place to be for people who are not already members of your gang.

Not to mention that other people who randomly websearch for that individual can stumble across that statement in google, not realise the context, not get that it's a 'joke', and be quite upset.

But of course it's absolutely hilarious to potentially upset other people for no purpose and without even having an actual joke behind it.  

I gave my pet Linux geek 50% for rebuilding a game from scratch to run on other platforms. I think that's the percentage I've seen other people offer for the same sort of work, but I'm not sure.

:\ That's easy for you to say. I just spent about a year laying the groundwork for my main gamedev project in GML (not to mention the additional time of learning my way around it), and was only aware of the change in EULA quite recently. So unbenownst to me at the time, I basically paid $20 (for GM7) to have the foundation of my work potentially ripped right out from under me. So excuse me for being a little pissed about this. (And the unrelated-except-in-cashcow-principle OKC sellout. That didn't help either.)

Which EULA issue is concerning you? There was a lot of misinformation about at one time from people misreading the EULA and thinking YYG was claiming ownership of their games, when that wasn't what it actually said. (Although iirc there WAS an issue with the T&C for uploading games to the yyg site, a very long time ago, that came out in a bit of a scandal, but that was before the site was live and the terms got changed before anyone actually used the site. And I really don't remember what that was about.)

It's a lot easier to make games when the hobby pays for itself and your dev time isn't interrupted by the hours of dumpster-diving.

that were sold and that I'll admit to in public? Charm School, Classroom Chaos, Pentagraph, Summer Schoolgirls, Cute Knight original/deluxe/kingdom (The mac+linux ports are kind of in GM. Spiky Caterpillar built me a tool that can load the GM source.), Fatal Hearts, and Twinkle Toes Skating. Many of them aren't available anymore though.

Sweet Dreams was always freeware. At least one other game was such an obviously bad idea that it was on sale for about five minutes and then stricken from the record. Beyond that I'm not completely sure, as I did a lot of weird things on the internet for spare change, but nothing notable.

There was that Mr Smoozles Goes Nutso platformer...

Summer Session is also Ren'Py, sorry. I've been using it for most projects lately.

I'm really impressed by your ground texture! It's probably my favourite part of the mockup. That said, it jumps out a lot to me, perhaps to the point where it would be visually distracting in a game.

Thanks, I spent a long time on those, I'm still not sure if I managed to get rid of the grid. Would it help, if I made the dirt part a little softer in color? There's no real point playing the game if you keep looking at the ground.

It's a nice texture in itself but there's so MUCH of it and the character is so small... You could do a game about the character being small and insignificant in the scale of things and have the rest of the world hint at giant stuff (which would allow you to have random big cool things underground to break up the dirt) but that's probably a quite different game than you had in mind.

If you want to show off big simple spacious mountains, maybe you could start your levels looking like that and then zoom in to a closer view?

(click for larger)

Anyways, that looks very good. I don't know if the glowy-ness around the textboxes really suits the very nice crispness of the background (which looks great btw), but overall it's quite cute. Wowowow that's a lot of stats! This appears to be some sort of wizard/witch/magician school?

Yeah, it's intended to be a magical school dating sim with mini-rpg segments for the "tests" (what better way to test your students than to throw them into dungeons?) With customisable main characters. I'm throwing in possibly too many features to the design (but they're cool!) which is part of why I don't have anything RUNNING yet...

The background and the character are commissioned art, I can't fake that level of art yet. I'm getting better, but not that much better!

alas, this will be hated as it is not cool pixel art.

but it IS me trying to learn how to manage better GUI design because I suck at that and yet don't want to hire an artist for it, because artists drive me insane with their not-getting-things-done ways. This is at the moment pure mockup, there's no code done yet.

(click for larger)

Might be worthwhile seeing if you can set up cross-posting for the Rampant Coyote's indie RPG news?

That's how the life is. A realistic RPG game would have you swinging a training sword at thin air for a whole hour. Every day. For months.

Just ask any professional how they become so kickass. Tedious and intense training. If a RPG game had realistic training, no one would play it except the biggest masochists with too much free time.

Although, it would be interesting to be able to actually -train- in a video game like that, but with the time needed scaled appropriately.

In the first Quest for Glory (ie Hero's Quest), as a fighter you were likely to spend a stretch of days in the middle of the game doing nothing but work, train, hit one goblin in the woods, sleep, work, train...

The later games still had skills that had to be trained up but the difficulty curve was adjusted, so that generally if you kept flexing your skills regularly as you went along, you wouldn't end up in a position of having to do nothing but grind for days.

Bionic Heart has voice acting that didn't turn out too badly IMO, but IIRC they couldn't find enough cheap actors and someone had to double. Heileen 2 by the same creator was also supposed to be voiced and has been endlessly delayed because the person voicing the lead keeps dropping out and having to be replaced. The developer is still interested in doing voices in future titles, but watching the struggles puts me off the idea... I have enough trouble dealing with artists!

Science Girls! has little bitty quips for battle exclamations but I wouldn't call that voice acting really.

There's an indie adventure 'Pizza Morgana' that has big-name Hollywood voice acting...

There are people who find the style of ransom notes artistically appealing and try to invoke it in their own creative work, but as for actual ransom notes, probably only the tacky shock-artists would try to use them as art exhibits.

(I'm always baffled by the 'are games art?' discussions because for goodness sake, you can call ANYTHING art if you have enough attitude about it. Whether or not they're GOOD art is a better question!)

But even making a complete fan-clone with completely stolen graphics is still game programming - what it's NOT is game design. Or graphic design.

It is sort of still graphic design in so much as they still have to choose how to put the pieces together, so it's like collage ...

This is semantics, but - if you're trying to make a clone and make it look exactly like the original (usually in the case of porting without source code), then no, that's not graphic design or collage. That's putting the puzzle together the way someone else has designed it.

If you're trying to use the existing pieces and fit them together into a new level that looks exactly like it could have come from the original game, that's level design, but still not really graphical or artistic design, because you're adhering to the formula and the vision laid down by someone else.

If you're taking the existing pieces and putting them together to achieve a totally new effect, like back in the day when people used to make "furniture" for their Ultima Online houses by carefully stacking piles of cloth in order to build up shapes - then that is a kind of visual design that's more analogous to collage. But to count as visual art, IMO, it would have to look distinctly different from the normal game. You don't generally call something a collage if they cut up a magazine page and then paste it back together with such precision that it looks exactly like a magazine page.

Making a game out of entirely stolen OR entirely pre-existing (see rpg maker) graphics is not requiring as many skills as putting a game together with custom graphics, whether you make those graphics or pay someone else to. Having the pieces of the puzzle and just needing to assemble them is quite different from having to figure out what you want in the first place and how to design around your nebulous needs.

But even making a complete fan-clone with completely stolen graphics is still game programming - what it's NOT is game design. Or graphic design.

Outside of the indie scene you wouldn't necessarily expect a programmer to have anything to do with game design or graphic design. Now, you also might not call those programmers the game's makers... you might say they worked on the game rather than that they made it.

[this is not a promise of success]

I think that the reason Cute Knight succeeded is because of good marketing. There were (and still are) very few games targeted for females above the age of 12. Hanako saw the potential value in that niche market and went for it, much to her success.

I wish I could take credit for being able to do good marketing; unfortunately I am completely crap at that to this day. Cute Knight succeeded because people who played it got really addicted to it, and a couple of those deeply addicted players had connections and bullied the game into portals for me, and then THOSE customers played and got deeply addicted. All I did was make the game I wanted to make/play.

It's not impossible for an ugly game to be a success if the gameplay is great. But in that case, you don't want to be using the video to advertise it. Bury that. Don't let people see it. Make them find out what the game is like by playing it. You at least then have a chance to win them over instead of driving them away.

See Also: Knights of the Chalice. It doesn't look like much (although it addresses the specific problems of readable HUD and depth that have been pointed out). But the people who play it are SERIOUSLY INTO IT. I have no idea how well it sells, but I do know it has crazy supporters.

That said, this is not a promise of success. Just because a few games that look crap managed to find eager audiences doesn't mean that every game will, and just because it might have been easier to win over a less-jaded audience in years past doesn't mean you were guaranteed to have been a big hit then.

(You should also take a look at Deadly Rooms of Death, a topdown game series which has graphics that are not amazing. What do they do differently from you and why? What might you learn from them?)

As I understand it, the cookie-cutter RPG Maker games sell really damn well. (Not from me; my website's audience is not the right audience. But from what I hear, the people who are into these things absolutely eat them up.) It's hardly surprising that the RPG Maker gamedev crowd keeps popping out more and more of the games if they keep selling like that.

I have the unfortunate tendency of being stubbornly interested in doing my own thing. So the closest thing I've worked on to a JRPG was not RPG Maker, not fantasy (well, not quite), and sells... very little. (Admittedly it also has a 0-dollar budget, but then, so did many of the games I've sold! Less helpfully, I didn't code it and it's had its share of bugs.)

I like the look of the RPG Maker games but I hate the combat too much to manage to force myself through them. Science Girls at least has combat which is IMO more entertaining. And the people who actually buy it seem to really like it. But the impression is that if the developer for SG had just put out Yet Another RPG Maker Game instead, he would have made much better returns.

And I never learn, either. I have a silly project I'm fooling around with which is yet another completely-bizarre RPG....

So, it might be helpful if we could get timestamps indicating when the feedback was left?

When the feedback is left doesn't tell you when the feedback is actually written, or for that matter when the version that the feedback was written about was downloaded. Some people download all the games up front and then only judge them at the last minute. Some people write up their notes on all the games in order to compare them to each other before submitting any scores.

Probably better to directly ask for version numbers in feedback instructions?