Latest version doesn't seem to allow reflecting at an angle!  Clicking, then dragging (whether mouse is up or down) only results in scrolling the reflection left and right.

Make everyone who wants to be "the idea guy" face off in a battle royale!  Example contests could be best Cave Story speed run completion time (video required), a Civilization multiplayer game, and a Call of Duty tournament.

We get entertained no matter who wins even before they get to start working on a game.  Win-win, IMO!

I more had in mind exploring what motivates players to finish games.  A taxonomy of compelling things one can put in games, as it were.

But, fair point.  Compulsion has negative connotations.  Goodspeak aside, I can think of a few categories of compelling things games could have:

1. "What happens next?" - player is hooked by story, wants to know how it ends.
2. "Sensawunda!" - Player wants to uncover more of the map, explore more of the world, see new things.  Ancient ruins, wild and exotic vistas, high technology labs and industrial centers...
3. "New toy!" - player has a new play mechanism unlocked by gameplay, wants to exercise it.  As I understand it, new toys literally unlock new areas in Metroidvanias, contributing to point 2.
4. "Achievement unlocked!" - sprinkling objective markers generously through the game lets players feel like they're just a few steps away from finishing an objective, thus they should push on to complete it.  Save points can serve much the same purpose, while allowing players to step out and take care of real life before returning.

There must be at least a few more distinct categories!

DavidCaruso: grinding in MMOs is compelling but generally not much fun.  Any kind of activity where people are driven to do them not because they are inherently fun, but because the player will be rewarded by eventual progress.  People who are completists will also continue to repeat a game after it has stopped being fun, for the sake of getting that last achievement.  The key word here is 'compulsion'.

For my part, I took 'how do I make this game compelling' as a very simple design question: how does one make a game where players will feel interested in completing it?  What will motivate players?

It's really not that simple to answer, though.  Even if you have fun gameplay, a story that grates on one's nerves may tip the balance toward quitting halfway through, i.e. the main character is hated by the player.  As I see it, the game designer needs to make the player want to see what happens next, hence, he should introduce a "plot hook", in the tabletop RPG sense.

Sounds akin to "sporadic gameplay".

I've played Skyrates, it was fun for a while but they kind of dropped the ball when they couldn't muster any further game development and they didn't have a good option for allowing players to develop their own endgame.

[gaaaameplaaaaay]

I like how this topic went through the full TIGS Design Thread Cycle, from asking a question so general that any decent answer would be ridiculously obvious (step 1) to people deciding to ignore the generality and just post cool things they like in specific games (step 2) to some guys going "it's all subjective and different people enjoy different things maaaan so it is impossible to come to any conclusions, look at me I just nullified the entire point of art theory" (step 3...)

Yeah, it seemed to jump straight to step 3 when I read this thread, actually.  I made an attempt to steer things onto slightly more productive grounds, but I like your commentary as well:

Instead of being a tardo I'm going to say to the OP that if he's making a stealth game he should focus on solid AI, creating levels with many, many multiple paths and secrets which the player can learn over time and use to their advantage (with a difficulty level high enough that they basically need to learn them if they want to not be caught), a variety of exciting locales so that they can pretend they're in Shanghai or Bangalore or post-apocalyptic Hawaii instead of in a textureless room running away from big black wireframe hitbox cubes, and a light narrative to tie all of these things together (maybe even with splits, since a stealth game design would afford a lot of opportunities for stumbling on huge secrets, etc.) This is still all very obvious but less stupid than "y'gotta make th' gaaaameplaaaaay compellin', boy."

Good stuff. ^_^

Oddly enough I also am working on a Metal Gear Solid-inspired stealth game.  But it pretty much only has textureless rooms.  Oh dear.

Since it's a first game project, I'm trying to keep the features pared down and get to a point I can actually put it out there.  So no fancy 3D, very minimal art, that sort of thing.  To make it compelling, I have to try to inspire the player's imagination, but I also have to make it actually challenging, yet achievable.  That, I think, is where compelling gameplay comes in.  Lemme talk about that last bit.

Challenge: it should be difficult in some way.  You're trying to sneak through a heavily defended installation, there shouldn't be obvious gaps.  If there are, it makes the player question the believability of your story.

Achievable: the challenge should be fair.  It looks hard, but you should be able to approach the problem in pieces, master one challenge at a time.  No unfair surprises: taking a step into a corridor and having a hitherto unseen turret blast you to pieces will surely rub players the wrong way, if they didn't have an opportunity to notice the turret or to escape.

For me, stealth games are about 'measure twice, cut once'.  You size up the situation, you proceed cautiously through the level.  At all times you're surrounded by hostile forces that could overpower you if they knew exactly where you were.

To some extent, engaging them in combat and thinning them down is actually cheating in that it reduces the difficulty of the problem, so eventually you wind up with a level full of snoozing (or dead) guards and no challenge whatsoever, when you want the difficulty of the game to ramp up as you get further.

I don't have any provisions right now for players to take down guards in my game, but if and when I do add some, I will probably include bonus "style" points for never confronting a guard.

Furthermore, the controls need to feel solid.  The player should never be fighting the controls.  Punishment should only come if he or she makes an actual mistake.

I think you need to apply the same thing a good GM would: put out hooks to catch the player's attention and keep them playing so they can find out what happens next.

Within the first minutes of your game, your player should have a feeling that something big is going on, that he or she is doing something important which will impact that, and that doing so is going to be fun.  Foreshadow the big threats.  Build up expectations.

Set clear goals your player wants to get to, then put obstacles in their way.  As long as they can see the goal and enough of what's in their way, they can plan what they want to do, then they can execute their plan.  Execution is where your game really happen in the player's head.

Watch downtime.  If it takes a long time to load levels, or reload after a failed attempt, that's time your player has been wrested out of the game world, when your player can't do anything.  Similarly, long cut scenes also rob your players of "agency".  There's a big difference between your player hiding behind some crates, waiting for the perfect time to strike, and your player stuck in an elevator, waiting for the level load music to finish playing.

Sure, 'X in the Y' is totally legit.

It's a subtle distinction.  'Cities in Stone' makes you think of 'flies in amber'.  In this version of the name, stone is a generic material, so you're saying the game is about cities made of stone, as it were.

'Cities in the Stone' is a bit of reference to 'Sword in the Stone', but also, putting 'the' in front of 'Stone' makes it a specific place, even a mythical place.  It can evoke Platonic ideals-- calling it 'the Lake' implies that it is a special lake, versus 'a Lake' which says it's just any old lake.

Your mileage may vary, of course!  I just figure dwarves would mutter prayers to 'the Stone' as if it were some sort of all-encompassing deity.

Here's a suggestion for you: make the player's suit light only work in the direction the player is facing.

Add monsters that creep around and try to sneak up behind the player.  Add monster-only vents they can move through.  The player needs to properly time moving with spinning around to scare monsters back into the shadows, and larger monsters may move more slowly, meaning you need to shine the light on them longer to drive them back, while something could be sneaking up on you from behind.

If there are several monsters in an area, they may try to bracket the player.  On the flip side, the player can try to lead monsters into a room, then use the light to force them to flee behind a door the player can then lock.

You clear stages when you manage to reactivate power to sectors and turn the lights on, of course.

Space exploration!  It's a genre that hardly gets touched.  You have lots of space 4Xs, space action, space war, but very little in the way of "You're captaining your own starship out in the deep black, you come across strange stuff and you have to figure out how to deal with it".

Star Control 2 had a lot of that space exploration vibe, and Homeworld also rang that exploration bell in that you weren't just hacking your way across a map but you were also going into forgotten corners of the galaxy, parts that were populated with mysteries and dangers.

Alien Legacy did the best take on the theme from the point of view of a 4X.  You were in charge of a generation ship that was supposed to bring colonists to a system that had been opened up by a prior probe, but when you got there, there was no sign of the first expedition...  So you needed to build up your colony while sparing resources to figure out what happened to them.

Star Fleet Command never really succeeded at making me feel like I was exploring, unfortunately.

Besides that, I generally like story-heavy RPGs that aren't just more cliche fantasy, i.e. Knights of the Old Republic, Planescape Torment, and Baldur's Gate II and Mass Effect, and stealth games like Deus Ex and Thief where you're being smart, not just tough and heavily armed-- preferably with the options not to kill anyone.  You've got a mission but you aren't a murderer.

Cities in the Stone, IMO!

Dunno, it doesn't seem excessive if you balance fire rate.  For instance, if you can fire a gun 20 times in the amount of time you can launch one bomb that could take out 10 enemies if you're lucky...

Looks interesting!  I'm wondering about how you chose the name, and if there will be giant ancient starships involved.

Can't help but think "It ain't over 'til the fat astronaut sings."

Maybe instead of abstract symbols, where the player will be struggling to remember both new symbols and new rules, you should use conventional (but stylized) pictures that represent the "feel" of those units.

LowA: a swordsman on foot to imply his short range and lack of mobility
LowB: a spearman on foot, also slow but having a longer (in front) attack
MedA: an assassin or ninja, who is more mobile but still has a short range
MedB: a wizard with a staff (echoes spearman's forward-dominant attack)
MedC: a cleric, who calls down lightning
HighA: a witch-queen with a wand (short-ranged attack but insane mobility)

I realize art may be a problem but as it stands, what the pieces do isn't obvious just by looking at them.

I'd be suspicious of how you're mapping texture coordinates then.  You'll need to post more code if you want people to be able to chime in knowledgeably...  Maybe a demo page somewhere, so we can see it in operation and comment if it works in our browsers or not.

While you may think corporate software engineering is irrelevant to indie game development, what happens when your game is a success and you have to figure out how to deal with more than four or five people?  Or, what do you do if your game is popular enough (in development) that many people want to help work on it?  Project organization is a perennial problem, there's no reason not to study what has worked for others if you ever plan to work with anyone else.

If it's a volunteer effort coordinated over the Internet, you can't expect people to submit resumes and cover letters, or come over for interviews...  But at the same time you should have a good idea where their skills lie, how much time they're willing to commit, and what their working patterns are.  Do they work better when given a feature and told to go nuts?  Or do they want clearly defined start and end points and specs?  Do they just want to add this or that thing they've always wanted in a game, or do they want to be equal partners contributing over the lifetime of the game?

If you sign someone onto your project assuming they work the same way you do, and it turns out their expectations or methods are totally different, then you have a problem.  Maybe it can be worked out, or maybe it's best to part way.  Either way, that's not "corporate", that's a problem that happens to any project with more than one person working on it.

Sorry, I'm not sure specifically what your problem here is.

However, have you looked at Three.js?  I've been working with that to avoid having to code all the webgl management stuff from scratch, so far it seems to work...

There is a serious omission of alpha blending though; by default it only seems to support RGB colors, not RGBA.

If I recall right, it's an option: you can opt to either refund the money if you don't get your target, or accept whatever you were able to raise.

My two cents: I've been away from City of Heroes for a while, and then they went F2P.

I came back to look at it, and was blown away with price sticker shock.  They want a little more than $15 for a power set that's basically a reskinned version of their other power sets, and a vanity power. ...  And to get into their 'endgame' of grinding Incarnation (epic-level powers and such) you have to be a monthly paying customer, to the tune of another $15 per month.

I looked at full indie games that are available for much less than that, back at their market, and decided not to buy those items or get back into the game.

I think companies need to think about how players will perceive their offerings, and make an effort to provide reasonable prices on cosmetic items and content.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think DLC or purchasable contents are a bad idea, as long as the game is structured so you feel like you get a complete game experience, and additional purchases just add on to your gaming experience-- side stories or post-game content, or things that let you go back through the game a different way.

If I were implementing Arkham City as supporting DLC/addons for instance, I'd block off some peripheral zones for side stories, unlockable via DLC.  Then I'd add some character DLCs that let you go through the game as a different character, following the story from their point of view.  Solid, meaty stuff.  Costumes and gadgets?  I'd sell those for cheap on their own, not bundled in with other stuff.

Of course transaction fees possibly eat up a lot of the cost of really small transactions, so no doubt that's why they prefer to sell bundles of parts...