Ah, I didn't realize it was going to be a multiplayer game!  I wouldn't do cutscenes for multiple players if they aren't all in the same ship.  My visual image was that the animation plays out as an overlay on the game world, not disappearing the game world, covering up the space the ship would normally occupy.

You could still animate large ships turning, you would just need a bunch of 'ship turning' sprites that you pre-render.  If you want to have large ships showing damage, then you could have smoke emitters tied to specific spots on the ships, i.e. 'smoke emitter s1 is at x, y' and then each sprite of "ship flipping" would give a location for s1, to allow it to feel 3D.

Well, Angry Birds, as of the time I tried it, gave you a fixed set of birds.  Your route to three stars success is basically to use as few of those birds as you can.

Picture if instead, birds were assigned a cost and you had an upper limit on how many points of birds you could spend in each level.  You might then be graded on Spectacle, Movement, and Economy-- did you get the job done?  Did it result in flashy explosions?  How many different things moved, how much, as a result of your choices?  Then if your score placed in the top ten of any particular category, you'd be eligible to submit a replay of your game, and anyone coming back to the leaderboard would be able to view others' replays.

Or, look at Defense Grid Awakening.  It offers a number of ways to play each level.  You beat the story mode?  Great!  Now play with a huge starting fund...  But you don't get any more money after the initial set, and you still have to beat all waves.  Or, play in reverse!  Enemies come from what was previously their escape route.  Or, play with only level 1 towers, etc.

I do agree that Immortal Defense forces you to do with a limited set of units, and frequently not the units you'd prefer to use, but that's part of the challenge; it's really more of a puzzle game in that respect, than free form Tower Defense.

Some alternate ideas:

1. Whoosh!  Ship zooms off screen, reappears a few seconds later facing the opposite direction.  You might have the ship take damage from enemy bullets in the way to prevent it from being used as temporary invulnerability.

2. Cutscenes!  What's the point of having a big ship if it isn't visually impressive?  Every time you flip the ship, cut to an animation of the ship turning.  You might need to put a cooldown on turning, call it 'hull stress' or something.

I prefer context-sensitive mouse actions.  If you click a unit, you select the unit; if you click the empty ground, you clear your selection.  If you press the button down and hold it, you drag the map around.  Right-click to tell your currently selected unit to do something-- to go where your cursor is, attack the unit targeted by your cursor, or perform some special action.

I definitely dislike panning the screen by moving the cursor to the edges.  As previously mentioned, it leads to a lot of accidents, and it feels unnatural.  You could argue it feels like you're trapped in a box and you can only move by pushing the edge of the box...  Which is not a normal mode of locomotion for most people.

I'd disagree that WASD is a bad choice.  With where most people have located their keyboards and mice, it makes sense to have the movement key cluster be easily reached by the left hand.  The arrow keys make sense for left-handed people, following a reflective scheme.

I think it was a terrible, terrible mistake for Diablo 3 to eschew WASD.  But that's not what this thread is about.  If you're developing a new game, I don't see any reason NOT to support a variety of screen movement schemes, and allow players to toggle between them if some schemes would be exclusive of others.

There's a Japanese anime about astronauts who run a space debris collection service...

Not suggesting you call your game Planetes or anything, but I figure there might be some interesting background bits that might make sense to appropriate.

Not only that, the histograms showed you INTERESTING information, since there were several displayed:

1. Number of reactors used
2. Number of elements used
3. How long your machine took to run

So this leads naturally to looking for better solutions because if you did a puzzle in 3 reactors, you might see that some people did it in 2, and start thinking about it again.  Or, if you find that your simulation took a lot more elements than other people did, you can think about that, and that can lead to optimization techniques that you can use to make future puzzles doable.

A simple leaderboard doesn't tell you how your performance compares to other people, or where you could improve.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

Seriously, prototype a lot.

Seriously, no, that's not the intent of #12, I think.

This is more aimed at cliche storytelling.  We all know the standard JRPG cliches-- hero's village is destroyed by big bad guy, hero sets off on quest to fix bad guy's wagon, and encounters a subset of stereotypical characters.  And yet, we so often repeat them, because they <I>feel</I> appropriate.  The big guy with the heavy gun, maybe a bit dim.  The femme fatale.  The wise-cracking rogue.

And when we haul all these old cliches out to play, the player may find all this a bit boring because he or she's seen it in other games.

If we want to retain player interest, we have to do something interesting.  That means looking at what we're doing, gameplay and story, and coming up with a variation that makes it uniquely ours, not Zelda #1516.

#13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it's poison to the audience.

Every time the player is expected to do something he better be given a good reason. The reason should be good within the context of your game's mechanics - i.e. what the player wants - and your game's narrative - i.e. what the character wants.

Ironically the player's character has to be malleable in the hands of the player.  Having the player's character do something at odds with the player's desire can be infuriating-- the player may be thinking 'Kill the villain, this is only going to end in tears' and the character is softheartedly turning the villain loose.  Or the player may want the character to strike up a romantic relationship with a companion, and the option doesn't even come up.

So, this kind of needs to be split into two parts: the player's character, and the NPCs that surround the character.  We need to care about the NPCs.  We need to care how our character relates to those NPCs.  And within the game, we need to be able to act out that care, within the game mechanics.

I'm not saying we need to throw in a 'Initiate Romantic Relationship' button or something like that, but it's one of those things that the designer needs to anticipate, and build in a response.

I think of it like programming an adventure game: what happens if players try to VERB that OBJECT?  If they get just a generic response "I can't do that" or "Nothing unusual happens", when they expected something interesting to happen, it takes away from the game.  KISS MORRIGAN should not yield "She's not my type" if it's a legal action in your game.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

Let the player control the character in the way that he wants. He/she should either be allowed to exercise his will, or be convinced of what his will should be.

The player should not be forced down a path. If a circumstance demands action from a player, and the player doesn't see the point, then the player shouldn't have to perform.

So, an argument about the ME3 ending?

Well, I agree with you about that, at any rate, but the thing is that if you're telling a story-based game, you can't code every response to every action the player may attempt...  You have to guide the player down to fixed channels-- did the player pursue peace or war?  Give the player appropriate results, but don't try to nuance it based on whether the player pursued peace by negotiating with NPC A or B, at some point you need to box that scenario up and give it some fixed outputs so you can move on.

For me, what this rule is saying is that the results from the box have to make sense, you have to pay attention to your story's consistency and the logical places where your player really wants to have a choice.

ME3 did some nice things with Paragon and Renegade interrupts for instance.  Even if there was little net outcome, they made your character feel different and gave you a little reward for clicking at the right times.  You felt more like your character was an extension of your will-- if you were thinking 'Dangit, shoot that guy' then you get to react at the right moment.

Games focus very acutely on our "success," how we've succeeded, how much more we've succeeded than someone else, how much further we have yet to go before we succeed. Haven't succeeded? Oh, well, "don't worry, you'll get there, no story until you do." And if it's "impossible" for us to succeed, then it's like, "here, have easy mode, super easy mode; we'll bend over backwards for you, retard our game, anything you want, because you must succeed eventually. That's what the game is for."

I don't think it's about altruism. When characters do things on principle just because it suits them, that's very interesting. Using some philosophy you could call that altruism, but it isn't obviously true.

I was going to point that out!  When you admire a character for trying, it's not necessarily because they're doing something good, but because they're exhibiting passion.  They're going above and beyond an ordinary level of effort.

There just seems to be something in us that admires the scrappy types, the ones who stand up even from a devastating loss...

Which brings me to a thought on game success/failure and our urge to restart the game if we're losing.  Basically, we design around the idea the player is going to succeed-- make that jump, dodge that bullet, push the enemy back from that resource point.  But we need to design for player failure too.

If the player misses the jump, then if the player feels it's the game's fault-- UI too clumsy or unforgiving, and the player is penalized harshly, i.e. having to replay an hour of the game, or having the character losing stats permanently or even permadeath, then the player may decide to stop playing the game, in reaction to that.  What's critical is to inspire in the player a spirit of "try again".

Put it another way.  Let's say the game's an RTS.  If you fall behind in the game, in a positive feedback situation (winning makes you more powerful, losing makes you weaker) your position becomes weaker and weaker, and there's very little you can do to come back.  Negative feedback means the winner gains less, the loser gets some advantages and incentives to help the loser catch up.  How do you want 'try again' to be represented in your RTS-- by restarting the level, resigning the game and beginning a new one (in the case of multiplayer), or maybe by persevering and coming back from the brink of defeat?

So "admire the character more for trying", IMO means that you want to set up your game in a fashion where the player becomes the character who tries and ultimately succeeds despite difficult odds.  So you have to pitch your difficulty level right, and you have to work out the 'try again' game flow.  Do you want to make the game easier if the player is having a hard time?  Or do you want to make it clear and easy to restart from checkpoints spaced not too far apart so the player can try again?   Or...  Some other model of try, try again?

Why not re-interpret them as game design rules and see how they fare?

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

I could read this a few ways:

1a. Some character doing something cool in the cutscene is only cool once.  Cool stuff that happens in the game is cool every time.

1b. You admire the game's difficulty more if you have to try more than once.

1c. As a consequence, watch how you treat failure and setting the player up to try again.  Does your player's character seem like this kind of character?

#2: You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

Works as is.  See: art games.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won't see what the story is actually about til you're at the end of it. Now rewrite.

Maybe you start programming your game thinking it's going to be a puzzle game where you rewind time to solve levels...  Then you throw in between-scene narration and in-scene discoverable story snippets describing how your protagonist is trying to rewind his real life and replay it in the same manner.

And suddenly you have an epiphany, like a nuclear bomb went off in your head.  Now...  You need to go back and fix your game so that it supports your vision.

(okay, obvious Braid reference)

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

Let's fill this in for Tetris.  Every day, a bricklayer took the bricks that appeared and laid them flat into rows.  But because his boss hated him, he would arrange for the bricks to be delivered faster and faster, and he would get misshapen bricks that were hard to fit in.  The bricklayer tried as hard as he could, but eventually there came a time that his workspace overflowed with terrible bricks.  (insert scene of gruesome violence in the office)

Ahem.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

Well, you probably don't want to rewrite your entire game, but IMO once you have the game basically coded and you can play it from start to finish, that's a good time to look at what is working for your game and what isn't.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

Substitute player for character?

Let's make this a game, continue from here, how would you rework these rules as game design rules? :D

Just a caveat, taking away progress based on time only encourages people to wait around in a safe spot so they have a time surplus.  When designing mechanisms, think about how people will try to game them!  But maybe death mechanics should be a separate discussion.

I kind of like health as a resource that regenerates rapidly when out of danger, but puts pressure on you when you're in the midst of battle and taking hits.  You could call it 'endurance' or 'stamina' if you want to get away from the notion that someone is taking bullets and then recovering to full within seconds.  Long term health losses are more annoying, if you force the player to go back and scrounge for food or spend a large amount of time Not Playing The Game, but they can work if it's the point of the game, i.e. post-nuclear war survival.

Reminds me of Hammerfall!

You could have enemies defend themselves in different ways: dodge (if they're small), put up a shield that they swing in the direction they think you'll hit them from (if they're big), try to hit you before you can release the hammer, or maybe hitting some enemies with it breaks them up into smaller enemies a la Asteroids.

Of course you should still have some hammer-fodder that it works particularly well against.

If a game assumes that I know how to play it right from the get-go, or will browse through options for that information, I get a bad impression right away.  I just tried Last Remnant this weekend and was very put off by the constant references to console buttons.  I had to do a Google search to discover that there was an option (under 'Xbox 360 controls') to switch the tooltips from Xbox controller-specific buttons to keyboard buttons.

If you want to avoid 'out of character' information appearing, but still be friendly to new players, I'd suggest putting tooltips on a delay.  Allow players to use all controls from the start, but if they don't start moving by themselves after a few seconds (maybe 10?), then give them a tooltip on basic movement.  If they don't make a necessary jump to a ledge or seem blocked, help them out again with a jump tooltip.  And so forth.

One option would be to allow your character to level up those skills, but only use a subset.  For example:

1. Actively being a mage may conflict with being a master swordsperson.  Maybe you need to have your hands free to cast spells, or you need to equip a magic staff, whereas you'd want to have a weapon and shield, two weapons, or a big heavy weapon when in combat.  So you might have to spend time switching to go from one role to another.

2. Maybe you need to put the skills and spells you want to use 'all the time' into an action bar with a limited number of slots.  If you want to swap, it might take time or you might have to be out of combat to change.  Diablo III skill builds, yeah.  Just because someone else used it doesn't mean you can't put your own spin on it.

3. You don't need to make every skill be part of 'character point spending'.  You can allow all characters to take certain 'everyman' skills and get better in them, i.e. World of Warcraft allows everyone to take first aid, cooking, and archaeology, and of course, riding/flying.  Players would spend character points in one set of skills, but they would be freely able to grind out the other set of skills at their leisure.

Why not just allow the character to be able to throw powerful spells and wield mighty weapons simultaneously?  Because godhood is boring!  If players don't have choices to make, they'll always resort to whatever option they've decided is the best way to solve a problem.  If players are forced to choose skill sets with inherent strengths and weaknesses, they'll have to figure out how to work around their weaknesses in gameplay, and more importantly, it will feel to players as if there are many ways to play the game, and they could replay the game a different way.

So, forcing players to choose what skills they will use can help increase game variety and replayability, is my view.

For me, the distinction between 'single character' and 'multiple character' is whether you have to make choices that lock you off from some options in the game, or you can have them all, whether you chose to get the skills on character X or Y.

So, in an RPG, if you can have a party, you can have fighter, wizard, thief, and cleric.  If you have to play alone then you need to decide which of these will dominate your gameplay.  It makes a difference, because you see the world differently when you've only got one or another of the tools.  If you don't have that restriction the the only remaining difference is which side you choose to aid, or whether you choose to play good or evil, lawful or chaotic.  And that doesn't affect gameplay, so much as story direction.

I'm longing for another game that captures the 'small fleet out in the deep black' feel like Homeworld!  I've played Nexus: the Jupiter Incident, and I know they've got plans for Nexus 2, but still, after the demise of the Homeworld license and Relic's seeming uninterest in pursuing the franchise, I keep watching new space games to see if anything will come out that lives in the same thoughtspace.

Edit to add:

- Homeworld intro scene and Mothership launch sequence.

Just a note that you may want to have someone go over your game text for readability.  For example:

A unit’s occupation level increases when that unit uses a skill granted by its occupation.

This sounds somewhat weird.  It might read more easily this way:

Units gain levels in their occupations when they use skills granted by those occupations.

That said, the premise sounds interesting, I hope this works out!

Main thing to keep in mind is that there are very few original ideas -- what counts is how you follow through.

Air being combustible... so how does the forge work?  Or cooking?  I'd suggest finding a different explanation.  For instance, maybe some kind of universal change has occurred, like the replacement of advanced technology with magic in Steve Boyett's Ariel.  That dramatic change could be the 'apocalypse' of which your setting is 'post'.  You might find some inspirations for what-makes-story-different in exploring the change and either what caused it, or what ramifications it created.

There are a lot of different ways you could handle it.  Maybe a viral AI went rampant and decided human technology must be destroyed to preserve Earth and spread nanotech devices that inhibit guns and other advanced weapons...  The King might be a servant of the AI, or might have his own designs to take control of the AI.

Or, maybe the Earth is passing through a magic-rich field and magic causes increased 'quantum instability'-- gunpowder still works but now it's a lot more dangerous and prone to blowing up in one's hands.  That might awaken inhuman wizards, whose race was forgotten during the last Ice Age.  Now they're out to reclaim the Earth and enslave the humans...  Or restore it to beauty and enlighten humans, depending on who you believe.

Once you have a likely scenario, explore it a bit, and try to figure out what each major character or faction wants.  Don't just give characters quirks like 'uses a guitar for a weapon' or 'speaks weird way in', give them goals and abilities and weaknesses.  Maybe the King genuinely wants what's good for his people, but gets misunderstood, or maybe the rebels are the actual bad guys.  Or maybe he sees Junktown as a thriving business and wants to keep it running productively, at the cost of human freedoms, and the rebels might come across as scattered protesteres at first, and it's up to the player to unite them if he joins them.

One other quibble I have to toss in: why a King?  Having a Queen of Junktown might be interesting.

I don't know why there's so much hate about not being able to keep the bosses alive in contrast with the original, since in the original you couldn't keep Anna alive either.

Well, while I was playing pacifist in my run-through, what offended me more was that the game basically forced me out of stealth for the boss fights.  Boss fights should play like the main game, only more so.  If you've been running around for 90% of the game using weapons sparingly, the other 10% of the game shouldn't be 'Okay, bust out the guns and go in like Rambo!'

I enjoyed DXHR as another 'running around being a sneaky git' game, akin to Metal Gear Solid 2, Splinter Cell, and Thief.  I wouldn't put it on a pedestal over those other games, but it's a pretty solid example of the genre.  In other words, it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Well, what I mean is this:

You have X number of supported screen sizes based on scaling your 320x480 screen up or down.  You find the biggest screen size that will fit in your target, and black out everything outside that.

This could result in having black around all sides of your game window, but at least it will have the correct aspect ratio and ensure your game is played as it is intended to be played.

You could also have higher resolution versions of your sprites for bigger screen sizes, especially for playing on PCs with a screen size vastly larger than your minimum size.

From this Android dev page I see the following screen sizes mentioned:

xlarge screens are at least 960dp x 720dp
large screens are at least 640dp x 480dp
normal screens are at least 470dp x 320dp
small screens are at least 426dp x 320dp

Based on this, I would suggest that you have sprites scaled for 426x320 and 640x480, then large screens would use 2x the first and xlarge screens would use 2x the second.

Have you considered letterboxing?

This would let you keep the game at an intended aspect ratio.