You seem unfamiliar with the definition of slavery.

I suggest consulting some form of dictionary or encyclopedic publication.

How clever of you to have seen through my use of hyperbole. Clearly I'm attempting to mislead people with my propaganda, as opposed to making a point with non-literal language and assuming people are intelligent enough to parse it.

Thing is, you can always find a good excuse to not pay for a game. "It wasn't that great", "it was good but only 10 hours long", "it was too easy", "it was too hard" and so on.

There's something psychologically different about paying full price for a game. If people are actively encouraged to give any amount they feel like to help the developer pay the rent long enough to address their gripes with a game, the result might be very interesting.

People just need to get used to the fact that they, personally, are responsible for which game developers will continue to make games, and what games they will make. Individual, single payments by one person have to feel like they matter. Buying games at a store, online or off, has lost whatever psychological weight it ever had.

But this show, as most TV shows, is sponsored in great part by advertisement. Unless you don't watch TV at all, you're already spoiled by advertisement.

Many other excellent TV shows are cancelled because they somehow don't bring in ad dollars. Maybe the audience is full of tech-savvy science fiction fans who would gladly buy lots of T-shirts, but use Tivo and AdBlock, and are a measly, tiny 900,000 strong. Or perhaps the show is too controversial, despite being excellent, and advertisers don't want to associate their brand with it for some stupid reason. Building a business on pleasing advertisers is a slippery slope, and it seems counter to what most every indie developer wants to achieve. It's not going to work for most games, period.

did try the demo though, and damn it looks great in 1920x1280 resolution

Isn't that 80 vertical pixels too many?

Go Ozzy on one of those velociraptors and bite its head off.

we already know all about your adventures Super Joe 

Hey, that was a one night thing, and we were curious. Now we've gone our separate ways, and I'd appreciate it if you guys let the subject drop!

But I want videos.

The people that support what these developers do will support them irregardless. There are no such thing as lost sales. These ratios are complete and udder B.S. Not that they aren't factual, I am sure that they are, just that they somehow represent some sort of pandemic that is strangling the PC gaming industry.

I agree for the most part, but what happened to Raycatcher is downright depressing, and I'm worried for the developers' financial health. I haven't played the game, so I don't know if the lack of support is justified. Maybe it's not a very good game. The description on Steam sounds very interesting, though. Admittedly, it's not making me want to throw $5 at it right this instant, so I think they'd benefit from a proper demo. As would everyone.

Regardless, this whole ordeal has given me an idea. You know those FBI warnings before movies saying not to pirate it? Do something like one of those, except not at all: A short block of large print text explaining that paying for the game will allow you to buy food.

I made a few for people to liberally use on whatever they want.

I don't think I suck, and I don't think people think I suck. Yet nobody donated me money

People won't know you don't suck unless they know you exist. The knowledge that someone is good at what they do requires the knowledge that they do anything.

On a related note, I highly enjoyed Eversion, and for some reason the donation box on your site didn't register in my brain when I downloaded it. I just sent you 10 bucks.

The problem, though, is that enough people aren't doing that. I don't think abandoning the concept of donationware is the solution to that particular problem, as the underlying concept is desirable. Why aren't more people donating, though? Not because they're horrible people who can't part with even a dollar when they enjoyed a game, but because they're not used to it. Even I'm not used to it enough to go actively looking for the ability to donate if it's not brought to my attention before or after playing.

I'm not sure what the exact solution is, but I think everyone trying to do anything indie should be thinking and experimenting with how to get (or remind) people to donate. Even if donations aren't your primary way of making money, it's never a bad thing.

So I read on Kotaku that the Raycatcher developers, severely burned by a 35:1 piracy ratio, are going to try in-game ads to support themselves. I think they have one of the best possible ideas ever about how to make in-game advertising not suck for the player. Sadly, it still comes with the price of their souls.

With an advertiser-supported business model, you are dependent entirely on their money. If they don't think it's reaching enough billions of people and stop paying, you're done. If your game is for mature audiences and they don't want their brand associated with it, you're done. If your game is critical of something they like, you're done. And if you manage to survive while dependent on a large corporation who funds your work, well, that's not very indie at all, is it?

I wrote a fairly long blog post explaining this further, and what a better alternative might be. Sorry to shamelessly plug my own blog, especially after criticizing advertsing, but I was originally going to post it all on these forums (also I don't make money from it, so it's okay kinda maybe). It just got too long and too focused on not just games, but all indie artists in general. I still think you should read it, though, otherwise I wouldn't have put it on the Internet, now would I?

I think we should try and make a 'narrative musical' game...new compo?

That strikes me as too deep a niche for a TIGSource compo, and I doubt a small team could write and record the required musical number(s) as well as get the rest of the thing planned and finished in 30 days. Perhaps a longer design challenge would jumpstart it, though.

Yes. Make this. Now. 

I'd love to, I really would. At the moment, though, I lack the necessary talents (programming of any complexity, 3D modeling) and resources (budget to make it look like the gritty games it would be lampooning, and enough voice actors) to do the project justice.

As an aside, I'd love to collaborate on something with someone who can actually grasp programming. Even Python makes my head explode, it's really sad.

And another way you could do something like this is to have COMPETING musical numbers. Like a battle of the songs. Two different songs playing at once, one coming out of the right side, the other the left, and singing/dancing correctly to the beat makes your song louder/sound better.

That idea's been sort of tried before in Battle of the Bands, and it didn't come out too well. Perhaps it was execution of the game mechanics, though. Of course, that's still in the realm of traditional rhythm games, not narrative musicals with gameplay somehow injected into them. Ideally, the game would play similarly to most linear story-based things, but everyone sings.

Kind of, but I'm not sure I like how it's done. The only thing that's synced up with the music is the enemies trying to kill you. There's no benefit for the player in keeping track of the music, and in fact, it's almost as if the music is the enemy. So you're fighting against the song. That doesn't seem very positive to me.

Only ugly women? Shouldn't a MILF be hot? 

Well, initially, yes, but after rediscovering one's sexuality, most MILFs transform into MILTSPHCBOs (That's "Mom I'd Like To See Put Her Clothes Back On" if you couldn't tell).

I think you should expand on that and have some really suggestive imagery / animation flash on the screen before the player is transported to the MILF's house. Something that metaphorically represents what's happening to him... maybe a piston pumping or a monkey eating a banana, but with scary sound design and effects. Saw style, hahaha.

I think that might be a bit too blatant. The Path didn't do this, so it's still kinda sorta possibly open-ended about what happens to each girl after they meet the wolf, despite the fact that she's clearly had something very traumatizing happen to her with questionable levels of clothing still on. For a direct parody of that, I think a guy with a big grin and a sore butt is telling enough.

I'm in a pretty good situation in this regard, because my boyfriend is actually much more of a gamer lately than I am. Granted, that's because he has the income to afford a faster computer and all three consoles (I still have never owned one), but still, he plays a lot more than I have. So despite the fact that he doesn't usually make great suggestions, he's great to talk to about my stupid ideas because he knows what the hell I'm talking about. And often, just talking to a live human being about an idea can help me develop it about ten times further within two minutes.

So yeah, he smiles and nods as I babble, and somehow it helps me think.

Music games are very popular. Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Audiosurf, there are lots. But for some reason, there don't seem to be any musical video games.

I'm talking like a Gears of War-style shooter where the gritty, battle-hardened marines sing about how "There ain't no place like the battlefield" while jazz dancing and machine-gunning alien soldiers to death.

Some of the earliest, most classic Hollywood movies have taken a page (or sometimes a whole script) from Broadway and featured singing and dancing with musical accompaniment as an everyday part of life. In fact, the first popular, widely-released sound film was a musical (The Jazz Singer, and it was terrible, but that's beside the point). So what's keeping video games characters from breaking into song?

Well, frankly, the design question. If all the songs were during cutscenes and not gameplay, it would fall into the Hideo Kojima trap. That said, Metal Gear Solid 4 should have been a musical. Anyway, there needs to be a way for the musical sequences to be playable. And in making them playable, it would be best to somehow link the game mechanics to the music, because running around arrythmically while your character is singing is rather unsatisfying.

One idea I had, which would work for shooters, is for the player's weapon to only fire and reload at a specific rhythm. Pressing the fire button off beat would still cause it to shoot eventually, but the shot would be "queued" up until the beat. Take a moment to imagine "We Will Rock You" being played on a pump-action shotgun.

This discussion isn't just limited to action games or shooters, though. I'm interested in coming up with ideas for how to make a musical in a video game in general. The closest I've seen is some of the Humongous adventure games, featuring Disney-like songs, but these were cutscenes. Can anyone think of a way to make a playable musical?

In "The Snatch," instead of five girls meeting "wolves" on their way to Grandma's house, it's about five guys meeting "unicorns" on their way to "the MILF's place."

The game opens in a bar, where the player must select one of the five dudes to play as. They are then planted at the start of a really long path in a forest, because for some reason this bitch lives in a forest. The instructions read: "Get to the MILF's place and get some action! Don't leave the path!" Of course, if the player follows these instructions, they will reach the MILF's place, enter her room, and then their chosen character will lament about how anti-climatic it was. Instead, the player is supposed to go frolick around the forest looking for flowers and unicorns and shit.

The "unicorn" only once takes the role of an actual unicorn (a bright and pink one, at that). Sometimes it may take the form of the muscular best friend in the gym shower after football practice, or the well-dressed young gentleman who comes by in his red Miata when mom and dad kick the player out of the house. Regardless, when the player has the unicorn encounter, he is mysteriously transported to the front of the MILF's house, a gleeful look about him despite the fact that he has trouble walking and is clutching his ass.

Having met the unicorn, the MILF's place ends quite differently. The player enters her room and suddenly realizes that he is not attracted to her at all, and what the fuck is that horrible thing between her legs.

Which snatch will you go for? The snatch with the teeth, or the snatch with the fangs?

That's some deep, artistic shit right there. I don't know if gamers will get it, though. It doesn't have enough explosions or sexy women. Just upsetting lack of explosions and ugly women.

(By the way, I'm serious, I'd like to see this game made)

If anyone is skilled at ActionScript 3, and either has experience with or can quickly learn Papervision, I could use some coding help on Your Face is a Cockpit. I have a very good idea of how things should be done, but I'm far better at expressing those in English than in AS3. Or any other programming language.

Social Compo: Create a game that uses some kind of social network as part of the gameplay, for user generated content, or both.

Plankhead is the name for my Internet avatar that I used from 2003 till the middle of 2007. I think I saw a surrealist painting of a man with a piece of wood for a head, and decided to develop the character further. I recently brought the name and character back when thinking about what to call my film production company: Plankhead Cinematic Extravaganzas.

Obviously, when I eventually release a game, it will be under a slightly different label: Plankhead Interactive Extravaganzas.

The reason for the ridiculously extravagant name is because every movie studio has "Pictures" or "Films" or whatever, and every game studio has "Games" or "Studios" or whatever. And just "Plankhead" felt a little too minimalist, even though that's probably how everyone would refer to it in normal conversation.

Eventually when I get out of college and start charging money for stuff, I'll have to incorporate. I'll register my massively tiny indepedendent media conglomerate as "Plankhead Limited Liability Corporation II: Revenge of the Limited Liability Corporation". It will look hilarious on legal documents, and I'll get to make a fake trailer announcing it, with the tagline, "The liability just got limited."

[2. the nature of the copyrighted work;]

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

       1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
       2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
       3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
       4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

(Emphasis mine)

The law basically states that "you have got to be fucking kidding me" is a valid challenge to a copyright.

And wow, this is your FIRST POST? I salute you, fantastic man of mystery and amazingness!

I figure it's best to make a dramatic appearance. Thank you.

Also that video made my head explode with giggles, thanks for that as well.

Haha, I'm curious to see if the game lives up to the description 

I'm curious to see if the game gets made...I promise it will deliver if I actually force myself to not procrastinate and do it.

Blah.

My name is Zacqary Adam Green. On my birth certificate it's spelled "Zachary" but shut up.

I'm a film student at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, but I've always been into games. I'm hoping to devote my life to making films that borrow from the aesthetics of video games, and perhaps making video games that aren't just movies with shooting galleries preventing you from watching it all at once.

I'm currently working on a short action film shot under black light, with a highly stylized depiction of violence influenced by popular video games. One of my back-burner projects (simply because things that are actual homework take a bit of a priority) is a game called Status Quo, an surreal political comedy/thriller which could theoretically complete itself if the player does nothing for three hours, but it's more interesting to change the story by interrupting the "status quo." I originally planned it as an experiment in writing "a gameplay" as a script, but then I got too many ideas that required production values, so I'll probably finish it in the future.

Hi.