Just to say I've seen the Jade Is Black discussion a few times, all in relation to that one article. No evidence there to say she is (and even, according to the game's ending, evidence to the contrary), so I don't think she should be included. There are loads of black main characters in this thread though, loads more than I thought and loads more than I've seen in any other discussions. Great stuff!

Fuck it. Go for it. But whichever takes off faster, drop the other one.

You're OK, because it sounds like they're both starting at the same time. Start worrying when you start new projects before the one you're on has finished.

lol

uh, what

I mean, that screenshot, now I have played RLs before so maybe that makes me biased, but it says to me, that's an RPG; it's got rooms and corridors, so it has dungeons; it evokes in my mind what the game is like to play, what the experience will be when I play it.

I think it's just as evocative if not more so than many of the screenies posted in this thread which I assume evoke something for the people who posted them but just do absolutely nothing for me. I mean, some GI holding a disk? Nope... not inspiring me to play or make more games.

Good point.

But those are probably hardcore gamers; it's important to gauge who it is who has made the comment so you can judge whether or not it's a well-thought-out response in game design terms or whether it's just a manifestation of being frustrated and has a deeper cause.

what

Oh ya, Another World was going to go in the same post as The Dig, but I got carried off in a nostalgic blissed out reading coma :D

I was going to post a reply, but I hit a rich seam of pure awesome and now I don't have time to look for more screenshots.

Interesting stuff and it's something I've thought about before, albeit not in such coherent terms.

Still, taking the example given, undo isn't a bitch to add to something - as long as you add it at the start So I can understand his reticence in adding it, but citing it as a reason to look deeper is a little weak.

I think a better moral would be to use testers to test your game, and personally oversee any focus testing.

Focus testing doesn't mean sending your game off and then seeing what people thought, it means watching them play; watching their movements; how they play the game. Sending your game off for focus testing is fine as long as you get replays, otherwise what you're doing is getting fairly nebulous feedback from untrained testers who don't know how to report problems properly.

Any good (pref. free) IRC clients that allow joining two networks? I'm usually on quakenet with mirandaIM but it doesn't seem to support joining two networks...?

Wow! 

"Virile Games" is brilliant, and I'll never forget his version of Alice in Wonderland.

Careful... IMO you shouldn't really optimise unless

1: the routine is known to be slow or
2: you know you will never touch the routine again (and even then, see 1)

Optimising all over the shop can reduce code readability and make things harder to debug, and even introduce bugs, all this aside from the fact that you are potentially using schedule time to optimise a function that doesn't need it.

Still, collision is often one of the things that needs optimisation (doesn't sound like you've got much 3D animation going on but that's another big sink usually IME) so you've picked a good one to hack away at.

Use profiling (easiest way is to set up timers all over the shop) to find out which bits of your program are slow, and then concentrate on those. I wouldn't consider optimising unless there was a good need i.e. the game was slowing down.

Jimbob: 

Madgarden: There are some awesome postures there! Really nice work, do you do martial arts?

Very nice, I like orc2.png. You could make the skull's animation more laughter-like by adding frames. Use this :D for reference: you can see that the eyes go back as the laughter reaches a climax, which telegraphs the head tilting back - this also gives you room to make the jaw open wider, which will help to emphasise the laughing.

ok, on way to do it is this. open your bmp in photoshop

set image mode to rgb

select the background colour by using the magic wand/0 tolerance/contiguous (or non-contiguous if you have a unique bg colour which you should)

invert selection

right click, layer via cut

hide the background layer

save as GIF/PNG.

there's probably an easier way though

OK, I uploaded the animations I've done for my player sprite as GIFs.






Cor, I just noticed that his legs are the wrong way around in that pushing animation.