Hey folks, I thought this might be of interest to the TIGSource community... I'm making an original game, doing everything but the music myself, and publishing it to the app store with a hard deadline of May 15th! What's more, I'm streaming a daily show of myself working on it, in hopes that I can use that time to talk shop with other indie developers, share tips, or at least let people learn from my mistakes.

The game is "Angry Henry And The Escape From The Helicopter Lords: Part 17: The Re-Reckoning." Find (a little) more info at: http://www.angryhenryandtheescapefromthehelicopterlordspart17.com

The stream is at http://twitch.tv/ShayMakesGames, every morning (until May 15th) at 11am CST. There's also an archive of the episodes on YouTube at http://youtube.com/ShayMakesGames. The early episodes are rough as I'm a newbie to streaming, but things pick up in Episode 4 where you can see the gameplay on my desktop more clearly. I'm making the game for AIR Mobile using Flash and Flash Builder mostly, on my Mac... the gameplay is very fast-paced and arcadey.

If you have no idea who I am, I'm Shay Pierce... I'm an industry game programmer (I worked on Hearthstone!) who's gone indie; I made an indie puzzle game called "Connectrode" (at one point that game and I were at the center of some Zynga-related controversy that went viral). Lately I've also been making Overland (http://overland-game.com) with TIGSource alum Adam "Atomic" Saltsman... which has been awesome... this crazy Angry Henry game is me taking a break from that.

Come watch and ask me anything! Episode 9 starts airing in 20 minutes! http://twitch.tv/ShayMakesGames

I just posted this in another thread but now I see this stickied (and more active) one; sorry for the "repost."

I wanted to get an Indie Pass (to send myself to GDC for the first time since I've been passed over by employers sending me for all 9 years I've worked in the games industry... yes I am working on indie projects though I also work professionally in the industry). Anyway yeah they're sold out. If anyone has a spare one please PM me or contact me at @IQpierce on Twitter.

At this point I've lost track of what the pass got me though; access to the IGS summit sessions, correct? Is there any way to get access to those other than getting a full summit/tutorials pass?

Aaaargh, I was going to buy an indie pass but I literally had $1 too little money in my "studio bank account", so I put it off and now they're sold out. (And now my wife informs me that it wouldn't have actually made any tax difference whether I bought it from that bank account or not, d'oh.)

If anyone has an indie pass and needs to cancel or sell it, or even just wants to try to sell it for a slight profit, please PM me, or ping me on twitter at @IQpierce! This will be the 9th year in a row that I've tried to go to GDC and failed to (I'm a professional game developer but my employers have never sent me, ugh), I was going to buy my own way and now these things are sold out... bleh. Very disappointing.

Really enjoyed playing this for the first time (with a contracting client and fellow Midway veteran) at Fantastic Arcade. Also great to meet Petri and Martin, and inexplicably receive a can of spray-on fake blood from the latter...

Nice fast competitive game with a ridiculous-but-very-fun theme!

[Video on YouTube:]

Connectrode, a simple but addictive indie puzzle game made using Flixel iOS, is on the App Store for $.99!

Video on YouTube:



Website: http://www.connectrode.com

Screenshots:


How to play:
Repeat after me - this is NOT a match-3!
There are "chip" pieces on the board and you are given "connector" pieces each turn to place onto the board. If you place connectors so as to "close the circuit" between multiple same-colored chips, then that whole chain of chips and connectors will be cleared from the board. The real trick is that placing a piece can block off parts of the board (new connectors can't be moved through walls of other pieces) - so each piece placement may limit you placing pieces on future turns.
Simple rules, but some complex challenges quickly emerge once you start playing (especially on the harder difficulty levels). There's some subtle scoring rules that can make the game much more challenging for those trying to maximize their score (connecting 3 chips is much trickier than connecting two).

Background
I'm a professional game programmer but I've been doing indie games (under the "Deep Plaid" label) on the side for a while - since I have a passion for game design that I wanted to pursue. (I've tried a couple times to be active in the TIGsource forum community, but doing games by day AND this game on the side, AND having a family, has left me with little time for being part of online communities, meh.)

I decided to design the most addictive puzzle-style game for iOS that I possibly could. I prototyped the mechanics in Flixel for AS3... after dropping the project, my wife encouraged me to mess with it again... suddenly I found gameplay I fell in love with... the very next day Flixel iOS went open-source, so I basically stayed up that whole night and ported my code from AS3 to Objective-C!

Later I got in touch with some other awesome Austin indies to finish what was by then called "Connectrode":

• Brandon Boyer put me in touch with Dale Austin, who did fantastic work with the art and the video
• My friend Brad Lewis (who worked on I Dig It on iOS and now works for Bioware) helped with art during early development
• Robin Arnott (who made an awesome art game, "Deep Sea") did the sound effects
• David Pencil compsed the music (he did the soundtrack for Penny Arcade: The Series, season two).

I'm proud of it as a well-designed, elegant puzzle game... and I love the graphics and sound that my team put together. Since it's a pretty personal game (I was the sole game designer and programmer), I dedicated it to my wife Laura, who encouraged me to pursue the project.

Designing a truly "easy to learn, hard to master" game was an incredible challenge. I hope to do more complex and experimental indie game projects at some point... but for now I'm proud to have made a "pure puzzle game" that I think ranks up there with the best in the genre! Hope others try it and enjoy it! Feel free to ask questions, or share impressions if you try the game.


Shay Pierce
CEO and Wombat Defenestrator
Deep Plaid Games, LLC
http://www.DeepPlaid.com

[Controls:]

So no feedback?

Hmm maybe we forgot some things...

Screenshot:


Play Online Here

This game was created as part of the Global Game Jam 2011 by a team of 9 in 48 hours. It was built using Flixel.

Controls:
Keyboard Player:
Move up/left/down/right: W, A, S, D keys
Shoot up/left/down/right: Arrow keys

Mouse Player:
Place an object on the field: Click there.
Change type of object being placed: Mouse wheel up/down.



...We'd love feedback! We're still working on a single-player mode...

If anyone is willing to donate a pass, I'm definitely interested in getting one.

In a way you might say I need one less, since I am probably closer to being able to afford one than most indies - I've been a professional game developer for over 7 years, I know tons of people in the industry...

On the other hand, I've been in the industry for 7 years and have NEVER ONCE BEEN TO GDC AAARRRRGH. No employer would ever send me, not even Blizzard - and they're much closer to SF than any of my other employers (I'm in Texas). Super frustrating.

And here's how badly I want to attend a GDC: after GDC 10, I sprung for an account on the GDC Vault, found a way to download all of the mp3 audio tracks of the talks, downloaded over 130 talks (it took me more than, like, 4 hours to pick out all of the talks I wanted and download the MP3s)... and I listened to them all within like 4 months. (I'm a programmer/designer with interest in AI and entrepreneurship and I'm trying to go indie, so yeaaah a lot of the talks were interesting to me...)

Anyway, those passes are frickin expensive and I just can't find it in the budget this year - ironically, going indie has made it more important than ever to go to GDC, but made it harder than ever to afford, as well.

So I don't know if I'm the most needy, but I definitely feel like I'd get as much out of it as anyone else. I also haven't met many other indies in person and would love to finally meet people and feel more like part of the community.

Thanks for posting this Vegas! I was part of the team too ("Team Nixon")... we're very happy with how it ended up - I think we were one of the most successful of the Austin GGJ teams, the game was in a playable state very early on and we got to add a ton of ideas and variety to it.

The game was made in Flixel, we were one of 3 Austin Flixel teams (appropriate since Adam is also an Austinite), though again I think we had the most success. It's a bit rough in some ways of course but it's quite fun to play. I'd be interested in knowing the highest score that TIGSource-rs can make.

The feedback we get from most people is "I can't play it because no one else is around", so yeah we'll probably be trying to add a 1P mode. We're planning to treat this as a prototype, work on it some more, and see how it will do on FlashGameLicense... fingers crossed!

Here's the types of penalties I can think of:

- Destroy the player's progress/time. (Mario setting you back to the beginning of the level when you die, and to the beginning of the game when you game over.)
- Destroy something the player has accumulated. (In Starcraft, your buildings being destroyed. In Sonic, losing rings.)
- Remove an opportunity from the player. (In Farmville, you have the opportunity to reap your crops during a certain time period, but if too much time passes then the crops rot. Nothing is taken away from you, but the opportunity to accumulate gain is lost.)
- Reduce the player's autonomy (reduce the number of things he can do; losing your fire power in Mario when injured is a penalty... or in Limbo, being "possessed" takes away control of your character, which feels like a penalty to the player).
- Reduce the responsiveness of the game (make the controls sluggish, e.g. "Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy" in Yoshi's Island... or, being blinded by a flashbang in Counter-Strike, which removes ALL audio/visual feedback temporarily).

I'd also be interested in experimenting with the idea of increasing OR reducing challenge, as a penalty - however this is a weird and recursive idea, since usually the "penalty" in question is meant as a "consequence of failure", the failure being that of not conquering the challenge in question.

Trial-and-error gameplay can actually be the least punishing type of gameplay. Super Meat Boy is one of the least punishing games ever made. The only "punishment" ever inflicted on the player is that of losing progress; but

• 1) the progress is always less than 30 seconds' worth, and
  
• 2) this progress is NEVER lost due to factors outside the player's control (there's no randomness in the game, everything is deterministic).

A truly punishing game is NetHack, or an old-school MMO featuring permadeath: one where the player can easily lose hours of progress due to circumstances that they had absolutely no control over - a failure that they couldn't have prevented. Even when a failure is PERCEIVED as being one that couldn't be prevented, the player feels frustrated - this type of "penalty", one that is feels like an undeserved punishment, is particularly harsh and frustrating, and each time one happens, you have a large chance of your player quitting!

Of course, your player will never "like" any of the penalties I described, which is why they're penalties - they're undesirable! But it's impossible to make a game that features challenge without including failure of some kind, so it's up to you to decide what form that failure takes. Note that more mainstream successful games feature less harsh penalties. (Again, it's impossible to ever lose anything in Farmville, actions either give you a reward or no result at all... it's only possible to lose an opportunity to gain something new. Though that kinda equates to the same thing as losing something, it's not perceived that way for the player.)

A game that's like a cross between Worms and Chaos: The Battle of the Wizards.

Two wizards (two players) are dueling; they can cast spells and summon creatures. The game plays for 30 seconds at a time, in a 2D platformer view; after 30 seconds, it pauses and lets the players decide on what they're going to try to do for their next turn. (See Steambirds or Flotilla.)

Among the wizards' spells are the ability to create and destroy terrain, bricks, walls, etc. How their spells (and the creatures they summon) interact with each other is chaotic and interesting. (A bit of a "Scribblenauts" element to this, especially if you go with the 2D side-scroller view I'm envisioning... although a top-down view might be simpler and interesting as well.)

(If you actually get a prototype of the basics of this sort of game up and running, send me a PM, I'd love to work on it.

Although this relates more to what I THOUGHT this thread would be about (based on the title) than what it actually is about, I thought I should point out Canabalt, which is truly a continuous platformer: it generates random platforms and obstacles infinitely, and the only question is how long the player can go without making a critical mistake.

The iPhone version of that game may be relevant too because I believe I've heard that after you run far enough, the tileset of the game (and presumably the random platforms too?) change to different art styles; I believe there's three different tilesets? And I'd be very surprised if there were any transition.

OP, you're right in one respect that this would be tricky in a Mario-style game: the tiles used in the world in SMB 1-1 are different than the ones in 1-2, so one set of tiles has to be unloaded from memory while another is loaded in instead. Keeping all tiles in the game in memory at one time may not be out of the question for a simple platformer these days.

[Time travel + Sokoban]

Time travel + Sokoban

Move boxes around you, push them into time machines and pick them up later/earlier, travel back in time and team up with yourself, and of course manage to hold down two buttons at the same time using only one box (hint: place it on the first button for a few seconds, take it back in time, place it on the second button, profit.)

Sounds a bit like one of my favorite Flash games, Chronotron, although that game is a platform-puzzler rather than top-down:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

Sokoban + Trading Card Game
You use cards (in the same vein as Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering) to move the crates on the playboard. Your goal is to place them in their respective place; but the computer's cards places traps and obstacles on your way (acting in a comparable fashion to that of the director in the Left 4 Dead series).

TCG + 2D Turn-Based Strategy

I've actually been thinking about this one a lot lately. Think "Advance Wars" where you get to (have to?) decide on a set few units which will be part of your tech tree in each battle you enter. As in the TCG, you want a "curve" of some early-game units and some late-game units, but you also want units that work well together and have synergies.

(Battleforge probably did a bit of this by combining RTS and TCG, though I've only seen it played a bit.)

"Achievement Unlocked!" is a true one-screen platformer - that game has about 100 levels all on one screen. Haven't played the sequel but I heard it's even better.

I love that game. Why make more than one "physical" space for your game when what's really interesting is the possibility space, which can be completely changed just by changing the goal, and without changing one pixel of the platforms, etc.? Brilliant.

Well maybe I shouldn't even chime in... I'm definitely one of those who comes down against building a game concept around a story first and foremost. I don't think games are a great storytelling medium, and I think the more you're trying to tell a story, the less you're making a good game.

On the other hand, it seems that what you're really enamored with here is a setting... and I do think that depicting a world, and allowing players to explore that world, is something that games do incredibly well. Games really ARE worlds, and playing a game is exploring a world - both exploring its physical space, and its possibility space.

If it were me, I would try to think of a way to make a low-tech version of something like "Far Cry 2" - which did a great job of immersing you in the evocative setting of Africa and letting you explore it, with a "trail" of quests directing your movement through it in a general way.

I would ask yourself this: what is different about life on this floating city as opposed to a traditional city on the ground? Aside from it being in anarchy (which could true in any city), what is distinctive about living in this floating city? You might have some unique gameplay opportunities arise from this.

But if you don't think of any terribly interesting/original gameplay ideas, I would definitely consider using an RPG-maker engine. Why spend your time on the technology when the depiction of an interesting setting and story is what you really want?

Finally I should point out that this setting bears quite a few similarities to that of "Columbia" in Bioshock: Infinite. Look into it if you haven't. "Takes place in a WW2 steampunk era floating city in anarchy" is not going to look like a unique selling point for a game...

The discussion here of randomness and its role in games has been interesting. Personally though I've never read a better take on this subject that Greg Costikyan's, which I consider almost definitive: http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane

The only thing I could possibly add to it (which he somewhat covered as well) is the fact that managing probability can, and should, be an interesting part of the strategy. As pelle just mentioned, in a game that has an element of random chance, the best players should be best at understanding what that element of chance actually means and managing it best.

Poker is a game with very real and quite deep strategy; but it's largely a management of chance. Magic: The Gathering similarly involves management of chance as part of strategy in deck-building.

My point is simply that the presence of some chance doesn't completely destroy any chance of having strategy; for some games it makes the strategy deeper and richer. However it undeniably increases the chances of "bad" player beating a "good" player - while this makes games more fun and rewarding for new players, hardcore experienced players usually hate it and want to feel that they won purely from skill every time. See the TF2 community, where the hardcore competitive players turn off crits, even though crits are one of the things that make the game the most fun for more casual players and allow them to have a chance of occasionally killing a great player.

The interesting thing about the Barney's, for me, was that I didn't want to kill them - I would usually try to work with them. But then their AI was horrible and they'd rarely do as much good as I could do by "putting them out of their misery" and then taking their ammo. (Actually, in Counter-Strike I would occasionally run out of ammo and then kill useless teammates to get their ammo, hehe.)

I'll try to turn this back towards the actual thread topic now... maybe something that could make a game really disturbing is to take this sort of thing and intentionally make the most of it... make a game in which you and many other innocent little characters are fighting to survive a threat, but each of you possess just a little of some resource (ammo, or something else)... none of you will survive unless you can collect enough of this resource... but the only way to collect it is to kill some of your fellow innocent victim creatures. It's necessary for the greater good, but that doesn't make them scream any less when you kill them.

It's a difficult and potentially emotional decision, and games are all about interesting decisions. It also feels somewhat more honest and meaningful than the "kill little girl? yes/no" in Bioshock, which actually ended up being meaningless mechanically speaking.

A game that asks you what you're willing to do to survive, or force you to make horrible "lesser of two evils" decisions, could be very disturbing - Heavy Rain does some of this I think.

Putting all this in a multiplayer game might be the most effective, of course. "Transformice" is really interesting in that way sometimes.

Sometimes what disturbs me most in games is the things I actually do. Half-Life had a lot of emotion in it, for me... the first time I had a gun, and a scientist ran up to me begging for my help and started explaining what I had to do next, and in the middle of his sentence I shot him in the head at point-blank range... I was disturbed. His death was bloody, instantaneous... and he was completely helpless. I felt tremendous guilt, and felt like a psycopath in fact. I don't think any movie, or book, has ever made me feel guilty.

(Of course the Penny Arcade guys seem to have a little less guilt about that: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/05/28/. Man I can't believe that comic is over 9 years old now.)

Aside from that, I wish more game developers would go with atmospheres and visuals that were truly surreal. David Lynch did a fantastic job of being both surreal, unsettling, creepy, and occasionally funny (though you could never quite feel comfortable while you were laughing). Cactus gave a good speech about how games need their David Lynch at GDC this year.

Thanks Guillaume! Sorry for what a wall of text that ended up being, but I figured this is a place to "put yourself out there", and when it comes to game dev, I guess I have a lot to put out there.

I hope that my experience from pro game development can allow me to do some "mentoring" for the community and particularly for people just getting started, but I also think that even old pros like me have a lot to learn from the crazy experiments happening on the cutting edge. 

Man, I feel like everything I'm writing is really earnest and formal. It's been too many years since I've been an active art of an internet forum, I think. I'm sure I'll be my old sarcastic/trolling/flamebaiting self within a few weeks of hanging out here though. 

If you're thinking about top-down 2D games, I think that Torchlight has a great level editor/mod creation tools. It's not strictly 2D of course, but it is in spirit since it's a top-down game.

And the lemmings part?

The "indirect control" part is the Lemmings part - you don't control Lemmings directly, but you do so by putting stuff in their way.

This is super obscure, but as a teenager I once read in some magazine about a game, "Pac Man 2: The New Adventures", where you controlled Pac-Man indirectly and solved problems "with" him. It always sounded like an interesting experimental kind of game (from an era where experimental games actually got made with major licenses and put on shelves, can you imagine that today?)... anyway I never played it but you might consider trying to dig up a ROM for it, it's always good to look at similar games to give you ideas.

Oh, you should also look at "Lucidity", a recent platformer where you place the platforms in front of the character for them to find their way around. "Eets" may also be relevant.

You know, I haven't played Heavy Rain (though I should), but I have played something similar: a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. I don't have a high opinion of them as game designs, although at the same time, I think that games are about interesting decision, and decisions that I heard about in HR such as "would you cut your pinky off to save your child?" are certainly interesting.

But my real problem with choose-your-own-adventure gameplay is that it ultimately still feels like I'm experiencing a story someone else wrote, rather than making a story for myself through my own experience. Unless there are hundreds or thousands of permutations (and the work behind writing all those, even for a text-based game, is impractical), it will never give me a feeling that I'm really choosing my own path through events.

Then again, Fallout was a game that had a lot of mini-stories within the game, and I definitely felt like I was occupying my character and directing my own path there. Maybe there just have to be enough choices for me to feel that I can express my own personality (or the personality of the character I'm role-playing).

All in all I'm more interested in games that are "systems" than ones that are based around branches of discrete choices, no matter how dense those branches may be. But it's always worth experimenting, I'd love to see an indie do something new with the Heavy Rain formula.

The time-travelling seems like a logical addition to me - but it does give you the equivalent of being able to basically flip through each and every page of the "Choose Your Own Adventure book"... an easy way to go back and see every different possible path you can go down. To some this might rob the magic and further destroy the feeling that "the story is my own"; to others it simplifies what they're going to do anyway, which is play the game over and over again and see all the content.

I would probably make a prototype without time-manipulation if I were you, and consider adding it later after you see how the game plays. In fact if you prototype this, I would focus on the "indirect control" mechanics first, those are experimental and mostly-unprecedented enough that you'd want to play around with them to be sure you had that core being something pretty fun.