Personally, KH's use of established characters prevented me from really seeing the game as anything other than a pastiche meant to please fans of the characters involved, even though it tries to "tell a story" at the same time.

Well, it's not like fanservice ever hurt anybody.

(Haven't actually played KH myself.)

Also, I will never understand why anyone likes Kingdom Hearts, sorry universe

The core audience for KH are the same people who enjoy fan fiction. Also furries and weeaboos, ergo the entire internet. That's a sizable audience. 

Dude, it's a Square-Enix/Disney crossover. Written by Square-Enix. Of course it's going to sound a bit like a fanfic.

And leave the poor furries and weeaboos alone, man.

I have discovered your identity!

When the suicide rate spikes 10-15 years from now we'll know who to blame.

Not actually working on this, except for the design. Placeholder graphics obviously. Black and white to account for both colour blindness and poor lighting conditions.

As far as I can tell, the Creative Commons' answer to this is the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

Hmmm. With this license people can redistribute your assets, without it they can't. So if you want people allowed to redistribute, yes, use this license.

When you say redistribute, you mean separately from my game right?

And I was just starting to wander what the difference between Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs and vanilla copyright was.

Did you watch it in English or Japanese? Just curious.

My two major projects are using Löve.

Placeholder graphics. I need to draw the player's attack animation [template] and give the NPCs better wandering behaviour and some flocking.


I need to figure out how the AI algorithm for the grey ship will work.


I also have a third C++ project about shader-based, hardware accelerated vector graphics including bézier curves, though OpenGL's VBOs aren't working for me lately.

I dunno man, does a character use a gun somewhere in the story?  That could be a deal breaker.

And to think I had it all figured out too.
Um, know any good Margaret Atwood novels without guns?

As a non sequitur, I'll just say that what gaming needs is a high-quality adaptation of The Shipping News. No zombies, elves, space marines, saving the world, loot collecting, stat building, being a gangsta, or anything else that nerds like. Just a person trying to come to terms with his heritage and his troubled family history.

It would probably be a point-and-click adventure.

I have not read the book.
I'm unlikely to make such a game.

My understanding is that NoDerivs means others can't use your content in their game.

Huh. I was under the impression that NoDerivs meant they can't create content using my content as a base. Sprite edits for example.

I might need to go through the whole Legal Code version.

I've decided it's time to figure out how I want to license one or two of my projects.

I have a freeware project in the works. I'm going to use separate licences for the code and for the content (graphics, sounds, music, etc.). My game's code is open source. I don't mind people looking at how the game works and putting that in their projects. The content on the other hand I want to be protected, but not so much that it restricts the whole project. I don't want people taking my game's sprites and stuff and putting them in their own projects, but I don't a content licence that would restrict the distribution of the game itself. I just need something to say that my game project "owns" this content.

As far as I can tell, the Creative Commons' answer to this is the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. However, I'm unsure about the meaning of the "You are free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work" clause (with regards to the non-commercial and no-derivatives clause). Would this mean that someone would be still free to use my game's assets if their project is non-commercial and they do not modify the assets?

Also, I'm probably going to use a mix of my own content and public domain or Creative Commons content (especially with regards to audio). What would be the best way to distinguish the different sets of content (and their licences). Would it be best, or enough, to put the files in separate folders and say which licence applies to which folder?

Note that, given my lack of access to lawyers, I'm reluctant to write up a licence myself.

[Edit:]

I think I'll just go with Bitbucket since it looks slightly prettier and so that my projects won't get eaten when Google turns into Skynet. Edit: Already done.

I put my projects on google code for some reasons, one being the code review feature (that I don't understand why bitbucket is the only one to not have)

Good point. I suppose that alone gives Google Code an edge, though I've had trouble finding a real breakdown of features for either site. On the other hand Bitbucket has more integrated (or at least more obvious) social networking features, which might be useful when I want to start promoting some of my projects.

Why does this have to be so hard?

9.2

Apps that rapidly drain a products battery or generate excessive heat will be rejected

So much for Dwarf Fortress.  Or anything processor-intensive, depending on whatever Apple product the program is being reviewed on, which doesn't seem to be specified.  Or anything Steve Jobs says drains batteries, like Flash-based apps.

Though from the perspective of a person buying off the App store, a guarantee that anything she buys won't drain her battery in a half-hour or cook her computer would be kind of nice.

The fact is that people who are not computer geeks want their computers to work as simply and reliably as any kitchen appliance. This has been for the most part Apple's design philosophy. This is why the iPad exists. An integrated App store would be a boon to a non-technical person who doesn't know how to and doesn't want to trawl through magazines, flyers, stores, and the Internet for some application she wants. Trawling that us computer geeks take for granted (and, arguably, unfairly expect others to take for granted).

Will I be happy if the Mac becomes a closed environment? Probably not. But only computer geeks will care. Regular people either won't notice or be happy they don't have to manage their applications anymore. I'm not even sure I want regular people to care.

What we have is basically something that developers will hate but people will love, and concessions to one side will piss off the other side. How do we manage that? You tell me.

So, yeah. I have some projects I manage with Mercurial that I want to make kind of public. I figure these are my best choices.

As far as I can tell the main difference between Bitbucket and Google is the existence of private repositories, though the code of most of my projects will be open source anyway so that point is moot. On the other hand I'll usually want to license my content assets (artwork and any non-code items I created myself) differently from my code for a given project. This isn't something Google explicitly allows; they only have official choices between open source "share alike" licences for non-code content. I can ignore this in Google and stick in a readme file, but still.

Other than that, Bitbucket and Google Code almost equivalent. Any suggestions or should I flip a coin?

Game art that takes forever to make.

Arguably the only thing against Minecraft is that its player base is mostly teenagers from /v/. </troll>

I just want to clarify that I try not to hold anything against teenagers.

Just teenagers from /v/.

I tend to be more interested in the setting/atmosphere in games than the plot itself. Also, I'm a big fan of "discovering" the story myself rather than have it spoon-fde to  me via cutscenes and shit. I like the approach of Metroid Prime and Demon's Souls where there's a lot of story, but most of  it is optional.

As I said, exploration-based storytelling would by its nature place emphasis on atmosphere, while cutscenes and dialog boxes would place emphasis on plot and characterization (please, please, please don't anyone start a debate on which emphasis is better  ). So, the method of story telling constrains the type of stories that can be told. Conveying the atmosphere in Metroid would look silly in dialog boxes, while I don't see how the story in Mass Effect can be told purely through exploration.

I suppose, if I'm writing a plot-heavy story, I may ask how would I reduce the sensation of spoon-feeding besides making all cutscenes skippable.

Arguably the only thing against Minecraft is that its player base is mostly teenagers from /v/. </troll>

Maybe we should keep in mind that the method of storytelling depends on not just the game, but also the kind of story you're trying to tell? For example, people have suggested games where the story is inferred. I appreciate the subtleness of this approach as opposed to, say, explicit cutscenes and dialog boxes, but I'm not sure how this would be used to convey the plot and characterization of, say, Final Fantasy (post-NES) or Mass Effect. The nature of inferred story would emphasize atmosphere over all else, such as Myst or any "art" game.

Also, I wonder if some storytelling methods are equivalent. In Half Life it is said there are no explicit cutscenes; there are just parts where you have to wait while NPCs talk at you. How different is this from any 8- or 16-bit RPG with a silent protagonist and dialog boxes, except for having to press a button to continue the dialog?