Heinz, does this ring a bell?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Manuel, what about BIT TRIP tripped you out?

'I dreamt I was a butterfly.

I couldn't tell if I was dreaming, but when I woke
I was I and not a butterfly.

Was I dreaming that I was a butterfly?

Or was the butterfly dreaming that it was me?

Even if there's a difference between the butterfly and I
the distinction isn't absolute.

And there is no relationship of cause and effect.

-Soshi, a Japanese poet

mind = blown  

Yup, good stuff.
So.. I finally had the weird lucid creative consciousness stuff again last night. Scared me, being awake and thinking without moving, strange sensations in my body. I kept fearing that some freak of consciousness would kill me.. gotta remember it's all in the mind when I do the dreaming, otherwise I end up sleeping on my face (lucid stuff doesn't happen) and then my neck hurts in the morning. Will try for tonight. I was thinking about programming / game design as I went to sleep.

I opened this thread along with a collectible card game roguelike thread..
Perhaps they could be combined? Business cards which can be used in a game.. collect all from a dev team somewhere, then battle against someone who's met all the business/marketing team elsewhere..

Tiny Wings just came out and it's one of the bes iOS games I've played. Kind of a Wavespark clone but it works great.

Tiny Wings looks fun. I thought the MCoy of Wavespark was working on an iOS port..

i have rules on how you should make a boss. i am the boss of you

I think rumour is eva's a troll account, but this is actually kind of insightful/funny.
Would we be better or worse designers if we didn't listen to any advice.. ?

Well, first of all, how much do you really need for an object to coincide with another? A lot of Roguelikes I see deals with this by randomly selecting an empty, adjacent space (if possible) and allowing the second "placed" object to go there, instead. Or, you can create a compound object (a bag or box, for example) that is capable of containing multiple objects within it. For that matter, you can just make it a "stack" or a "pile."

If each tile object has a pile array, and you just show the icon for the topmost one (or sort by threat level eg. show a trap before you show armor), does that accomplish what you want?

(not efficient: )Or you could track an array of items, figure out their co-ordinates and draw that way.

There's room for achievements to be useful in a game design sense, I think. You can use them to hint at things that are possible that the player may not have thought of. For instance, maybe your game has rocket jumping. A player that hasn't read the manual may not even realize this move is possible, but could see that 'rocket jump onto the factory roof' is an achievement. Or if your game has branching plotlines, you could use achievements to provide hints on the branch points.

Yes, I think that's how they should be used. Encourage creativity.

XRA: that's how most of them are, unfortunately. Consider the "average gamer" playing games actually appreciates / likes those..

I kind of like how TF2 used them. Some of them were easy (do so much total damage), others were difficult (get X kills/damage/captures on 1 life). Enough achievements and you got a new available weapon.

I second Warning Forever http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index_e.html
Also, have you played roguelikes? Ala http://nethack.org/. I think that's more what you're looking for. Procedurally generated elements like this:
http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Potion#Generation

I think there's a serious distinction between single-player and multi-player challenge. Mechanics vs mental evaluation. I find this game pretty interesting (reposted from somewhere else on the forums):

http://www.epicmafia.com/home

As it's *all* psychology / convincing, with some mechanics but.. the social aspects crush the mechanical parts of it.

I do this all the time! The other day...

I was thinking about sinewaves and somehow they ended up in my dream. I saw a snake... Then I was playing Snake. Snake moving in a sine-wave fashion. Would be pretty cool. Probably has been done before.

Two days ago, I was having trouble sleeping (18 minutes of sleep. ), and I was thinking about programming... what method would work best, problems I might come across... It seemed so real. But I guess this doesn't really count because I wasn't asleep.

I went to sleep last night thinking first about a single pixel dodging / moving around a bunch of other lines, geometries etc. Then this turned into wavy motions and then I started thinking about snakes and fish(es) moving with a similar pattern. It was fun.. concentrating/meditating on something prior to sleep tends to give me better lucid dreams / more consciousness during the sleep (as opposed to "fuck i'm tired i just want to sleep").

Tergem, that's hilarious.

Many boardgames have multiple options in a turn eg.
"You can do 2 of the 5 options" like buy, sell, trade, upgrade, etc.

http://boardgamegeek.net

Anyone?

I had a few this morning. One was a chess style game where you moved in rook moves between stars or points to kill the opponent, and could make unlimited of those but you couldn't cross certain points.

Others but I don't wanna talk about them. One has some ethnic stereotyping (NON VIOLENT)

I also played a crappy "chess" style game where you moved single circular pieces in linear movements one space at a time, that's how they could capture too. Played vs some old German lady (ETHNIC STEREOTYPING EARLIER MENTIONED IS NOT GERMAN OR RELATED TO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT). I was pumped because I was gonna kick her ass, her opening moves were terrible.

There is a block.
There is no head.
I do not trust you.
Did you already crush the head?

That sounds awesome! How far do you want to make the speech recognition aspect? Are there small speech commands, or do I actually have to chant a whole spell?

We will require players to chant the whole spell to cast it. The stronger the spell, the harder it will be to cast.

I am also excited on Milestone 3, where players need to look for and memorize the spells. Spells will be randomly generated so players are required to learn how to say them. By doing it this way, every match is a fresh start for everyone, nobody knows how to cast spells unless they learn it.

Or do the combine approach where a syllable = effect, combine effects eg A+E+I does something different, yet similar to O+E+I like.. "first syllable determines spell type, second determines strength/mana cost".. etc

Enjoying the dev log.
Related: the game where you draw hills on a planet and an astronaut collects them (Link anyone?)

Tron comes to mind. Troncraft? =P

Indie victory.

Awwww yeah. Sounds great. FPS ala http://www.achrongame.com/site/

Mikejkelley - nice art. I wish I knew flash by now.

I'm looking for a ruby tutorial getting Active Record up and running with Sinatra. I thought I was pretty close but then couldn't figure out how to get the database initalized. Should be able to get help from a co-worker but maybe not in time for the comp that's over.

I like the "Blob" idea. I think that could work well.
With generating specific parts, I would give more leeway than "hairpin curve" or "slight turn". Give a random angle value.. where the higher the "difficulty" setting of the map, the sharper your angles can be. Your algorithim would have to make sure the track didn't turn on itself, so it would straight out / keep going in the same "direction" it was traveling.

Helsing's Fire: Procedually generated spatial puzzles with a gothic theme.
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14065.0

Ynth and Beyond Ynth I quite liked, they are puzzle games where you play a ladybug who rotates blocks and dodges spiked-fruit in the boxes, pushes boxes etc. Well-done mechanics.

Self-promotion: I find my game Enlightenment Vision more fun than most titles I've downloaded. It's physics / arcade that started off as "can I make an iPhone" game. The experiment worked imo

. there's a bug that makes the physics extra "fun" and in hard to reproduce cases can force a restart on your game, I will fix it though.
Also made another one called ComboRocket but it needs some redesign.

100 rogues is a decent roguelike, the updates keep improving it well. Nice "challenge" mode addition (complete all of them and get extra starting mana or something).
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14660.0

Tower Defense plug: Fieldrunners has tons of great reviews and well-deserving. Excellent balance, challenging gameplay. "Build your own maze" style.

Jet Car Stunts is pretty good.



That's everything that comes to mind for now of "play often" games. Enjoy.

EDIT: Oh yeah, Eliss is great too! I didn't enjoy Rolando too much. Will look up Kometen.

EDIT 2: Orbital kicks ass for a single player physics challenge, and multiplayer rocks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqrQce9DkhI&feature=related