I never skip cutscenes. Even if they're really crappy, I'll watch them until I realize I don't like them, and then I'll stop playing the game entirely.

Often a game represents a story about a character; Mario jumps around to save Princess Toadstool, or Master Chief shoots aliens in the face to save the universe. Ignoring these stories makes the game half as fun as it could be, and I can't grasp why people would want to do so. If a game has cutscenes that I actually want to skip, I'm wasting my time playing the game at all because there are other story-type games I could be playing.

Sonic Adventure was intended to be the most story-driven Sonic game ever, and that's what was fun about it for me. Yes, the story and characters were kind of bland, but the gameplay alone wasn't worth it; it almost never is!

I guess my answer to the problem you pose is to make the story inseparable from the rest of the game. If you're trying present a movie to people who, a priori, are inclined to ignore the movie in favor of playing, then remove the distraction. Remove the gameplay that can be enjoyed without watching the movie. They'll either start paying attention or quit. Those in the latter case simply will never want to watch your movie. But who doesn't like movies?

Oh man, Typing of the Dead is such an awesome game. It exceeded my expectations.

I only made one game, so I don't claim to really understand how to use GM effectively. I'm just saying that it was unnecessarily difficult starting out and that such difficulty goes against its image.

Number Munchers did a pretty good job of being a true game with true educational merit.

3D Body Adventure had some solid gameplay in certain parts, and it taught me a lot (for an eight-year-old) about anatomy and medicine. I'll never forget the "futuristic hospital simulation" part, wherein I zapped clumps of plaque in the interior of some guy's heart or eradicated rabies viruses from his nervous system. 3D Dinosaur Adventure is less of a game, but it was just as much fun, allowed some exploration, and taught me a lot about dinosaurs.

I think the exploration aspect is important. If you can play around with a program and discover things yourself, you have fun educational software that has a lot of the merits we appreciate in real video games.

This is absurd!

"CARS DON'T TALK! CARS RACE!"

There are a couple of different places to write programs in there. For instance, you can write an object action or just a block of GML to run. It can get more complex than that:  actions potentially depend on textual expressions, each hidden away in its own popup window.

The thing that annoyed me first, besides having the program split up into many different forms, is how it seemed impossible to get the disparate elements to talk to each other. I never was able to look up a particular object and write an action condition based on it. That's a pretty simple idea to express, one I imagine lots of newbies might come up with. It should be front and center, not apparently impossible.

If you're just looking to get your feet wet, SOME games are pretty easy to make with GM, and the interface may guide you to them. But if you have ideas of your own, it's SO HARD to express them.

I wrote a simple game to try out Game Maker, and I was surprised at how much of a pain in the ass this supposedly friendly, easy program is. It tries to "protect" people from programming, but it just makes the inevitable programming harder than it needs to be.

The only purpose officially on the table here is "to surprise the player." If you really want surprise, the plot twist should come out of the blue.

If you're looking for something beyond pure surprise, then dramatic irony makes sense. Information that the player has but that the protagonist doesn't can support a great progression to a climax. It could also make clear a character's shortcomings, or at least her ignorance.

Somebody mentioned Baten Kaitos II. I didn't play it, but I played Baten Kaitos; that game has both one of the most personally gut-wrenching twists (in the middle), and also one of the lamest (at the end) that I've ever seen in a game.

I made a video game as much "from scratch" as any sane person should ever make software. It was my first time doing this and...well it was a life-changing experience.

"Vuess Vow Vong Vo Vold Vown Vhe Vey," or VVVVVVVV

I hope the game is self-explanatory, especially to those who played a similar game with a very similar name.

You can get it here, on Linux or on Windows: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~alex/vuess.html

To each his own. If I crank on code problems in bed, I fall into this horrible half-asleep state where I toss and turn, running the same three nonsensical thoughts about definitions and linkers through my head. I feel convinced that I've almost come up with a solution, but after a while I realize that nothing I've been thinking about for the past hour makes any sense. It's exhausting.

Hi-def bro.

I want to be a hi-def bro!

You might be a programmer if you have a personal rule not to think about code as you're falling asleep.

The cover of Fragile Dreams makes the game look a lot better than it actually is.

I did unit testing for a rigid body system I was writing for the Wii. I didn't have any code for displaying things on my desktop machine, but getting error messages and other debugging hints was pretty hard on the Wii. Unit tests were a quick way to test on my desktop without talking to the OS.

No software should ever be such that every last little part of it can't be broken up and put somewhere else.

I'm looking at you, Windows API.

[I played Ikaruga:]

Hi, I'm Linearity. I started making video games a little over a year ago. Pretty Goddamn hard, it turns out.

I started playing games at age 5 when my nanny brought over her brother's Sega Genesis and Sonic 1. It was the best thing in the world. Around the same time my babysitter (different person) introduced me to her NES, with Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Zelda. I really liked that Zelda didn't have a time limit and thought it was a pretty mind-bending, progressive idea.

As an aside, those girls loved video games; why is it considered a dude's thing? Even years later, after she introduced me to Myst and then got her driver's license, my babysitter put her keys on an OutRun keychain. I wanted that thing so bad. And one time I got off the bus and my nanny was playing my copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. These girls were not nerds, they just liked video games. What the hell happened? I digress.

Anyway, I spent the next twenty years playing games with dudes and talking about them with dudes. I drew a million pictures of Sonic, and then learned to draw other stuff. I got pretty good! Then I stopped and started studying math a lot. I got pretty good! Then I switched to computer science because computers are awesome and a lifetime as a mathematician seemed boring. I don't know how the hell these things work, though.

I graduated from Computer Science Edumacation last year. Before that happened I realized that I wanted to make video games. I want to really understand the most powerful moments and elements of the best games and bring them out in my own work. I think there were two events that set this in motion:

I played Ikaruga:

This game is like a beautiful garden. It struck me with how dense it is while still being "just a game." There's a huge, supposedly Buddhism-influenced story of struggle and regret. There's a deep, puzzling, ever-changing pattern of challenges and rules to explore. There's Sanskrit! And you blow a lot of shit up. The fact that all of this came together in a completely traditional, I-would-tell-all-my-friends-if-I-were-in-fifth-grade sort of game made me think, "okay, there's something going on here." This thought was driven home when...

I played Ico:

And I thought "okay, there is DEFINITELY something going on here."

So yeah, I started making video games. I'm going to keep doing that. This place seems like a pretty cool thing.