I tried signing up but failed, even after setting jam location in profile. :/ just getting an Access Denied link. Emailed the doesn't-bite-lady, and I will likely be attending once all the paperwork is sorted out

Edit: Lol,

Flight from Victoria, BC: $280
Bus from Victoria, BC: $350
Train from Vancouver, BC: $370, to Edmonton, then probably have to bus it anyway, nevermind costs to get to vancouver in the first place

Anyone have any deets on nearby hotels or such?

I'm totally down for this, in perhaps february? let us know more details as they fill in!

In the US/Canada (just as an FYI, I know the OP is from another country):

Donations are tax-deductible for the donator. That's why you get receipts for donations, typically when the value is very high.

If people start claiming those deductions, the government needs to account for where the money came from.

That's why there's a line on US/Canadian income tax forms that say
[ $    ] Income Received
[ $    ] Donations Received

I believe if you make any decent amount of business on donations you have to apply for a charity license too, which becomes more red tape and hassle. That's why every single company doesn't switch their business model to "gifts" and "donations" from their retail storefronts downtown.

All around, it's simply less headache to sell it and declare it on your tax forms. Besides, we like paying taxes and keeping our roads and communties and EI cheques coming in, right?

2) The core of the existing Flash games market consists of players who are strongly averse to paying for anything.

^^ agree!

One of the big problems with the Flash market is that it's hard to monetize your games. They are usually shorter-form games (as compared to the big-box titles) and the players are very "I don't wanna pay." On top of that, people don't typically play a game as long as the big-box bretheren; attention spans are shorter.

MTX are an attempt to skirt around those issues. Nobody wants to pay $60 for a flash game, so the price has gotta be cheaper. A lot of games (for me: Fantastic Contraption) charge $10 for premium content, but even *that* is pretty pricey, considering most people want "free". FC on the iPhone doesn't sell worth anything until we dropped the price to $6, and even then, the average app price is what - $1?

Heck, look at the world-of-goo average price during their birthday-bash choose-your-own-price sale. Something like $2-3.

Charging pennies or only a dollar or two will expand your payment opportunities by leaps and bounds.

But the neat thing is - most people that are willing to spend a dollar on a game -- aren't averse to spending another dollar on the game down the road. In fact, most people that have made an MTX purchase in a game in the past are more likely to pay again.

So suddenly we aren't trying to pay for content or a big chunk of the game - we have to make the game purchasable in several bits. This is usually accomplished by buying "little things" -- things that usually make gameplay easier or more personalized but do not affect the core gameplay elements all that much.

And let's not forget that as much as we increase our sales -- a "good" conversion rate is still pathetically small. Usually counted in sub-3% terms. That means if you want to have a successful game, you have to keep your FREE players happier than your paying customers. That means the core of the game must be free and engaging; perhaps even give people the chance to buy that top-hat even if they never pull out the credit card. This is where monetization systems come in handy (like bars vs. coins in Puzzle Pirates). PPirates essentially PAYS YOU .. what is it.. 20 cents an hour to play their games?

And as much as it saddens my heart, selling tophats is probably the #1 sales tool in our market right now. People want to see their characters personalized; if they are willing to pay us for that, why not let them? Especially considering they won't typically pay you otherwise? Not saying there isn't room to innovate...

With FC, Colin Northway decided to put up premium content for $10. Turns out the game was a hit and a lot of people purchased, at first -- but as the game grew older, those paying customers kept playing -- and kept playing... and kept playing... and never purchased anything else. People often complain (I still get emails every few weeks) about there not being anything new to unlock or any ways to customize the game experience. We really missed out on capitalizing on that, and as such the 'long tail' is much thinner than we'd like. Our core members have been playing our simple flash game for over a year now. (!!!)

I'll agree that the long-form Flash game is a rare beast, and there is more and more opportunity for this market every day. It's very much in it's infancy. But MTX is "in" right now for the simple reason that it's one of the most *effective* ways of getting people to pay. If you come up with a better solution, please let us know!

flash doesn't scale dropshadows. 

As one of the fantastic contraption guys (mentioned on page 1), I'll agree that precision is a big headache. We get complex saved games performing differently between even AMD/Intel chips because of Float precision errors. :/

Spoke with my lawyer on this subject a few years back. It's not all about money. You can be fined for any form of compensation you get for the game, INCLUDING fame/recognition/credit -- those things have a cash value apparently. If you happen to steal a dozen ideas that they were "working on" or "thinking about working on" or "lying about thinking about working on" then you can also be slapped with denying them potential sales of their new product. Then there's diluting of their IP if you take it in a direction they don't like.

All of those things have cash value; the opposing lawyer makes up some figure that the company thinks will make them feel better.

If you can't pay up, or refuse to pay up, there's a chance you'll go to jail, but it's not likely.

Of course, it all depends on the opposing company. Sure, Nintendo and maybe a few others are "nice guys" about it, but all it takes is one jerk company to come along and sue the bejeezus out of you to ruin your life.

The lesson here was stated in the first few posts: Make your own world that doesn't rely on the IP to get your message across.

That said: Try writing the company. Tell them your plans. See if they let you do it. Most often I'll bet they say "yes", especially if it's a smaller company or a title/IP they no longer care about. Giving you special permission also protects their company from the "failure to defend" bits if that comes into play.

Found an artist, thanks for the interest guys!

Nice idea you have. IF you are look for someone to do some music, I can help you out with that. I may be able to do some simple sounds and stuff too.

I'll be looking for an audio guy next. Realism base to the sounds and some old-feeling music. Think you could pull off something like that?

No because it's pretty whored and is unoriginal because it's done so often.

Depends on the spin you put on it. New concept art contains zero top hats, monocles, or aviator goggles.

I think the FOV argument boils down to "realism." Nobody would fault an artistic game that gives you an FOV of 2 degrees, or a robotic puke-inducing 360 degree FOV robot-vision. Nobody criticized Privateer for the default spaceship viewport being "unrealistic" (it WAS too small, but you could upgrade to "better" ships later in the game). Many cockpit games like flight sims have serious restrictions.

Almost all of the FOV-complainers are FPS players. The standard argument seems to be "I can see X degrees with my eyes, so when I'm playing through the eyes of a character I should be able to see X degrees as well." Though the argument may be flawed in several ways, it remains a valid point.

So the question then becomes,

"Is realistic more fun and a better gaming experience for the player?"

The answer to that is probably "Depends on the design of the game." A lot of times realism isn't fun (if you get hit by one bullet you should be debilitated; two or three bullets you are dead -- WHEEEE). My first hand experience with this is making a 'realistic' platforming game with proper person-moving physics; it was horrible, un-fun, and the final release had gravity-defying feats and double-jumping.

If I know the FOV is going to be "only" 20 degrees, I'm going to make sure my art fits in that; it's going to affect my level design; it makes things like ambushes easier. Allowing someone to crank that out to 270 degrees with an INI edit *will* ruin the game. It's suddenly impossible for a monster to sneak up behind you. Of course it's an extreme example, but extrapolate that down to your argument range- 50 to 100 degrees or so.

But the answer varies from game to game. I suppose you could further say the whole problem was "The levels and gaming experience wasn't balanced to an FOV I'm not comfortable with", which CANNOT be fixed with an INI edit (It's a band-aid that doesn't heal the internal bleeding).

tl;dr:

Only the game designers know how they want you to experience the game. If they are smart, they will design it to be enjoyable to 51%+ of their audience. If you aren't in that 51%+, oh well I guess? You can always take comfort that you are a unique snowflake, or that the developer made a mistake.

Edit: POST NUMBER TWO:

Re: Modding and such - I love buying a lego kit and building the suggested devices, and I like buying a frisbee and throwing it to my friends. However, the longevity of those products comes out of modability - I only ever build the suggested Lego item once, and I use my golf clubs to beat up children at the playground. It's this ability to experience fun *the way I want to* that takes a _great_ product to an _amazing_ product.

perhaps the only option is a dedicated server (which can be pretty expensive, about $150 a month on average)

That's why my OP said I'm looking for recommendations on a good managed dedicated server Well aware of the price!

i'd suggest nearlyfreespeech.net and liquidweb.com, both are very good in terms of what you talked about

already been kicked off LW and NFS is my current host - with several warnings :3 I use them for my static day-to-day stuff, low traffic sites. They just don't have the hardware to keep up with those spikes in MySQL usage.

This must be your own fault. I advise not to pass this on as "advice".

Careful there - I'm nothing but polite, detailed, and respectful, and get the same responses (ie: none).

I've never had trouble finding artists as a programmer. In fact, I get emails and messages quite often from artists wanting to do spritework for me, and I also get asked all the time by artists if I know any coders who would be willing to work with them.

As I mentioned, I get this frequently too - but it's always artists approaching me. I've never been able to find an artist available to work on an ongoing project. I get messages all the time asking to collaborate on new projects or to help them with their own project. I even get referrals to other artists, who are all busy if I contact them.

It seems like every artist is saying "don't call me, we'll call you."

Yeah I really don't have to time to deal with "keeping it healthy" and want someone to take care of security, hardware upgrades, making sure it stays online, etc... last thing I need is something going wrong at crunch time and having that burden on *my* shoulders.

I've read all the hosting threads I could find, but they all seem to be focusing on lightweight, inexpensive, easy-to-use hosts.

I'm looking for a big, bulky, awesome host.

I have several applications, websites, and games - that all make very heavy use of databases in expensive manners. I can run command lines and know all about hardware, but I don't have the time or inclination to run a co-lo. I guess that means I'm looking for managed dedicated-server recommendations?

MySQL performance is my top necessity; lots of CPU and RAM available for use. Fast hard drives, good access times. Bandwidth and hard disk space are secondary concerns. Usage comes in spikes - within a few hours per month, typically. The rest of the month it's usually slow and can manage fine on a shared host.

When running Fantastic Contraption through its growing pains, we hopped between a total of 5 different hosting companies - and each of them burned us pretty badly. One kicked us off, one turned us off, one didn't fix a failed hard drive, most didn't return our calls. Never found one we really liked, in the end. Don't want a repeat of that experience.

Anyone know of a good one?

For initial release, four planes - background graphics - scenery (clouds, etc) - animations for death, shooting, flames, etc.

Gameplay design for a side-scroller/top-down/platformer may be different, but the requisite work for the programmer is likely going to be very very similar.

I sent you an email on the off chance that it's something I'd be interested in; I really recommend posting a lot more details right to the thread. Even ballpark figures are better than nothing!

I suffer from some definite "grass is always greener" syndrome. My code never quite feels fulfilling until I'm *not* doing it, in which case it's my greatest love.

I guess my solution to keeping it "fun" is to often do other work. I do the occasional job here and there - fixing a neighbor's PC, moving office furniture, heck - even vigorous exercise - and I find I'm put in my place. I always come crawling back to my text editor!

With all the experiences I've had.. No, I wasn't joking.

I'll second that. 3 projects now with no artist onboard, including my latest:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9009.0

The only artists I've had work with me are ones that approached me independently or were recommended to me. :/

Also accepting suggestions and advice on how to rope in more than a single response  Is it something I said? 

This is weird. I have no idea what sort of thing I should upload.

edit: Don't know what registrar you used, but be aware that if you let it expire and then want to buy it again, you will possibly pay a lot more than if you just renewed your contract.

Heh, stage fright?

Thanks for the tip, but if I didn't use the domain in the year I had it I don't think I'll find another use for it in the next year.