That's really more of an art direction decision than a mechanics design decision.

A lot of mechanics I've implemented without any thought at all as to how visually it will look in game.  This is not always possible, because art and presentation do impact how the game design works (sometimes very significantly), but sometimes they're pretty much interchangeable.

I think, in order for a game to be interesting, your aesthetics will have to serve some purpose, and will likely have to have some sort of theme to go with them.  Having a good central theme or design language also helps a lot to make game mechanics easier to understand.  If you establish that all green robots are good, and all red robots are bad, the player will always know what's an enemy and what's an ally, for instance.

As for your specific super hero question, I think the right answer is "whatever theme the artist and creative director agrees upon that delivers the highest quality visuals while servicing the overall design vision."  It could be robots, or aliens, or monsters, or mutants, or regular humans, or other super heroes, I don't know.

Ask yourself what you want the game to do, what sort of experience you want the player to have, and use that as a guide to selecting art that services it.  Unless you have this question in mind, it's going to be hard to make meaningful creative decisions.  If you don't know the answer to this question, do some exploring and tinkering with concepts until you can nail it down.  Don't be afraid to change it if something else creatively tickles your fancy, that's ok too.

Do you want to have a scary game?  Xenomorph aliens or twisted mutants.
Do you want an action game that provides really satisfying visuals as you beat the crap out of stuff?  Robots that explode and aliens that pop into piles of goo.
Do you want a game that has really epic looking combat?  Other superheroes/villains.
Do you want a game that feels like an old, pulpy comic book?  Classic thugs and mooks.

That really sucks, st33d.  Makes me wonder, though, the game's pretty obviously broken, right?  Like, there are things that quite blatantly don't work.  Did he take a stab at solving problems, fail and go "Oh well, onto the next one I guess?"

You could also attempt to scale the speed your game objects move at such that it is consistent across your different screen resolutions.  I think this wouldn't hold up as aspect ratios change, though, but it can still feel fairly close.

When in doubt, talk to a programmer:  We're wizards, no joke, and we can do some snappy stuff with code.  You might be trying to animate some crazy complicated effect in a sprite while a programmer could whip something up in code that can do the same thing in 5 minutes.  There are some things code is better for, and some things art is better for, knowing the distinction will make everyone more efficient.  When you have the experience to make your own judgement calls with great authority, then you can skip this step, but until then it's a good idea to run something you want to do artistically past a programmer to make sure there's not a more appropriate code solution.

I think that they are fantastic redesigns. Valve walked the fine line of making sure they are instantly recognizable to a DotA 1 player but without being slavish copies.

I just don't see why 'recognizable to a DotA player' is a priority when even ownership of the name 'DOTA' is in question, legally...

It's subjective to be sure, but I still feel like Valve really didn't try on some of them.  I absolutely love some of their more original character work (like the incredible Nightstalker), but the one's that are still similar are treading dangerous waters - especially when the models they're based off of are prominent/named characters in the Blizzard IP lore (I'm looking at you, Grom 'Axe' Hellscream).

As an 'aspiring' (read: not really that good) game designer and artist, it makes me uneasy to see an industry leader engage in what I'd consider artistic theft and set such a dark precedent for our craft...

They did change the characterization when it fell too close to Blizzard lore, like Earthshaker.

I think it is utmost importance they they make the characters recognizable to DOTA players, since DOTA2 is effectively DOTA with better graphics.  For a MOBA, having a strong competitive community is totally key to success, and they're pretty obviously trying to get the existing DOTA community onboard.  The last game to attempt a DOTA-esque MOBA (HoN) didn't do fabulously, so I can understand a company treading close as they can to DOTA.

I am really starting to like the look of the lo-fi 3d stuff in this thread.  That scene is gorgeous, Delko.

How's your game's framerate?  Is it below your target level?  If it isn't, I probably wouldn't worry about things too much.

A profiler is a tool that's used to analyze the performance of a program while you develop it.  Typically, you run the program with the profiler enabled and you'll see a detailed breakdown of information about resource usage in the program, CPU usage, memory usage, GPU usage, number of allocations/deallocations, number of draw calls processed by the GPU, etc.  Most profilers break down your running program into individual function calls and tell you how much time those function calls are consuming.

They're very useful tools if you feel that your program is not performing well.  Using a profiler can often give you a good idea of where specifically in the program performance is suffering.  If you don't use one, you just have to use your intuition or try to reason things out, which can be time consuming and a lot less accurate.

I am not a fan of Smalltalk in the least.  Granted, my exposure to it was through VisualWorks, which might very well be the worst piece of software crafted by human hands.

Still, I don't like it.  The syntax for Smalltalk just sucks.  There are other solutions for doing that whole hot coding thing than having to use Smalltalk.

It does depend on how complex a quest you want these systems to represent, now and in the present.

Personally, I think a component based architecture would work well.  What I'll propose is kind of similar to the decorator pattern.

Let's say you define a class called Quest.  Quest more or less exists to act as glue, binding together the actual parts of the quest.  These parts are individual objects that perform some sort of quest-y task, like.

VictoryCondition
QuestProgress
QuestReward
QuestDescription

So on and so forth.  Depending on the complexity of your quests, you could have a lot more of these.

The idea is that these components would be totally independent of each other.  You could mix in any dialogue, any reward, any victory condition, etc together.  Some of these classes could be kept pretty general (like QuestDescription, or QuestReward), but ones that could conceivably require more specific behaviors (VictoryCondition maybe) could be subclassed.

If you wanted your quests to be really flexible, you could add in a special QuestProcessor class to control the logic of executing the quest.  The intent behind this class is to handle the problem of having a bunch of different possible components that may not all be present in the same time.  The QuestProcessor would assume that the Quest object had components of certain types and orchestrate the processing of them.

Then, in your XML/Plist/whatever, you define the structure of the quest by describing the components that it has, and the initialization data for those components.  Have a function that will parse the input file, instantiate the appropriate components, add them to the Quest object, and return the whole thing when it's done.

I have a minotaur warrior and a human rogue in the front. I'm building the human rogue as a monk-type thing, giving him lots of dodge and unarmed.

In the back I have a lizard dude bow-rogue (currently wielding a pike as I wait to find a bow) and a bug-wizard.

I had another party with a similar layout, but I wasn't satisfied with it and re-rolled.

Sadly I won't be able to really sink my teeth into Grimrock for another couple days, but so far it's super awesome.

I would suggest learning Calculus if you haven't.  I find it pretty useful in game design.  Specifically, being able to use derivatives and integrals to manipulate curves.  I use definite integrals to put difficulty progression curves to work in some of my games.

I'm about to go to lunch, so I'll give you a quick overview of other topics I feel are really useful.

Games are, ultimately, an experience that players have.  All parts of the game, from art to gameplay to sound to how the controller feels in your hand matter in this experience.  I think the key to making very good games is being able to consider how all of these parts combine and influence the emotions of player.

If your goal is to operate as creative lead, or to operate as a one-man-band/indie, it's very useful to have a broad base of knowledge on many topics that crop up in games.  You don't have to be masters of these, but you need to know enough to figure out how they work.  Useful topics include.

Sound design
Music theory
UI Design
Typography
Animation
Art theory
Art history (if you can get a good one, this class is really valuable since it should also teach you solid decomposition skills as you analyze pieces)

These are all independent of game mechanics, but incredibly important for how a game feels to a player.  While you may not be able to do all of the above, being able to understand them (and how they relate) is key to orchestrating the development of an effective game.  I can't draw, but I understand, psychologically, how art works and how it is constructed.  This lets me see where art is deficient in a game and work with real artists to help connect their desires to overall creative vision.

As for game mechanics, pay attention to how they tie into the above.  It's hard for me to really articulate how you go about learning what mechanics are good and bad, because it's something I've been thinking about since I was a kid.  Just be reflective.  Think about a mechanic, think about what it does to you when you experience it.  If a game is frustrating or if you think it sucks, figure our what, specifically (and it may be an intricate combination of factors), is causing that.  Think about what you would do differently.  I wish I could be more helpful here, but sadly I can't right now.  Just play a lot of games and think about them.  Play them to win and try to break their systems.

Interesting. My guess is the overall success rate might be lower because it's harder to make physical rewards for Video Games, and they're harder in general to pull off than say, a board game, because so many different skills are involved.

I think in the talk they theorized it's partly because it's harder for the audience to grasp such an intangible concept as a video game.  You see a mockup of a boardgame, you understand exactly what you're going to get.  Someone says "I want to make a strategy game set in WWI era Western Europe", and it's harder to understand what that will actually be at the end of the day.

Bearing that in mind, they said that the most successful Kickstarters had really good trailers and demos of their games before they attempted the Kickstarter.

At GDC during the Kickstarter panel, the successful funding of video game projects was said to be around 25% -- much lower than the normal rate of around 45%. There were some other numbers mentioned, but I cannot remember them off of the top of my head.

@EdgeOfProphecy: I don't see why you couldn't talk about your notes. I say throw 'em out there.

Edit: The 25% number is out there in the wild, at least.
http://indiegames.com/2012/03/gdc_2012_how_to_get_funding_on.html

I'll dig 'em up tomorrow maybe.  You are totally correct with that number, though.

Interesting note, board games fall within the site average for successful funding.

Also an interesting note, I seem to remember they said that video games (even excluding Double Fine), tend to exceed their funding requests by a wider margin than other projects.  Hopefully I wrote down the exact percentage somewhere, but I remember it being non-insignificant.

So less get funded, but the ones that do tend to get quite a bit of money.

That said, the amount of money being generated is still pretty low compared to the full cost of making a game, which is why I consider it part funding rather than a full solution in most cases.

I think Kickstarter leaves all project pages open, so if someone wanted to we could crunch the numbers ourselves. I wonder if there is a way to access the data in a less labor-intensive way than just opening up all the pages one by one.

I'd be super interested in what the numbers are for just game projects - if no one else does it, I might crunch those stats myself some weekend.

They talked about those very numbers at GDC during the Kickstarter panel.  I was there and took notes on it all.  Is it ok for me to talk about them? I could dig up my notes, but I don't want the Kickstarter police hauling me away in the night.

Or maybe there just isn't a big enough international market to justify the investment.

That's silly.  Of course there is, but they have to figure out a way to reasonably tap it.  Pretty sure they're working on it.

Here's a mockup for a RPG battle screen with some enemies I did.

No background is kinda shameful - everyone loves Earthbound, but I really need to get into proper scenery, even if completely stylized.

Ah, and here's another enemy, not pictured above. Thing is, I ended up shrinking the whole image to check the result and not re-sizing it back up, so this is actually working size. Hopefully this explains the dabbiness and lack of detail...

Wow, you really nailed the Earthboundiness with this!  With the current background, I would believe you if you told me "This is Earthbound HD".  To me, that's pretty awesome.

Huh.  Weird article.

A couple thoughts on Kickstarter

1)  No, big name devs are not going to be siphoning tons of money away from indies.  That's not how money works.  I can guarantee you that many of the people who funded Doublefine's game had never funded anything on Kickstarter before.  Here was Doublefine, a legend, telling you "Hey you know who we are.  We'll make you a game that you've always wanted, all you gotta do is preorder it."

 

If anything, that is good for tiny, unknown indies.  Those first timers have discovered Kickstarter, and they'll be more likely to go back and fund more projects.

2)  Yeah Doublefine has a reputation, and little guys don't have a reputation.  It's very natural that people would be mistrustful of unknown developers, even if they were asking for a comparatively small amount of money.  Remember, a dollar is still a dollar, and just because you're asking people to give you 15k dollars doesn't mean that dollar is any less valuable to a backer than Doublefine's 250k (or whatever their initial target was).

3)  It's an open ecosystem, and the best will survive.  I don't see that changing.  In order to attract dollahs, you need to provide TMV (total merit value) to the backers that exceeds their "I'll back this" threshold.  Tim Schafer's name is, quite literally, worth money.  If your name isn't worth money, then you have to drum up that TMV from somewhere else.  Strong rewards, good demo, great concept, etc.

4)  People also tend to misuse Kickstarter a lot.  I think the dynamics are different for a big brand studio versus some unknowns, and what's possible is different.  As alluded to above, Tim Schafer can make a hilarious video, say "I'm gonna make an adventure game", and that's all he needs to attract enough money to fund a game start to finish.  But that's because he's Tim Schafer, with all of Doublefine behind him.  He doesn't need a playable demo, voice acting, a fancy title, or really much of anything to convince people that backing him is a good idea.  Indeed, if you watch the video, you'll realize it's very carefully made to sell Tim Schafer and Double Fine, not a specific product.  They knew their strength and catered to it.

It's different for people with no reputation to lean on.  In many cases, you will not be able to fund an entire game through Kickstarter, since you will need to make part of the game to convince people that it's something that you have the skills to make, and that it's worth investing in.  For many people, Kickstarter needs to be used as part of a grander funding strategy, not as a be all end all solution.  I think people are far more willing to fund a game that's well on its way to completion, and help push it over the edge, than a game concept in its earliest planning stages.

There's no paradigm shift here, or the threat of draining money from honest, hard working, tiny indies.  We've never seen the value of a name on Kickstarter games before, and it works differently from what people are used to.  It's the emergence of something new, not the death of the establishment.

That's very impressive!

The collisions seem a bit odd, though.  The ships lose a lot of momentum when they hit walls; it's kind of jarring.  If the ships deflected more off the walls, and lost momentum from prolonged grinding, it would feel less abrupt.

Good luck!  The premise sounds really cool.

Never be afraid of math!  Math (at least in the US) is very poorly taught in schools, at all levels, but it's not actually that hard to understand.  I historically sucked at math, but once I actually started using it got a lot better.  I do a lot with it now that I would never have dreamed of two years ago.  Just takes some persistence.

When Blender overhauled the UI it promoted it to "useable piece of software" status.  I would love for GIMP to get the same treatment, being free and open source and all that.