^ I remember that bug. Brilliant game.

Ahh!  Thanks!  Took me a sec to figure out how to access it, but that means the sound should be in your SAMPLES folder, called worm.wav.  I can still play the sound, but only through KnP.  It's as glorious as I remember.

I'm pretty sure it's part of that .snd file. Otherwise, it'd be in your samples folder, and evidently it isn't. I played all the sample games yesterday before I started making this game, and they do use a ton of sounds that aren't in SAMPLES. Still got no idea how to open it though... smash it with a rock?

To be honest that last bug was mine. Still, it was almost impossible to detect, and the kind of thing I would never do in another programming language. I notice now that despite the 2D layout, information density in the Klik & Play event editor is crazy low. You'd be in better shape even with a text-based language where only a dozen lines could be displayed at once. A bunch of checkboxes don't mean shit.

Now I'm stuck on a limitation, rather than a bug. This game scrolls, and unfortunately whenever an object leaves the gray zone that frames the "Play area", it is destroyed. An obvious solution is to make the play area bigger, but common sense gets thrown out the window here. See, KnP's camera always frames the play area from the top-left corner. Because it doesn't let you move this camera, there is no benefit whatsoever in being able to make it larger than the window size, which you can do. Yves and Francois must've been planning for the day when people use 10,000 x 10,000 monitors. And still make games in Klik & Play.

Graahhhhh I was busy making what would've been the most complex game ever made in Klik & Play. But it was shot down by a ridiculous KnP bug by which an object's X position can only be set once per tick (Y position works), and while the point was to hack around the program's gross limitations, I simply can't be bothered to do so around glaring bugs as well. What a tragedy.

Here's something that presumably contains the sound you were looking for. Opened up Hungry Hedgehogs and it's definitely there, the question is how to get it out of the .snd file- checked FileXT and nothing jumped out. KNP doesn't appear to have this capability.

This may sound like a stupid question, but is it important to be good at math to know how to program?

It depends on what you want to do and how you go about it (i.e. how much you rely on other peoples' code). But you are programming by making games in Klik software, and using math just as much. I'd argue that it's even harder though, because you can't really construct layers of abstraction in it that would otherwise make complex math more palpable.

For some reason, I can't function unless I can click through a series of on-screen commands. Actual programming is like a total "mindfuck" to me.

There are already other visual programming languages that can be used for games. Unfortunately none that I've seen are as easy to get started with as Klik products, and some are just terrible (never touch Cycling 74's Max). I'm pretty certain that the next major game implementation program for beginners, whenever it comes out, will be based on a VPL. Anyway, guess one man's simple is another man's mindfuck.

It mostly depends on what you wish to program. Unless you're doing 3D graphics, it shouldn't be too bad.

High-level 3D and 2D are equally easy.

I remember that sound and its associated image. The weird thing is that the worm smiled at the hedgehog before he was eaten, a mildly horrifying sequence.

KnP was my first brush with game implementation. Problem was that it was so goddamn hard to shoehorn just about any desired game into it, especially since I was such a whippersnapper at the time. While today I find the language impressive for its originality, it was just plain shit all along. For that reason I continue to deeply respect people who implement games of arbitrary complexity in Clickteam software- which remains largely unchanged to this day. Sure, C++ is associated with dozens of stumbling blocks, but at least it encourages a kind of understanding that (given time) hammers the user into the shape of a programmer. The Klik way of implementing games, on the other hand, is a mindfuck from start to finish.

I might make an Adult/Educational compo entry in KnP (also got an ancient retail copy), just for the hell of it.

Looks nice to me. How would you specify server-side variables that must be synched?

This is a weird question. Most games heavily involve spatial reasoning, including the near-entirety of action and strategy games. Can you link to the conversation?

Perhaps it's a disconnect in terminology then, because your understanding of "Gamer" is how I define a "Hardcore Gamer". I would equate that with being an "avid reader" or a "movie buff". All of these types of people tend to have their own language and interest in technical minutia of the subject. To me gamers are just people who enjoy playing electronic games. You can enjoy games without wanting them to be a central part of you identity or playing hours of them a day or having to play games designated by the elitist gamers who feel their social identity is being threatened by 'stupid' casual games.

No need for straw men- never called casual games stupid or illegitimate. Actually I find the term "hardcore gamer", and every attempt to define it, completely ridiculous. You're either a gamer or non-gamer. And I argue that the term is almost always applied by gamers and non-gamers alike to individuals fitting my conception. My definition arises from the usage I've seen it in, not from my ideals. And according to this definition, someone who only plays Solitaire and Minesweeper is not a gamer.

Simply having done something does not make the the kind of person denoted by that action. Fishing every few months does not make you a fisherman, kicking around a football with your friends on the weekend does not make you a sportsman, and putting ideas into text does not make you a writer. "Gamer" denotes a hobby, thus implying importance of the activity to the person.

I don't think it's fair to say that women like different things in games. As in the male gaming population, female gamers vary along a similar distribution.

Exactly. There is already far more within-sex variation in game tastes than between-sex. People often talk shit along the lines of "Men prefer games about domination, death, and penetration, while women prefer games about nurturing, caring, and relationships". No. The most absurd implication of these kind of ideas is that because they're based on observations of sociological and not biological phenomenae, they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

^ Doom with the mouse? Heresy. Cursor keys + < + > + rshift = win. Actually FPS is one of my favorite genres, which I almost always play with mouselook cause I tend towards post-Quake ones (Doom is the only old raytracer I like, and I've played many). Yet I don't find strafing while rotating with the keyboard difficult at all. It's as easy as mouselook with key movement for me.

Moving forward while turning and strafing is a perfectly valid move in Doom, which I have used. And there's the simpler turn and strafe move, which still requires rotation independent of movement.

Also usually in those games strafes served only for the purpose of dodging bullets.

I disagree. It's used just as often for bounding around obstacles to maximize visibility in minimal time. Strafing is important to infantry tactics, another reason why Boh doesn't need it; the nature of the threats doesn't necessitate it.

^ Do people ever accuse you of being a 12 year old boy? Seen that happen so many times.

and sometimes men.

Right, except in that case it has nothing to do with sex. At least not that I've ever seen.

This = WRONG.

Female gamers are about even split with male gamers.

Only on a lame technicality. While yes, as high a proportion of females occasionally play games on computers as males, most of them wouldn't be considered "gamers". You have to consider hours clocked, centrality of games to one's identity, and the games being played. Blazing Solitaire a few times a day does not make someone a gamer. "Gamer" is comparable to terms like "avid reader" or "movie buff". So there are alot of female gamers, but they remain severely underrepresented.

And back to that rant, I've seen too many slightly above average girls exploit being the center of attention in a nerd group.  It's sad for all involved.  Of course, I've also seen dudes shouting perfectly solid female players off of Counter-Strike servers, so it's just sort of a skewed expected population dynamic problem.

I've played many a Half-Life mod, and every overt female player was either on or above the level of everyone else. However I hardly ever played Counter-Strike, and considering the average maturity in CS, your account doesn't surprise me at all.

The whole "this game is for girls" shit is just shameful.

Yea! I cringe when I hear that stuff.

i never used the strafe too, i think it's pointless unless the game uses the mouse to aim, and of course this game doesn't!

This a curious statement. While obviously not every game needs strafe, including Boh, it has nothing to do with the mouse. Try the original Doom on Ultra-Violence without strafing. It'd be really hard. Strafing is required whenever the player must be able to move independently of aim, regardless of the aiming controls.

Seen it on Gametrailers and GameDev a few times, and I thought it looked like a cool game. But it being free and open-source is news to me. Incredible.

Two problems I see:
-ascribing represenatative point values to objects is non-trivial, and
-most multiplayer games don't get many (enough) players sans modularity; it would aggrevate this problem.

Though in general a multiplayer game where players design stuff would be awesome. It would be especially cool as an actual mechanic though, where players engineer things to gain supremacy, whether in production, destruction, construction, aesthetics... dunno. Anything. Guess those robot coding games are like that, and I've heard of a hacking MMO involving programming (the name escapes me). There's just so much more that could be done.

Anyway, this concept would eliminate both stated problems. But I guess it strays pretty far from your original idea.

My sister is a gamer, though she doesn't play many indie games.

I don't really like the way the question was formulated. In the context of the Internet, it doesn't matter whether someone has testes or ovaries (or neither). This fact has absolutely no relevance to the consumption and discussion of games. Yet whenever women pop up in mutliplayer games, or game-related boards, men start acting weird. Truth is, communication over the Internet is faciliated by visual and audio symbols, never haptics, so it cannot be considered even vaguely sexual. Unfortunately a small minority of girls exploit mens' tendancy (far smaller than in RL), lavishing in the center of attention. But that's another story.

The problem is actually more serious than unfulfilled sexual attention. There are far less female indie gamers, because there are less female gamers, and the former is a fairly small subset of the latter (like falsion said). Why? It's just another failure of a mediocre society, I reckon. [/diatribe]

I liked the demo up until I reconfigured from the default control scheme, and found that you can't strafe and rotate at the same time. Seems a minor complaint, but it's far more annoying than total exclusion of strafing would've been.

There's interest here. Sounds like a cool and totally worthwile project, hope you find time to get it done.

I'd want to see support for both C/S and P2P models. That's all I can think of now.

You've been given the answer 3 times so I take it you're having conceptually difficulty.

Imagine you're looking at a bookshelf. Like a 2D game camera, the direction of your view is fixed, perpendicular to the books. Now if you walk directly to your left, the books appear to move right. Walk to your right and they move left. This is the same no matter how short or far of a distance you walk. So the books always move in the opposite direction of your view. In other words, their apparent position is related to the inverse of your viewpoint's position: this is -camera.x and -camera.y. Of course, if all the books were at the point defined by (-camera.x, -camera.y), they would all be in the exact same place. You have to account for the objects' actual positions: this is (sprite.x, sprite.y). Put the coordinates together and you get the draw position (sprite.x - camera.x, sprite.y - camera.y) for each sprite.

This defines where your camera is looking at, and implicitly controls what your camera is currently showing, because objects outside of the viewport won't be seen. When you've seen it working, next implement the offset your sprites as described here, so that they're drawn from their origins and not their top-left corners.

@Inanimate:

It's undesirable for several reasons, and I guess that's one. But it's pretty easy to disguise people as opposing fighters. Ever heard of a false flag operation? Anyway, AI combat robots would probably have pretty advanced identification mechanisms.

A bit too late to quote people directly (did read the entire thread), but I think that non-violent games are aplenty, while there is a high proportion of violent games. I'm with the people who reckon we need not less violence, but better violence. If we had games that explored violence more deeply we'd be in good shape.

The "young male demographic" explanation for the primacy of violence in games is poor. Whether it happens to be a necessary evil, social ill, moral failure, psychological defect, or whatever in a particular case, it's undeniably one of the most important interactions people have (yes- I'm for more games about people, including their societal constructions). In fact, this is reflected in other media. Since the origins of literature, drama, and cinema, violence has been one of the most important themes.

I see two issues with the violence trends in games. First, it's textually weak. Usually a jive-ass "good guys" plot is simply glued on, which basically serves as an excuse to kill some creatures, by putting violence in a purely justified context. Though this can be pulled off well if aesthetic elements are up to scratch (e.g. Half-Life 2 and others), it hardly ever is. Excellent literary/dramatic uses of violence rarely stoop so low. Worse, the mechanics of violence seem highly resistant to change. Kill.switch introduced a cover system for a third-person game that worked. Gears of War ripped it off, then everyone ripped it off. Halo had a recharging shield; now most shooters do (not to say either game invented said mechanics, they popularized them). My reaction to the dozens of ridiculously derivative third- and first-person shooters plaguing the market borders on disgust. K.s and Halo's achievements were fine in their day, but games ought to move ever forward with innovation, because there's still so much to be had.

Where's fear? Your enemies and allies are stupid, one-dimensional moving targets who gladly throw themselves into any fight, with no concern for self. This kills off any real emotional involvement, and much tactical consideration. What about the escalating and polarizing nature of violence? Violence spreads in the real world, yet we don't see this happen in games. Losing people you feel kinship with? This affects to moviegoers, and there's even more potential to hit gamers with it. A relationship made with virtual actors, however unreal, can be formed through interaction, not pure observation. Hell, even anger? When I play FPSs I feel aggression, never anger. I kill the enemy because it is specified that I do so, not because I'm pissed off with their past interactions with me. And I just pulled all this out of my ass: there has to be much, much more. We need at least a mature subset of violent games.

EDIT- I was just about to edit and point this out, but mewse beat me to it. One reason we see alot of violence in games is because it's fundamentally easy to design on a basic level.

@pgil:

Thanks for the feedback and warm reception! I'll make them into longer tracks before I use them, but they'll still be repetitive as hell, and dark. It's the kind of music I appreciate most... while the screams of my soul respitelessly echo. But really, ~3/32 of those sketches are bright, a marginally higher proportion than Joy Divison's songs. Har!