I just played some Mari0 and realized "man, I love portal-based puzzles, I wish there was more".
Then I thought of this, would a game based on portal concepts be considered a rip-off? Or could it be the beginning of a new game genre?

A similar occurrence of this is the MOBA (massive online battle arena) genre. It started with DOTA, then HON and LOL came and people said they were copies, but now we have the MOBA genre that is slowly growing.

But what about the FPS genre? It became so saturated that now we have stuff like this

What's your view on this? Can we avoid overused video-game stereotypes? And how could existing genres be improved?


I've recently replayed Half-life and it really feels like a polished game, even now. I then read about it's development, and I learnt that it's success was heavily based on it's differences from other FPS at the time, such as cutscenes being replaced by scripted events and the addition of puzzles.
So, HL stood out between other FPSes because it twisted a few conventions, and added some elements to the gameplay, creating a unique experience.

You can also turn a common thing scary by conditioning the player to think it's scary. For instance, have a door with a red light under it, and when you open it a monster appear.
Next time you have a door like that, the player with be apprehensive

Half-life 2 (episode 1?) was pretty darn scary to me, with all the zombies (and zombines!) and all. Even though I had weapons and save states, I was pretty scared >_<
The sounds helped a lot:

Traps in Skyrim are pretty funny to come around, but not the obvious pressure plates that shoot fire and others like that (that btw, can be used against enemies). I like the simple traps. Like sometimes a chest will be wired to a spiky ball, and you're like "why would someone do that?!" or the dead body surrounded by ice glyphs IN SNOW. I died a loot before I noticed what was killing me

This may also help

Pokemon games are really bad in my opinion. Takes too long to open the menu and do whatever you want. Also using HM's are really annoying... yeah I know I can break this rock... yeah I want to use rock smash... yeah pikachu used rock smash... repeat ON EVERY ROCK.

Now, any UI that's fast and show me the information I need, that's what I like. That's why Skirim's UI sucks, its slow, shows no information... the UI mod really makes it the way it should be

Interesting how bad UI design makes a bigger impact than a good UI ^^

Development has been kinda slow this last few days... working on the end-of-level screen
Not entirely sure what to do with the right part yet, i'm thinking give the player medals that slightly increase the final score. Something like "built 10 towers" or "only level 1 towers" and that gives a small score boost to help achieve the high score cap

That reminds me, I need to explain what's the score for. Each level has a score cap, and that means if the player obtain a score equal or greater than that, he gets a tech point bonus, to spend at the shop. So if a level seem too hard, you go back and replay previous levels and try to earn those extra points to get stronger

Level 0?

The alpha version will be soon complete.

Remade the tech shop when adding the mouse support. Now the icons are more colorful and brighter. Also reorganized them and removed redundant techs

Tower defense levels

Currently:
-Tower defense on a post-apocalyptic world with 8-bits graphics. Story is about robots and your journey on protecting humanity against something we created ourselves

Dream games:
-RPG centered around alchemy. The characters are 3 girls and you can develop their battle abilities as you like. Villains are an evil secret organization, corrupt elemental spirits and a double-personality artificial being

-Simple metroid-like platformer where you climb a gigantic tree

-Shoot'em up where you're a medieval fantasy rpg character. You get randomly generated equipment along the way

Amnesia: Dark descent
Interesting; scary; but bad storyline

Terraria
A good RPG I guess

Realm of the mad god
Hard as shit, addicting though

League of Legends
Great gameplay, better MOBA community

Team fortress 2
It's still a good FPS

Diablo 2
Too easy, better with mods

Skyrim
Gotta complete ALL side quests

I'm looking forward for more episodes of Lets Test, I enjoy these, and I will surely request one once my game is complete :D

Decided to mess around with the "behind the scenes" stuff, and downloaded visual studio to make a better database editor.
Even though I'm a complete noob to VS, I could recreate the database editor that I made on Construct in a few hours.

The creep editor is fully functional, while the level editor is all in place, just waiting for the coding

Mouse is fully implemented for the gameplay, menus are still using only keyboard though

The most recent screen shot:

The new performance also allowed me to increase the "speed up" mode. There is now 1x, 2x and 3x speed options

So, I was messing around with my game and I discovered something terrible. If I had too many towers and enemies, FPS would start dropping fast, and i'm not even talking about a huge amount of objects. A total of 40 objects (between towers and enemies) and FPS dropped from 60 to 45, worse if I was accelerating the game: 17 fps.

I was sure that was some limitation of the engine. I mean, construct is a game maker, and a really buggy one, so what could I expect?
But after some digging through the code, i found out that the built-in turret behavior was causing the fps drop because of its "aim at enemy behavior". I turned it off and created a custom aiming event,that for my surprise worked even better than the built-in option.

Guess what now? Not even by filling the screen with turrets and enemies I can get the FPS to drop under 58. Even when accelerating, the game runs as smooth as possible.

Here's my 2 cents on the brick tile

Stuff!

I would like some feedback on some features i'm considering adding

1. Mouse support
All TDs I've played used the mouse. Do you think this is necessary here? As I said, this game follows some NES restrictions, so I'm using only 2 buttons + directions + start.
I was thinking about adding a mouse mode, what's you guys opinion?

2. More buttons?
I believe 2 buttons only could get confusing at some point. 1~7 for tower shortcuts could be a useful addition. Also a button to speed up the game (like Defese Grid, holding F makes the game faster)

Outcry

Outcry is a Tower Defense that follows the restrictions of a NES game. You can build 7 types of towers, each one with a different on-hit effect to counter the enemy waves from reaching your HQ.

Features:
+ Create your strategy to counter many different enemies with different weaknesses and status.
+ Position towers and upgrade them to get the best effect combo.
+ Dialogue system enhancing the story mode.
+ Three difficulty modes and secret levels.
+ Research system: get extensive upgrades that carry over levels.
+ Achievements: you also get in-game rewards for getting these.
+ Unique monsters create a need to a variety of strategies

I've started this project 9 months ago with a mockup and slowly started programming it using Construct Classic.

The setting of Outcry is a post-apocalyptic world where mankind struggles to survive the creatures created by the holocaust. With the help of a advanced military robot AI called B.E.T.A. they developed towers capable of dealing with the wild beasts.
Your job is to protect key areas with these towers, and find out a way to return the world to its normal state.

More images, info and a download of an early alpha can be found here:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/outcry

The things I mostly look forward when I play a TD:

1. Lots of levels.
- Like Gemcraft with it's 60~100+ levels

2. Customization
- So the gameplay don't get repetitive too fast.

3. Challenges
- Being able to play challenge modes, like endurance and hard modes