I came recently came from that same background(heavily C/C++) to working in Unity.  My first experience was awful because I started from an existing project(Angry Bots) and had to integrate a C# Steamworks wrapper that I had been developing for a while.  It was a nightmare to work in a fully component based system when I had no idea how component based systems worked nor what components existed in Angry Bots.  I have since developed 2 projects from scratch in Unity, one that's 2D and the other a combination of a 2D "app" with a 3D game available.

If you are doing something that's heavily GUI based(using common widgets: lists, drop downs, etc) then I would suggest picking up a package such as NGUI.  If, however, you are just working on 2D and want basic buttons/toggle buttons, those can be developed from scratch without any packages.  For both of my recent Unity projects, I have used 3D planes to develop 2D components and have enjoyed every minute of it.  Obviously you can use the Unity GUI system for 2D, but from what I've ready, it's largely crap which is why NGUI is so popular.

If you are comfortable with working in 3D space, I would recommend going that route, as it will open up 3D opportunities in the future, whether that's including 3D assets in this project or developing a 3D game in the future.  Unity makes it extremely simple to work with 3D components and to perform 3D math calculations(almost every basic calculation you need already exists, including things like interpolating 1 Quaternion toward another).

You guys aren't thinking ahead far enough

Haha, fair enough

[static]

This was not actually your problem.  Polly's solution works, but for different reasons.

Your problem was a misuse of the keyword static.  Name mangling isn't part of the issue.

I concur, as name mangling only applies to functions you declare, but you are declaring variables in this case.  The reason that Polly's solution works is that it used the proper keyword "extern" in the header file which allows each translation unit to know that there is a variable out there, somewhere, with that name.  During the final step of compilation, the linker attempts to resolve these "externs" and if it is unable to find the global variable with the same name in a compiled file(typically a c or cpp file) it will throw a linker error.

Alright well it doesn't exist for Mac at least.

Sorry to tell you, but there's a Mac version available, as well.  Also, with a CD-Key, users are able to bypass the Desura Client entirely by creating an account and visiting http://www.desura.com/indiegamespack

I do think that page should be easier to find, though, because I was only able to find it from a Google search, not straight from the Desura home page.

I agree with these 2 guys that posting to your website with excerpts and/or links on Twitter/Facebook is your best bet at reaching everyone who might be interested in seeing the content.

UE3/UDK uses DirectX and Alt+Enter to toggle fullscreen mode, so I'd see if that has the issue, as well.  My guess is that Gregg is right, the OS is eating the keys before the currently focused window has a chance to respond.

From my limited experience, the GC in AS3 runs quite infrequently.  It does, however, always run when the system gets low on memory, so if you get close to exhausting the memory on a particular machine and you've correctly removed references, the GC should kick in.

To me, it really depends on how knowledgeable you are in particular areas, because I don't feel like there's a whole lot of room for a thesis about gameplay programming, unless you were trying to do something radical like genetic algorithms(already been done). But in particular areas like Graphics, AI, Physics, User Interface(probably more around input methods), or perhaps even game tools, you might be able to come up with something interesting enough to write a thesis on it.  In order to know what, specifically, to do, you'd probably already need to have decent depth of knowledge in the area, because I don't think they usually allow you to research what your thesis will be as part of your course work.  I haven't been through that personally, though, so I may be wrong about that...

I don't know the website, but I don't think there's any harm in getting back to them.  As soon as they ask for money, though, that should put an end to that =)

As was put brilliantly by someone on these forums, "if the website is making so little off advertising that they need you to pay them to review your app, then they obviously don't have enough traffic flowing in to make it worth paying for the review"

The one that is absolutely the worst I've experienced is one of the most obvious: undercommunication. I have experienced this with the only 2 "game producers" I've worked with; just not keeping everyone in sync.

The other issue I've experienced is a lack of knowledge about the state of the game, the desired features for the game, and a lack of understanding of how each discipline is working toward the final product.  Put another way, understanding what is wanted, who needs to do what first(priorities/dependencies), and what the current progress is.

I guess it's useful as it lets you potentially get in the indie royal bundle, but other than the bundle pay which is separate, we've never reached the 500 dollar payout threshold with Desura.

Yeah, that damn payout threshold! It's like Desura's way of making money for themselves because there are so few games that ever get near that on Desura...

Wow, that's ridiculous, but I would assume there's some good reason behind it.  Google isn't infallible, but they do tend to make logical decisions in my experience.

Although I wouldn't take Break Blocks as any indication of what a game is capable of selling on any platform, it has only pushed 34 units via Desura, most of which were only a dollar or 2.  Comparatively, we have sold around 100 units on our own website without any real marketing pushing people toward it.  I think its good to get your game out there in any capacity, but I don't think that anyone should count on Desura to drive their success(like you could potentially count on with Steam).

Or get your game rejected by Valve because it's on Greenlight.

http://indiegames.com/2013/05/developer_claims_it_was_reject.html

Honestly, I think that was Valve's new excuse for the old "not a right fit" message.  I think the reality is that the game just wasn't quite good enough in Valve's opinion and they wanted to let it stick around on Greenlight to see if the community would disagree with their decision.

I was just wondering if you guys could give me insight on how one should be effectively using their Facebook Fan Page when it comes to marketing and advertising for your game. I was wondering what exactly should differentiate your FB page from your website or blog? Or should there not be any differences and both sites get all the same updates?

Also when raising awareness for your game is it better to send people to your FB fan page or your website/blog?

Not that our first game was very successful, but we didn't create a game specific website nor fanpage.  We are keeping everything about the collective of the company with all games being hosted on a subsection of greatergoodgames.org, all Facebook being kept on our company's Facebook page, and all tweeting being done from our company's Twitter account.  The idea behind this is that making players aware of one of our games will tend to make them aware of our whole future catalog(we've only released 1 game so far).  If we want a game specific domain name, we'll just have it mirror or forward to the game page on our company site.

If we have a game that seems to get a following, we will probably create a Facebook fan page just to be the owners of it and give players the ability to "Like" the game on Facebook.

You can always have a platform specific header file that deals with these situations using externs or typedefs, but I can tell you that using a void* will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without even needing to have the void* actually point to an address.  Windows' HWND is 32-bit, Mac uses an actual pointer(WindowPtr), and Linux also uses a 32-bit ID like HWND.  I know this isn't the "proper way" to handle it and it may not be safe to handle it this way forever, but it is currently.

It seems that you're headed in the right direction with your code.  Not spreading out the hierarchy too flat, nor allowing it to build up to a massive sprawling hierarchy.  If you were all but done with the game, it wasn't a tiny puzzle game, and it was only 23 classes, I would start wondering how many lines of code are in those 23 classes.  It's very hard to balance, especially when you're new to programming or game development, but it seems like you're doing a good job.

Games are big code bases, there's just no way around it(except to build tiny puzzlers, but what fun is that?).

I don't have a lot of personal experience with this, but I can tell you that it can be difficult to get the major press to look at your game if you don't have broad appeal and don't offer an exclusive to them.  Smaller press sites, however, are generally a bit more friendly, especially when you are wanting your game reviewed.

My only experience with "Let's Play" style videos actually comes through a friend, the developer of Dwarfs!? who was lucky enough to get featured on a "WTF is..." video, which got 400K+ views and added something like 3000 sales the day it was published on YouTube.  If you can get one of the more watched "Let's Play" guys to post a video of your game, I think it can absolutely get you more than a moderately disseminated press release.

If you guys really want to open source it, then I think it's pretty straight forward: put it up on an open source site(like GitHub) and continue developing the engine.  You mentioned that you're wanting to move onto developing the game, so you'll want to separate off the game layer(hopefully you've already been doing that), but you'll invariably be modifying the engine as you develop your game, so be sure to continue merging those changes back into the open source project periodically.  As far as driving traffic to your new open source engine, there are a few threads around here that you'll want to join in on, as well as announcing its availability in your own thread.  There are also plenty of websites you could get it listed on.

I'm sure there are some people around here who may have some better advice on it, but I kinda view it as an "if you build it, they will come" kinda situation.  Developers need engines and if yours better suits their needs, they're going to use yours and hopefully give back to the community/engine in the process.

CS may not be mandatory but I'd at least expect a FAQ just in case I encounter a problem.

And what better way to do an FAQ for a freeware game than to throw up a forum and respond to people until the players start responding for you(it always happens eventually).