I think J-Snake might have mentioned the "correct" solution, meaning the realistic solution, which is to update the players based on their velocities.  If player one is moving and player two is standing still, then when player one hits player two, player one should transfer his momentum to player two, meaning that player one's velocity should be zero and player two's velocity should be set to player one's velocity.  If player one and player two are running toward each other at the same speed, their velocities should cancel each other out(sounds like this won't happen normally).  Finally, if player one is moving faster than player two in opposite directions, then player one will be halted and transfer his excess momentum to player two.

It's easiest to see how this works in pseudo-code:

Code:

OnCollision()
{
    if(Player one velocity > Player two velocity)
        Player one position += (-1.0 * Player one velocity) * Collision Intersection Amount
    else
        Player two position += (-1.0 * Player two velocity) * Collision Intersection Amount

    Player one velocity += Player two velocity
    Player two velocity += Player one velocity
}

Consequently, you don't actually "move" the player when a collision happens other than to make sure they are not still colliding when you check for a collision on the other player.  You really just want to let the transfer of momentum affect the velocity of each player and have the reaction happen over a few frames(assuming you have some friction coefficient to stop the other player from just sliding along forever while they're not holding an acceleration key)

I agree, I think the parentheses method is perfectly valid in this situation.

Reading their website, it seems you should be able to easily write an exporting plugin for the editor to output it in whatever format you'd like.

I would guess, though, that it'd be better to write a TMX loader.  Perhaps looking at the source code for this plugin will give you a good launch point.

Today I sent a bunch of review requests to a dozen websites or so. I dunno how others do this, but I feel stressed somehow -_-
Can't help but to feel worried about every email i send (I keep rewriting them every time i send them). Maybe because it's my first game and all.

I guess marketing and PR isn't my thing

I know how you feel, man!  We ran through the same thing just 1 week ago.  I was lucky to have a few contacts in the industry to help me toss around e-mails, but there still hasn't been a whole lot of coverage.  I just want to make the games...why don't they market themselves?

Awesome game, btw.  Highly polished and aesthetically pleasing/interesting.  Best of luck with the release!

Prototyping in AS3 to get the things down, then porting to C for a low-end machine that would be highly unlikely to even run anything Flash.

Waaa, this sounds so ridonkulous it, just, might, work! But srsly, use Haxe instead!

This is one of the craziest things I've heard recently and my wife believes she's a cat!  Paypal is beyond simple to set up and it will surely come in handy to have one setup in the future.

It is certainly a tough thing to venture into unless you know a number of companies in need. It doesn't help that a number of contractors and contracted companies do a horrible job or don't even finish the job, thus making a bad name for everyone else regardless of their talent and/or professionalism.  At Tripwire, we worked with 5 different contractors on various programming tasks and only 1 of them did a decent job(not even good job, just decent) and we were thankful for them...so companies are skeptical of contracting to relatively new or unheard of contract offerings.  I know that doesn't answer your question, but I thought you should understand the difficulties before trying to dive into it.

While this is true, the same can occur in the other direction as well. I've been on both sides of the fence (contracting others and being contracted) and it's not a one way problem. The key thing is to build good references yourself AND require references from the other party, irrelevant of the direction of the relationship.

Quite true, sound advice!

We straight-up put our game on the pirate bay when that came out

...

So the lesson learned is that you should just accept that people will pirate your game- BUT you can do more than just sulking about it.

Holy crap, man! Brilliant! Simply brilliant! I have been developing games in some capacity for the last decade, but I've always thought that the whining over piracy is exaggerated.  My most recent ex-employer said "we've lost millions to pirates!" to which I said "oh? tens of millions of people have downloaded the game?"...and I got looks like I was retarded followed by "no, only about 50 thousand, but at $20 a piece that's over a million dollars".  I just kept my mouth shut, not wanting to start a war with the president over it. IMO, every download is not a lost sale, not even close...maybe 10% of the downloads are lost sales...maybe!

It is certainly a tough thing to venture into unless you know a number of companies in need. It doesn't help that a number of contractors and contracted companies do a horrible job or don't even finish the job, thus making a bad name for everyone else regardless of their talent and/or professionalism.  At Tripwire, we worked with 5 different contractors on various programming tasks and only 1 of them did a decent job(not even good job, just decent) and we were thankful for them...so companies are skeptical of contracting to relatively new or unheard of contract offerings.  I know that doesn't answer your question, but I thought you should understand the difficulties before trying to dive into it.

He's pointing out that there's a general pattern to the screenshots you've shown.  Things tend to go at a 45 degree angle from the bottom right to the top left of the screenshots.

Read a few entries in what could be described as a Facebook Status or Twitter Feed of every activity of a bunch of Indie Game Devs

We've been debating going this route, as well.  I think it's frickin perfect...now I just gotta get my business partner on board!

Agreed! Even a boss that seems to believe he owns your ass may just allow you to do your own thing on the side.  I would say, though, that if this is built into your contract and you don't trust the words that come out of your employer's mouth, I would get it in writing(or have the conversation via e-mail from a personal e-mail address).  Better safe than sorry...

I don't think any amount of explaining exception handling is going to make it work in C...

Hah, see, Will gets it!

I don't know how my "joke" got lost in translation(regardless of whether it was funny or not...cuz it wasn't)...I know what exceptions are and how to handle them, but I honestly have never bothered using a try/catch statement in my own code...I really just watch it crash and figure out how to fix it...which is one of the many reasons I've felt comfortable downgrading to C from C++ =)

I could not give up my exceptions.  Coupled with RAII error handling/cleanup is 1000x easier.  Also great for 'out of channel' communications.

Hrmm, that probably would make life a lot easier...but I'm just too stubborn =D

My buddy and I chose a small game for our first project...

I thought it might take a maximum of 1.5 years, but was hoping for 9 months to a year...

These two statements seem mutually exclusive. Your scoping seems to have been way off. Binding of Isaac was made in 3-6 months, I believe.

While I agree with you, I noticed that the Binding of Isaac was made by someone who had about 15 games to his name.  I don't think you can compare their situation with this one.

i wish you luck but i want to give a warning: no matter how experienced you are as a programmer, i'd warn against believing that you can finish your first game ever in 2-3 months and that what you create would be marketable. i think that's way too much to ask for. it's the equivalent of being really good at spelling and grammar, never having written a story before, but wanting to write, and sell, your first novel in 3 weeks

I'd like to second this opinion.  My buddy and I chose a small game for our first project...2 and a half years later we finally released it.  I thought it might take a maximum of 1.5 years, but was hoping for 9 months to a year...it just takes too much time to get into a groove with another person on your first game.  Not to say that it's impossible for you to show us how it's done, but you'd be surprising a lot of people if you really pull it off the first time within that time frame =)

This looks like a decent very basic starter:

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/611/1/Getting-started-with-Actionscript-3/Page1.html

Make sure you understand all of the code in there before moving on, not just copy-paste and get it working.  Toy around with some of the numbers in the tutorials and try to get a solid understanding of what variables control which aspects of the scene and figure out why they do those things, until it all makes sense.

Then you can jump onto slightly more advanced things, like this:
http://tutorials.flashmymind.com/2009/04/flash-mouse-trailer-with-stars/

I don't think any amount of explaining exception handling is going to make it work in C...

Hah, see, Will gets it!

I don't know how my "joke" got lost in translation(regardless of whether it was funny or not...cuz it wasn't)...I know what exceptions are and how to handle them, but I honestly have never bothered using a try/catch statement in my own code...I really just watch it crash and figure out how to fix it...which is one of the many reasons I've felt comfortable downgrading to C from C++ =)

I've decided to jump aboard and follow a number of Indie Devs on Twitter:
@Emberheartgames
@Farmergnome
@darkscavenger
@DushanChaciej
@PompiPompi
@thatshelby
@eclectocrat
@xfry

Our twitter is @GrtrGoodGames

Wait, we're supposed to handle exceptions?  I always just watch the game come crashing down.  I'm doing it wrong!

Writing in pure C probably isn't helping me do it right, eh?

I have the most experience with and love for UnrealScript due to it's C++/Java style, but that's a little proprietary

I'll have to go with AngelScript as it is the most C-like language on the list, I believe.