I tend to think of EPIC MEGAGAMES when I think of low resolution games. Like, Jill of the Jungle.

I also think of Jetpack.

And the original Duke Nukem! With the grappling hook hands. AWESOME.

Hi y'all. My name is Kyle. I live in Seattle and I look like this:



That is Tiffany in the background, making RSVP cards for getting married. Now we are married.

I got started playing games on a Commodore 64 owned by my grandmother. I loved turning it on, putting in the ridiculous large floppies, and wrestling with what the hell was supposed to be going on in Beachhead. My favorite game was Jumpman.



I liked the Bombs Away! level the best, although Hotfoot was a good one, too.

My parents were distrustful of video games while I was growing up, so I did most of my playing at friends' houses. This was probably to the detriment of quite a few friendships, as the novelty of video games had worn off by the time I arrived. I first remember Mario being played at a big party my parents were at. People were taking turns in the living room while others mingled with drinks and stories. Mario 3 was the first game to consume an entire night of sleep.

Now I pretty much play anything, although I gravitate toward games from the 16- and 8-bit eras. Tif and I like to play games on the DS together, like Bomberman, and Bangai-O. My favorite game is R-Type for the PC-Engine, although I associate it with my teeth (orthodontist had a coin-op).



By day, usually, I am an elementary school teacher. Tif teaches kids with emotional and behavioral disorders. We run a small record label in our spare time, and we have a band devoted to making weird, dorky, noisy pop. I started making games because I wanted to distribute little video games with some of our songs.

Also, we have rabbits to go with our cat:



They are called Scully and Mulder.

For a long time it was the coding thing for me; I'd spend weeks learning how to draw something to the screen in Objective-C and get something up and responding to keyboard input and then I would quit.

Now I'm just using Game Maker Language (with a dash of DnD) and finding out that there are SO MANY things that go into a game before it even feels playable.

It is hard to think about spending a lot of time making a game and then not having very many people play it. It's a different feeling than creating things in other venues. When I play a show, people are right there in front of me, and I can at least look at them to see how it's going. Making a game, I can put it on the internet and tell people about it and...I can't see how they're reacting to it. I can't even tell if they're playing it.

I will take some later today? They no longer live inside our apartment, so Tetris no longer rides on them.

our cat is called tetris, or tiny-face. most often she is tiny-face.

I like Nectaris / Military Madness (PCE) a lot. When we visited our friends in Minneapolis, we played that a lot. Like Advance Wars, but chunkier. And it happens on the moon!

Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS) is great, if you haven't played it already.

For rainy days, I like roguelikes a lot, too. Shiren the Wanderer, Nethack, Powder, Crawl; they all feel appropriately epic and indoors-y.

Most PC games don't tend to disappoint me, since demos and shareware episodes mitigate expectations pretty well.

A game that I really dislike is Scurge, for the DS. I didn't like it because despite it's neat little sprites and the satisfying chaining mechanic, and despite a lot of the design decisions that were really nice (like letting you hold a shoulder button to switch weapons, and not making you do that in realtime), the basic tasks that you were expected to adhere to were horrible tedious jumping sequences and "find red key to open red door" puzzles. This was made worse by the "biological contaminant" factor, which meant oftentimes I had just invested an hour or so pushing boxes, throwing switches, and clearing rooms of enemies, only to die because I couldn't find a safe room fast enough. It would have been a much better game if it wasn't filled with so much "ye olde generic stuffe to do!" between the encounters that mattered. The worm boss? Awesome. The impact was a little deadened after two hours of running in and out of the hub, throwing switches, and dying as my lungs filled with "SCURGE." It was like two different games.

I guess I just don't like poorly executed Metroidvanias. I love Metroid - I love the gloomy "on your own" sense of being deep in a level with threats all around you - but I can't stand games that have me do tons of backtracking through a central hub that has no reason for being there. I liked the "hub" in Shadow of the Colossus. Arriving back in the temple had a purpose, it didn't take too much time, and it forced the player into a neat relationship; the most familiar place in the game was eventually the most awful and unsettling. It used repetition to build that relationship.

I love Moonfruit! It was delightful.

Today I made the charge shot for a game I am working on. The game is called Cloud Cats and the shot can be used to either activate a portal (the peaceful use) or to shoot some enemies (the not-so-peaceful).



I am new to making games and use Game Maker, like so many others. It took me awhile to make the "aggressive" charge heart work. It uses "instance_nearest()", but I am still getting my head around OOL.

I don't think children are driven away from pixel art at all. If the game is fun enough, they'll play it anyways. That's my experience with younger children at least.

It might just be the kids that i work with, but they tend to focus on mechanics and "what you can do" in a game world. Sure, they'll talk about graphics too, but most of the kids I talk to about games like games with lots of verbs in them. They love Pokemon because it feels exhaustive. Say what you will about games that equate quality with quantity, Pokemon games feel substantial, and they give kids plenty of feedback. Pokemon games are funny, too, because there are so many Pokemon and so many things to do that the animations of the individual Pokemon are almost placeholder animations.

I think the best game mechanics give the player a satisfying feeling of control over a novel action, and kids are sensitive to this. So, it doesn't really matter if a game uses pixel art or 3D modeling to represent the game world; it matters if the art consistently supports the game and makes the player feel responsible and in control.

Also, I'm new to this forum; hi?