Heeeeeeeeeeeeere!  

I hope you're prepared for the legions that are sure to be amassing now that you've ousted yourself.   

But seriously though, there are plenty other mediums to get into if your goal is to have a skill that's able to attract the opposite sex.  As has been said previously, female gamers are a (rising) minority, and indie gaming itself is also a minority.  Multiplicatively, seems you don't have much of a chance, mate 

But yea, if you're jealous of those guys with guitars and silver tongues with the hordes of women flocking around them (not really) then by all means, there's nothing stopping you from picking up a guitar and crooning words that will make the coldest hearts quiver.

Another CRPG advantage: no time spent bickering, doing math, or looking up rules. I used to role-play with friends in high school, and I still remember the incredible amount of time we wasted over that stuff. CRPGs streamline the experience enormously. I guess you could say that while they allow less freedom to improvise, they also allow less freedom to ruin the damn game.

This is too true, P&P RPGs rely too much on the people involved.  While the same could be said about CRPGs (i.e. the people involved in the making of the game) it has the advantage of going through an iterative process by which the unsuccessful parts will have (hopefully) been taken out.

Most of the main points have already been mentioned previously, here are my thoughts on the greatest advantages of both mediums.

In CRPGs, the greatest advantage that I can think of would be summarized in one word:  Convenience.
It's more convenient to have complex rules that are handled by a machine, the action moves along without pausing to calculate logic; it all happens automagically.  It's more convenient in expressing the world experience to the player, having graphics and sound that represent the idea of the situation.  It's also more convenient in terms of it being readily available whenever the player wants to exist in that world, without having to rely on having a DM and other players run it, they just run the game.

In Pen-and-Paper RPGs I can summarize what I think is its greatest asset in one word as well:  Open-endedness.
I ran a campaign that lasted over three years with a group of five players using a game system I created myself.  Without going too deeply into the game system, it described characters in terms of attributes and skills.  The system allowed players to use skills tied to different attributes which would effect the outcome and how the skill is applied.  I also encouraged my players to describe in detail what and how exactly their character was using that skill.
My story-telling was also as open-ended.  I planned only key characters and environments that I wanted to have in the world, the story moved along according to the party, not me.

In P&P RPGs, the logic is purely that, logic in a human's mind; very easily malleable.  Even if a DM uses a pre-made system they could bend and/or discard any rules they don't like.  What's been programmed in a game, is what's been programmed.  It doesn't change.

It is precisely for those reasons that I encourage my players to embrace the freedom of the medium.  If they wanted hack-and-slash dungeon crawling, there are plenty of CRPGs that cater to that.  I run my campaigns as a story-teller and they are the main characters.

So would you mean a character in a platformer who is self-aware?  Like, he knows he's being controlled by something and, say, if you were to try to make him jump across a chasm that he knows for a fact he won't be able to make, he'll just refuse?

As has been previously said, I think that's been done in RPGs and Adventure Games, but I think it'd be very hard to do to make it not frustrating.  In a genre such as platformers, a hallmark is tight and responsive gameplay, and I think adding AI interference would mire that a bit.

Unless you mean that they are self-aware and only display that by commenting on their situation, then in that case it's just fluff and wouldn't affect gameplay much, other than give hints and analyze the situation to help the player.

   

As long as it's not a paddlin'.  Anywhere but my butt, that's my sittin' butt.

Why does being made by hollywood or after the year 2000 prevent something from being a movie you need to see?  Just because it has a possibility of familiarity doesn't mean it's not a movie a designer needs to see.

You should rename the thread; "Movies that there's a good chance you've not seen yet and need to"

Start a different thread called "Movies that can provide good inspiration to designers" if you want to keep the restriction arbitrarily placed in this thread.

Oh, it's not so much necessarily a cop out in the creative sense since it just fit my needs.  It just also happens to be a plus that it's generally easier to do.  I'm totally open to other ideas though.
In terms of visual design, my roommate goes to SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) and she's been showing interest in providing assets for my game, so they certainly won't be of horrible quality.  The main character will be rotoscoped (Me being the model) and abstract is the key element.

Take this piece as a proof of concept.  I made this when I got interested in the silhouette look a while back.

It's sad, but because of the overused silhouette style I'm not all that interested in Night Game, despite me being a fan of Knytt and wanting to play his Wiiware title.

That's precisely my fears.  It just seems like such a striking aesthetic that, once used, makes it cliche and kitschy.  While I genuinely enjoy the look, I have to admit that it's attractive to use due to not having to actually be competent in lighting, having to deal with such things as shade and highlights.

Would it seem as tired if the silhouettes weren't black?  What about a vector-style look, though much much simplified.

I don't know why, but when I code I often like to slap on either of the two E.S. Posthumus albums.  If it's not that then maybe Amethystium.  I generally like ambient/chillout for coding.

I don't think there's necessarily a poignant lack of thinks to keep a player's interest if violence is taken out as long as it's there's a good amount of interaction that is generally pleasing to humans.  Social interaction is one you've mentioned, but there's also human's curiosity and urge to explore.

Early adventure games relied on the human inclination to explore and play with the environment to keep the player interested.  Sure, most were point-and-click adventures, but there's absolutely nothing that restricts the pure-adventure genre to that method of control.  I could imagine a gamer where one plays as a wildlife photographer dropped into a lush rainforest and given, say, 20 rolls of film would be a very enriching experience and also with lots of replayability in a sandbox environment, so long as you keep the environment interesting with possible ruins, geographical features, and the like.

Don't forget, most people hail Super Metroid as a classic because of the immersion and exploration, not the pew-pew 

This issue isn't exactly new, nor is it unique to gaming.  The issue at hand is just that violence is just a really popular way to create conflict.

I mean, even games of old had violence.  I think the main beef people have today is graphic violence.

I mean, even in the infancy of gaming there were many many games based solely around the idea of enacting violence upon other game objects.

I'm keeping an eye on this.  To be honest, you could just release the engine code you did for Aquaria and just strip out all the game specific stuff and only left the libraries for rendering, input, sound etc. and I'd totally hump you or anything else you'd want me to hump on your behalf.

As of now, except for the engines already mentioned, there's also Haaf's Game Engine which is just a set of libraries and renders using DirectX

Also, I've been doing my prototyping with LÖVE which is an engine programmed in C++ that uses SDL but reads LUA for the gamecode.

Though you've already gotten massive support behind starting this engine, now you're getting +1 from a fellow who also happens to be named Alec.   

Yea, that's what I was afraid of.  I'd want the visual style to attract attention and interest, not put people off.

I've also been playing with the idea of having a main color in each of the worlds so that not the entire game would be black silhouettes, but shapes of other colors as well.

Also, thanks for the heads up about that luminance-banding style, I'll definitely look into it and get more information.  The advantages you list serve my ideas very well, though it would be more detail than just plain silhouettes, but I think I can manage a few shades.   

Ahh yes, I can't believe I forgot about that.

I want to play that game all kinds of hard.

Drop someone in a 3d simulation of a room with obstacles and a goal and give them the means to ambulate in the world and I can almost guarantee that the person will be able to do just fine in navigating without much more explanation than the methods of motility.

Make that Gutsman's or Iceman's level, in 3D, with jumps, and a third person camera.

Well sure, they'll know what they'll have to do.  Might not be able to actually do it

I hope this is the right forum to ask this.

What are your thoughts on more games being made with the silhouette style wherein game objects are mostly black silhouettes placed upon a more colorful backdrop?  For an example of style, look at;
Feist:

and Night Game:


Would a game made in this style feel kitschy?  The reason why I ask is because the game I'm currently working on uses this style to support the story.  The game is a 2d platformer that utilizes physics and swarm algorithms.  The story is about a man who has died and sees the afterlife as silhouettes of familiar objects but as the game progresses the world is filled more and more with abstract shapes.  Each world will be exemplified by an emotion that he feels while dealing with the fact that he is dead, i.e. confusion, anger, denial, sorrow etc. and gameplay and level design will try to express these ideas and emotions.

My reasons for using this look is two-fold; because it conveys the character's feeling of existing in a world which is but a shadow of its former self, and because it makes it easier for me to make art assets 

Would this game be seen as merely a rip-off of others before it just because of the similarity of its look?  (Being that it's a rather stark and unique look, I mean, not much you can do to differentiate it from other games with the same style since so much of it is just straight black)

Or would most players be able to look past the similarity and recognize that it is a (hopefully) unique experience in its story and gameplay?

[snip]It took artists forever to figure out perspective, and anyone who's drawing knows how much training it takes to feel the forms and get them down on paper.[/snip]

While this is true, I think your example pertains mainly to an artist's ability to represent three dimensional objects on a two dimensional medium.  Drop someone in a 3d simulation of a room with obstacles and a goal and give them the means to ambulate in the world and I can almost guarantee that the person will be able to do just fine in navigating without much more explanation than the methods of motility.

My view of it is that, while the human brain is very inclined to comprehend spatial dimensions as 3d, the fact that games aren't necessarily tied to reality and branches off into the abstract very often ensures that 2d will never really die off.

My reasoning is that, while it's not much brainwork to consider a semi-real environment in three dimensions, when you model a reality that isn't tied to the physical world, the brain just has an easier time grasping it if it's in two dimensions.  Case in point; almost the entire puzzle game genre.  There aren't many successful puzzle games that fully utilize three dimensions.  When an abstract structure of rules is to be represented, it very rarely NEEDS to be in three dimensions.

And as has been mentioned previously in this thread, just because a game uses 3d art assets doesn't make me consider it a 3d game.  I can understand that, in the case of something like The New Super Mario Bros. for example, using 3d assets might actually save time as technology has gotten to such a degree that for any big company, the effort needed to produce 3d assets is probably negligible.  Being that 3d might be easier to create many many animations for once you have the mesh, it might not be so with 2d sprites.  Such as it is though, the game is still played in 2d, thus making it a 2d game in my eyes, not even 2.5d.  I would consider a game that allows the player to move amongst multiple planes of movement by switching between them (like in Paper Moon for instance) but still restricted to 2 planes of movement while within these planes to be 2.5d

To be honest, when I think of 3d only games modeled in some way after reality (games wherein you play as some sort of being moving about in some sort of environment) comes to mind.  In a sense, that's a really restrictive limitation to put on the definition of what a game is.

Hey.

(I'm horrible with introductions.)

I'm a repeat lurker of many forums.  This is pretty much the first time I've posted to a forum in about five years.  I like this place though, the average post length pleases me greatly and it's not hard to find an interesting and intellectual conversation on here (Compared to the usual drivel I find in most online communities anyway)

On the subject of independent gaming, I wish I were more involved, though I am starting to merge my two disciplines together in the form of making games; something I haven't done since back in highschool with The Games Factory.  Since then I've spent two years studying IT, three years as a graphic design major, and all throughout as a programmer and web designer.  Shameless plug for seldom updated blog:  http://www.omgalec.com  (The design of which was wholy done by me)

I spent about four years running campaigns using my own Pen and Paper roleplaying system.  My players all spoke highly of my storytelling ability and the spark of gamedesign brought back those good feelings I had when making 2d platformers with TGF.  Now, I try to use the knowledge I've learned through years of meandering into and out of different disciplines and craft something enjoyable.

I think I've finally found a community in which I could feel at home.

Nice ta meetcha