Pretty well. Even the majority of blockbuster titles are just mods of Unreal 3 or whatever It's a pretty blurry line.

From a creative and artistic perspective, I agree with you, William. I can understand them not being covered on TIGSource due to the need to own the base game, but it does feel like semantics to say that TCs especially aren't indie games because they happened to use a layer that the user needs to buy. If GameMaker became a "service" where you had to buy GM to play games based on that engine, would they stop being indie games?

I made a window! http://playpen.farbs.org/index.php?title=Cloud_House_West

Cool stuff :D

Wrote up a blog post recently on some of the code work I've been doing to change over to the new genre - it'll be interesting for anyone wanting to find out what steps it took to convert a Tower Defense game to an isometric character action game

12. I will shoot my business in the foot because of arbitrary ethical lines I have drawn for myself.

Isn't any ethical line you draw arbitrary, at least from some points of view?

Has anyone mentioned Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, the Bioware Sonic game? That felt to me like a Bioware "cover" of Sonic - here's what happens if we take the Sonic world and mash it up with a Bioware style game.

That said, I think there's a few things limiting video game covers:
- Companies are super protective of their IP.
- Developers in general aren't controlled by auteurs who choose what they want to create, and can pump out an album of games a year.
- It doesn't take a far shorter amount of time to make a cover game than to make an original game.

I mean, it seems like an unfair comparison. For a lot of musicians, simply enjoying a song they love means learning how to play it and sing it in their own way, and then releasing the cover version is just a byproduct of that. For a game developer I can see them wanting to have that process, but there's such a difference in development timescale between pieces of music and video games that if you want to make anything that doesn't just feel like an off-brand title it would be a huge, huge investment.

Ed: Furthermore, music has been around for way longer. Why would you make a cover of a game when there's so much obviously untapped territory in video games? At least for me, that's a major part of the draw of development - it's a new medium, and there's so much more for us to do!

Still working. New Website! /out

Are you guys ever planning to get on iTunes? Would be super awesome for me (and I'm guessing anyone else with an iPhone/iPod Touch )

Thanks for the shows, been enjoying what I've heard so far!

Saw the gameplay video, looks pretty cool!

One thing I'd suggest (if it's not too late for suggestions) is to get a couple of particle effects in, particularly on the wrench collect and the enemy death/despawns. When they just disappear there doesn't seem to be quite enough visual feedback.

Good luck!

As far as I can tell, in XCode 3.2 at least there is an option for turning it off. In your project settings, it's under GCC 4.2 - Code Generation, called "Compile for Thumb". By default it seemed like mine was unchecked in debug and checked in release. I haven't seen a huge increase in performance in release by turning it off, although at the moment my game isn't doing much. (It will be after this collision rewrite though!)

Yep, although it's pretty important to separate Cheating and Laziness. If you're lazy in your approach to an integral system in the game, you'll either find yourself rewriting it, or cheating yourself into a bandaided-to-all-hell solution that you can't touch for fear of not being able to recover it.

There's cheating with the design of the game systems (okay, as long as it's not obvious to the player), and then there's ugly code cheating. You might be able to get away with a few ugly fixes/patchups right near the end of the project, but in general I'd definitely advise against it

I had a quick read over the page regarding components ( http://www.gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html ), and if I were you I'd go with the first or second of the options he gives on that page under "How do components communicate with each other?", rather than the third messaging option. It just makes logical sense for me that if you want something in the physics component to have an effect on the sound component, it should just call it directly on that.

That said, I've had bad experiences with full-on component design in the past before - I kind of have a physics component (an m_pCollision) and a graphics component (an m_pSprite or m_pModel, depending on if it's a 2D or 3D object), but I keep the game-specific code in the core object, and it's the arbitrator of everything. This approach puts you in more danger of having 5000 lines in your Player class, but at least you're not worrying about update orders of your components, and trying to access information cross-component that you have no way of getting without reworking your design.

The Lego-style of building any object you want out of whatever components sounds great, but while I've seen a few attempts at it, I've never seen one that actually succeeds at working like that in practice

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 3.0Ghz (2 cores)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 (1 GB GDDR3)
RAM: 4GB DDR3

/Resurrect for fun and self-aggrandizement. I finally joined up, and am located at http://twitter.com/Jason_Bakker . My (fairly infrequent) updates regard development on Shadow Field and other random goings on!

[no longer a tower defense game]

Er, okay. It's been a while since we've updated this devlog, but I've got some important news - the game is no longer a tower defense game. I repeat, it is no longer a tower defense game!

Our initial idea for a 360° tower defense game was cool, and it probably would have made a pretty good game eventually. But it doesn’t have the gameplay spark that we were banking on, and a lot of our core goals for what we want the game to do, such as bringing life to the characters and making them feel like the core of the experience, are subverted and muffled by the tower defense gameplay.

I wrote about this change of direction in a bit more detail on our game's site.

So what is it now? Well, in a nutshell, it's a strategic action-RPG, where you control the characters with roughly RTS style controls as they defend an isolated village. The focus of the game will be more on moment-to-moment gameplay being fun and rewarding, a deeper upgrade system and, time willing, some exploration elements.

We're still at an early stage in the new stuff, but will update this as we head forward - at the moment I'm experimenting with just getting the core movement controls feeling intuitive, and then will start working on the new combat systems.

Wrote a short story recently, based roughly on this day when I had a bout of extreme paranoia. It's very first draft at the moment though, need to spend some time on it and see whether I can polish it up into something worth reading...

Been reading a book of Lovecraft short stories recently... in between those, finally read Going Postal by Pratchett, and have been slowly making my way through the Sandman comics.

And I'm subscribed to the New Yorker for their short stories, haven't been reading them that much lately though, should catch up!

It sure looks awesome, but I'm not sure if it would play very well. It all looked very cutscene-like.

Yeah, looks pretty cool, but you'd hate to play it - those track turns would be impossible from that low camera, unless you memorized the entire track Moving the camera up would lose a lot of the impact. But yeah, a lot of the other stuff looked pretty cool, and +1 for being Road Rash. That game is awesome.

Failure is good! At the same time, releasing anything, regardless of quality, is a bad idea if you don't want to be criticized. It's good, at the end of the day, that there are places like TIGSource around where people understand the value of failure.

That said, I think it's important to fail loudly - to view the flaws of something that you've created subjectively, and use that to further the medium, either through your own work or letting other people know about it. Postmortems are great for this...

Still truckin' along. Here are some shots of the latest build:

Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel... Still need to get the majority of the story and dialog into the game, but gameplay-wise it's starting to come together.

At the moment we're at the really annoying stage of breaking down the game systems and introducing them to the player one by one. The worst part about this process is the save system - the "tutorial" bits really need to be quit and resume-able at any point along them, even though that means every time a tutorial feature is added, a flag for it also needs to be added to the save file.

Video of the latest build

- took a cue off Runman and grabbed some royalty free music for it Let me know what you think!