What is this thread about?

1. Geneforge 5
2. Au Sable
3. Canabalt

I may not have played that many games last year...

Download

(it gets a name change because I ended up removing the other shadows, not because I think this is a better name...)







Since I gave up on my first project I've been working on this - not especially hard, but I think I can get it done in time if I stop dicking around.

The basic idea is to go and get the different costumes (which have some kind of animal spirits or something in them? The plot is kinda loose) which give different abilities, the ultimate goal being to drive away the shadows. I'll hold off posting a demo until you can at least use the tiger costume, but thought I'd better start a thread now or I might never get around to it.

'Girl in the Shadows' is very much a working title, but I can't come up with anything. Help in that area would be appreciated. Thinking of taking the lazy way out and giving her a name, then just calling the game that ... but I can't think of something good to call her, so ... yeah.

I have no interest in reading/watching/whatever things to improve myself. The great classics and such aren't usually the sorts of things that interest me, and most people I know who try to slog through the 'greats' don't sound like they're having a good time doing it.

I tend to hook onto a certain theme and then devour everything I can that fits. Right now the theme is something like a blend of really nice 'pretty' things and really horrible things mixed together, before that it was magical-feeling fantasy, before that ... I think the alien world/culture exploration phase? And then there was the post-apocalyptic phase ... there is a lot of post apocalyptic fiction out there, and I think I've beaten that one to death.

These phases aren't as sequential as I make it sound there - I'll go out of my way to get a magical fantasy or alien world exploration book still.

Might I point out that rule #1 disqualifies pretty much every indie game there is? Unless you like to consider 'the internet' as 'America'...

I'd like to nominate Geneforge 5, although the Mac version might have come out last year. No one cares about Macs though, and the only release date on Wikipedia is for the Windows version.

A nitpick - but I really don't like the title. 'Labyrinthica: The Quest of Lima' ... is not catchy or punchy. For starters, it's in passive voice ('Lima's Quest' would be better than 'The Quest for Lima'). I would throw out everything after the colon - 'Labyrinthica' is good. All the other stuff is superfluous and dulls the impact.

Who is your target audience, anyway?

Your explanation of the game above makes me want to play it. The updated version on the website is better than what it was, but still not great. The wording is ugly (am I correct in thinking you're not a native English speaker...?), and there are too many comparisons to games I haven't played. Rather than saying that the controls are like Abuse, say that 'aiming is done with the mouse' or something. 'Like Abuse' isn't a description to people who haven't played Abuse, and I only did that a week or two ago.

The problem with the wording is that it isn't punchy at all.

Labyrinthica: The Quest of Lima, is a single player, melee focused action game

This is a good sentence that tells me stuff quickly, without waffling.
(Well, you should remove the first comma - it's killing the flow of the sentence)

The monsters in Labyrinthica are strange and interesting, like the Drabee, which is a dragon bee. Or a Shruby, a walking shrub.

This is lame. 'strange and interesting' aren't interesting descriptions. Explaining that a 'Drabee' is a dragon bee is a little bit cringeworthy.

How about something like 'The monsters of Labyrinthica are bizarre and whimsical. You'll encounter violent shubbery, fire-breathing bees, and <something else - rule of threes demands it>.'? Even if those aren't the best descriptions for your monsters, it's a stronger sentence structure.

Also, mention your potions system. It sounds cool.

I get results very slowly, so might not be one to give advice - but I think losing the C++ would be a good first step. I do honestly like C++, but it's just not a language for getting things done quickly in. It's fiddly, and there's a lot of dicking around needed. If you end up with mysterious segfaults it can take forever to find out where the problem is. I'm a lot more productive in Python and AS3 than C++, even if I still feel horribly slow looking at the people zipping by using Game Maker or whatever.

I don't think this problem is going to be solved for a very long time, and dialogue trees are far better than half-baked solutions.

Besides, I like dialogue trees. They inject character into your response, while with these sorts of systems there isn't any point to inputting something with a certain tone because it won't have any impact - you just aim to hit the keywords you want. Sure, with a dialogue tree you might not have the option of a tone you really want, but at least you have something, and the NPCs are able to respond to that.

I won't consider downloading anything that size. I have a strict cap due to living in an assbackwards country when it comes to internet (that's Australia, in case you were wondering) - 170mb is a significant amount. I don't think there's any good reason to package it with DirectX - anyone who plays games has it already and this game as far as I can tell isn't aimed at non-gamers.

90mb is still too much for me to download, mind you. 10mb and I can justify downloading on a whim, 90 is in 'I know this is superawesome and I must have it' territory, which is not what the front page of your website gives me.

I'm not very clear on what the game is about either, mind you. I didn't watch the video (and you shouldn't expect that people will) - is there a story or is it pure hack and slash, because I get mixed messages. Whichever one it is ... why is that awesome? The description of the combat doesn't really tell me that, although I think it's trying to. It's not a very exciting pitch, and I'm not sure what the games with similar control schemes you're referring to are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder ?

(and, uh, if you've ever heard of the Digital Liberty Coalition ... try and forget. Apparently imploded. Fortunately the Pirate Party seems to be pulling itself together ... although I guess a lot of people here won't agree with the rest of their platform)

An organisation run by the Labor party ineffective at protesting against the Labor party? who would have thought!

Uh, you must be thinking of someone else. The DLC was set up by mostly by /b/tards, ex-Chanology people, and miscellaneous internet people. Anyway, back to forgetting about them.

I'm curious if this whole Australian censorship thing looks likely.  Do you think it's gonna go through?  I'm not in the country, so I don't have a good feel for the situation.

Hard to predict. Before a couple of weeks ago I would have said 'no way in hell', and generally wasn't very worried. With the leadership change of the opposition it looks a great deal more likely, although I'm still not sure. It's hard to get a handle on what the Liberal Party actually believes these days.

I would say it probably won't go through though. It's sufficiently unpopular that the Liberals should oppose it trying to get some votes. If they do I'm pretty sure it won't pass. If Tony Abbott does his moral-puritan act though, we're boned.

Also, if it does go through, will it end up that things need to be classified to "make the list."  If so, what will that do to burgeoning websites and will Australia miss the gravyboat of online business completely?

I'm pretty sure it's meant to work on a public-complaints basis - someone complains about a website and then it's classified. It don't see why Australian business would be effected, except maybe porn sites, and even then they'd have to be specifically aimed at Australians for it to matter any more than to your average porn site.

Seconding (thirding?) Iji and Photopia.

I think All Of Our Friend Are Dead and Au Sable fit, although it's an atmosphere and implied-story thing rather than a story that sucks you in/induces emotion.

Actually, if we go with the idea that a game doesn't need a story to be emotionally involving, I'll throw out Crystal Pixels, which is very melancholy. Also - Cloud, which is simultaneously melancholy and uplifting. I suspect this isn't the sort of thing you're asking about though.

So, I've just been talking to my connected activisty-friend. For Brisbane, there's a meeting with an ever-changing venue set for Monday to discuss action and stuff, although I'm not sure that it will be a valuable one (online organisation works well - why organise a meeting to organise action with far too many people there to actually get any discussion done? Blah). Hopefully there will be some further actual action in the near future...

I'm not too sure that this won't pass the senate. Now that the Liberals have wandered a significant way over to the right and with Tony Abbot of all people at the helm, they could very well support it.

(and, uh, if you've ever heard of the Digital Liberty Coalition ... try and forget. Apparently imploded. Fortunately the Pirate Party seems to be pulling itself together ... although I guess a lot of people here won't agree with the rest of their platform)

Thanks a lot It seems my knowledge of AS3's syntax is rather lacking.

It seems like the whole filter protest movement died though, or at least never followed up on any of the momentum that it had. I must get onto my protest-organising-general-agitating friend and find out wth happened to the Digital Liberty Coalition and all that.

I'm completely out of steam. Thinking of starting a new project involving the furry-girl vs the creepy shadow cave paintings, but am reluctant to leave yet another project unfinished. OTOH, the alternative is ... well, leaving it unfinished anyway and doing nothing, because I just can't bring myself to do any more work on it.

Meh, maybe I'll go back to it later, or something.

I agree with the OP. Reality simulators would be fine in moderation, but I just don't care that much for them.

Mind you, this might just be my taste, which is leaning strongly against realism (or at least for a mix of realism and the fantastic). Many great books and movies may be realistic but they're not the ones I feel like reading or watching either.

(and yes, I do read lots of children's books, because they're generally the only variety of fantasy that isn't blanded-down for adult sensibilities).

Ginger Snaps.
Pan's Labyrinth.

Well, it's not your fault that your stuff is so good that everyone's using it, but it's a bit tiresome and you're a convenient scapegoat...? :p

I intend to use the pregnant (fat?) unicorn, the missile rain, and the clocks/the curtains/chair from Joaquim's stuff somewhere. I'd also like to see the furry children get used somewhere because they're weird and awesome, but while I'm pretty much just throwing whatever together and hoping it looks okay, I don't think they'll fit...

I have a class called Assets, that basically just has all the stuff I want embedded in it and if I want to use an image I'll just go Assets.imageName. Looks like this inside Assets:

Code:

[Embed(source = "assets/girlspritesheet.png")]
public static var girlSheet:Class;

That's fine, except that I've decided to load characters from XML. I can store the string of what the asset is called there, but actually getting that asset from that string is proving difficult.

I hear good things about getDefinitionByName and getQualifiedClassName for this sort of thing, but extensive poking the code and googling hasn't helped, and I'm not sure that it's the right way after all (it creates an instance of a class from the name? Not really what I want given that they're static, I think...)

My loadCharacter method currently looks like this:

Code:

public function loadCharacter(charName:String):void
{
var charList:XMLList = charXML.children();

for each (var char:XML in charList)
{
if (char.name() == charName)
{
    characters.add(new Character((getDefinitionByName("Assets."+char.attribute("asset")) as Class), int(char.attribute("x")),
        int(char.attribute("y")), int(char.attribute("width")), int(char.attribute("height"))));
spritesLayer.add(characters[characters.length - 1]);
}
}
}

Which crashed messily insisting that the variable 'girlSheet' doesn't exist. It runs using getQualifiedClassName instead of getDefinitionByName, but doesn't actually load the graphic.

So, is there a smart way of doing this, or do I start on the dodgy solutions?