First thing I noticed is the key for rotating the yellow pieces was set to UNDEFINED by default.  Might want to fix that.

Intended. I don't use that key in the default bindings, but some people might want it.

typo in the first tutorial: "connect to the drills to the station core"

Thanks! Fixed.

pipes inside pieces mislead: they suggest that they need to connect but they only need to be adjacent

Good point; I'll look into it.

EDIT: Uploaded a tweaked version. Visually noisier, might solve the confusion you encountered. Undecided.

[Starhaven]

Starhaven

Starhaven is a game about mining in space. Blast rock away and sink drills deep into the earth, power and crew modules ranging from mineral launchers to rocket guns, and then defend your fragile station from swift-hurtling meteoroids!

I've been working on the game for the last 9 months, and I'm opening beta testing for the next three weeks (until March 24th) in the hopes of getting feedback on difficulty, bugs, and general playability. The game has limited, anonymized automated reporting for some events (tutorials skipped, level won, etc...), but I still want human feedback for things like "Mechanic X makes no sense!" or "Level Y is way too hard!" (Preferably with slightly more detail than that.)

The game can be played here, and you can follow development at my devlog. Have fun!

And it's out!

I really liked it! (Was linked by Christine Love's twitter.) Very adorable.

Got confused by the intro logo thing (spent about 30 seconds clicking on it, being routed elsewhere, coming back...), but I think that is because I am dumb.

Very well done!

[it's just another method for the reviewer to express his judgement as concretely as possible]

the problem is: this is exactly how game reviews work at the moment

that is the punchline to the joke

But seriously. Off the top of my head, Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku have unscored reviews, and a number of other sites have scoring systems that... at least aren't decimalized / percentile, which I think is one of the more absurd things games review sites do.

Kotaku being a champion of good games journalism practice is the other punchline to the joke.

tl;dr: this discussion is a complete waste of time, read the fucking reviews instead of skipping to the numbers at the end, you illiterate morons

Good idea! *goes to a website with 200 expert reviews, many of works he doesn't know much about, and just reads every single one to find out which ones are worth his time because the reviewer was too incompetent to numerically quantify his qualitative judgment from the start*

All the negative reaction to scores I see in different places seems to be based on shitty reviewers using them in shitty ways (stupid scales, payoffs, disparity between score and text, etc.) There is absolutely nothing wrong about the concept of attaching a score to your review; it's just another method for the reviewer to express his judgement as concretely as possible, and quickly let the viewer know from the start whether he liked or disliked a work. Of course if someone is a shitty reviewer who can't make concrete qualitative judgments they might be against doing this, but I really can't see any other reason not to include them. It sucks that many people care more about them than the actual reasoning of the review text, but that's not a very good reason to get rid of them.

Games are art. They're a subjective medium. Incredibly broken, unpolished games can be fantastic, for someone who's willing to push past the broken parts - STALKER, for example, or Crusader Kings. These games tend to get low review scores at launch, and not by 'bad reviewers'. On the other hand, extremely polished, tightly-scripted games can very easily end up turning people off with their artificiality, while still - again, justifiably - getting high review scores. (I'm sure you can think of a few examples.) These aren't the results of shitty reviewers misusing the rating systems - these are examples of important qualities in games that can't reasonably be conveyed in a 1-10 rating scale. (Or 1.0-10.0, or whatever.) These aren't isolated cases - they happen again and again.

I guess I'd back away from my earlier position (and my invective - sorry about that, got carried away), and say that some kind of review scores do make sense for the mass market. However - anyone with a passing familiarity with the industry who puts any weight on scores, especially 'objective' scores, is making a fool of themselves.

I agree with everything after the quoted section.

How come no one ever talks about rating movies more scientifically? I mean, most reviewers just rate out of four stars! That's just 5% of the precision that game reviews have. Pathetic!

First, movie reviewers need to start breaking things down into components: they need to have scores for plot, characters, cinematography, sound, and 'other', for anything else that those don't cover. The scores will obviously be decimals out of 10, or percents, just the way all the best games reviewers do it. Then we can set up a highly advanced heuristic (using principles from machine learning) to set up the best possible average between the different components, and between different reviewers, too: we'll need to have a truly objective movie rating if we're going to determine the exact percentage difference in greatness between Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring and the Hurt Locker.

As a bonus, after all this, we can just discard all that pesky 'review text': I mean, a lot of the time it doesn't even seem to bear any relation to the scores games receive! Much better to focus on the numbers. Words are obviously subjective, but numbers are objective.

tl;dr: this discussion is a complete waste of time, read the fucking reviews instead of skipping to the numbers at the end, you illiterate morons

Yeah.  Who cares?

Just curious.

Are you the DFTalk Capntastic?

super joe, please marry me

(Also, Capntastic, http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=23703.msg685680#msg685680 was a fantastic post.)

me, the day you posted it first

solid feedback

I don't mean to seem rude, but it sounds like you're saying you don't actually have the time to judge the games properly, but volunteered anyway.

If the other judges are in the same position, it's no wonder that people are getting upset.

10. fez
9.  fez
8.  fez
7.  fez
6.  fez
5.  fez
4.  fez
3.  fez
2.  fez
1.  left unfilled for a MYSTERY GAME In no particular order: Bastion, Frozen Synapse, Binding of Isaac, Cthulu Saves the World, SpaceChem, Don't Take It Personally..., Balloon Disapora, English Country Tune, Minecraft, and CRIME ZONE. ?

I played this when it was linked on RPS a few weeks back. It's very pretty and has a lot of promise - as of when I played it (that would have been your 0.1?), it felt very unfinished (many of the abilities felt redundant, you could win the first mission by reaching out and drowning the enemies, etc), but very pretty and promising, with the right levels.

Basically what that ramble was trying to say was: nice work, keep it up!

placeholders = fair use

(game looks cool)

Lmao. As Laura just said: I was not serious at all guys.
Haha. I didn't expect anyone to think i actually quit, publicly, within minutes of starting, because of a spelling mistake.

I didn't notice the spelling error!

Good luck with the game regardless.

they surely must be happy

I thought furries were miserable sons of bitches?

You would be too if you were persecuted by 90% of the internet.

hm

Wow. Assuming Jared is serious... I wish you the best of luck! The game looks cool, it's a shame it has to encounter this kind of setback so early.

I will join this trainwreck.

I am ready to be analraped.

Yzed.

Traditionally, people who don't believe in evolution claim no new species ever came into existence - every species that ever existed did so 6000 years ago, and then most of them were killed off in the Flood and scattered at random heights.

This is stupid for any number of reasons, but it doesn't have any more problems with Neanderthals than with any other human-related species.

This conversation should probably move into PMs if it goes further, but I wanted to drop off a link to the Procedural Generation Wiki for Mr. Pickering.

[24:18:09:02] <@googoogjoob> fungus i want a credit in tick tock isle
[24:18:09:05] <@googoogjoob> googoogjoob: rat hunter
[24:18:09:25] <@WorkingFungus> ok

if this doesn't happen i want this to stand as a belated testament to pf's deceit

ok

(I reserve the right to hide your credit as an easter egg.)

((But hopefully we'll have playtesters before the game is released; we can stick your name in with them. No one will suspect!))