I think platformers are still popular among mainstream players. Just look at the millions of levels that have been published in Little Big Planet. Also, Nintendo doesn't have trouble selling Mario games.

As to why the industry tends to avoid the genre, we probably have to go back to the time when Sony and the like were discouraging (or was it prohibiting?) developers from putting 2D games on their consoles, given that platforming is better suited for 2D than 3D. The obsession with 3D may have been where the industry began to go wrong, if you subscribe to the notion that it did.

As to why indie developers around here like making platformers, my suspicions are that a lot of them have never tried Little Big Planet! (I've never seen it mentioned on the forums by anyone other than myself) Whenever I get the urge to make a platformer, that urge is easily satiated by its "Play, Create, and Share" features.

I thought they had already succeeded with "sorrow" in Demon's Souls, particularly the Lady Astraea part.

[not]

I fear that it's too much work to do all the graphics and music, in addition to the programming. I know that I'm good at programming, and that I enjoy writing. Therefore, I could probably maintain coding and coming up with a story for the game, but I have little to no graphical or musical skills when it comes to creating stuff for games. (Possible resolutions to these problems are that I could 1. practice, 2. use extremely minimal graphics and music, and 3. recruit the help of others (probably in later projects.)

I think that it would be very difficult to maintain development on a game like Dwarf Fortress--that is, a game you are constantly adding new content to for years to come--if you are not doing the graphics yourself. Because what happens when during those 10+ years your artist ups and quits?

Well that's the dilemma I'm in. DF might be able to get away with ascii art, but my project won't. It will be a romance game and appealing art is expected from a romance game where, after all, appearances are an important part of attraction. But with a development model patterned after DF, I'll be in the position of having to do the art myself. (I don't have the capital to pay for an artist anyway) So I'll be going with a combination of solution 1 and 2, but will it be good enough? What am I getting myself into?   

I also think that sports games that aren't trying too hard to be realistic are typically a lot more fun than ones that are.

Free throws are boring. NBA Jam and NBA Street got rid of them and the result was nonstop fun. You can't call timeouts or switch players, a limitation that keeps the game focused on action. Because what what we really want to do when we play a hoops game is crazy, flamboyant, unrealistic dunks.

yeah, I can't really logically defend the stopping to aim thing as not annoying beyond saying it's a horror game. and i understand why people would find it annoying, but i personally think it really adds something 

Does stop and aim need to be defended? It's both realistic and makes sense from a design standpoint. Even RE4 & 5 kept that, and for good reason.

Good games limit something or else they'd be too easy. Dark Souls doesn't let you keep more than one save state for your character.

How about this for annoying: I can't stop my run on a dime in Super Mario Bros so I end up running into goombas and off of ledges. 

^ Yeah, it's addicting as hell. And it has some things in common with Dark Souls, but could probably use some sort of auto-targeting. Especially when swimming you get disoriented easily, and the sea monsters are tough as it is.

It's a bit like Monster Hunter in that regard. That game had absolutely no stats or levels and yet a player with a hammer was completely different from one using dual blades or lance.

Someone is talking about me! The die-hard hammer wielder who refuses to switch weapons even when the hammer isn't the best choice on a monster. With my ps3 out of state and Monster Hunter being the closest thing to Dark Souls that you can find on the Wii, I am sure playing that game a lot these days.

I miss the days when gender consciousness didn't matter in a Metroid game...and when Metroid games were fun.

There's something wrong here. Old and middle-aged ladies have problems in their lives, dreams, aspirations, and probably more time to pursue them after they're done raising kids. That is a huge demographic not being portrayed seriously!

For some times I've been wanting to design a game in which the protagonist is an old grandma simply because I've never seen it done. (Has it been done?)
But that would be too much work, so maybe modding Zelda 2 to have the grandma townsperson as the player's sprite would be my best option.

^The question is how believable does an NPC need to be to not get treated as a vending machine, right?

About Love Plus, it looks considerably better when you're playing it on the handheld, and it's animated in a cutesy appealing way. If you played it for only 10 minutes, you would only have seen the part of the game where you try to win over the girl by raising stats, which is the less interesting part. For those who get into it (and I only half count myself as such) the real game is in nurturing your relationship over the long run--which can be a very long run if you choose to play in real time!

Whether the goal in a game is to get laid depends on the game, or you could say, the developer. With Konami romance games (Tokimeki series, Love Plus), the goal is never to get laid. Nor with Enterbrain romance games (Amagami, Kimikiss, True Love Story series). Nor with most otome games.

And you know what? Those are the romance games where I see the most innovation from a gameplay standpoint. (Unfortunately, they are also the romance games that almost never get English localizations) Enjoyable gameplay typically utilizes a challenge-reward system. A sex scene can act as a reward. But the developer who makes the decision not to include sexual content has to come up with other ideas.

For instance, In Love Plus, at a certain point in your relationship, your girlfriend will ask you what you think of her hair today. If you answer in the affirmative, she'll begin wearing her hair the way you like it every day. Tons of little things like that attempt to simulate the "reward" of succeeding at a relationship without sex, which is after all only one facet of how relationships reward us, and a far from indispensable one; I agree with the article's author to that extent!

Perhaps the best way to get players to seek out relationships in games without treating the NPCs as objects would be to shower them with countless small rewards over the duration of the relationship and not tell them what those rewards are in advance. In real life relationships, we don't know in advance the countless ways that becoming close to another person will reward us.
I do think that fitting things into the context of a challenge-reward system is something a developer can't ignore.

Love Plus is lame and tropey and the character models are really badly rendered (which is the main issue i had). Katawa Shoujo 4 lyfe.

It's hard to tell when people are being serious but... Love Plus has really badly rendered models? Wtf? Lame and tropey? It's got exactly the kind of game mechanics and innovations relevant to the discussion at hand, whereas Katawa Shoujo (from what I've seen of it) is one of those "arguably not a game" games I alluded to, patterned after the kajillion similar titles cranked out in droves year after year.

I think it's hard to step away from goal-oriented focus in games without going into the space of highly story-driven games, where the players at that point have put their faith in the writer to keep things going in an interesting direction rather than in their own actions (for instance, most visual novels, which many would argue are no longer games). But as long as you're letting players take actions with the expectation that their actions will make a difference, they will naturally do so with goals in mind. If interactions with NPCs can turn them to aids or obstacles, players will naturally try to turn them to aids.

Simulations, too, are goal-oriented. The good ones like The Sims let players set their own goals. (though the designer must have an idea of what kind of goals players are likely to set for themselves)

The problem is just as the OP said. Simulation of real people is probably too complex to make for enjoyable gameplay (yet). When you give a gift or listen to someone's sob story in real life, it's because you genuinely care about that person. In a game you just can't suspend your disbelief that the character isn't real to that extent (at least I can't).

Even in Love Plus--the most advanced romance game that has been made so far--it didn't work completely. There's only three characters in that game, fleshed out surprisingly deeply, no sexual content, your relationship with your chosen girl develops well past the point where she becomes your girlfriend, she has varying moods (like days when she's simply colder towards you), and you set dates with her in real time. When I set a date with my virtual girlfriend for Sunday, I'm actually supposed to remember to turn on my Nintendo DS on Sunday at the scheduled time to play out the date. But when Sunday rolls around and I'm busy watching a borderline-interesting TV show in the real world, I'm as likely to stand her up, because I know that she won't really mind.

About that article, she almost seems to be arguing for an end to challenge-based gameplay. Well, it's easy to complain how games don't mirror real life. It's harder to make them do so in a satisfying and interactive way.

Sometimes people aren’t interested in others. Sometimes small differences make people incompatible. Sometimes people aren’t ready for a relationship.

Have relationships end regardless of what the player does simply because not every relationship works out.

Apply that thinking to a combat-based RPG and many people will call that bad game design. Who wants their RPG to be full of boss battles that are unwinnable regardless of what the player does because not every battle works out? Isn't the point to overcome the challenge through your actions?

If the player's actions don't matter, then you have to find unconventional ways to make the game interesting. I'm sure there's lots of potential for unique games there, but typical players are more interested in challenge-based gameplay, aren't they? (I think that's why we all love Dark Souls to death (after death (after bloody death))) Or if not challenge-based, at least where player actions influence what happens.

"Get-the-girl" objectives in games with romance might do a piss-poor job of reflecting reality, but they fit well into challenge-based systems, rewarding players for their actions.

In fact, I think in games with romance, a more common complaint among players is the opposite complaint as hers! "Why isn't such-and-such a character romanceable?"

Sometimes you want to model things after reality and sometimes you want to let players indulge in fantasies. With real life romance sucking @$# as often as it does, I say here is one area where you're better off letting them indulge in fantasies.

Game music good.

even better.

I plan on cutting back on presentation.

^ I know exactly what you mean. YU-NO is one half pure genius. The story is great. (I skipped through the ero scenes, too) The jewel save system and the way the game uses sound/visual effects to hint at points where the story can branch depending on your actions is a brilliant and fascinating way to marry adventure game mechanics with story branching that VN developers ought to have studied and emulated.

But the "guess-the-click-spot" problem in that game is worse than interactive fiction's "guess-the-verb" problem ever was since you very often cannot leave the room or do anything else until you read the author's mind. It's a problem I've seen repeated in countless first person adventure games made by the Japanese, especially from the 90's.

I suspect that the visual novel medium evolved into what it is today precisely because most Japanese are so horrible at making adventure games. It's as if they collectively realized that the facade of interactivity they'd been offering over and over to players is actually worse than minimal/no interactivity, so they reduced interactivity to all but its most basic form, resulting in a medium friendly to those who simply want to tell a story or draw pretty art.

Daily reminder that you will never experience Coco's route for the first time again.

Argghhh. Don't remind me of that.

For #1, Little Big Planet 2, without a doubt
For #2, Dark Souls
For #3, Skyrim, Super Street Fighter 4, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are contenders in my book

I'd call Phoenix Wright an adventure/visual novel hybrid. Same with 999. Same with YU-NO. (those are all amazing)

Digital: A Love Story, I would say, is not a visual novel at all.

Now, I'm still really interested in such a world, but only as a backdrop.  It can be used to flavor a story, but won't really produce compelling stories on its own.  At least, not often enough.  Like monkeys with typewriters, you can eventually produce compelling stories randomly.  But I think that producing them reliably would mean stifling the system to such a point that they wouldn't be very varied.

Now what if a game were made to learn how to generate--or simply replay--the interesting stories through some means of in-game player feedback? If an infinite number of stories can be generated, there must necessarily be an infinite number of compelling stories that can be generated. I wonder how a game could be trained to build up a memory of the stories that have gone over well with players and select these stories for retelling, like a master storyteller who tells only his best stories.