He certainly has a way of phrasing things that implies a slight air of superiority. I do think that's true. But where's the harm - there's worse things than being smug.

Every cult game designer needs their quirk.

It was actually Cactus who reminded me that game development *could* still be fun. The stuff I do is far from enjoyable - way too much work for the payoff. Cactus' games demonstrated that with the right approach you can flip that ratio on its head.

When I quit, I want to make games the way Cactus does. That's how I'd like to retire. When I saw his GDC presentation it made me want to stop what I was doing and do that instead, right then and there; he made it look like so much more fun.

Don't tell me that even this way of working takes a terrible toll...

If I'm going to work with a pixelly look (and there are definitely times when I really feel like I want to), then I'd want it to be low-res. Even lower than 320x200, most likely. It's taking what used to be a limitation and using it as a conscious style - which generally means an exaggeration of that style; playing up the elements of the style that attracted you to it in the first place.

But on the other hand I'd be happy to mix different resolutions on one screen, or even mix pixel art with something else. You can still use pixelated objects in a high-res environment; it doesn't have to be a straight mimickry of the past.

Mostly, I'd like to do things as easily as possible while still looking good. If I want high-res, high-fidelity images I'd probably use a different style (I've been using clay, but I'd just as happily choose some other medium). But if I'm using pixels then I'd want to do it in a way that makes life easier, not harder. Life is hard enough! And making games certainly doesn't need to be any more difficult.

Chunky pixel art is a (comparitively) fast and easy style to make games with and it produces attractive results. The style is also extremely sympathetic to repetition and tiling. And you wonder why so many indie developers use it? You do NOT want to end up like me, spending years and years polishing up the backgrounds and animations for a single game; life is too short. Find a style that allows you to spend the most time being creative and the least time grinding out assets.

Thanks for that excellent run-down. Definitely interested in checking it out now.

Mobigame/Papazian should have checked the trademark registries before they chose the name of their game, so chosing EDGE as the name when Edge Games own that registered trademark was a big mistake by Mobigame.

I know there are some people out there, who consider it morally justifiable to punish other people for any "mistakes" they can find with their business. Like they are agents of natural selection or something... treating life like a big strategy game, everyone against the rest.

And here it is again. It is such an ugly philosophy.

Looks absolutely fantastic. I really don't like the name though; it's like a lame jokey name that suggests something much more clumsy than this extremely sleek and stylish-looking game deserves.

I think it will always be around too, as a conscious style - both in video games and in graphic design in general. Particularly the most low-res, most palette-restricted kinds (as these are the "purest" forms, in that they look the most like pixel art and the least like anything else). But I also expect to see the "pixel art look" being used more in combination with other styles and media.

And video game developers will always have good reason to adopt a pixel art style - because it makes their lives so much easier! It's a style that was developed for making video games with, after all. And the classic iconography of pixel art is also the classic vocabulary of video game design.

This competition has been disturbingly effective at drawing out people's deviant fetishes. This one is almost sick enough to be one of Jack Thompson's pervy designs.

- A space battle game where a couple of rooms are set up like a battleship control room in a movie; screens around the place showing sensor data, logistics, communications, engineering and so on.  Some chairs for gunners, with goggles and joysticks.  So you have a team of people taking on different roles, working together to control the ship, and as the battle goes on you could have equipment malfunction as the ship gets hit; screens go out, things shake, flashes, concealed smoke machines activate.. Totally epic.  I'll definitely do this if I'm ever rich.

I thought of that too. I decided that it should be developed as a LAN-party game for normal hardware first, then add support for custom I/O so that dedicated users can build their own sets.

It wouldn't have to be fancy.

You could set it up as an explicitly multiplayer game, where rather than displaying the entire bridge of the ship in first-person perspective or whatever, each player's screen simply shows what would be shown on their character's console's screen. I think the takeaway idea from this is that each player's display, and available commands, would be different, but inter-connected. There would be some overlap as to which functions could be performed by each player, and one player having problems would have a flow-on effect to problems for other players. Part of the captain's role would be to  route tasks to different players and make sure nobody was overwhelmed by too many tasks, etc.

Tactical Monster Versus Adventurer Game
We play as all the monsters in a procedurally generated dungeon, and we have to try to keep a computer controlled adventurer from plundering our domain and wantonly killing everything

Like Dungeon Keeper? (Perhaps Peter Molyneux's best game design, that one).

Go gay, problem solved.

Sadly I think that *I* might now be considered the me of the previous generation...

I heartily agree with everyone here who is complaining about incorrect aspect ratios being the scourge of the modern display. It's seriously shocking how stretched and fucked our video images are getting, and very few people seem to care.

Even my laptop's 1440x900 screen has slightly rectangular pixels which means that something rotated through 90 degrees appears to have slightly different dimensions. Okay, so a supposedly professional game artist probably shouldn't be working on a 15" 18-bit laptop display anyway, but are square pixels really too much to ask?

Don't get me started about the godawful things people do with their flat-screen TVs.

I think that aspect ratio support is now just as important, and possibly almost as much of a pain in the arse, as supporting variable refresh rates. You'd love to just ignore it, but the variance has become so extreme that you can't really afford to.

We're running our sprites in anti-aliased 3d anyway, so we can afford to be resolution-agnostic. But widening the field of view has gameplay implications for us (being a side-scrolling game). The vertical aspect isn't so important, so what we did was give priority to the horisontal aspect, and in non-widescreen modes we just show a bit more sky. Special cases still have to be accounted for though, and the HUD and other screen elements have to be able to re-arrange themselves to suit. It is a hassle, but as I say I do think it's a hassle we need to be ready to deal with.

The other option is just to build for widescreen, and add horisontal black bars for 4:3 ratios. I think that looks a lot more acceptable than vertical bars on a widescreen monitor. But even that can cause problems, like the dreaded "windowboxing" - this is what happens when your game defaults to a 4:3 screen mode, and displays on a widescreen monitor with horisontal black bars added in software, and vertical bars added by your video driver.

Every time Langdell does something, I hear about another game I enjoyed while growing up having their creators screwed over by him.

Last time it was Fairlight. This time it's Inside Outing/Raffles. These were seriously classy games made by people who obviously cared a lot about their work - and, it seems, were thoroughly exploited and shafted for their trouble.

As for A and B. If it uses cursors, jump, shoot and maybe one more button, the making it in any other way than A jumps, B shoots is wrong. How can I explain this? The A to jump B to shoot formula is absolute. It's impossible for the way around to work as well. It feels wrong and unadequate. The possition of the buttons make it this way, it's intuitive to jump with A and shoot with B.

You seem quite definite about this, but you must have noticed that the great majority of games are actually the other way around?

The way you describe feels very wrong to me, and it always throws me off when games default to it, but that doesn't seem to happen all that often. I guess I got used to having shoot on the left and jump on the right playing arcade games in the 80s and it's been like that ever since.

Ooh, this could be what I was looking for. I've been after a simple synth/drum machine for the DS that I could use with live instruments/drums etc - not strictly dance/electronic music; more like a Le Tigre/Trans Am sort of thing.

Limited tracks is fine, so long as it's simple enough to sequence on the fly.

My first pixel art was all drawn on graph paper and entered in hex. This was before I thought to actually write a paint program... this was about 1985 or 86 I guess. Sheesh.

I made a ton of stuff but nothing pre-PC survives. I sometimes wonder what I'd make of it if I could see it again.

I don't think "indie" has anything to do with this game, except for the tentative associations that has developed between that word and others like "side-scrolling" and "platformer". But never mind that, it looks very nice.

I do feel like it's too expensive though - it's comparable in price to "AAA" retail games, which is fine by me (no reason why it shouldn't be as good, or better, than any other game you might buy), except that I also think most retail games are way too expensive for what they are.

Lastly, a major complaint is that Trine will not offer online coop. The developers have stated multiple times that they simply didn't have the time and money to implement it and still make the game of the quality it has now.

I can totally understand that. We DO support online co-op in our game, but in order to do so we did have to cut out some features I wanted to include. Generally, this was stuff that involved any kind of physics/collision modeling that potentially could effect both players simultaneously - unpredictable network lag doesn't play well with a highly interdependent physics system. For a game like this, implementing online co-op would likely be a total mind-fuck of potential bugs and glitches and it was probably very sensible of them to choose not to support it.

From what I saw at the IGF that looked to be true. It's still hotspot-based but the puzzles seem to be more involved and the game appears to be a lot less linear.

I was only having little peeks though, because I didn't want to spoil it for myself.

Setting up a twin-stick style configuration on a keyboard is not only awkward (I would anticipate that only a minority of potential players would be able to deal with WASD and IJKL simultaneously), but it will likely lead to keyboard matrix conflicts as you need to register up to four keys at once, in numerous combinations.

In other words, don't be surprised if your keyboard doesn't allow you to fire diagonally up-right while moving left, etc etc.