Well... I once played through Grim Fandango with someone who had no interest in videogames, but was a film buff. He really liked it, and said that he had no idea there were videogames like that in the world. Although he was still kind of dependent on me to take care of the fiddly interface stuff. But that's quite different from the sorts of games we usually play; I doubt he would ever have found something to appreciate in an action game. Maybe watching someone playing Shadow of the Colossus, or something like that. But being a spectator kind of misses the point, doesn't it?

Yes, we can improve this situation with improved interfaces and more intuitive designs. However it is the case that many people will still be put off by the amount of active participation a videogame requires. You aren't going to reach these people with videogames, but why should you? Nothing says you can't make movies too, if that's your thing.

For my part, I like to create games that look beautiful and offer a window into some other, complete little world. Basically a direct, sensory kind of appeal. No real stories or character development as yet, but I wouldn't rule it out in future. At the moment it's hard enough combining the above qualities while still making a mechanically solid game.

Yeah, but what are these important things you're doing?  Paying bills?  Stuffing an Egg McMuffin into your mouth so you can live for another couple of days?  Reading a book?  Everything you do from day to day is an indulgence.

Well, speaking for myself, at least 14 hours of every day is spent doing things I don't want to do, and most of the rest of the time is broken down into little 5 or 10 minute chunks (hey, I'm spending one now, while I'm waiting for work to start). A few years ago I probably would have said the same thing, but now I have a family and a mortgage and all the rest, the terrible thing is that suddenly it's all about responsibility and duty. Which is why I don't participate in indie community stuff; why I'm not releasing a game a year, why I don't paint any more, why I don't play in a band (my favourite thing in the world) any more, why I can never read a book all the way through any more, why I don't listen to records, go to concerts, visit art galleries or even play videogames except on rare occasions. Not because I don't want to - I would love to; I'm desperate to - but I have worked very hard (and will need to continue to work hard) in order to get myself into a position where I can once again indulge in the creation and appreciation of art, which is all I ever really wanted to do in life.

The issue at hand is how to deal with the acceptance of games in the mainstream. Do we discredit the mainstream as ignorant people? Or do peacock and lure them to our world?

But, we're all ignorant people. Does it really matter? If someone took a $50,000 bottle of wine and gave it to you in a $10 bottle, would you really sit up and take notice? Probably not, unless you were a wine enthusiast. But we don't all need to be wine enthusiasts. Wine, classical violin, videogames - they're all just one of many niche interests that some people choose to pursue with a passion, and the majority of people choose to largely ignore in favour of painting, photography, heavy metal, cooking, sports, reality TV, etc etc etc.

I don't know, if you're so single-minded that you can't step out from your comfort zone for a few moments and appreciate the work of someone who is one of the very best at what they do (regardless of your own interest in their field), then I would honestly say that you need to reevaluate your life a bit.

But if you aren't already interested, you won't even know they are the best in their field. None of those people who walked on past would have gone to his concerts, either. Everyone who happened to be a violin enthusiast recognised that something special was going on; everyone else didn't.

You can step outside your comfort zone and appreciate something like this; certainly. But first, you generally need someone to point out that here is someone who is the best in their field, and why. People would form a crowd for Britney Spears, but only because they would recognise her.

And I'm saying all this as someone who has dedicated their whole life to the pursuit of art. I think one of the problems with that experiment is that it had a fairly elitist attitude to the heirarchy of art - it was assumed that a really good classical violinist was the peak of human musical achievement, but it turns out that for most people, classical violin doesn't really push their buttons.

Ah, yeah, you're right. Damn late night posts. Well, it's still a good one.

Man, that article just went on and on and on. I had to bail out. Just like the violin guy, the experiment simply wasn't interesting enough to take up that much of my time when I'm busy.

It is very easy, I think, to live within your own subculture, and not fully appreciate just how insignificant you are to the world at large. That guy is one of the most famous classical violinists in the world, adored by many - but I'd never heard of him. I don't move in those circles. His violin is an amazing piece of work, but only people who are really obsessive about violins would give a shit. To everyone else, it's just an impressive price tag. Most people aren't really into Bach, either. And everyone else has their own lives to be getting on with. The public were not deluded; it really wasn't that big a deal after all.

Similar to what we do. If you're really into videogames, Shigeru Miyamoto or Kenta Cho or whoever else might be a big deal. To the vast majority of people, they're just another anonymous human; their games are just more of those dang videogames.

I'm not going to downplay the value of art - I love art in all its forms. But it's not really "important" - despite the hype, artists never really change the world in any significant way. And art is an indulgence; you can only really appreciate it when there's nothing more important you have to be doing.

even if he did polish them up, his game is still gonna' look 5 years behind the curve so why bother?

Because they'd look nicer. As far as I'm concerned, that is all the reason you need.

I don't expect cutting-edge graphics, but if the game is at least pleasing to look at it does increase my enjoyment quite a lot - regardless of genre.

[completely off topic but I just had to share] - the TV is on in the background here, and there is some guy visiting an elementary school. And the music they are playing in the background is the Imperial Death March from Star Wars performed on a tin whistle. I swear; the music in Japanese variety shows is something else. Once I saw a feature on vintage cars that used Monty Python's "Sit on My Face" as background music.

I always wondered why Spiderweb games have such horrible presentation. As far as I can tell he is quite successful; it oughtn't be too big an issue to get some help in polishing the games up. I guess you could say "well, he doesn't need to..." but I just don't know why anyone wouldn't want to, especially when it is a relatively simple thing to fix.

Oh man, that looks mighty. I'm generally not into retroing things all the way back to the 8-bit era. But this looks way nicer than any 8 bit game ever was; it's like revisiting the past to show the past who's boss.

As has been mentioned, it's the great use of colour that puts it over the top.

What, you want Martha to go away? No!

It really, really totally depends on what you want to do. Games get much, much slower  and the graphics take up exponentially more memory as you up the resolution. That's not nearly so important now as it used to be, but if you want a fast action game with loads of overdraw and stacks of big, fluid sprites without requiring a huge download and a top-of-the-line machine, lower resolutions are still a good idea.

Personally, I think that if you use edge-antialiasing on your sprites, then 640x480 looks absolutely fine. Some people would consider that heretical in this day and age, although obviously not here on TIGSource, where everyone competes to see who can use the lowest resolution, and 320x240x8 is considered excessive... 

However, if your game has a clean, vectory look, you may want to go higher. This is also generally true for more static game types, particularly ones with lots of text and other info on screen, like strategy games. You probably don't want to go higher than 1024x768, for maximum compatability.

Any game that runs in 3d hardware (whether it has a 2d or a 3d look) can be scaled to any resolution with very little effort, so you should allow the user to set it to whatever their native res is.

It's fun to walk like that in real life, though. Makes you feel like a door.

[edit] d'oh, wrong thread; silly me...

So, what was the bigger motivation for you then? The fact that it was a good game AND it was on the GBA, or that it was a GBA game that was also very good?

Well, I hadn't tried it beforehand, so I didn't know if it was good. But I'd heard it was good, and I thought that it would be a game that I'd like. Strange as it sounds, I'm kind of a sucker for buy-before-you-try. It's more exciting that way. And it turns out that it is a very nice game.

Also, I am a sucker for physical objects, and the cart is a nice little limited-edition thing. It's kind of special that way. The package I got was endearingly hand-made.

Being for the GBA wasn't that big a plus point, as I only own a DS Lite and the GBA carts stick out of it a little awkwardly. But being a cart for a console that I own was good enough. And the game is well-suited to portable gaming.

Also, I wanted to support the author for sticking his neck out and making a GBA game.

Awesome use of the apostrophe. My inner English teacher did a double take, then saluted you.

Yeah, I threw that one in there for the punctuation fans. It's one of my favourites (along with "McDonald's's" - indicating something belonging to McDonald's).

You'll find you get a much more natural walk if you make the left arm move in the opposite direction to the left leg. [edit] I mean the right arm and leg. Well, I mean both. The arms should move in step with the opposite leg.

That tunnelly game looks pretty sweet, Adamatomic.

Just... "drugs" in a general consensus is BAD DRUGS.

Oh, I see. So people shouldn't "do drugs", because "drugs" in this context means "bad drugs" which are by definition bad things. I don't think anyone would disagree that it's a good idea to avoid bad things - only problem is, now we need to agree upon which drugs are "bad drugs"!

Incidentally, this isn't a minor semantic quibble at all - it's symptomatic of the entire "drugs" debate which is hopelessly muddled and contradictory. I'm sorry I got into this at all now, though. I certainly didn't think I was saying anything controversial.

"Ignorant" hey? A strange choice of words.

It's just acknowledging the fact that our bodies are sloshing around with mood-altering chemicals all the time, and those chemicals go through all sorts of peaks and troughs depending on what we do. Ingesting other substances can contribute to that, but we are never actually "free" from the effects of mood-altering chemicals, and there are other ways we consciously manipulate our chemistry too. Heck, people get high from jogging.

And the only reason I mentioned this was in response to the "all drug-taking that isn't medically prescribed = drug abuse" comment. Our lives are far too intricately tied in with drugs, both internally produced and ingested in food and elsewhere, to ever really be able to claim to be "anti-drugs". So if you're going to be anti-drugs, you need to specify which drugs you mean. If you just mean "oh, all the illegal ones of course"; well, that's actually quite arbitrary in a lot of cases.

I guess what I'm saying is, every drug you are for or against needs to be discussed seperately rather than all lumped together.

Comedy aside, it must have taken enormous processing power to render all those individual little people in the background. So that's why we need those huge, expensive, multi-core games consoles!

Oh, I saw Guitar Wolf play a while back; it must have been just before the bass player died. I never knew that. Aww.

I didn't think their music was much cop; kinda forgettable, Ramonesey rock'n'roll - but they put on a great show and they had that real Japanese quality of being intense and agressive, but also really harmless and friendly at the same time. The thing that really stood out to me, apart from their constantly pulling out combs to redo their greasy rock'n'roll hairstyles, was an incident when they pulled out a young fella from the crowd. He was all decked out like a memeber of the band, with the hair and the leathers and everything, and he can't have been older than 14. He looked pretty scared when he was hauled up on stage, like the guy was about to deck him or something. But nope, he put his guitar on the lad and told him to go for it.

Well, the kid couldn't play guitar at all, but he knew all the right moves, and the band just kept playing while this kid rocked out and squalled away on the guitar; probably the highlight of his life to date. And the best part was, they really let him go for it - he must have been up there for at least 20 minutes doing his thing. It was like the band had no agenda whatsoever except to want everyone to have a good time.

Before that, I probably would have gone away thinking they were a not-particularly-interesting retro-rock outfit, but they won me over with their unique combination of total anarchy and touching kindness.

ANYWAY

I've been a rock musician for a long time myself, and making games is really nothing like it at all. I wish it was, because being in a rock band is the most fun thing in the whole world. But I don't think there is any way we can capture the spontaneity, the energy, the performance of live music in such a slow and meticulous medium as videogames. We can perhaps evoke that kind of spirit in our work, but we won't ever experience that adrenaline surge of pouring every ounce of yourself out in 40 wonderful minutes in front of a cheering crowd. It's just not a performance medium.

Heck, we don't even get to experience a public screening like film-makers do.

playing on my couch witha  controller in hand is worth a lot of money to me.
i hate, hate mouses and keyboard. i spend all day at my desk, when i go home and i wanna play games, i wanna sit down and relax, not sit a computer.

Amen to that. The only reason I work with PCs is out of necessity. I don't like gaming on the PC, and I don't tend to think like a PC game designer. All else being equal, I'd've never even started to make PC games, it would've been consoles right from the start. As a designer, I crave gamepad. A single, standardised controller. Mmm.

Also, although I take a keen interest in what other indies are up to, it's mostly out of curiousity so I don't tend to stick it out very long. There is something just really off-putting about using the PC for games to me these days. But I quite happily paid my money to get a copy of Qwak for the GBA, and that was a fair bit more expensive than most indie games. But see, it was on a proper games machine.

I think that old games mostly tended to be hardcore, because videogames were such a fringe activity in the early days, and people were willing to overcome the general unfriendliness and inaccessibility because of the novelty of it all.

Yes, but I guess the point I was trying to make is that there are so many things that we do that can drastically affect the various drug levels inside our bodies without actually consuming drugs, and that these affect our productivity just as much (in fact they may even be the same drugs). And, I guess, I partly wanted to get away from the demonising of "drug use" since we are constantly awash with various drugs that out own bodies manufacture (and, perhaps self-administer in inappropriate dosages in some cases). So some people need to take medication just to function normally, etc.

That's only tangentally related to the discussion at hand; granted. But we so often hear about people coming down on "drugs", when it's such nonsense. Which drugs? We survive on drugs. If you think people taking heroin is bad, then that's fine; say that. But being "anti-drugs" right across the board really makes very little sense.