I think it's worth noting that, whenever you are feeling tired or happy or angry or just normal, or any other mental state, then that is the effects of drugs on your brain as well. All of us have to maintain the right chemical balance that helps us work.

Nobody can really be "drug free", because our bodies manufacture all sorts of drugs all the time, and everything we do affects the balance of different drugs in our brains.

Possibly he could, but I'm sure it would take most of the fun out of it. Making experiments and prototypes is fun; making full-length games can be a grind. And games like Tumiki Fighters, while interesting as conceptual pieces, would require a huge amount of work to transform into fully-functional games.

anybody here think we might end up having to pay to play the new shinny kenta cho game on our console of choice?

or is the man really the mysterious indie hero he's made out to be?

I hope that it isn't a prerequisite that indie heroes stick to making PC freeware. 

Actually I don't think "hard to master" is a requirement of casual games. Casual games don't need to have depth to be successful, and I would say that if you were following the "casual" design ethic then you would be inclined to sacrifice some of that high-end mastery if it made for extra simplicity. In fact I would say depth of mastery is the defining characteristic of a hardcore game - the kind of game which has enormous scope for you to get better and better and better.

"Easy to learn, hard to master" is the best of both worlds; it indicates a really, really well-designed game - neither casual or hardcore (terms which, I think, both indicate that something has been compromised). Unfortunately, knowing that doesn't really help you to achieve it.

Well, I think that if your experience is from a rehab facility, then that is probably going to skew your perceptions away from the normal reality somewhat. It's hardly a representative sample of the population.

(I mean, if you are using drugs without a legitimate medical reason you are not using the drug the way it was designed: abuse)

Well, there are plenty of drugs around that weren't designed, but simply exist naturally. And since our brains keep running on a cocktail of drugs all the time anyway, it's never so cut and dried as that.

Now, excuse me while I get my coffee. I freely admit to abusing that drug in the mornings.

I think that Chocolate Castle is a monstrously hardcore game. It's a stone cold brain-shredding puzzler that would make casual gamers weep.

The difference between casual and hardcore is, in a way, the difference between wanting your game to be well-liked, and wanting your game to be right.

"People on drugs think they are creative. To everyone else, they seem like people on drugs"

I'd say that's absolutely true, but don't underestimate the value of thinking you are creative. That's probably the biggest barrier of all; you need to become confident and enthusiastic and believe in the quality of your work before it will even start to become good.

I... er, well from past experience I will say that it can help you with playtesting, finding out whether something is fun or not and also approximating the sort of impression that somebody else may have when they see your game for the first time. That is to say, it can briefly strip away that jaded, tired view of your own work that you can end up with after working on something for a long time. It's also fun for playing other people's games.

But for actually getting work done... nah. I don't think it helps with your creativity at all, and it certainly does nothing for organised thinking. But it can help replenish your enthusiasm.

I noticed, but I'm not going to flatter myself by supposing it means that.

Oh, it's finally been released? Yay!

Yeah, Chocolate Castle is genius, but be warned that it will fuck your brain.

Advertise your game all you want, but only if it's:

1. free
2. bloody damn good

stop wasting my time with more shit games which i need to pay, thank you.

Except that oftentimes, people who make really poor games tend to think they are pretty good. And those that make good games are often very self-critical. You can't really judge your own work objectively; that's part of the whole "feedback" thing.

And do you really not like paying for games? I don't mind paying for games if I like them. And I don't mind people trying to make money from games, either. In fact, I would encourage it, since making money from games can sometimes be fashioned into some sort of ongoing career, whereas sticking to free games is something that is in danger of just petering out sometime after the university years are behind you.

People successfully profiting from their work is a great thing, and an excellent sign that you're not trapped in some increasingly insular, fringe cult scene like an Amiga demo coder. And it means that they can afford to do more of it.

Oh yeah. Your game could be the next "Momma, Can I Mow The Lawn?"

Man, I can't help but notice that most of you guys are fairly young; presumably unmarried and with no kids. And from what I remember of the time when I used to actually release stuff, so was I...

I'll write me up a proper intro one day, but it's kind of a daunting writing task to sit down to, when you're a globe-trotting adventurer like me. Rattling off a quick paragraph's worth of random bitching is more my usual style.

If you plan to localize the best thing is to not cram you text areas too much as they may grow (or even shrink) depending on the language you are localizing in.

Although I'm yet to actually have to deal with this, I prepared for that eventuality  by adding some simple HTML-like formatting codes that my text-writing function can parse. So a translation file can include the codes to resize the text if it doesn't fit properly.

It's a nice enough picture.

I think perhaps when you are young, or maybe forever if you never get over it, you have certain expectations that an artist is required to impress you with their skill or insight in some immediately obvious way. But really, it is sometimes enough to just have some nice shapes and nice colours together. It doesn't have to be clever or symbolic - especially if it's something you are going to be living with in your house. It can be just a simple, relaxing thing like having a nice flower garden.

It probably doesn't help that there is this big, ridiculous hierarchy around art that has been built up by academics, dealers, buyers, and galleries. It makes everything come across as so self-important, so competitive. Nobody likes to be told that something they don't like has been officially deemed "great". People resent the fact that certain paintings sell for millions of dollars; and quite rightly really because it's absurd. But beneath all the bullshit it's really quite an innocent, simple thing.

It struck me earlier, that this phenomenon isn't restricted to nerdy computery internet stuff, either. Jazz went the same way - it started off by opening up new possibilities, and then along the way it became kind of elitist and closed, with an unwritten set of rules you had to adhere to if you wanted to be "in". I guess it's human nature...

Paul Robertson makes his videos for fun in his free time, while Richard Williams couldn't finish The Thief and The Cobbler even doing it professionally, as a full time job -- and it was a 26 year project by a "master" of the art.  So the comparison is a bit skewed.

Oh, absolutely, and I'm only mentioning it as a way of illustrating the difference between frighteningly hard-core animation moving fluidly in 3d space, and a bouncy 8-frame loop. The project itself was a mess, but some of the animation in it... yikes.

And I feel a bit ugly taking this kind of negative stance, which doesn't really reflect how I feel (I liked that Pirate Baby Cabana Battle video); but I do get a little tired of the "mad skillz" of pixel artists being overhyped. Celebrate their imagination and hard work, by all means, but as you say the nice thing about pixel art is that it is accessible to everyone and not particularly difficult to achieve good results with.

At least, it is when people aren't arguing about whether you're doing it right or not.

I have read it through now. I have to say you kinda lost me with all the Mario talk.

It's not that I didn't understand it... it was more that I already understand these mechanisms quite well - and I suspect that most people with any game programming experience do too - and so I don't really need such a detailed breakdown of the mechanics of Mario in order to get the point. And I don't know that a non-programmer would be interested enough to want to have it described in such detail (but I could be wrong?).

Also, I think people tend to overstate Miyamoto's revolutionary influence. He's a good designer, but he's not god. It may be different from my perspective, since in my country there was no videogame crash, no NES revolution (in fact, the NES had almost no presence at all), most games were played on home computers rather than consoles until the Playstation came along, and the arcades didn't start to die out until some 15 years later. So there was really no earth-shaking arrival of Shiggsy on the scene. And besides, I also find Donkey Kong's stiffness quite endearing...

But I am happy with my new signature quote; thanks!


 

I don't think you could achieve what he does, Anthony, without a lot of hard work!

Well... it's all going to be hard work, sure. Animation is a time-consuming and painstaking process. But I don't know how I can say "yeah, I can animate to that standard" without sounding like an ass. Except to say that I know my limits, and I've worked with pixels for years, and I've been animating for a long time too. And there is plenty of animation out there that leaves my jaw on the floor (I recently got ahold of a copy of Richard Williams' The Thief and The Cobbler, Recobbled Cut, and there are certain scenes in that which are just astonishing). But I know that I could totally sit down right now and do sprite animation at the level of guys like Paul Robertson, and if I was still unemployed and single I'd go right ahead and prove it. But since I'm not, I'm just going to have to say it without proving it and sound like an ass.

But I don't want to be disparaging about these guys, or about pixel art - it's all good fun, sure. It's just that people "in the scene" seem to elevate the skills of certain pixel artists stratospherically, and then there are the debates about whether something is "real" pixel art or not... I guess my instinct is to stay far away. It's kind of like how I like shootemups, but hardcore shootemup fans make me want to stay away from that area.

I wonder if this is related to the reason why Capcom Classics on the PS2 has such horribly cocked-up controls on the analogue stick. It's almost impossible to pull off diagonals, so without an arcade stick two thirds of the games are ruined, just like that. Silly boys. Fancy expecting people to play Commando when the diagonals don't work properly?

It would never even occur to me that a real programmer would attempt to create a dead zone by simply hacking at the x and y axes to make a square hole. Urgh.

I used to consider myself a pretty good pixel artist back in the day, and I could do some pretty good things with a 16x16 grid and a four-colour palette. But people are so touchy about it these days I don't think I would want to go there again. It almost seems a little bit cult-like, the rules and hierarchies of the pixel-art community.

And (here we go) even though I can enjoy and appreciate it, I don't recall ever seeing any display of pixel-art virtuosity that genuinely awed me or made me think that these guys were operating on a level far above what I could achieve if I got down to it. Compared to some of the amazing cel animation work that is out there in the world of not-videogames, which I am completely humbled by. Good pixel art is plenty nice, but it is neither as difficult nor as impressive as many people make it out to be.

See also: programming a computer.