I paid in towards Jake Elliot's A House in a California but I believe he'd already finished the game and was just hoping Kickstarter would allow him to make the money back for the work involved.

Like Dock I'd be interested to see how many finished games we get out of all these Kickstarter projects.

Power 4-way is not essential but extras are always useful with the amount of people who'll be there. I'm taking one and hoping a bunch of people will be.

I don't know about Three but I've never had any problem using my O2 iPhone there or my T-Mobile broadband stick. (The latter being essential as once the jam begins I suspect we'll crash the bistro's internet as per usual)

In terms of security there's never been any issues afaik. I'd expect you'd be with your laptop most of the time, and when I've gone out to grab a snack or something there's little chance of someone walking off with your stuff. If you're worried you could just throw it in a bag and take it with you.

In terms of table space usually there's enough to accomodate your laptop and mouse, I think a lot of people use a mouse when working I know i do. I've also seen Wacom's around but space for one might be a bit of luxury.

Yeah it's our monthly pub meet up today, details here:
http://cambridgeindies.com/emails/cambridge-indies-pub-meetup-25th-january-6pm-tram-depot

I've not read your article but I think prototyping is useful depending on the project but it's not important to me as a general rule.

I do a lot of smaller projects and game jams where I generally just take an idea and run. I guess you could consider that a form of prototyping for bigger projects since I use what I've learned from that but the result is usually small finished game not throwaway code.

On larger projects I much prefer to iterate over the development. Get something running as a quickly as possible and modify and change from there.

I don't consider myself a great coder and as such I never really worry about having good clean code, I tend to take the whatever works approach. As long as I get a working game out of it.

[Name]

Name
Perrin

Pic


Coming from:
London

What I does:
I spend most of my time making games in Unity and Flash. (I also do some Drupal CMS web work to pay the bills)

Some of the things I've worked on:
Most notably the white chamber but I've done a bunch of smaller games and over 30 jam games.

TIGJam participation:
I've been to the past two TIGJamUKs and a bunch of other UK game james. Last TIGJamUK I made like 10 games which is a record I'm not looking to break or repeat.

What I want out of TIGjam:
I'm not so fussed about making tons of games this time. I might work on a couple of games over the weekend instead of joining in every single jam. Overall though hoping it will be a fun social event.

I always feel a bit conflicted about Game Maker. Until I started using Stencyl it was my 2D jamming tool of choice. Just because I can make stuff really quickly with it and I still recommend it to people. I've never managed to get onboard the Construct wagon I'm afraid.

But YoYo Games really seem to have killed all progress on the product. It could really use a decent overhaul with some more modern tools and better multiplatform support.

Instead their focus seems to be on chasing the iOS gold rush and in the process putting their efforts into publishing games instead of working on their dev tools. I can understand their thinking as a business who need to pay salaries but as a fan of the product itself it just seems a real shame.

I think some kind of centralised 'TIGJam UK' web-page or blog might be the best help, just some way of helping people find their local TIGJam and maybe information on how to set one up and get it listed.

Yep, that's possibly a good idea.

Well the existing cambridgeindies.com site could be expanded to cover more than just what we're doing in Cambridge. The only thing holding it back is the name really. But right now we're always more than happy to include any jams people want to publicise.

Yeah I tend to agree this event wouldn't really have the same feel if it got a lot bigger. I guess there is enough demand to run bigger events, hopefully World of Love is just the first of many other UK indie focused events to appear. However I'd be a shame if TIGJamUK got a lot bigger and lost the kind of close friendly atmosphere it has right now.

Yeah it's very cool of them to start supporting Unity stuff. I spent a few hours just porting those games to Unity 3 and getting workable lower resolution web versions of them ready for the site.

Upside of putting them on there is a lot more exposure that they would have otherwise had and there's been a few bugs/suggestions that I'm hoping to fix/implement in those games. Downside of course is that most of the comments are from people who hate my games.  Oh well, I can live with that.

This approach is already used a lot in dialogue sequences in games like Fahrenheit where you kind of feel like you're given a lot of choice and are affecting how the game plays out. However if you play through it again you'll find a lot of the choices all lead to the same place really. You see it in BioWare games too in places. You kind of give players the ability to change what they said but not where the conversation is going.

I don't have time to make anything for this sadly. Also while the issue interests me greatly nothing comes to mind in terms of game ideas. Like Increpare I was more interested in what you could do with the war diaries data they posted a while back.

However I am very disappointed to see people advising against making games that associate with political organisations or figures. Whatever side of the argument you take I don't think people should avoid making games about anything they're interested in tackling as a topic.

I for one think Turbo Brother's "Where In the World Is Julian Assange?" could be pretty good satire of current affairs.

It does seem as soon as you mention Minecraft a lot of people take it as an oppurtunity just to make it clear how much they don't buy into it and think it's overrated. Never enough just to enjoy and promote the things you do like, gotta let everyone else know they're wrong for having fun. Haters gotta hate.

I find this an interesting phenomenon because I'm totally the opposite of what seems the norm for gamers. I love wandering through a game knowing I've not seen everything, that there's a huge world I've only seen a part of. I'm not the type to check both paths in game where there's fork.

I'm working on an exploration game at the moment and I've had people say they felt it was overwhelming when they suddenly had 5 doors to choose from. But that's exactly what I want to go for, a sense of wandering around and getting to know the place.

So far in my game you do kind of eventually need to explore all locations but I'm more than happy to produce a load of content that some players won't see if they don't look in certain places. I think that's whole wonder of exploration.

This looks promising. I had a real problem with the pace though.

I started with the worm level and after playing for a few minutes there was still a huge numbers of cells to kill and I just kind of got bored. For a shooter like this I kind of want the early levels to be a simple and short fun challenge while I get to grips with the game. I don't really want to spend 10-15 minutes doing the same thing over and over again. As I say I quite out before I even finished one level because it felt like the level outstayed its welcome.

Also the recharge on the laser seemed to slow for my tastes, again it turned what could have been quite a fun fast paced shooter into a very slow waiting game. Rather than being a test of my skill of me versus the enemies it felt more like a test of my patience.

P.S. Unity rocks! ^_^

contrary doesnt like minecraft without even having played it so i guess it probably is a scam???

lol wut?

Contrary has the right to express his opinion, no ?
No need to get butthurt over one person who doesn't like minecraft, get over it.

learn to sarcasm

In english, please.

I like the guy using 4chan language asking for someone else to speak in English.

I was working on once and the game not completed, I just found it really hard to come up with interesting game mechanics in that overview perspective. I did come up with some stuff but it was a lot harder than working from a side on platform view.

I know better designers than me have and will make great top down games but I definitely found it difficult.

With a side on platformer once you put in jumping and some platforms you've already got a bit of a tangible game feeling. You can jump around and exercise a bit of skill. Top down you're kind of glued to the ground since jumping tends to be very poor and you have to do a lot more to get something fun out of it.

also i think games like spelunky, super meat boy and vvvvvv are works of art!!

Sorry to be a pedant about this but I didn't say they weren't art. I was just saying I felt like producing art didn't seem like the developers motive for those titles. Terry, Derek or Edmund are free to correct me on this but it seemed like these were games made to be fun and enjoyable rather than thinking about the dreaded a word.

It's a tangent to the topic but I don't want to seem like I'm having any kind of a go at those games. I picked them because I loved them.

I almost always release source code with my games, so if you want to look at any of my game maker stuff you can check out Alfredo here:
http://lockeddoorpuzzle.com/site/works/alfredo

And tons of my jam games include Game Maker source:
http://lockeddoorpuzzle.com/site/works/jams

Though I think my use of game maker goes against the received wisdom as I try and do everything use drag and drop and use as little GML as humanly possible. ^_^

I feel sorry for people still working with the engines who might have been relying on future support and updates. Personally though I never got on with Torque, I bought both their 2D and 3D engines and felt they always failed to live up to their promise of being easy to work with. I'm sure some would disagree with me but I always felt like they were not great products.

I don't have a problem with social games at all. I do however have a problem with some of your assumptions in your original posting:

I would go as far as to say originality is a core value of the indie game community.

I don't really think that's true personally. While there are certainly many innovative creators in the community my perception is that the majority of the output in the indie community is people taking their own stab at established genres and styles. I've seen just about every possible permutation of platformer and shoot'em'up come from the indie community and I don't feel like originality is always the creators goal nor is it required.

Indie games strive to be works of art; there is no question about that.

That's obviously a hot button topic around here from the amount of threads about games as art but once again I think "art games" are certainly a niche part of the indie community output as a whole. If you pick any of the high profile games like Spelunky, Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV they're all great games but none of them feel like an attempt to produce works of art to me.

The easiest game to make, and I may get some backlash from this but I believe it's true, is a game for yourself.

I don't think this point is so much wrong as you've come at it from the wrong angle. I don't feel like indies make games for themselves because it's easier I know personally that making games for myself is entirely the only reason to be an indie developer in the first place. If I tried to make games for a target audience then I might as well join the mainstream games industry.

I really don't have a problem with social games. My reason being that I love that the games industry as whole is becoming a much bigger and wider place which caters for gamers of all kinds and not just for people like FPS games. I think it's awesome that FarmVille exists, that tech like SingStar and Kinect get various audience playing on consoles who would hate a game like Fallout 3. It's also great that the DS has a whole host of games for teenage girls that I would never want to make or play myself. I have no reason to resent the existance of any of this stuff because it means more people get to enjoy games that suit them even if they're not something I'd enjoy playing myself.

I do have a problem with your characterisation of indies as this cliched imaged that we're all trying to scrape by making high art while we don't really worry about the money so much. Since that to me shows a lack of knowledge at the depth and breadth of what is actually being created and by whom.

So finally you mentioned apples and oranges in the original post. Here's what I really don't get. Why this matters? Because I don't feel like in general the indie community gets on that well with the makers of Call of Duty or GTA either. I feel like if you take a general view on it I've found a lot of indie developers focus a lot of their love on other indie games. Which makes a lot of sense since those are the kind of games they make and are into. So I don't think it matters if people dislike Facebook gaming.

When you've spend a year working on a weird offbeat game because it's just the thing you always wished someone would make then no maybe you don't like FarmVille, but so what?