One thing that amuses me about this whole sad tale is that some of the original advice I gave him that seemed to help send him over the deep end was that he needed to get rid of all those silly shareware awards on his site and put links to his games front and central. Which it looks like he's actually tried to do now. Though his site, especially the front page, could still use some work.

Anyway more on topic, I get the impression from his post about Alexa that he's obsessing over his traffic numbers and has realised this drama is generating hits to his site so is continuing it on purpose. However he doesn't seem to have connected that people interested in the juicy drama of watching his continual meltdown are not his target audience for his game and I don't see how all this extra controversy traffic is really going to get him the sales he obviously wants.

I guess at least he's providing free comedy at this point.

I've got nothing else marked down in my calendar for that weekend so provisionally I'm in!

With no tube strike I shall indeed be there.

With some of the awesome voxel images of NES games I've seen about the internet lately I've been really interested in doing something with this same sort of visual style myself. I was thinking more of a platformer though.

You've pulled it off really well.

spawning blocks and materials perhaps?

This. We had everyone as ops so we could all teleport around. When the rest of us were mining for diamond and he was giving himself records, obsidian, whatever he wanted kind of made a mockery of it all. Sure it's just artificial scarcity but it was the fun of the challenge. And him abusing something he'd been given in trust.

It was even more sad that his reaction being caught was to throw a tantrum and start placing bedrock about the place, so we had to use a map editor to remove it.

Thing is I'm not even complaining. It's a testament to the game that these kind of situations can arise.

Hey guys, does anyone think it would be alright to have an audio-portfolio website built totally in Flash?  Is that a bad idea?  I have this idea for a pretty cool site that I intend on building myself.

I'd always recommend building against building website in Flash. It's not really the done thing anymore and hasn't been in a long time. Flash is really nice for games and embedded media like music and video but not for content and structure of your site.

Somehow recently has taken over all my friends lives. We've got a Multiplayer server setup now for all of us. Some of my friends have been spending like 5+ hours on it a day. I'm sure Notch doesn't need any more pats on the back but the way it has managed to drag most of my immediate social group away from other games to just to focus on building a town together is really awesome.

We've even just had our first bout drama when we found one of us was cheating and have had to destroy a lot of his stock since.

I like how for all his prevarication and pontification, the best thing this guy could come up with is a bloody forum fiction game, something people have been playing for ever, and was lame in the first place. Great going, bvanevery.

Yeah I get forum role playing as a means of people taking part in interactive storytelling. But I failed to understand how it was an example of any game design lesson. Especially as this forum is primarily focused on video game design and development, as oppose to pen and paper role playing stuff. There are already tons of other forums where people play these kind of "games".

I just wanted to point out that this has interesting ramifications - Brandon claimed to come here at the behest of the IGDA as part of their outreach program. Contacting them instead of banning bvanevery may make better neighbours rather then sending them the action message of "your representative isn't welcome here".

If the IGDA's idea of outreach is to send someone over to let us all know we're wrong about game design and we're all idiots for liking Minecraft then that's not a great link to be forged.

Ultimately I don't think his status should be an excuse for his behaviour. Which has been a constant nuisance. While he presents himself as intellectual he has repeatedly insulted and belittled the people who've taken the time to engage in his arguments.

Other people have found examples of various other forums on the internet where he has been an equally unpleasant disruption but has been allowed to get away with it because he sometimes makes interesting points. I would love TIGSource to be a place where he was made example of and so have voted to ban him.

Nice graphics style. Good luck with this.

I generate discussion.  I've participated in, what, 4 threads in the past week?  2 of which I started, all of which are in the Game Design forum.  If that's too much "website monopolization" for you, then people around here don't talk enough.

It's not the quantity of your discussion I take issue with but the quality.

You seem like a very angry person. Why bother coming here if all you are going to do is argue with people?

I have noticed every time I lurk the forums lately there's another thread with him being right about something in a verbose manner and getting quite worked up no one here think he's right. Maybe he should have his own board for these discussions.

Errr yeah I'm gonna try and be there but this tube strikes looks a lot more problematic than last time. Even though I'm in London it's going to be annoying getting there and back. So no promises.

@perrin: i'll continue maintaining the list. i don't want the the quality of the games in the project to be more lax as a result of new management. if a52 owns, well, then it must own.

Okay that's cool. I was only offering to step in if you didn't want to do it anymore.

Hey Guys,

I've been keeping track of this thread even though my two games are now long ago finished. I really like this project and would like to see it through to completion.

If no one has any objections I'd be happy to put together a new site, listing what's already been done and make a renewed effort to get some other developers involved. Even if it involves a touch of begging.

I totally understand Mr. P's position on this why he's lost faith in the people making games for this and his stance on rejecting underdeveloped games. However having sunk a load of time into the games I made for this I'd really like to see this not lose momentum like so many ambitious internet projects.

Would people be okay with me putting something together to try and keep this project moving forwards?

Was a really good event, looking forward to the enxt one.

I am really excited about this. Been so busy with proper job I've not done any game dev in like 3 weeks now. So I'm starting to go slightly crazy. Really looking forward to sitting and making something.

Unless there's any Friday night plans I guess I'll travel up Saturday morning this time around.

Is the goal to follow the original as close as possible?
Or to make something totally new with the spirit of the original game?

This is covered in the opening post by Mr. P. I believe the point is to remake the game so it keeps the spirit of the original game alive but while the original games were really bad your goal is to make them good.

If you look through what games have been done so far people have varied in how far they've strayed from the original. I myself took a lot of liberties with both the games I worked on because I wanted them to be fun and bring something fresh to the table that wasn't there in the originals.

I would have thought it is to make a port of the game, and giving it a face life while staying true to its original design idea.

Most of the original games were really badly designed. My money would be on improving the design rather than just updating the graphics and music a bit.

I've made games with code using C++ with DirectX, XNA and Flixel

I've made games with engines Game Maker, Unity and Wintermute.

Personally I'm a big fan of engines as they allow me to make games and get them finished. Myself I find no joy in programming as a thing in itself, having a clean code base or and an efficient engine are not something I feel any satisfaction from. I know I'm not the same as many others in this regard.

For me the joy of all this is in making games. So I'm happy to take whatever shortcuts I can to get my games finished. I find with stuff like Game Maker it might be a bit more restrictive but any designer with even a modicum of skill can work around those limitations and make what they want.

The main thing that draws me to working with stuff like Flixel and Unity when they take a lot more work is the extra platforms you can reach. Basically I want to make games and them reach an audience. Personally in my experience working in C++ just draws me away from that as I spend all my times making engine code and not games.

If you click my profile and check out the actual 20 or so posts I've made here in about 8 months, you'll see that I mostly just post a thread with screenshots and links when I make a game release, pretty much like everyone else, and then answer people's feedback.

No I think a lot of other people get involved in the community outside of their own spam. It was because I noticed in the time since you've joined you've rarely stepped outside a thread about your own works that made me leap to this assumption.

When we (Lisp games folks) started the Expo and its remix contest, where we were openly inviting people to particpate, I posted about it in Contests, like the other contests. If that is advertising, no one saw fit to accuse me of it at the time, despite linking directly to the game with screenshots.

Yeah but even that contest to me seemed a bit desperate. Loads of people here post the source code to their games all the time and don't make a big deal about it. You spamming that here and on Slashdot (where it got assaulted quite badly) just looked like a desperate PR gimmick.

Anyway, I mention the contest in the essay because it is exactly what prompted me to look deeper into the iOS licensing issue in the first place and write the essay, and linked the essay here because it's an issue that affects independent game developers.

Well as I've already said I think people should really be a little more live and let live with their platform choices. I grow tired of being preached at why I'm wrong for developing for Windows, Mac or iPhone. And I still strongly believe you just posted a controversially titled article for hits.

Is this ok? You've made over 200 posts in roughly the same period (you joined about a month earlier) and you link to all your stuff too.

In those 200 posts you'll find I don't link to that many games. Most of the stuff I've made this year has not been spammed to TIGSource. The links you'll have found recently would be the Action 52 games I made for a TIGSource project not my own personal stuff I want downloads for.

Anyway I'm not a mod here, I'm not trying to back seat moderate. I'm in no position to tell you what you can and can't post. I brought it up because you've been here about as long as me and you only seem to post when you want publicity. And so that feeds into this argument because I think you posted this article in the same spirit you've always used TIGSource.