To expand upon what 2DArray said, you want a way to quickly figure out which shapes are close to the player so that you can run your fine collision detection on only a few shapes.  The general solution to do this is to store (directly or by reference) your objects in any data structure that somehow encodes location information.

One example would be a grid of linked lists, where the coarse location of an object is implicit in which list (which grid cell) it is stored in.  To get more complex, you can build spatial partitioning structures, such as BSP trees, quadtrees, or octrees, which optimize the memory usage somewhat over uniform grids but introduce more pointer chasing and fragmentation.

Actually, I'd like to delve more into the whole "bad LPer" deal.

I wonder what would happen if, as a developer, you specifically told a bad LPer that you didn't want them to use your content while you still allowed others to do so.  I have a feeling that you would get a lot of negative publicity concerning "elitism" or "playing favourites", but at the same time I wouldn't feel comfortable with someone like DSP or PewDiePie (or someone doing the same as they do) making a mockery of my work, while making lots of money off of it.

I'd say that state machines (I don't like "design patterns") are applicable to pretty much any user interface element, be it a GUI control or a player input handler.  Anything where you can gain from turning a switch statement within the game loop into polymorphic state objects.

I think it should be up to the developer to state the terms of use of their content.  Because it's your IP and thus under automatic copyright in many jurisdictions, you get to say what is fair use and what isn't.  Look at software licenses and Creative Commons as some examples.

It's really a tradeoff.  Either you can make some more money by getting LPers or whatnot to pay royalties (and file an infringement claim if that doesn't happen), which will probably lead to decreased publicity, or you can make Let's Plays fair use.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  All the legal information in this post was gathered and figured out haphazardly from experience with software licensing.

EDIT: As for YouTube itself, I'm sure they will make sure they are not infringing upon any copyrights when splitting revenue with a video of your game.

I'm trying to design a bytecode for a Scheme implementation.  At first I thought it would be possible to implement it using reverse Polish notation (just flipping around the expressions), which would allow me to use a stack VM (much simpler), but the fact that procedures can have side effects killed off that idea.  Otherwise the side effects would happen in reverse!

Man, I really love Lisp but I hate that it isn't a pure functional language.  Haskell is better in terms of basic language design (monads are heavily supported in its syntax) but I hate how obtuse the syntax is.  Maybe I'll just develop my own pure Lisp dialect and use that.

I'm not a big fan of the exaggerated blur, but I understand you're trying to make it look "miniature".  What I do really like is the sound design, though.  Nice and clean and it breaks the silence.

Galaxy of Dreams 2 was dropped today so I'm currently listening to that.  Maduk never disappoints.

I don't really like the Observer pattern, or at least how it's commonly implemented.  I'll use the example from the book: the achievement for falling off a bridge.  Does the logic for detecting something superficial like the state of falling really belong in the meat of the physics engine?  Instead, I'd have a separate system that peeks at the physics data and triggers events like that, which can then be sent off to the various interested parties.

My philosophy is that lower-level components (i.e. the physics engine) should never ever have to know about higher-level components (i.e. the fall detector).  That way, the physics system is reusable in another use case where you don't need to send out fall events, or where the criteria for a fall are different, and it can be factored out into a game-agnostic library.

Just wanted to pop in and say that I've been excited for this project for a long time.  Congratulations on being so close!

What general ETA are we looking at here?  Couple months maybe?

Not a specific programming issue, but I'm just pissed off at graphics programming in general.

So people are finally starting to realize that the current graphics APIs (D3D and OpenGL) are shit.  Ridiculous CPU overhead, terrible concurrency problems and limitations, clunky API design, and unpredictable drivers (the last three points are pretty specific to OpenGL).

And we get Mantle.  Great, now we can do console-level GPU programming on a PC!  Oh, wait.  It's exclusive to AMD, which means that even if we write a Mantle backend we still have to do it again in D3D or OpenGL.  Oh, and now Microsoft is announcing D3D12 which does the same thing!  Well, that's all fine and dandy if you're willing to make your game exclusive to Windows 9 and the Xbox One.  And guess what?  None of these work on anything outside of Windows platforms.

As expected, everybody who likes programming on Linux or who wants to release cross-platform, like me, gets to use OpenGL.  What a mess.  First of all, it's 2014 - nobody should have to use that awful 90's style global-state-centric API.  It's clunky and doesn't lend itself well to multithreading.  Just let us upload and download data to and from device memory directly like we would with Direct3D.  Don't even get me started on the shader compilation system...why do we need programs?  D3D gets by just fine letting us bind shaders to pipeline stages independently, and it has a proper standardized compiler that actually supports all the features that it says it does.  Memory management is awful too.  In games it's not really efficient to let the driver juggle around buffers and textures as much as it wants and to be that bratty child that goes "I DON'T WANNA!  I'M GOING TO DO THIS INSTEAD!  I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALA..."  But wait, here's ARB_bindless_texture to save the day!  Nope, Nvidia-specific patented extension.  Good luck getting AMD and Nvidia to cooperate on bare-metal graphics.

Just a rant about graphics programming.  I love the power that GPUs give us, I really do, but the ARB and the various vendors make it very painful to actually harness any of it.

I think the big issue is that indie game development changed.

In its early days, it was all about making a fun game that people liked.  You didn't care about money.  The arguably greatest indie game of all time, Cave Story, was freeware.  Concepts were innovative and broke barriers.  Games were polished and released as complete packages.

Now, it's all about being "the next big thing".  Thanks to Steam, Kickstarter and other similar services, you can become well-known and make money just by making empty promises and showing some pretentious "retro" art, along with some pandering.  People flock to buy unfinished products that never will be finished, like Minecraft.  Games don't try new things because developers are being afraid of only attracting niche audiences.

That's not to say that there aren't some games still being developed with the original spirit in mind, like a lot of games I see here and in some other tightly-knit communities.  Games should be developed to fit your vision, not to open the wallets of the masses.

I'd be wary with code decryption puzzles as they are basically metagaming and can also alienate non-English-speaking players.

As far as puzzles in this type of game go, I really like the shinespark puzzles in the Metroid games (especially Zero Mission).

Did a fresh install today.

Background is the (unofficially named) Madokami Nebula, NGC 6357.

http://www.penguin-empire.com/

Fucking Daimidaler now I have to watch you

Watched Rebellion last night and finished Nichijou this morning.  Now I feel empty inside

Should I watch Daily Lives of Highschool Boys or Kiniro Mosaic next?

Yeah, I think you have to go for a WYSIWYG kinda thing so that they can see if it will be a problem. 

This.  Let them write from within the game (or a game-like environment) so any problems are immediately apparent.

It's pretty much time for the new season to start: http://anichart.net/spring

Looks decent, I guess.

Might tune in for Atelier.

In games, fps and fast pase movement games will take a back seat to games that are more like rides. A Pok'emon Snap type game would be a tremendous hit and I think point and click adventure games will evolve nicely with VR.

Well we're definitely going that way...

TRIGGER didn't lose it's way