I don't know about you, but I don't think I would ever pay a subscription to play an offline game. A lot of people do actually have metered bandwidth and while paying for individual websites would be bad for the individual, it would actually provide a working business model for the Internet. Of course, since almost everything is already free, there's probably no going back now.

I still don't know that there are enough quality games being made to justify such a service. I think the popularity of a portal/game manager might shed light onto whether its viable or not. But if such portal/game manager existed, it would be difficult to make people start paying for what was once free.

Tunneling? An object completely jumps over/passes through another object because there's too much time between updates and/or it moves too far each update. Though, if you're making a turn based game, I'm not sure where you're having collision issues or needing collisions.

I can't say that torrenting is less convenient than Netflix. Also, I would be concerned about there being enough quality games to justify a subscription, and since most indie games don't compare to commercial games, the subscription charge would probably have to be pretty small. Also, profit does corrupt things. There would be complications in profit sharing and some people would be simply be in it for the money alone. If a user could select who to donate money to, why have the service at all? The only real reason would be to publicize the games in a central location.

On the other hand, if there was simply an application like Steam that connected to a game repository (like TIGDB) and allowed a person to view new games and install them with a just a few clicks, I would think that to be a good idea.

This is what QuadTrees are for.

If you ask your computer nicely with a microphone, it will give you some.

This is what I hate about programming in general. You might start in one language or using one library heavily, find out down the road that its insufficient, and then have to switch to a different language or important library. All I want is an easy way to port my code (algorithms) across different languages.
HaXe seems like a potential half solution to this because you can use one language to compile to many other languages, but I haven't tried out any language targets except for flash, and since I couldn't embed resources directly, I just said I would go back to it later.

About 33FPS average. Using a PC with a 2.1 GHz dual core CPU, Windows XP and 2GB of RAM.

There was a game for the PS2 called Lifeline, I think, in which you were a person trapped in a locked room with a bunch of monitors of the entire space ship or whatever you were in, and you had to guide around a woman with a mic. I don't think it worked too well. Good idea though.

Are you going to post every one of your article-type blog posts here? What would be the point of going to your blog then?

Shop worked for me.

[Things I wanted to add:]

So slow at the beginning, I was going to quit for a second. Gold should be closer to surface for first upgrade or something.
Also, if you fall down a vertical shaft, you're kinda screwed and will have to slowly build steps back up.
The "innocent" dragon gave me an idea for a game where you have to dig down to the bottom, and rescue some large creature from a cave-in by digging a path out for him.

Things I wanted to add:
-A proper boss/game end
-Enemies!
-Simple items (TNT, ropes...)
-Procedural generated levels?

So, more like Spelunky?

Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems like you could ask a bunch of people here to test it for you. Not sure if you could do it more than once if it was too buggy to be played, but I would think you could get a few dozen people from here and other game related communities if you specified a certain time to start for testing purposes or something. Maybe people would be too unreliable to all play at the same time and play multiple times, but some people will play anything.

I think this only works if the player feels clever or inventive for using these skills properly. Obviously you don't want a game to have a "Don't lose" command or button. Also, some obstacles are meant to be deadly. It usually means the player clearly screwed up somewhere.

As far as MMOs go, while you are godlike to peasants, you are usually bested by hundreds or thousands depending on your own level and the number of players.

I would count a power fantasy as a non-mature/kid subject for a game, honestly.

I guess I'm really just saying that its a fuzzy line. In almost all cases, games have some kind of protagonist. If you have a protagonist, you have some kind of quest or goal to achieve. If you have a goal, then the game usually depends on the protagonist to achieve that goal because otherwise, what is the point of playing? The goal is usually contained within an appropriately sized scope so that the whole game and your whole experience with the game is to achieve that goal of saving/destroying a universe/world/country/city/person/object. Even your idea would involve you in the pivotal role as the savior of your whole family from murderous gods.

Not every game has a "save the world" scenario. I think its just the difference between games for kids and games for more mature people. Isn't this kinda how MMOs work as far as being relatively insignificant?

Just because every PS3 game isn't an AAA title doesn't mean you can make a PS3 game for $500,000. A random article I found (http://www.develop-online.net/news/33625/Study-Average-dev-cost-as-high-as-28m) says: "A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an averge of $10 million." So, I doubt you're going to get anywhere
Indie games on average would probably straddle a "B" line, if the letters actually meant anything. Just because Sony is developing the Move doesn't mean they're they want cheaper games. They just want in on the motion control market that the Wii is currently leading in. Sony doesn't want blatantly low quality games on its console.
Also, are you realizing that "indie" means you front your own money for development? I'm not sure why you're saying that indies receive budgets.

You could release a free demo to make sure they can run it, of course.

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2, dual core 2.1 GHz
GPU: GeForce 8500 GT, 256 MB?
RAM: 2 GB DDR2

Simple and lean in what way? Though I haven't used it, I thought that OGRE already was fairly simple as far as full featured graphics engines go. There's nothing wrong with making something barebones so you can see how it works (as long you're developing the engine WHILE making a game that will use it), but trying to make your own engine usually means you're reinventing the wheel. Also, obligatory article post:
scientificninja.com/blog/write-games-not-engines

I guess the question is whether you simply don't like how OGRE works or if you just don't understand why its so complicated.

Original Poster. The one who started this thread.

Usually, the compressed all-in-one-directory solution includes all dependencies in the same archive with the game.