Yeah, a painted map gives a less interactive feel, but like someone said, perhaps it can be liven up with a layer of interactive vegetation and stuff. Some spots could have florescent light which could have a local effect on the texture (lighting up the walls and background). I guess I could make an animated gif to try that theory out...

Tiles takes some time to work out if you want them to be tile'able and versatile. I wasn't able to make big painted tiles, and I don't think it will work. To generate a painted look procedurally might prove very difficult, because computers aren't very artistic. You'd get a lot of ugly bad placements of things. The range wouldn't be very good either. Stuff would get repetitive fast.

One thing I can do is paint big chunks of kind of generic rock types, then I use liquefy in Photoshop to distort and make special bits from those. That would speed up the process a lot. For the large solid areas of the map I could use these and be more sloppy.

As for memory, the beeb map is 7 * 5.5 k pixels or so. With a painted map I would keep the geometry as poly lines (with normals), then just stream the texture depending on where the player is. Pixel level destruction (if I go for pixel gfx) would take a lot of memory, but like I said, I could allow for only the surfaces of the tiles to be destroyed. Surface is a lot smaller than area.

About 480p resolution I believe. Just testing. It's good to have a bit view distance in this game. The 1200 version was far too claustrophobic I think.

Exile actually had little worms (maggots) and spore releasing fungus. There were lots of animal life. Wind and particles also livened up the game. Yeah, stuff like that could liven up a static painting too.

The game had a tiny graphics block which was cut up into sprites. The bird (flapping its wings) had a frame which could be flipped upside down. Because of this it had two heads, one on the bottom and one on the top, one of which was always cropped off. The red robot was a cropped version of the chatter bot.


Painted. I tried to preserve the red with green dots feel. Pericles can be a rusted wreck.



Edit: 3 months fulltime to paint the entire map. Sounds like a lot, but on the other hand you never need to figure out how to do an editor and how to make the tiles/chunks and stuff. You can just come up with whatever you like. Of course, every time estimate is *pi.

Pixels. Although I didn't get very far with this. It takes me as long to pixel as it does to paint. I think it would be fun to do 8*8 px tiles and build stuff from them. Small tiles are abstract enough to work as many things.


Painted big tiles: Failed. Because large high fidelity tiles repeats badly.

I worked a bit on my Exile project. well, actually I just started making new stuff from scratch, some of it based on the Beeb version of the game. Most of you may be more familiar with the Amiga version.

Exile for the BBC Micro reference page.

Here's some art:

New roughs:


Old painting:


Here are my problems:

At first I wanted to paint the entire map (which is giganormous, but it seemed like a fun thing to do). At the same time I really liked the angular tiled feel of the Beeb version (rather than the more organic looking Amiga version).

Then I realized that it was a false choice to go for just organic OR angular.

I can have structured corridors, and combine those with more organic caves, a bit like if someone had been cutting mining corridors, bumping into natural caves every now and then.

I could suggest this by placing large mining machines here and there. This brings me to the issue of destructible terrain. Certainly buckets or a quad tree could be used to limit the information density mainly to the surfaces of the cave walls (which the bullets would hit) (the solid rock would rarely be affected and thus use less mem) (empty space would be less affected too).

Then I thought of another interesting solution. I could place sediments and plant life, moss and stuff on the walls, which could be shot off, giving the feeling of destruction / interaction. Some of the plant life could spread via spores and grow back. Stuff that is destroyed could rot, etc (to free up mem). This would make the environment feel like it could be affected even if no tiles can be destroyed. The size of the mining drill mentioned earlier could suggest that the rock is really hard and that's why it won't break even when exposed to Coronium explosions.

A big question which remains is that of the amount of interesting graphical features to use for the foreground (i.e. rock walls) and background. The rock is obviously some sort of cut-through view, and I don't know if I should keep it simple and grainy (sometimes artificially structured) like in the Beeb version, or if I should have large interesting hand painted features. Perhaps the interesting stuff should be put in the background, because the player in in the caves and not inside the walls. It might be distracting to put interesting features inside the walls if the player can't get there. However, the player can't get into the background either! It feels wrong to tempt the player with another dimension.

Perhaps the background and foreground (walls) should be kept mostly simple, with landmarks where needed. This way interactive foreground objects should be the most interesting with nothing to distract. Perhaps the background could be interacted with though, kind of like in Impossible Mission where you turn towards consoles and furniture. There could be special rooms where the backgrounds is obviously rich. A bit like parts of Aquaria where the background can be generic rock at many places, then there's suddenly a big stone with a swirl on which suggests something significant.

However, I do feel that it's slightly confusing to add another dimension to interact with. The player might become paranoid that he's missing something in the background, and it is possible to just put a big swirling stone as a foreground object instead.

Oh yes, now when I think of it there's the pillars which you can run behind.  I haven't thought about those at all. I think the bushes might be in the same layer.

Another thing I'm not sure of is how to approach artificial vs 'organic' rock texture. The Beeb version had quite structured rock. A fully painted look would be more difficult to tile (unless a system like that in Aquaria is employed). It would also suggest that the rock has different levels of hardness which would be bad is the rock is indestructible. I think I'd rather see a more grainy artificial look for the rocks like in the beeb version. I don't know if I should also use artificial colors. I think I want to suggest that the environment was 'made' long ago.

Any thoughts? I suppose the only real way to find out is to make a proper mockup.

Edit: I think that with a blocky approach it feels more like you're moving around in a very graspable/readable interactive game environment, whilst if I were to paint each cave by hand, moving about would feel more like just gliding around on top of a painting, disjointed. There would a lot of special little spots but at the same time none of them would be interactive in a special way. It doesn't feel 'honest' somehow, like everything is fake.

I think you're confusing design and concept.

I think you misread my post. "Concept" and "Design" is semantics, but I know what you're getting at. I certainly agree that the designer should be flexible and adapt the original concept/design (whichever level it's at) as new opportunities arise when the code starts doing stuff. That was my point. Better yet, the code should be designed so opportunities arise. I think programmers (or designers who can program) are better suited to do that. When you move from "idea" to "concept" to "design", sometimes the design gets so detailed that you find yourself writing actual code in the design doc then pasting it into the compiler.

I think technically speaking, you'd never notice those "design decisions" if they were good ones.  It's only the bad ones that are visible, because they are very clearly decisions taken by the designer for reasons the designer believes to be valid (and the user probably doesn't).

Yeah, I think good design decisions are invisible because they are consistent with the basic laws of physics established by the game. The player will soon get a feel for what those laws are, and wonder why the designer didn't include certain things (consistent with the laws), or perhaps plainly disallowed certain things.

Edit: Just saying that there's a benefit to knowing how to program if you're doing design. I'm sometimes contacted by programmers who doesn't even have ideas.

I think that the sum is greater than the parts. As the designer you need (perhaps less nowadays though) to understand what can be done, and how easily it can be done. If you know programming then you get a certain foresight. Sometimes a great feature comes for free because of clever programming. Sometimes stuff turns out to be too hard to code and you need to be able to adapt the design on the fly.

One thing which bothers me with many games is... obvious, imposed 'design decisions'. It's a bit difficult to explain what I mean... but you may have gotten the feeling when you played a game that the, uh, freedom to have fun have been needlessly restricted. The game mechanics, physics, art assets can all be there, but someone forgot that it's the player who should be entertained, not the game designer's vision and personal fantasies.

The game designer should communicate well with the programmer to make sure that opportunities are taking advantage of. The shortest route of communication is if they are the same person.

Some of my favourite games have been made by small teams of programmers (who obviously were great at game design as well). But it's difficult to say if that's an indication of something since non-coders couldn't make anything at all back then.

I've had a similar idea ^. The character would adventure on its own, but an alarm would go off once the character returns to home base/town. The player has a few minutes to purchase equipment, potions, etc, and maybe spend level up points. Then the character runs off into the wild to grind again. Upon character creation you'd set race, psychology, etc. A character which doesn't take risks will level up slower because it will grind low level monsters and spend a lot of time walking home to base. A brave or foolish character might die more (returning to base empty handed). You'd also be able to set fav/hated enemy type and environment, and in such a way indirectly control where the character goes. E.g.

Name----------: Uluthióndor Anaeraóthoinir.
Race----------: Elf.
Psychology----: Brave borderline foolish.
Strong against: Bug type enemy.
Weak against--: Elemental type enemy.
Homelands-----: Desert.

There could be more initial stats of course. The map would be divided into sections with  danger levels. A brave L-10 character might consider roaming into a L-13 map section.

/old bottled brainfart

You need to be L-10 to start a clan, but I think bossquibble is getting there thanks to his 80'ish pupils. There are people with hundreds of pupils who level up like mad.

Bossquibble kicked her pantyclad arse. She got Herculean Strength for level two though. I'm not sure if it's good, but the Str meter went up almost to max.

http://lowleg.mybrute.com

I remember MoonStone (Amiga) getting a rather poor rating in a local gaming mag, and when doing research on the subject now it seems like it got very scattered scores, ranging between 50-90%. I'd like to see a slash-em-up game in that freeroamy style again. The rubber banding sucked though.

Tao's Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal is probably the DS game which I had the most fun with, until I ran into a random level-down 'treasure' that is. Maybe the game actually deserves its low rating, which says something about fun-level the other games in my library.

I wonder how much RAM/ROM it will have. If they're going for a cheap learning platform, then going retro for retro's sake seems kind of silly. Solid State Drives are also really cheap nowadays. They mention Flash mem on their blog.

Having a bit more RAM would make it more feasable to run an OS. Having to turning off the machine to boot another program is annoying.

NES hardware? Does this mean they'll use tile table PPU stuff?

Edit: reminds me of this thing which I've been doodling on.

Smaller companies are unpredictable as they might have an angry person pretending to be a lawyer or having really powerful lawyers just nearby.

Larger companies only seem to care if there's money involved and are less likely to pursue small fishes. Nintendo shut down a lot of fan projects (particularly 3D ones) in time for the Metroid Prime launch. It was a way to minimize the amount of competing products (free or not) out there.

Then there's trademark dilution too.


I wonder how Take2Games feels about X-Com. They bought the license from Atari a few years ago. UFO: Aftermath and the UFO series are closely based on X-Com, but perhaps they were developed when there was less commercial interest in the X-Com style games so they got away with it. Speculation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_Munchkin

New project!

Name: Nasoj and the Krazy Kosmonauts.
Idea: A space opera set in space and everyone is a robot... a sexy girl robot!
Likelihood of being worked on: Extremely high.
Reason: I just found a stray coder that appears to have been thrown out with the trash, because he was carrying an empty orange juice package and some torn notes with game ideas around. I put him right to work. I'm going out to look for stray artists now.

Cool thread! Here's my list list of ideas, but please don't steal.

1: The Ghi'Nertakk Legacy
Idea: MMO with GUI (Graphical User Interface) sliders controlling all the characters.
Likelihood of being worked on: Low.
Reason: I don't have any arms or legs, I had to sell them to afford my gymnastics classes. At any rate I don't think I can find a coder competent enough to implement my slider idea, and the art would at least have to be Blizzard level, but ingame. I would also have to buy Games Workshop since I'm using some of their characters.

2: Princess 39 and the planet of cheese-buttocks
Idea: I don't know what I was thinking here, but... well. Could be cool.
Reason: I just took the biggest dump and I think I'm bleeding to death from my anus. I may only have minutes left to live. *flails stumps about*
Likelihood of being worked on: Extremely low.

3:gffgfddssssssssssssssssssss

...

Actually I should be working on Zerberk. Damn you procrastination!

Here Loomis is marking the various bulging shapes quite clearly. I don't agree with some of the proportions, but the curve placement is useful to reference.

http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q166/iagainstcomics/loomis.jpg

Did someone plug http://www.posemaniacs.com/blog/ yet?

Pushing the stereotype:

Females have curves. Extremities gets thinner, e.g. Butt starts big, then the leg gets thinner towards the feet. Same with fingers. Hands should not be too big and squarish.

Opposite for males. Blocky and square. Extremities are more chunky.

I think a good way to learn is to practice cartoon and realism at the same time. Then you learn what lines to exaggerate and what anatomical part it is that you actually exaggerate. If you just practice cartoon style you won't know where the lines are coming from (they are a product of sorts, and you don't have the formula). If you just practice realism you'll have a hard time finding the traits which are good to exaggerate.

Hard Sci-Fi like the Foundation trilogy or Rama is probably pretty hard to make into faithful movie adaptations, because of the high tempo that is required nowadays. I don't remember, but 2001 was probably pretty slow. I remember Star Trek (1) was.

I suppose it might be theoretically possible to compile the books into an interesting movie while staying faithful, but it'll have to pass through the Sturgeon's Law filter.

 


I think the game was fine at the original pixel size, but I suppose with a release on a large platform (Wii was it?) there are other demographics to worry about. Interesting to see the upscales though. The head no longer being square changes my impression of the character.



As for fat discussion:

I think it's the almond shaped body that makes her look a bit... preggers. I'm not sure if I'd say fat, because the limbs are pretty slim. Most of the volume is around the belly area. It's kinda pouting out there.

Chibi proportions such as these:

http://www.hlj.com/product/GSC96315

...doesn't look fat because there's no accentuation on any bodypart (like the belly), everything is kind of even thick, and in conjunction with the big head the body looks relatively small and thin.

I kind of like undocumented features, because I expect a game to have a lifetime beyond a dozen hours, and I don't go into a game with the mindset to suck it dry in 10 hrs then throw its corpse on the garbage pile (aka. game shelf). I think the trick is to scale the amount of (and importance of) features the player is exposed to with the player's experience. It can be secrets, easter eggs, and strange combinations of common game verbs (eg. rocket+jump). There should always be something new to find, but the impact on the gameplay should probably be reduced for each 'oh neat I didn't know this' a player finds as he gets more experienced.