Hmmm, well it sounds like it should be okay with some buttons within reach. I think if there's a standard, it's that Z is calculated in some other way, like moving forwards/raycasting until it hits something, throwing it etc. Or if manipulation is rotation, just click and drag. Might not be appropriate for your game though. Hope it helps, not sure if it does 

I think some games with "zoom" would also allow you to hold alt, shift or control and just move the mouse up and down. Can't actually think of any examples though. Or on screen, clickable buttons.

If you're designing something similar to a spaceship game, some of them have Q and E as "throttles" iirc so you just press e a bunch to get to max speed or q to slow down etc so you don't have to play twister with 6 buttons just to move. If it's a personal preference thing, just putting some buttons wherever should be fine but it sounds involved in the mechanics.

It's a bit tricky without knowing more about the game, because you've described X+Y mouse, Z mouse and probably X+Y from the arrow keys too and .

I haven't done any for a while, but this is mine:


and a friend key: 10848697140136_72f6d8fa7b0732794b402f3dbeb406e6
I might have to try some more soon.

I managed to get in the first 30 for problem #345, but it was the easiest of 5 that came out at the same time. It's interesting seeing all the tricks you build up over time.

That being said, Frozen Synapse better win this shit or else I will be forced to declare the IGF judges unintelligent in my professional capacity as a world-class trained psychologist who is a TV star on the weekends. Seriously, I have the IQ charts right here:

So come on dudes, prove that you know your stuff!

While I would not dare to question the veracity of the graph you have provided, I will point out that IQs above 150 are rare enough that it is reasonable to assume no more than 1 or 2 judges voted for frozen synapse.

I like it and I think I will enjoy the strategy behind it, but it has a lot to grasp. Do you have any thoughts about communicating everything to the player more smoothly? That seems to me like it would be the big hurdle and I'll add some thoughts. (And it turns out I took a while to stop. UI design/usability is complex )

Clear, easily communicated changes:
Remove health/energy bar borders to make the actual informative bit bigger. Could make the bars disappear when full.
Make panning easier. Screen edge panning or click + drag should both work fine, maybe do both. Actually, I can't even figure out how to pan at the moment!
Zoom should probably support middle mouse control.

I'd almost skip zooming entirely and try working with everything being bigger all the time. It would help heaps with reading damage/ability text and seeing sprites properly. In the long run, allowing the player to choose a resolution would be fantastic to offset this.
If you make it bigger, you might be able to actually have the energy bar as pods - IE you can actually see that you have 9 energy left because there are 9 dots, possibly with grouping for easier reading.

In general I think a whole lot could be taken from the Desktop Dungeons unity beta (and some of the above suggestions are from there). They introduce a huge number of classes in a slow but interesting way and do quite well at displaying information to players - not just the UI but the unit sprites which are all extremely distinct. This applies to things like "fields" too - just stick a symbol on them.

The ability UI is okay and in the end I think it suffers a bit from the amount of information you're trying to cram in (8 abilities with costs, complex descriptions, times you can cast it different recharge rates). Not unmanageable, by any means. So uh, here's an awful ascii mockup that would probably be better:

Code:

---------
|         |
|  Attack |
|         |
|X        |
|0  ///   |
|   ---   |
|   ///   |
 ---------Q

If I'm actually good at this, the information will be obvious but I'm probably not, so we have:
Use counters on the left. Adds to current version by showing maximum uses, and is much more obvious when it changes (crosses should be red or some other obvious colour)
Little lightning bolts = energy use.
In my mind, the hotkey Q ONLY appears when you hover over the button, but players might not realise it's actually a hotkey. Anyway, a tooltip or making it actually say "hotkey" as well might be handy, but (correct me if I'm wrong) you shouldn't need that information all the time - hotkeys are useful because they're memorised.

The descriptions up the top actually work quite well for their format - to improve significantly on that, you'd need a semi-graphical way of displaying them. I'll leave that to you as you actually know what the "language" would need to describe

Finally, a possible bug: There was some odd behaviour when using "restore" - It seems to do nothing, but use lots of mana. Not really sure what's going on there.

Uh, so, I hope it's helpful because the strategy seems to be cool.

@Toeofdoom - getting a game to work on the xbox at all is a technical achievement (it has like 512mb of ram)

console specs aren't directly comparable to pc specs like that.

Also mobile devices tend to have less. Anyway, I'm not saying it didn't deserve its place or anything, I just wanted to know. The stuff on their blog mentions cool 2D lighting systems as well which could contribute, it just seems like there's probably more I haven't seen.

I too would've liked to see Spacechem get something, but the design and overall categories where it hits best are pretty crowded. It's always interesting to see the grand prize finalists/mentions because there tend to be a few I don't expect or simply haven't heard of.

Hmmm, what changed about spelunky to get it into technical excellence? My best guess is... multiplayer, fluid dynamics and maybe some weapon interactions. There's nothing very obvious in the video or the old PC version so I want to know what there is I can't see.

I would make sure to keep an eye on bandwidth if you use nearlyfreespeech. My dreamhost account ended up using 80GB over a few months when what seems to be a rather crazy botnet downloaded my AGBIC game 300,000 times. NFS also isn't too cheap if you upload large files.

I find dreamhost nice, largely because I can create an SVN repository for whatever I want to. Do most webhosts have SVN? I don't really know. Dreamhost is a bit more expensive than some options, though.

It's a pretty bad theme imo... There will be some pretty cool games even so since there always are. I thought up something weird so my game is going to be called Atomic Ark.

I prefer coffee with some milk... I tend to drink 1 coffee in the morning and sometimes don't have time for it to cool down. Adding cold water seems wrong somehow.

I would be somewhat interested in this though I probably wouldn't want to spend more than 1 or 2 weeks, especially not knowing what the game is yet! Anything C++ or unity is fine with me, might be able to figure out other frameworks.

Based on the chart at the bottom of this page you can use triggers but you won't get any information apart from what you collided with. The other simple option is to use a rigidbody which as you know will be simulated internally.

If you like, you could manually try using Rigidbody.SweepTest (or the related SweepTestAll) or one of the various Cast functions under the physics class (Spherecast, Raycast etc.)

Fair enough - in all honesty it's a bit hard to say which parts are "unfinished" because with 6 people who had never worked together before we didn't really have a focused idea of what we wanted it to be. I wanted it to be something like envirobear at a carnival (the theme was "carnivale"), with a goal of "entertaining" the crowd (maximum mayhem, minimum injury). My previous attempts at 3d vehicle controls haven't gone very well and these are "better" as at least they don't bug out, but I see why they might not be that fun.

That would be an accurate assessment of the game, yes. It's a little hard to tell what you specifically mean by "poor controls". (poor for multiplayer, poor button placement, terrible vehicle handling, no way to get "unstuck")

We submitted it because it was a versus game that we started and finished the day before the competition closed and thought "well why not?". Perhaps you would have preferred we didn't just chuck it in, if so I'll keep that in mind for next time. I'll update the webpage to reflect the unpolished complete hack nature of the game but if you found it through this thread I consider you at least partially warned.

I see a cool flickering/blending effect, but nothing I'd describe as an "impossible colour". I seem to see teal/red more, which would be what my left eye is looking at.

At 500 pixels per second it would only take... 1000 hours to reach the end of the 32-bit universe. Although I don't quite understand your description of the warp drive - something can't both move at a finite speed (50000 pixels per second) "instantly" because they are different measures. My best guess is you can instantly jump 50000 pixels but it has a cooldown?

  Quite incoherent indeed, then. We ran out of time before making it have any sort of "purpose", but being a 24 hour prototype there are probably multiple interesting games that could evolve from this if we decide to do so.

Although the original purpose was just a "drive around clumsily and having fun to entertain the crowd" game, it got a little sidetracked from there. It is now a "drive around smashing what we had time to hack together" simulator.

<div style="padding: 5px; padding-bottom: 0; float: left"><img src="http://images.toeofdoom.com/gallery/d/175-1/carnivalethumb.png" width="300" height="200" /><p style="margin-top: 0"><a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=18109.0">Carniverse (Carnivale Universe)</a>, Team we never quite got around to a team name.</p>
</div>



Carniverse (Carnivale Universe), Team we never quite got around to a team name.

Game was finished, slept for 14 hours, got up, posted link: http://toeofdoom.com/carnivale/

Have fun, hope it's not too incoherent!

Actually this is a 24 hour jam that happened to coincide with the deadline, so it's 7 hours for that time limit. We'll probably do more after that anyway, of course, but it will be nice to see what we can do in a day.