Joewintergreen

Yeah, it's the single biggest, most obvious fuckup of the whole thing. Even if you think the whole system is "good in theory", it's fundamentally broken, as compared to what it wants to be. That's really interesting and rad. It struck me as a bad idea immediately to actually ask piracy folks to not distribute the game, piracy folks being all about Freedom and Sharing and stuff I guess. I think a lot of them do understand though that if they only ever get stuff for free, people like us don't get to keep making stuff, and folks have a lot of respect/admiration for creators even if they do steal their work all the time. I got a bunch of emails from Pirate Bay folks, some saying "I wasn't going to buy your game but I read your message and bought it", some folks saying "I pirated your game and really liked it so I bought it", some "I pirated your game and I thought it was shitty but I read your message and liked the way you handled that so I bought it", and some saying "every month after rent, bills, food and internet, I have no money, so I pirated your game, and I won't be buying it any time soon, but I wanted to say thanks for understanding!". Weird, cool, super interesting. I personally have no problem with any of those statements. That's based purely on how many cash dollaz Impromptu got in the first payment. I don't have access to the detailed stats where I am right now, maybe I should have included them. I was super surprised by how much Blink made though. Apparently it was their first bundle, so whoever was in charge of that must have done a pretty incredible job getting the word out for it to trump Indie Royale, which is known. I guess it Desura's was only a daily bundle though. I forgot to mention in the post that dealing with Indie Royale was annoying. Dealing with the Desura guys is almost always annoying to me. On the bundle, they kept angling to get me to actually distribute the game on Desura, which I didn't want to do, I only wanted them distributing Steam keys. Then they didn't tell me what day the bundle was going up - some random person told me it was up on Twitter. Then afterwards, they took a couple days responding to my email asking how much money it made, and when they did get me a figure it was "log onto desura and check your stats page because I can't see the stats", and then when I asked when I'd be getting paid, they didn't reply, I had to ask again, I think it took like 10 days. Then when they finally paid me, they paid me through Paypal, which was not what I had on the invoice, and I lost like $40 in Paypal fees. Add to that their tone in emails/PMs usually seems kind of superior and dickish, and their customer support guy's twitter routinely quotes and mocks Desura support emails, and the relatively paltry sum, I'd just as soon never deal with Desura again.

I wrote an article on how m'game did money-wise http://impromptugames.com/?p=483

Ideally I would like both the cake and the eating, i.e. a menu option controlling which behaviour to use. I dig it when I play (patched) Deus Ex 1 at 1920x1200 and the text is "small" (the same size text tends to be in my OS) but that would also make it impossible to play from my couch.

Yeah, I didn't mean the controller would be the thing draining it, just that if you're playing games on your phone you're probably running that sucker down pretty bad

XCOM just came out on Android. I've been playing the shit out of it on my Nexus 5. You know what'd be great in those clip-on controller things? If they had a large battery of their own in there, and you could plug the phone into it, so you wouldn't drain the hell out of your phone battery while using the controller. Perhaps there is some reason why this is a bad idea though.

Groove Champion, fuck yeah.

Most buildings in games aren't really bigger on the inside, the entire scale is just kind of whack. It's not necessarily because of exaggerated movement capabilities or collision, but more a whole narrow-FOV thing making environments feel small and cramped when you make them to a real-world scale. Most games operate by some other weird scale whereby rooms are weirdly huge to make them feel right, and mostly folks don't notice as long as it's consistent. For instance, most people probably never noticed that Alyx Vance is not much more than half the height of most of the doorways you walk through in that game, and she's taller than Gordon. You notice the scale of the world being kind of crazy a lot more in VR. This is even more of a problem with third person games. There used to be a pretty helpful article floating about Max Payne 1's level design scale, where there were screenshots of Max's house perfectly in-scale to Max himself, and a comparison shot with the much vaster version they ended using. When the room was the correct scale it felt cramped and awful and the camera kept bumping into shit. Oh here we go http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131401/gdc_2002_realistic_level_design_.php?page=2

Oni is incredible, yeah. Bizarrely, its mod community kicked off in 2009.

I've been playing Oni again recently and really like his work on that score too.

There are a few avenues I'm lookin' down simultaneously with it but I'm also increasingly thinking that making games in that visual style might be just going to be my Thing now, like the way Brendon Chung's got that consistent look between Citizen Abel games. I find it super rewarding how quickly I can make stuff and just leave it and still love how it looks rather than making relatively realistic looking stuff and taking heaps of time on it. One of the ideas I am looking at right now is kind of a weird first person multiplayer thing where two players have a fairly typical action movie style deathmatch, and then a third player shows up as a detective investigating the crime. I'm in a hurry right now so that is a super vague gist of the idea but I have actually fleshed it out a bit more in a doc and I really like the idea. Two dudes play it like an action/stealth game, the third dude plays it like an adventure game.

here's some video

Yesterday I added a gun to my game, so holding right click draws the weapon and left click fires if it's drawn. Like Gunpoint. And it leaves a mark on the wall and spawns a particle effect and stuff. Having trouble getting it to replicate properly though!

I'm not new to it, I've been using 4 for a few months and 3 for a few years, before that I was on Source. I dig Unreal, especially 4. Blueprint is pretty amazing for empowering someone like myself who isn't great at programming to implement the things I want to implement in a reasonably timely fashion

today I made a conversation system in blueprint in ue4 yaaaay

Not yet, I'll get one in a bit. I actually just had what I think is a pretty great idea to combine this jump-around-shooting-game thing with some of the adventure game stuff I've been doing. The result will surprise you (if I get it done)

I just got back from San Francisco yesterday, and woke up super early this morning and was like "fuck it let's make one of those John Woo dive-through-air-shooting-guys action games that were all the rage in the HL1 modding community, so I started dicking around on UE4 and now I have a first person thing with Thief-style mantling, The Specialists-style leaping through the air, and a triggerable bullet-time powerup. Bam.

I'm told Blacklist uses the same engine as Conviction (or, you know, the next "version" of it) and that that engine is so far removed from UE2.5 that it's unhelpful to think of it as being that engine

I would download and start messing around with UE4 or Unity sooner than Cryengine. I reckon CE to be relatively user-unfriendly and, in my experience, unstable, and with a relatively small community and probably not amazing documentation. Even if you turn out not to want to stick with Unity i reckon going through the v official video tutorials in order is an excellent way to introduce you to making things generally

I will respond to the rest of that later but just fyi the part about AAA devs definitely not accepting having to pay a royalty is false. That is what happens

5% is mega reasonable though. Pretty sure that's what big devs have always paid when licensing unreal.

Yeah, eot has it

UE4 has the "only ever pay $19" option, which I'd say would be attractive even to the very small time

Ue4 runs on consoles as well, you just need to send a couple emails

I saw it at the Castro with a mate who got in by pretending to be Chet Faliszek's +1. I thought it was good, although we all felt a bit weird about some parts of it - Dendy's sad story thrown in at the end and then his fishing scene felt super awkward and constructed to us. My personal favourite thing about it is that since those CG "gameplay" bits were done with Source Filmmaker, they almost certainly started with the .dem recorded demo files from the actual match, and then animated from that. I just think that is cool.

I've been using 4 for about six months. I find it to be excellent. Previously I was on UE3 and before that Source, I haven't delved deeply into Unity but by most accounts what Unity has over UE4 is pretty much the asset store and the existing community and community documentation. Both of which Epic are hoping to emulate. And a bunch of rendering and polish stuff, obvs. The licensing deal is also kind of incredible.