Joewintergreen

I feel silly saying "gameplay" in casual conversation, as much as I would saying "I really liked the story and cinematography in Looper, but felt that The Matrix had superior filmwatch".

I just tried doing a sneaky run of the party. It was all going okay until tried to blink to behind an unaware guard, and he somehow flew over a railing and broke his neck on the floor of the foyer below. I tried to stay non-lethal after that but it really didn't work out

Oh man, yes to this post. "Gameplay" bugs me the most.I was talkin' to a pal about the word "mechanics" recently along similar lines. Most of the time it's just used as this super vague "a thing that happens in a game that isn't the graphics" way, which makes it basically useless as a word but it's used constantly. It seems like almost any time "mechanics" shows up in a sentence related to games you can delete it from the sentence without changing its meaning.

I definitely thought it was too long. I got pretty impatient with it. Really it's all downhill once he shaves his head, the best parts are the New York flashbacks, and the game gets more and more like GTA towards the end, until finally It did make me want to replay the first two games, which I did, and man, they are still so good. The dialogue in particular is so much weaker in 3. I walk into a room in 3, Max is almost certainly going to say something like "It was time to find out what was going on here!" I walk into a room in 2, maybe he'll say "I felt like I was walking into a trap. I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught." Or "your past has a way of sneaking up on you. You'll hear broken echoes of it everywhere, like a bad replay. You'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it's all in your head."

This is extremely cool of you to do. I will pass though because my 360 has the red rings.

I've been using Windows 8 for quite a while too, including the previews, and upgraded to the RTM the day it became available on MSDN. I like it a whole lot - going back to 7 after 8 is surprisingly annoying in the same way XP is after using 7. I use my PC mostly to make games with UDK (and the other implied creative software you need) and play a few, and have no complaints at all. The start screen is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge improvement over the start menu, which was a pretty dated design. A lot of people seem to be confused about it or think there's functionality missing, but everything is still there and works basically the same way. Most of my start menu use was always "press winkey and start typing to search" anyway, which works just as well here. I don't use Metro apps much except to check the weather or dock a twitter client sometimes but maybe that'll change as more stuff comes out. Also, everything feels faster than 7, multi-monitor support is a billion times better, new task manager is great (has startup stuff built into it that you used to have to dig into msconfig for), copy/move dialogue is super verbose. Everything is just superior, I dig it. The only criticism I can agree with at any level is the worries about the store being relatively closed, but obviously you can just continue to download software through something else.

JP is a rad good, good interview. retweet'dAlso, pluggin' my level in here

Bind tiledshot at your hdd's peril

I agree. Half-Life, for instance, with its application of scientific method and scientist protagonist, could be described as a ludonarrative resonance cascade.

Well, people are always likening it to Marble Madness and a bunch of other games but I've never played any of them. It started as me trying to write this super simple game (I'm not a programmer, so this was some of the first unrealscript I did) where you'd roll a ball around and shoot some other balls in a kind of deathmatch thing, and every now and then the entire level would rotate 90 degrees and present a different set of obstacles/structures/whatever. As soon as I tried the rotating room thing I thought it was way more interesting in a puzzle situation where you have to navigate a room and get a thing from A to B by rotating the room. Everything else built up from that. We thought about doing some more actiony stuff a few times but it just didn't really feel right and the puzzling stuff was more interesting to us. Maybe if I'd had the experience of playing Marble Madness back in the day it'd be different. Also, UDK has a few annoying limits on stuff like angular velocity that you can't get around without being a full licensee, which would basically balls up a more actiony sphere game entirely. You should totally play igneous"]http://www.igneousgame.com/]igneous[/url] though. Also, went up 10 ranks in the top 100 today and yesterday, not sure where it's all coming from.

Hooraaay this means I get pushed up 20 places.

I totally want to put a thumbs easter egg in a game

This is extremely true. I consider myself to be largely immune to microtransactions and the like - I would never consider buying a TF2 item for instance (though I've sold a couple that somehow ended up in my inventory, for real money, to my at-the-time astonishment). The guys I've known who are making free to play games are also immune, they'd never buy a hat, they don't understand why you would want to, and here they are basing their games around the same thing, and ethical considerations don't necessarily occur to them, even at the level of "should I care if people are wasting money on my horse armour". You can go very easily from making the games you'd want to play to targeting this incredibly nebulous (but, you assume, vast) audience who you don't understand, and you maybe have nothing in common with. Maybe you've never even met one of them. Maybe you'll make a million bucks or maybe you sabotaged yourself by targeting an audience you might not be capable of understanding. Jury might still be out on that.Also, a while ago a reader mail of mine was on the cast, the one about getting pressure from other devs to implement stuff like this (also achievements/leaderboards/etc), it's near the end of I Had A Gleam, and the discussion was good. Didn't really touch on ethics of freemium so much as "is this smart", but relevant. Also the interview with Foddy from ages ago was really interesting and made me think about this stuff more.

I also basically agree with everything Rodi said, and also it's also the complete opposite of what I want to provide as a developer. I want people to keep playing my games because they are having fun/some kind of meaningful experience, not because they're compelled to for some other reason. Not really a freemium example, but a few years ago I noticed my WoW-playing friends had completely stopped enjoying the game but still felt compelled to play it every day and couldn't satisfactorily explain why. I still don't exactly get it but I remember wanting to never end up making anything like that. I do think developers have some responsibility about this stuff but also probably most of them haven't thought super hard about it. I do know some people who are making a freemium game, very much hoping/planning to make most of their money out of in-app purchase compulsions. None of them are people who would ever actually consider spending their own money in a freemium game, so the quote about casting a net and hauling in suckers really rings true to me. Instead of "let's connect with our community" it's "I don't know who the hell these people are but apparently people pay money for this shit so let's go for it". Not that it's a consciously predatory thing, I think the developer attitude often is that people should just be smarter with their money (even though you're basing your financials on them not doing that) hmm, possibly this post is a mess, I should sleep

Hooray!

Pluggin' the audio from my vidjagame (probablyvoteforitongreenlight). This song works super well in the level pictured

Yeah I was thinking of doing a playthrough with quicksave and quickload unbound. I quicksave every two seconds by muscle memory so I probably don't have the self-control to just not load Also, Harvey Smith is an awesome dude. He seems to reply to every tweet he gets, and says he will play my HL2 mod if he has time. Yesss

I guess somebody I know posted a wizard on my facebook

It actually really bothers me when this is attributed to the Unreal Engine. I've devved on UE3 and Source and in my experience neither is more biased towards this effect than the other. Epic in their own art, of course, do this stuff all the time - relatively low-res textures with crazy steep normal maps and waxy specular - but it's their art, not a predisposition of their engine. Doom 3 was ugly in some of the same ways.

I'm rocking an i7, all the rams, and a 5770 and GTA4 still doesn't run great. I guess the bottleneck there is probably the vidjacard.

Yeah that's pretty early on. I'm the opposite, usually can't be fucked with side missions, so I didn't really get burnt out at all.

Being in the top 100 at all means you're doing pretty great. I climbed up two ranks in the last day, hooray

I am talking to him right now! I am telling him he should post on here.

This is not a childhood story, but I finished Max Payne 3 before I found out you could roll. Also I'd played through Prince of Persia: Sands of Time about three times before I figured out how to mega-freeze (that move that kills everyone in the room).

Wow, I just realised there's a whole bunch of recent videos of my old mod on youtube by popular people. This is awesome.