Dinosaursssssss

I was hoping this'd be more helpful http://www.giantbomb.com/twins/3015-3990/

Booth Stuff! I'm showing MILE-AGE at 2 local events (Boston Festival of Indie Games, and Bit Fest which is a little arcade + beer popup) over the next 3 days so I wanted to make sure I had everything. Chargers, cables, banners, water, headphones, regular phones, stickers, pins, tools, tape...tryin' to be prepared. This might kinda be my last hurrah as a full-time solo indie...when I got laid off I budgeted for a year of development with 0 income, and I'm just about there. Barring a sudden avalanche of sales, after this I'm doubling down on job applications I guess. It's certainly been educational...I donno how much other folks would find it useful, but I feel like I ought to write a post-mortem of the year to sort out my own thoughts on it.

Oh nice, I really wanted to make something for Barfcade so I'm gonna definitely....try and find time for this. It ends the day after Unite, which is after I'm spending all weekend at a wedding, which might make things tough.

I hope everyone is excited for the 'Visit Dinosaursssssss' Apartment' mod, coming spring 2016.

I kept thinking that HOTS had a better community than other lomas, but apparently part of it is that there's no all-talk, and at the end of the game the only text that will show up in chat is 'gg.' Teammates do seem generally helpful, so maybe there's more to it, but I thought that was an interesting approach. It seems a little heavy handed, but it definitely resulted in me having a better experience with the game than dota, where in my first game after not playing for about a year, I was told to kill myself and never play dota again.

I finally listened to a Nicki Minaj album (The Pinkprint) through for the first time and dug it. Definitely not what I expected, since I've only been exposed to her Top 40 pop stuff like Starships and Super Bass, which I still really don't like. It definitely feels like a proper capital-A Album rather than a bunch of singles and some filler. Also when I was about half way through it, Danielle linked this neat GQ article about Nicki that probably increased my enjoyment of the back half of the album.

On the Beastcast Austin mentioned the Boston Festival of Indie Games, which is great and also is next week so if anyone lives around here you should come out.

I completely agree; the problem is that for me, the minimalism of the original is part of what I find so appealing about it so I'd rather just leave it as-is than compromise the original design (though admittedly by rushing to make it, I've kinda already done that). There's some part of me that feels like preserving the original and putting it on new platforms is a public service, and that as long as the monetized parts are completely optional it's OK for me to profit off it in the service of making a great game available. Obviously though that's not legally the case and without being able to talk to the creator about how they feel about it, its unfair and kind of a moot point. While researching, I found a game called Orbital that might be one of the clones you're thinking of. It's $3 and acknowledges Gimme Friction Baby and Wouter Visser (the creator) in the app description, but also drastically change how it looks (it has a Geometry Wars vibe) and adds some mechanics. My read is that this is fine, and probably more generous to the creator than similar clones would be. I don't even know what constitutes due diligence here; I searched the name and found a lot of people with it, including several game developers (none of whom list Gimme Friction in their portfolios or elsewhere), and there's no contact information on the site it was first hosted on. I considered starting to message every Wouter Visser with a visible interest in games about it but felt kinda uncomfortable? Not a great excuse, but I felt like that wasn't a good approach. Anyway I don't actually know what I want out of this discussion, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot so thanks for wondering aloud about this with me.

That's really cool! What sorts of obstacles will players face in missions, and how will they be able to design ships to overcome them? I ask 'cause I've been working through the Kerbal campaign and as someone who needs some direction in that game, I appreciate their contract system which encourages you to experiment with different types of ships to meet the challenge of each contract (for example, building ships designed to reach certain speeds vs. ships that will be able to get into orbit).

Alright I have a specific, concrete, real life example I'm curious folks' opinions on. I made a clone of Gimme Friction Baby, a flash game I really loved a few years back, for phones. I made it because I REALLY like the game and wanted a mobile version for myself, and figured if I was gonna put in the time I might as well just put it out. Before starting, I attempted to contact the author, but wasn't able to find him. Had I been able to, I would have pitched a version that was virtually identical to the original but with either some purchasable cosmetics or ads to make a little money. Instead, I rushed to get the game finished in 2 days, since I didn't feel comfortable making money off it and didn't want to spend a lot of time on a free game. The final version is passable but not ideal. Now, a few months later, I've been debating working on it a little more and polishing it up; mostly UI and art to make it look and feel a little more professional. But I don't feel like I can justify dumping more time into it without adding some sort of monetization. I also don't want to drastically change the look or style of the game away from the original, since I think it's basically perfect. I've credited the original author in both the app description and in-game, and I feel this version is morally acceptable to have released given the circumstances. But is it ethical for me to continue working on it and attempt to make a little money too? Is there a morally just monetization strategy in this situation, or do I need to significantly distance myself from the original in some way first? For more context here's the app on iOS and Android.

I guess on the bright side it means there's still plenty of space in the UE4 tools market for solo/small team developers, unlike the Unity asset store which feels really crowded and is drawing in bigger teams that are dedicated to plugin development? Granted I haven't checked in a bit so maybe there's more there now, but it seemed pretty sparse when I last checked.

What's extra-good about the thread title is Ghostbusters was being filmed in downtown Boston last month.

Portal - 3ish hours. I would feel very silly describing this game, since it's become such a massive phenomenon. It's a puzzle game. 30 Flights of Loving - 20 minutes to complete, another 20 to check out the commentary (which you should). A non-linear narrative heist game by Brendon Chung, originally given away to Idle Thumbs kickstarter backers. The Stanley Parable - Hard to say, but probably an average of 5-10 minutes per possible ending? I have an hour played and feel good about it. I guess I would describe it as a satire of choice and narrative in games? It's funny and bizarre and surprising in the best ways. edit: included some times/descriptions

Just came across some bonkers open source Unity assets on Twitter that I had to share...there's some incredibly cool looking stuff in here. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3hst9l/best_unity_assets_by_keijiro_takahashi_including/ And the creators actual blog: http://keijiro.github.io/ He says he makes a lot of visual effects for musicians, and looking over these gifs...yeah, they would be PERFECT for making some weird little audio-reactive games. edit: I made a tiny visualizer thing using https://github.com/keijiro/KvantTunnel and it's pretty neat, but doesn't seem to run on webgl. Anyway, I super highly recommend checking these little projects out; his Vimeo page also has some absolutely incredible stuff

I started playing Kerbal again

I didn't buy a pair of underpants until I was 25 'cause my dad was in the underpants making biz so I got them for free. That said, when I did finally need to buy some, it was not difficult.

Beastcast was so good last week, in particular I was fascinated by the monopolies of knowledge that Austin talked about a little. It's something that I think I've been wondering about indirectly recently: there's a LOT of talk these days about collecting game analytics, but to do so effectively requires a large userbase, so really the only people who benefit from that sort of analysis are already large companies. Also I thought his joke about Jesus fanfic was really funny.

Haha, that's really great, I love the idea. The interface being a single screen panning around feels good, and the lil' cartidge floating in 3D is a really nice touch. Also I like the art in general, the game has a good vibe. Wish I could collect more carts though! I didn't end up finishing anything; my PC stopped booting on Saturday so I've been in panic mode trying to diagnose it. Finally got things working last night, but I didn't have time to wrap up my game. Which is probably fine since it wasn't shaping up to be anything interesting to anyone else anyway...what I have now is a little rabbit guy who will eat, sleep, and fetch, and a floating eyeball that will also do all of those things but without any animations. I also have some code for the beginnings of some AI stuff, a state machine and a system for determining desirable positions in the world. It wasn't at all necessary for this game but I went to a talk that Damian Isla (Halo 2, The Flame in the Flood) gave kinda early in the jam and decided I wanted to implement a bunch of what he talked about.

I haven't used the SC2 editor at all, but thinking about it now the Warcraft 2 and Starcraft editors were probably my first exposure to makin' games. I think they've gotten waaay more complicated, but for me as a kid the SC editor was amazing because it didn't require any scripting for level logic, you just sorta picked event triggers from dropdowns and such. The Morrowind editor was also really cool; I haven't used the newer ones as much, but the Skyrim/Fallout editors seem really good, and their snap-together level prefabs are a really easy way to start blocking out levels and make good cohesive looking environments.

Those are some good picks, I really dug the tetris stuff and the Ori run in particular. Two more that I really liked were: Prince of Persia (by Henneko) Yoshi's Island (by Trihex)

I donno how much more I'm gonna be able to work on this, so here's the last feature I added. I put in a second pet (now there's the eye and this rabbit) and made them go to sleep when their energy ticks too low. Eating/fetching will also decrease energy.

Hm, that's odd, haven't seen that happen before. Mind PMing me what kinda device you're on? Thanks!

I just put my 2nd game, MILE-AGE, out on Android and iOS! Please buy it and let me know what you think; if you have feedback, definitely feel free to drop me a pm/email/whatever with your thoughts! Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funghost.mileage iOS : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mile-age/id998185826

This is a little weird to share in the Amateur game making thread, but I just put my 2nd game, MILE-AGE, out on iOS/Android! If you have a buck to spare, please check it out and let me know what you honestly think in a pm/email! I certainly didn't get everything done I wanted to, but I'm happy with how this came out, so I'm of course curious what folks think. Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funghost.mileage iOS : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mile-age/id998185826