itsamoose

If it isn't going to be that art heavy, or be entirely 2d, going with a 3d engine might be unnecessary. It might even be easier to go with an event-driven input framework, for example something like windows forms, which will make the UI construction a heck of a lot easier. Though if you are comfortable with Unity, that seems like the best bet.

The main question is really what are the needs of the game? If you're looking to model thousands of units there likely isn't an engine out there that can do that easily out of the box. So as far as writing an engine goes, what would you need it to do that can't or isn't easily done elsewhere?

That actually seems like a fair assessment. If you spend a lot of time with something naturally you tend to see yourself as a master of it. Then one day something new comes along and not only are you not an expert, but no one cares what you have to say about it. It's basically the gamer version of arguing about who can bench press more. Oddly, gamer culture of late has basically absorbed all the worst elements of jock/bro/frat culture. I bet the guy in the gym who lambastes me every time I go for not lifting enough weight would get along quite well the with gamergate crowd.

I've heard a lot about A girl walks home alone at night, its about a female vampire's adventures in Iran's underground. Its been praised pretty heavily and from what I understand deals with a number of social justice issues.

I think that if there were anyone in Gjnoi's life who was willing to question his motives he would be much better off. He is enjoying a temporary victory at the moment, and isn't dealing with his feelings of betrayal so much as delaying confrontation with them. I think the existence of gamergate is all the proof he needs that he did the right thing. At some point in the future he is going to have a negative experience and the whole house of cards he has been building around himself will come crashing down. I suspect it will be at that point he will publish the second half of his ramblings in the hope of again convincing himself of the righteousness of his actions. He acts like someone who doesn't believe he did the right thing, but is allowing himself to be convinced of that because having to recognize he did wrong would be too much.One of my friends was in a similar situation a while back (essentially a bad breakup) and was considering writing letters about it to anyone and everyone who could bring his ex harm. It took some doing, but I ultimately convinced him what he was thinking about was not righteous but vindictive and petty. He made a lot of the same "she's forcing me to do this" type arguments Eron is currently, and similar to Erin after getting another girlfriend he was fine. I don't know him, but I get the sense that Eron is at the least introverted and unwilling to expose any kind of weakness to anyone.

I get this quite a bit, particularly when dealing with religion. I think that what is most scary to people is that in order to admit that privilege exists you must also admit your own weaknesses. If circumstance truly can exert some control over our lives, then we must recognize we are fundamentally vulnerable. I was certainly raised on the idea that determination was all that mattered, and for me at least coming to terms with this idea was scary as hell at first. Usually the response to this is pretty predictable. First deny context, then refute specifics with ideals, and finally suggest the opposing opinion is the result of elitism. There doesn't need to be be bigoty mixed in there, but it usually is.

The number of people I've seen say something equivalent to "if people just did this one thing, everything would be fine" is astounding to me. Time and again I find the people I consider to be my more intelligent friends fail to, or are simply unwilling to, view these events in the context of anything but whatever is trending on the news that day.

Let me play devil's advocate a bit on the part of valve. First valve needs to host the content on their servers and provide all the necessary back end support for these things, and if regular game sales are any indication they probably take about 30% of the sale. Next the developers of each game need to integrate and support the tech in their games. This might not sound like a big deal, but supporting a live product is often much hairier than it seems as first. It's not just about creating a workflow or pipeline, you need to do some pretty technical stuff to make sure people can't create a mod that installs malware on someone's machine, causes crashes or leaks, etc. It make sense that devs would get the lion's share of this cost because they are likely doing the most work and are ultimately responsible for what happens in their game. A company like Bethesda probably has a dedicated team or person working on this who is certainly not making an entry level salary. Also, what happens if an update to the game breaks a mod? That's probably Bethesda's responsibility to fix, especially if the mod developer is no longer actively supporting it. It's not an issue of the exact percent so much as what Bethesda would need to make in order for the enterprise to be worth the time to them. It's certainly possible the rev share amount will increase for modders, but that would likely require them to take on more responsibility with respect to their work. I think because most people see how much money games like Skyrim make as a nominal value, they tend to not understand what that number actually means when you factor in all the people who get a piece of it. Edit: also forgot to mention the legal/export regulations that may apply, which could be eating up some of the cost

I'm with you on missing most of the areas, after beating the game I hadn't even unlocked a couple of the zones yet. I quite enjoyed some of the area specific missions, like retaking the outposts in the exalted plains or clearing the dam in crestwood. They were all these little stories taking place alongside the main story and added a nice bit of texture to the world. I was really hoping bioware would do something related to after the main story ends, though games don't tend to have much in the way of falling action/post big bad going down. There were a number of times your companions referenced what was going to happen after corypheus was dealt with, so I was hoping for a kind of red dead redemption style epilogue that never came. Also for anyone that has completed any of the collection type quests, does anything happen? Like if you close all the rifts or gather all the shards and open the final door?

Yeah I agree, node based systems can get pretty sketchy when you rely on them too heavily. What I like about uScript is that when you create a node system it actually generates a C# file you can edit as you like. Still, I wouldn't want to rely on it for gameplay scripting but for events and the like I've quite enjoyed it.Shaderforge on the other hand I'm hesitant to use, mainly because I don't understand shaders well enough to make sense of the file it generates.

I haven't heard much about the sad puppies thing, but from what I gather it's pretty typical of a lot of criticism I see lately. Mainly if your politics don't agree with mine, I accuse you of pandering in some way, but if my politics agree with yours I laud you for exposing the truth. The severe lack of self awareness is incredibly frustrating, and completely antithetical to the point of most of these works. OK, Rant time. To me this isn't so much about the actual issue being discussed but the way we discuss. I feel as though in the internet of today people are more concerned with having something to say than saying something of substance. Because it is so easy to toss out a tweet or comment, simply peforming this act is seen as what is valuable. Whatever cause they proclaim matters little compared to the desire for their part in it to be recognized. We like to delude ourselves into thinking the number of comments or retweets matters, but in the end these are little more than the flaring of passions. They don't translate into real change without an additional, concerted and long term effort that could exist on its own. This allows people to mask whatever intention they want with whatever reasoning they want. You discredit your opponents by associated them with a perceived negative--ignoring the specifics in favor of vague generalities. An unarmed man is gunned down in cold blood only to have mention of this be attributed to a desire to see the conflict inflamed. If we as a society could simply allow our egos to be injured, we might actually get somewhere. We would rather celebrate a public figure for aligning themself with a particular cause than seeing that cause furthered. We become enslaved to the spectre of our passions, elevate our egos and refuse to acknowledge what we know to be true if it conflicts with the myth we have created for ourselves. Personally I don't know the way out. Hell, the only people who would even entertain this notion are the ones who are not guilty of it themselves. Trying to describe this to the ones who really need to hear it is like screaming at the wind. And rant over. Thanks for playing.

If you want runtime-editable input bindings, cInput works quite well. Also for general prototype stuff there is a package called prototype textures that is pretty useful for blocking out elements. For visual scripting I recommend UScript, easy to use and really extendable for custom events. Basically if you've ever used Unreal's Kismet you'll be right at home.

I got a similar feeling from the game. I really enjoy the combat, or more specifically the level up system. I like the theory crafting aspect of RPGs and DAI allows for some pretty cool combos and what not once you get into it. After beating the game I think most of my problems arise from the world design and the inclusion of mechanics that seem to just be there because they are expected to be. I may go back to it at some point, particularly if there is a sizable expansion released in the future.

For those that have been following it, is Gamergate growing or is it just kind of a permanent fixture on certain websites? The things GG does are pretty common in other areas of the web (mainly extreme conservative circles) and I wonder if GG is just kind of a manifestation of the typical bigotry we see elsewhere as opposed to its own thing.

This is the read I had on the articles I saw making the rounds on Facebook. Representation and other social dynamics have become a greater part of the public consciousness of late, and because other artists in the past haven't had to deal with kind of criticism to the extent these artists do, they don't know how to deal with it. I admit I'm guilty of the same thing, though I've always tried to take a step back and see what the people are really saying. When faced with a criticism you've never heard before, it's difficult to not take it as a personal attack at first regardless of the intention. What is odd to me about this article, and others like it, is this weird dissonance that exists in the reasoning. The person will say something to the effect of "you just need to have thicker skin" to their critics...while writing an overly hyperbolic rant about how people shouldn't criticize their work in certain ways. But, fuck it, I've given up trying to make sense of anything the internet does lately. Long Live Idle Thumbs.

Not a youtube video, but I'm sure y'all will get a kick out of this. http://www.dorkly.com/post/70851/7-lines-that-would-have-completely-changed-jurassic-park

The game I've been working on for the last couple of years is coming out tomorrow for PS4 in North America. European release will be soon after, though no date is set as of yet. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/03/30/rack-n-ruin-out-tomorrow-on-ps4/

This piece seems like a pretty accurate portrayal of many of the complaints I've heard regarding TotalBiscuit. The author points out, rightfully I think, that these problems aren't necessarily only related to him but are more related to the culture of games media on places like youtube.

If anyone is interested in hearing about some of the things I learned while using Unity, you can check out this post I just put up on the Unity forums.

I've been interested recently in playing and really researching games that primarily don't involve violent mechanics, mechanics designed around a theme, or perhaps a unique take on traditional mechanics. I've managed to find a few of these such as Cart Life and Papers, Please, but beyond a few of the more well known ones I really don't know where to look. I was hoping that some of you know of some games/designers/companies that do this kind of thing, and perhaps could use this thread as a way to discuss the topic in general. So far I've been compiling a list based on recommendations of friends: Cart Life Papers, Please Crusader Kings 2 Maniac Mansion (I've heard a bit about this but can't seem to find a working version) Beyond good and evil

The video game case that went before the US supreme court's main theme was regarding whether or not minors are entitled to free speech rights the same as adults if I remember correctly. I guess the central question then would be whether or not that counts as free speech.

That's entirely possible, I haven't kept up with the research in recent years. Though whether it be psychoanalysis or Maslow's Hierarchy, these things really are all just theories about how the mind develops or functions so it wouldn't surprise me. There have been a few notable theories debunked over the years--some of them because they were ill formed and others because they were based on what we now understand to be pretty barbaric methods such as dropping an infant into a tub of water, or frontal lobotomies.

In regards to the flow vs. immersion angle, I think the main difference really is in the terms. Immersion is a concept, so it's certainly open to interpretation and can mean a host of different things depending on the context. Flow on the other hand is a psychological phenomenon. Meaning that flow is a concrete, distinct, idea with specific parameters and definitions surrounding it. Often I hear psychological phenomena defined as though they were abstract concepts, mainly because psychologists use words that sound as such. For example, Maslow's Hierarchy of needs refers to specific periods in a person's psychological development--it is not a checklist that need be filled out. So usually by the time someone learns about Maslow's Hierarchy, they are already beyond the age where the conflicts in the theory of taken place. Flow sounds like a general concept, but in reality it isn't any more open to interpretation than the result of 3x5. This is why if you ever dig into say behavioral psychology you'll find a whole host of different theories that all seem like the same concept--the difference is usually in the methods and details.

I found this youtube channel thanks to a Polygon article earlier today. I haven't watched all the videos yet, but they are presented nicely and have some really cool insight into some popular games' design philosophies.

We recently completed our Unity game, and I'd like to pass on what knowledge I gained from this while the experience is still fresh in my mind. I've written most of a post I'll put up in the coming days on the Unity forum, but I just wanted to put a feeler out to see if there is anything regarding making a game in Unity people would like to know. So far the post covers some editor best practices, integration tips, initialization structure, some method usage, and a few other odds and ends. Also I should mention the post will be aimed at programmers, or at least anyone writing their game in Unity. I can't speak with any authority from an artistic perspective, but if you have any questions in that area the artist I worked for would probably have some insight on the matter.