clyde

This is the most impenetrable of Thecatamites' games I've played. The fact that it doesn't close to desktop once the game is seemingly over makes me feel like I'm not ever finishing it. It took me atleast ten tries before I realised that there is player input (cicking on the three buttons in the right-hand corner). I've been trying to figure it out for days. In my desperation, I went into the notes provided in the bundle. They are not helpful. I may not understand how to play the game, but I'm already opinionated enough about what it represents. This strikes me as a game you find on the road. Sometimes when I am forced out into the broader world, 10 miles or more from my house, I find computer-games that are placed in gaming-deserts. I might find a Deer Hunter machine at a truck-stop or a touch-screen hidden-picture game at a bar. I've run into a few machines that Klogg's KrapSack reminds me of; they are slightly heavier and they sometimes have built-in ash trays full of ashes and candy-wrappers. This type of thing, but older. I've never actually played one, but I've always imagined that they are less interesting versions of Klogg's KrapSack. I'm pretty sure that the three icons arranged horizontally are digital-slots and the pac-man ghosts fit the theme well, since Pac-man or Ms. Pac-man is a game I would expect to see right beside it. That's all I've managed to get from the game, but it's only Friday.

I'm hoping to discuss Totem's Sound with y'all. It's free and available for Windows and Mac (and Linux?). I think it took me about an hour to complete. A list of controls are nowhere to be found. Took me a while to find out that 'x' changes equipped item and 'c' uses it.

Hey Twig, how do yo make something follow the edge of a collider like the creatures in your platformer? You know, so if they are on a box, they get to an edge, climb down the side then they crawl upside-down, back up and start over.

I got some sort of cold-sick thing 8 days ago and I have a personal rule that I can't drink alcohol when I'm sick. I'm still coughing up yellow phelgm every couple of hours so I am not fully recovered. I'm hoping to get wasted tommorow night. I miss the wine.

Do you know what you want to ground's shape to look like? You could probably get a decent amount of terrain variation in a 2D game by drawing some large sprites with odd shapings on all sides and then overlapping them and rotating them random amounts. This would require you to use only one color for the ground though (if you don't want the player to see that the ground is made by the same shapes rotated different amounts). Another similar way to cheat would be to make an oddly shaped 3D column, lay it on it's side and then give it a random rotation on the world's x-axis before the game starts. If the two poles of the column are identical in width, you could probably use the same one over and over again, attached end-to-end.

I know y'all mentioned KFC/Tacobell, but any combination will evoke this tune in my mind when mentioned

I haven't been in this thread much lately, but I though some of you might enjoy this comic by Elizabeth Simins about her experience of loving video games as she grew up and how cultural gender-norms affected how she perceived her passion.

For the week of October 6th, 2014 we will be playing: Klogg's KrapSack by thecatamites You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. ...sorry I'm late, apparently I came on yesterday to post the game of the week, but then got side-tracked with a long post and forgot.

@SuperBiasedMan I only read a little bit of this so far, but it seems legit. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JayelindaSuridge/20130903/199457/Modelling_by_numbers_Part_One_A.php

Itch.io just added tye ability to follow developers. It's a pretty obvious thing to implement, but I'm excited about it because on Game Jolt it's a facebook-esque friend-request to follow a developer (which is not well though out if you ask me) and I can't always play a new game by a developer on the only day they tweet about it and often forget a few days later. It hasn't been active long enough for me to see if it sends followers a notification, but that's what i'm assuming.

While watching the part of the video where the guy got a call from the human woman, I thought it was going to thrn into a joke-video "Go ahead and call her back." "I can't do that Dave." "Call her back Jibo." "I don't trust this one Dave, I think she wants to tear us apart." "Just order dinner for two Jibo." [orders something from lowest aggregated Yelp-reviews]

Did y'all see this Jibo indiegogo campaign video? I feel like 99% of the time that thing is going to be saying "Where'd you go?", but I can totally see this being the new medical-alert solution for the elderly or something as normal.

Would the faux-retro aesthetic often present in small games be considered skeumorphic? After playing Bernband and Hernhand as companion pieces, I've been thinking about this aesthetic a lot. In Hernhand (which may be Jake Clover's first 3D game, I'm not certain) there is a distinct aesthetic of the creator's limited technical skill savored in many design decisions; for instance, the disembodied first-person hands pronounce their 2D-sprite construction by having the alpha-channel blacked out. So you are running through this 3D world with cardboard drawings of arms in front of you that aren't even cut out. Similar decisions are made throughout Hernhand and it creates this unique aesthetic that is formed as Clover mixes his 2D methods with the techniques that Unity advertises to its new users early on, and some tricks that Clover must have decided were high enough priority to look into the execution of within (presumably) the last few months. So playing Hernhand as a fan of Clover's previous work and as a new user of Unity is like getting taken behind the scenes of shadow-theatre to see how the 2D play has been performed in 3D space and like someone put twenty of the demo-projects from the tutorials together in one weird alien world. I see this as being the opposite of skeumorphism. All the seams are real in comparison to something like the the Media Molecule produced levels of Little Big Planet; LBP is supposed to look and feel like arts&craft materials. Interestingly, I would not describe the consumer-created content levels of LBP as skeumorphic, they (like Jake Clover) seem to have an aesthetic of making something work out of limited parts. Tom van den Boogaart's Bernband, however, I would consider skeumorphic because it appears that a screen-filter was applied over the game to create a pixelated look. When you turn slowly, you can kinda see how the actual lines and colors of the world are first drawn in a middle-illusion that is divided into many more segments than the depicted resolution. It's similar to looking at an enlarged 8-bit game through a screen-door. It's very strange (and super cool). This aesthetic is consistent through multiple parts of Bernband's design. All of the characters are jagged, blockily colored, billboarding sprites that lerp smoothly through a 3D world at a much higher fidelity of smoothness than is implied by their giant pixelated depictions. It's really strange. While Hernhand is showing off its actual method of construction, Bernband hides its own with a technical knowledge of how to create a convincing illusion with the contemporary tools, but then goes to additional effort to imply the limitations of tools only capable of lower fidelity. The implication is not subtle at all and it makes me associate certain aspects of the game with 8-bit (culture?) while keeping things like movement and the architectural space as a clean, smooth modern. It had a really unsettling (but pleasurable) effect on me. It makes you approach everything in the world with a question of which nature it ascribes to. Maybe this is the experience people were having with 3D Dot Game Heroes. The thing that intrigues me is that the mix of (what I may be incorrectly referring to as) skeumorphic aspects with contemporary fidelity makes me curious about the types of familiarity that are being evoked; is it gaming nostalagia or is there something more complex going on like a recontextualization of those 2D 8-bit worlds into the realities of the concept-art from that era being post-processed into lower fidelity. A good comparison here would be film. I imagine that when people first watched colored film, they immediately extrapolated all the black & white films they had seen earlier as having been imperfect depictions of colored reality. The weird part here is that those 8-bit worlds didn't have 3D high-fidelity sources, but Bernband makes them feel like they did.

I get the impression that the author cares more about the passion for fashion more than fashionable clothing itself; the reason being that everything in Fashion World plays up the intensity and importance of subjective taste and ritual iof fashion, yet the actual clothing from which to choose is not interesting enough to evidence any personal taste. The most interesting thing about the clothing in Fashion World was the possibilty of mixing dark and light-colored Fashion is a lot like accents, everyone has one but it's typically invisible to them. I think that one way to look at the art of fashion is that people want both of the things you just described. They want to wear something that helps them blend in with the crowd with which they want to assimilate, but stick out (or just make in impression) to certain individuals. It's not always about finding a mate either. When I lived in New Orleans, my clothing tended towards rips and assymetrical paint stains; cargo pocket pants with the knees ripped out so much that I had to tie them up with loose thread so I wouldn't trip. It became a way to signal that I was an artist, I rejected my wealth, and that I was willing to look like a fool. It sounds silly and maybe even irrelevant outside of its context, but this was not only a way to attract certain people, but also a safety measure to look less like a mark. Fashion. I think this is one of the strengths of having a collection of short games. I have the time to play through enough to get all the obvious endings. This gives me a chance to see it as a system. In fact, I often don't enjoy them the first time through. I like the idea of a game that is mechanically about presenting yourself as something. Something deeper than requiring the player to wear nice clothes in order to be admitted to a dinner party in an Elder Scrolls game would be really interesting if the player had a lot of significant iterative choices and feedback. Someone should make the Mark of the Ninja of fashion-games. Sure, whatever you have in mind. Images on this forum has to be hosted by another site (like imgur). Then you click the little tree in the posting tool-bar and put the image url in there. If you need help, just say.

How complex would writing a program that takes Unity screenshots and turns them into .gif files be? Where would I start? I already got screenshot functionality set up. Update: So there is some open source software with the Apache license (which I believe means that I can redistribute it with my game) called imagemagick that can convert .png files into animate gif files. Now I guess I need to figure out how to write a program that Unity opens that automatically takes all .png from a folder and puts them through imagemagick? Update: This is looking promising. http://www.dotnetperls.com/process

I used to love watching Project Runway. Fashion World diverges pretty harshly from Project Runway though because Project Runway is all about designing clothes for a client whereas Fashion World seems more like picking out a combination to wear yourself from the clothes drapped on items throughout your room, the not-clean-enough-to-put-back-in-the-drawer-but-not-dirty-enough-to-throw-into-the-hamper pile. So I read this game as finding some humor and enthusiasm in picking out what to put on from the usual selection, by using the voice and perspective of a professional fashion-writer. I thought of this aspect as being a representation of the apparent fickleness of subjective, passionate taste in fashion. In those dress-up montages in romantic comedies, there is always a dualism; either there is a chaebol (wisely) shaking his head as he watches the many possibilities of dressing up his (naive) shrew, or the fashionista is (naively) pleased when looking at the clothing on the rack but discards it (wisely) whenever they see what it actually looks like on them. In the case of Fashion World, the dualism is between the naivety of we the players and the untranslatable wisdom of the scoring-system. I love how the ending messages treat your self-appointed score as inarguable truth. I think there were a lot of opportunities for cooler-than-thou cynicism in this game, and they were never taken. I think that the design decision to maintain a certain sincerity throughout the entire game is what really allows it to be a satisfying experience for me. Picking a '1' for my score gave me a great message that I would usually interpret as pandering, but because the voice that internalizes the subjective values of others throughout the game is the one that says it, I found it endearing. I'm not sure if they are chronological or not. I'm posting them in the order they are presented in the 50 Short Game bundle I think that the expectations and motivations of the player can be a medium for significance in itself, but I do think that such a significance would be more accessible if the was some in-game support of consequence. Most of the time, I don't have feature requests for games in this collection, but it kills me that I don't get to see my avatar walking down the street whilst covered in socks at the end of my game where I collected nothing but them. I think if that was the case, it would be harder to argue that nothing you are doing matters.

I published an improved version of that 3D sculpture, flying, trail-leaving, not-game. It's free. http://clyde.itch.io/yarn

I like how that one sees the void and then gets a boost as if to say "Don't mind if I do!"

I thought this was a great article about the "indie scene" in Japan. It's nice to see multiple, relevant perspectives being noted in such a short, informative piece. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/01/dojin-nation-indie-gaming-japan?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

What inspired the relapse into gaming?

I just saw one on sale. I haven't used it. Not sure if it's what you are looking for. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8849

Can't stop, won't stop.

Maybe it's the potassium.

Strangethink's Art Machine is fun as shit. The physics brushes blew my mind. just going through the tutorial, I ended up making 20 or so screenshots.

I just played some Rust. The experimental server is still broken. After getting shot at when collecting wood, I ran to the next valley. Someone in chat said that they killed the guys that shot at me and I could have their stuff if I came back. I politely said "no". The sun was soon setting and the only meat I had seen was on live bears and wolves. Since I had nothing but a stone axe, I continued running through pastures. I saw a guy with no clothing running down the road being chased by a wolf. Dying from hunger I went after the wolf hoping that my good-faith gesture would create enough of a friendship that we could divide the meat and cook it together. I killed the wolf but it took a chunk out of me and I was still losing health from hunger. The guy continued to run away. I bandaged up and crafted a campfire near the road. I put the wolf meat on the fire and died from hunger immediately after. It was awesome.