hedgefield

I like how jmbossy puts it, that essentially your world becomes bigger, and you no longer (need to) have a personal relationship with everyone around you. In my case I found that somewhat comforting, you can be who you want to be with the people you like, and the people you're not that interested in will generally leave you be. Your identity is going to change over the next few years. I was sort of comfortable being in the geeks niche in highschool, then I went to game design school and basically everyone was some shade of geek, and I was free to reinvent myself. It takes some time to find your new place in that environment, but it will be closer to who you want to be. Best thing is to probably focus on the things you love. If you do something with passion it will reflect your personality, and people will notice that. It's hard to communicate my experiences and thoughts about it exactly but I hope that helps. I think things will turn out fine, don't think too much about it and go with the flow. In a year or so you'll have a much clearer idea of who you are or want to be. And Gormongous, I've been in your position, a girl I went on first date with and really hit it off with wasn't looking for 'anything serious', which she later told me was because her last boyfriend had abused her. If you really mean that you don't much mind whichever way it goes, just keep hanging out with her and be a nice and loving person, treat her like a friend and she will come to you. In my case, even though it didn't work out, she still credits me for helping her trust men again, and she's over most of her fears now. But if you look at her like 'I'd want to be with her eventually', you're going to get frustrated from trying to get her over her fears, and it runs the risk of blowing up. I guess what I'm saying is see where it goes, don't be afraid to let go of the reins for a bit, and don't focus on it too much, keep doing your own thing.

Agreed. Last week was shit, but I got back my faith in video games somehow, but now these issues are cropping up again and again, and I am deeply ashamed of our fellow gamers. I might return to simply being an illustrator for a while until this situation has improved. I don't want to make games for these people.

I do that too for any game that doesn't have much of an explicit narrative. It's great during TF2 matches, or when playing Grid Wars, which I use as a 'quiet-thinking-time' game anyway to occupy my visual senses. I've had middling results with survival games like DayZ and State of Decay because those also have an element of having to watch for audio cues in the environment for whether you're going to get mangled in 5 seconds or not.

Oh man! Trains... Agreed, it was a lot of fun! Quite 'gezellig' to hang out with you cool kids. Wish I could have stayed longer, but I'll be there next time for sure. Also.

"The hero's journey is not the only journey" is one of the best quotes related to narrative design I've heard in a while. I never thought about it conciously, but it's a great way to write characters, to keep in mind that they too are going through something at that moment probably and aren't just there as conversation fodder for the player. Otherwise an allround good discussion too, I've found this game fascinating for a long time. It's funny that you mention Sophie and Rebecca, as I was briefly dating a Sophie at the time I was playing through the iPhone version a few years back, which made me pay more attention to them than maybe the average player does. P.S. I just noticed Last Express for iOS is now only .99c on the App Store! What a nice coincidence, if you haven't played it it's now super easy to pick it up.

This sounds really interesting, between this and Counterspy there finally seem to be some good stealth games coming out again.

Hear hear.

Rad! I glanced over this thread title and had to do a double-take. As a Thumbs citizen living in Utrecht, meeting some of you fantastic people sounds like the best thing. So count me in! PM sent.

Jon, I agree with you 100%. Nonsense like this makes me not want to be in the games industry anymore. Phil Fish, he can fly off the handle sometimes, but he's absolutely right to call out the bullshit. I respect that guy, it's distasteful to start a campaign against someone personally just from what you can glean off their twitter, or indeed some anonymous tumblr. Puppygames wrote a good article about the dark side of being in the indie spotlights, it made me feel as bit better yesterday in light of this, and after being hit with some hate myself. On the one hand I feel like it's good to talk about it, even just in a sort of support group kind of way, although I doubt it will make a change, but on the other hand I'm glad at the Idle Thumbs forums it's only a small mention somewhere, and not a hot thread on the frontpage.

The discussion about time-based games in regards to Gods Will Be Watching reminded me of a small game I made a while ago where time progresses at a normal pace, and you have to reach the objective within those 15 minutes (it's why the game is called 15 Minutes ha). It's also a spoof of the tv show 24. You can check it out here. It's not particularly deep or challenging but maybe someone will get a kick out of it. That's true, there have been at least three moment where you think you're just asking an innocuous question and the detective flies off the rails with accusations in a temper. In this context that's actually pretty cool, but I remember at the time mostly thinking 'oh christ no shut up what are you doing man I had this!'. Same goes for Mass Effect where sometimes a keyword like 'rebuttal' would result in a genuine headbutt, exploding the whole situation. I think KRZ does a better job of it yeah, also because those choicesw do very little to the narrative. That's the way I'm trying to do it in my games too.

Aye, you can do almost anything in Unity Free but the lighting system is seriously underpowered there. I just don't understand that stuff at all.

That is some insightful feedback, thanks! I can definitely work with that. I always try to be mindful of what I write in terms of it not feeling like it's exposition or that it could be a real conversation that people have. But I don't have a very structured way in which I write the dialogue, I usually sit down and start at "hello", then let it meander from there. Sometimes that leads to something cool, sometimes that goes into rabbit holes a bit. It also helps me discover who the characters are by bouncing topics off of them and figuring out how they respond. Most of these conversations are a first pass at that, so I can understand that they feel a bit stilted. Do please point that out when you see it, like Ado turning a bit too mystic at the end (and hallucinating on weed, I have never done drugs yeah), or what I discovered for myself recently that I'm writing Sofia as a bit too much as a cynic for being a documentary maker, someone who should have a wonder about all the things in the world. I think it's also because I don't have all the clues worked out exactly yet that sometimes a conversation can be without a goal. I'll have to watch out for that. I have a dutch novel- and game writer as sparring partner so I will definitely involve him more as I write the next sections of the game. It's funny because the idea for the UTBAPH conversation was in my mind even before I knew the location and the point in the story, I just thought of that and knew I had to include it somewhere I'll be open to more of those opportunities. And definitely there will be more environmental exploration, the camera is the only example of that currently in the demo but there will be much more. I've recently rewritten the intro part where you meet Sofia and Caleb, I'd be interested to hear what you think of it. I realized that's the only conversation in the game where you don't have any response choices, so I added some flavor at first (thanks clyde for the twin peaks link) and then gave an option to conciously steer how the PC feels about the central theme. I made a video of it but Vimeo is difficult so it will be up in 45 mins, the password then being blackfeathers https://vimeo.com/103153763

Solid suggestions, thanks! I've heard more people complain about the Chrome malware thing, I suppose it concerns itself with downloading zips with an exe off somebody's personal dropbox. I'll upload it to the website eventually. Did you dislike the auto-continue because it was too fast or because it continued by itself at all? I can set it to be slower but I feel like that takes the speed out of the dialogue a bit. Although it doesn't much matter when there'll be voiceacting eventually. Maybe a bit slower would be good, you can always still skip manually.

Wow those are some great creepy characters. really awesome style! And thanks! Yeah Adventure Creator is pretty easy to get started with, dev has some great tutorials on his website iceboxstudios.com/adventurecreator. There are a TON of options so it takes some experimenting to figure out what works best for you, but I'd say within a week you can have something very playable up and running. I especially like the menu editor, you can create menus visually with sliders and dropdowns without having to run the game, and they scale well to whatever resolution the game is played at.

Woah! Rad! The camshake really adds to the feel. Btw if you're looking to make a more adventure-type game I can highly recommend Adventure Creator. It costs a few bucks, but it has a great amount of features and integrates well with 2D, 2.5D and 3D stuff, like UFPS and such, so it offers a lot of possibilities. And it has rad polygon-based navmeshing and parallaxing. Anyway, I'll put down my marketing hat now but I've wouldn't have been able to make the game I am making without it Speaking of, I've been working on a True Detective meets Puzzle Agent sort of game, inspired by true events, called Black Feather Forest. I posted a demo in the Feedback thread ovah 'ere.

Heyo, I've been working on a True Detective meets Puzzle Agent sort of game, inspired by true events, called Black Feather Forest. There's a website with some info HERE, but I made a little demo (it's more of a vertical slice type deal really) that you can check out HERE (includes win + mac binaries). I'm still working on the GUI system and the gameplay mechanics and such, so any feedback is very much appreciated. All the systems will eventually integrate much tighter but I couldn't make that work just yet since it is my first actual game made in Unity. The idea is that you can search for clues in the environment and then use those to talk to other characters and combine all the things you've learned to progress the story. Think Detective Grimoire. Any feedback is welcome!

I feel like talking about this kind of thing is veering into 'climate change' or 'fossil fuels' territory, the topic is so huge and pervasive that you can keep discussing it (see 174-page count) but the big companies that peddle murder simulators to the masses don't seem to really care much about it. It's like Argobot says, I've grown out of it and am starting to actively dislike and avoid those kind of games, not being a giddy teenager anymore and all, so I don't like to engage in discussions like this because in my experience the medium of games is so much broader, and that's hard to communicate to someone who doesn't have that experience. I'm not saying let's forget about it, since obviously if the opinion of the masses is eventually swayed the game developers will have to obey them and start thinking about smarter better games, but I don't see a huge difference that I can make personally, so I figure it's better to just carry on and make good non-gender-biased games myself and let the heavyweights fight over tits and guns.

I haven't played Ether One but I've heard from people (Hot Scoops?) that the world building is really great, when you walk through the town there are notes and things left everywhere with which you can piece together backstory, so that sounds pretty good.

SVN is always a bit of a pain since I have to trust in the fact that it understands what I changed and that it doesn't do something weird with files I know nothing about, but that said, TortoiseSVN has been nice to me so far, it's 'fairly' easy to set up a local repository to keep a backup in case I do something dumb and irreversible. But the most pleasant backup method so far was just zipping up the project folder every night and putting it in my dropbox.

Same here, went in expecting a sub-par experience, got a lot of fun out of it, they really got the flow of getting new gadgets and it making sense story-wise right. SHOCK GLOVES. And the investigations are fun too.

Is anyone playing the Lost Alpha mod? It made a bit of a splash recently for restoring all kinds of content that was cut from the earlier versions of the game, such as upgrading the ALife system to actually work the way the devs wanted it to, while at the same time adding DX10 dynamic lighting and other fancy stuff like that. Some of the fancyness is quite taxing, but I'm having fun re-exploring the game I spent a lot of hours in years ago. The way the narrative plays out feels liek something from a long forgotten era when you compare it to Metro, but the open world is so good. I was playing for maybe an hour, doing an early mission for Siderovich, I turned a corner down some zombie-infested tunnel and I found myself in a huge abandoned underground complex. It was just there. I felt so tense moving through it like I hadn't felt in a game in a long time. Like actualy dread almost, stumbling into this unmarked dark thing. No Outlast can top that.

Jake mentioning Christian Doom clones reminded me of the fact that there are actually a ton of them. The best one I remember isn't in that list, but I can't remember what it was called. I think you played Jesus or at least some high-up dude, and instead of a gun you carried a bible, and your ammo were quotes from various verses that dispelled the demons and heretics. Coool game.

Last night I was listening to episode 112 of 99% Invisible, a (great) podcast mostly about architecture and historical events - it's like a short and sweet version of This American Life. Anyway, the story this week was about the Sutro Baths, a collection of swiming pools and amusements at the San Fransico coast. When listening to it's rich and weird history I couldn't help shake the image of Bioshock's Rapture. If people had actually cared enough about it it might have eventually turned into that. TLDR version: A crazy property developer called Adolf Sutro built a giant glass structure with tons of swimming pools, then built an entire public transport line for people to get to it. When they didn't care much, he also built a tropical (indoor) beach, an aviary, a museum of antiquities, a ferris wheel and a SKYTRAM connecting two nearby cliffs. It was eventually abandoned and it burned down. Now it's part of an SF national park and people come to the ruins to marvel at them (including Hot Scoops). People often think it's something from Ancient times now, even though the ruins are only 45 years old. Sounds like it's cool to check out if you're in the area. Then: Now:

I played the demo for the latest one and I was very impressed by the amount of content and puzzling happening in the space of about three screens. Very rich worldbuilding going on there. Cool game.

Hot damn this sounds intense! Someone should make a movie someday about this thrilling experience you find yourselves in. Are the clocks surgically removed upon receiving a passing grade or do they just reset for the next project until you graduate cum laude? Or is it like Speed where you have to keep up momentum and not turn into a slacker or dropout lest you get splattered? Kudos on doing facial motion capture on a student project! I would have never dared venture into such technological lands. Game looks and sound cool, looking forward to seeing what you guys make of it.