gregab

When Jake said "XCOM Obama" on the show, I immediately flashed on a game idea I've wanted to do for awhile which is basically: "West Wing Tactics", an isometric turn-based tactics game where you play as the assistants for the West Wing staff with the staff themselves as the enemies. You have to navigate around the hallways and offices of the West Wing dropping off papers, trying to hustle the President and other staff into meetings on time, etc. I'm a programmer with intermediate Unity chops and some familiarity with the systems that would be needed for this kind of game (pathfinding, basic AI, etc). If someone wanted to do some art for it that would be amazing and I could probably whip up a prototype during the jam. Would need: isometric sprites for President, Chief of Staff, Vice President, Communications Director, Press Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff, plus one Staff Assistant each. Also: environment art: cubicle walls, hallways, the oval office, etc. If we did it isometrically the whole thing could be done with 2D assets and still look pretty nice. Anyone interested?

Thanks, that bit about queueing commands is incredibly helpful! Would it also make sense to start epicenter, blink into the middle of a fight, and then queue up burrow strike to get back out to the periphery to increase your chances of survival while still doing a lot of damage? @undermind9: Also, that's the second time you've mentioned the shiva's guard. Will you say a little more about the strategy for using that? Are you using it's freezing aura to trap targets before epicenter or arctic blast after you've gotten into the midst of things? How does it play in?

@taterdactyl and @casktapper: thanks! It's definitely got its hooks into me good at this point @undermind9: thanks for the build tips. This is really helpful. I'm still relatively clueless about build orders and items in general. It's an area in which I'm really trying to improve, but finding it hard going as all the knowledge seems to be quite specific to how items combine with each lord's particular spells and abilities. I've watched/read some overviews and have a sense of all of the items and know some of the most popular and generally useful ones. But I haven't found a good way to discover exactly these kinds of combos. More specifically about your comment: I thought I'd seen some people (like Purge) start up epicenter on the fray of a team fight and then use blink dagger to teleport into the middle just as it really gets going. However, when I tried that, it seemed that blinking canceled the spell? Am I just mis-seeing that or does blinking cancel spells in some contexts?

Haven't posted in this thread before. Only been playing Dota for a couple of weeks. Had to stop in because I just finally managed to pull off my first successful carry! Am so excited and didn't know who else to tell that would appreciate it. There's a screenshot here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/unavoidablegrain/13531538223/ I played as Sand King, one of the few heroes that I feel like I sort of understand how to play and the only one who's not a support. After watching this Purge video I tried a new build order building up burrowstrike before sand storm and going for a blink dagger. The combination makes for great chase and kill potential. Ended up 29-4-7, more kills than their whole team put together. It may sound like I'm bragging here, and I guess I am, but I think it really speaks to how amazing this game is. The learning curve on this thing is amazing. Just so well tuned. I'm constantly balanced on a knife edge between feeling frustrated with myself when I fuck up or have a bad game and so psyched when I finally feel like I'm getting the hang of some new skill -- like improving my last-hitting -- or or pull off some maneuver -- like ganking with a blink dagger and burrowstrike combo or trapping someone with Lina's light strike so someone else can finish them off. And I've only probably played about a third of the heroes ever and I only feel like I have the hang of maybe five. The learning curve just goes up forever as far as I can see. It's awe inspiring. I'm totally shocked to find myself as into a game that's this goddamn complicated and fiddly as this one. It shouldn't work but it does.

Hi all. I came across the the podcast a few months ago and have been ravenously consuming the back catalogue since. I'm a master's student at the MIT Media Lab in a brand new research group called Playful Systems. We make and study games and other ways of playing within complex systems ranging from digital computation to food distribution. My background is all over the place (from indie music to computer vision), but in games I come from the Big Games tradition: making games that involve running around in cities and strange mixes of computers and the real world. If you know the Come, Out, and Play festival, it's that kind of thing. I'm currently working on a game for this year's SXSW based on Neuromancer that involves streaming 3D video from an iPhone to an Oculus Rift. Lately, I've been getting more and more interested in making specifically video game-y video games and listening to the Thumbs podcasts has been inspirational in that regard. I'm definitely interested in the Amateur Game Making thread and am really excited to see what people are cooking up there. I'm currently playing: Banner Saga, Super Hexagon (obsessively), Eliss Infinity, Nidhogg, VVVVV, Quadradius, and others. Probably about to play Far Cry 2 after hearing about 30 hours of pro-it ranting by the Thumbs. Also, being at MIT means I'm in close proximity to all kinds of weird and frightening Robot News items if anyone is interested in those. Thanks for the great podcast!