Dean

Hey. Recently attended a 48 hour jam here in Canberra. Fun weekend all in all, met some pretty chill folks. The theme given was "There's too many of them" and our group (me and 2 artists) went for a relaxing medical-type game where you play as an alien blob in the bloodstream and must eat other blobs, duplicating and growing as you go. We ended up with an eat-everything game with zero difficulty in which you may or may not play as cancer itself. We may continue working on this, and if we do I'll be sure to post our progress somewhere in this forum! Working Title: Membrane Left-Click to expand, Right-Click to shrink. Here is the build, enjoy! https://mega.co.nz/#F!5FRg3CDI!IcvC2uutMyvlXBNrL1kgZw

Cocos2D is worth a look. http://www.cocos2d-x.org/

For 2D games in Unity, I really think it's worth it to code your own collision checking, as opposed to using the built in collider/rigidbody setup normally used (assuming you're not doing any physics simulation). Checking whether 2 rectangles intersect is really easy, and the performance increase can be well worth your time as you can simply do away with many of your unnecessary rigidbodies and colliders. Best used with object pooling, I suppose.

Lately, I've been considering the dual pistols in Super Crate Box. For those who haven't played the game, (you should by the way, it's free) it's an arcade-style platformer in which you survive continuously spawning waves of enemies whilst trying to collect crates. Collecting a crate is how you score points, but it will also switch out your current weapon for another random weapon, forcing you to adapt. Now, the dual pistols are immediately singled out by any experienced player as the worst weapon in the game BY FAR. The disc gun is incredibly easy to kill yourself with if you use it wrongly, and the flamethrower can completely wreck the timing of your jumps, yet the dual pistols are far more annoying to receive after collecting a crate. They're just shit, basically. They do fuck all damage. The shotgun will kill a larger enemy in 2 close-range shots. Revolver - 2 shots. Disc gun - 2 shots. Rocket launcher - 1 shot. Grenade launcher - 1 shot. Laser rifle - 1 shot. Dual pistols - 8 fucking shots. After a while of playing, I grew to loath them. I thought they were rubbish, broken, imbalanced. Dying any other way felt justified, but the dual pistols just made me feel impotent. I could be incredibly effective with all the other weapons, but I would find myself in scenarios with the dual pistols that were just impossible to survive. It wasn't until about 150 hours of gameplay (I like crate box) that I started to realize what an effect this particular weapon has on the game as a whole, even when you aren't using it. And then they did feel justified. A big part of Super Crate Box is the simple tactics of using each different weapon effectively, but if it weren't for the dual pistols, you'd never have to think beyond the weapon you currently have equipped. They force you to fear them. To respect them. They force you to consider, every time you go to pick up a crate: "What if the next weapon I get is those fucking bullshit pistols?". The moment I realized this, I became a much better player. Finally I understood how the mere possibility of getting the dual pistols changes the way you play with every other weapon in the game - all the time. So, you learn to do what's logical, really. Before picking up a crate, make sure the playing field isn't too populated by enemies. Don't let yourself get into a situation you can't get out of. This effectively makes every weapon in the game harder to use, except for the dual pistols. Which leads me to their true advantage. Say, for instance, the crate has spawned behind a sequence of enemies. If I have any weapon other than the dual pistols, I will be thinking about killing the enemies in front of me to get to the crate. However, with the dual pistols my strategy now changes completely. I instead look for gaps between the enemies - can I dodge past them to get to the crate? Because in Super Crate Box, you can't pick up the same weapon twice in a row. These are the kind of things I love about this game. I don't even know if they designed stuff like that on purpose, but I think it's elegant.

The Newgrounds Audio Portal has collected some pretty cool content over the years, and all of it is free to use so long as you credit the artist. http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/

In my experience, there is no fantastic way to accomplish this kind of thing in Game Maker. The engine just isn't very good at drawing hundreds of sprites to the screen fast enough to allow a decent framerate. No way of getting around this, so you're just going to have to optimise as best you can. Which means you have to try and lower the amount of sprite draws per frame. First of all, yes you are going to have to track the location of each blood sprite. You can't just have a buttload of sprites drawing off-screen, it's not efficient. In fact, as far as I can tell, it costs just as much performance to be drawing sprites off-screen as it does on-screen, and you'd be drawing them for literally no reason at all. If a sprite is off-screen, don't draw it. If you want better performance you should do this with every object in the game that might be leaving the screen view. Something else that might help is to limit the actual number of blood sprites that are being created. What I would do is increase the size of the blood sprite (not too big) and have it spawn only when the player steps a certain distance, as opposed to every frame in which the player is moving. Hope this helps.

John Dies at the End is probably my favorite book (though I haven't read a lot), and I personally feel as if it was sort of made to appeal to me. It's fairly unstructured and imprecise, yeah, but it's still wickedly paced, and full of weird imagination and humour. Just unstoppably entertaining from start to finish, in my opinion.

Hello all, I'm a 17 year old who recently moved out of his parents home in Queensland to study Game Programming at the AIE here in Canberra. I've listened to Idle Thumbs for almost half a year now, and would definitely call myself a fan of the podcast. I mostly look for single player games of most types, but can be persuaded to play almost any game. I also watch lots of movies and television and I read no less than 1 books per year. I play the occasional game of Payday 2 or Red Orchestra 2, so if you're up for a round, add "whalesnail" on steam.