mike

Okay double-post but I totally fixed it and uploaded a new version: http://mantiseyelabs.com/games/flappyjam2014/0223/ (you might need to do a hard refresh) For anyone curious the issue seems to be Chrome changing how the 'canplay' audio event was fired. It seems like it now fires the event every time a sound can be played and not just the first time it can be played. I was using that event to track when a sound asset was loaded and increment a counter. If the expected asset count equaled this counter then all assets were considered to be loaded. However, the event firing additional times caused the counter to go up even higher and the asset check was making sure the counts were equal. Barf. And then in the main loop if assets weren't yet loaded the drawing operations weren't run, which is what caused the issue you all saw. Anyway I made the asset loader a little less naive so it should work now. HTML5 games, the future of sadness Thanks for everyones help!

I just updated Chrome and it seems to be happening for me too. At first I thought it was an audio issue but it seems to happen even if I remove that code. Infuriating. Well the art (of which the only thing is really the bird) is like that because I am a terrible pixel artist, so I just went with something super simple. The pixels on the bird are pretty huge though (he'd be 10x8) so it might feel kind of jerky. I think I know what you're saying though, which is I should make the game like 80x60 and scale it up. Which is something I haven't quite figured out how to do smoothly!

Anyone want to help me playttest a thing? Flappy Jam ends on the 24th so I guess I'll release it tomorrow? http://mantiseyelabs.com/games/flappyjam2014/0223/ (lazily tested in Chrome, but it seems to work fine in Firefox aside from not playing a lone WAV file... IE11 chokes on it entirely) Flappy Jam ends on the 24th so I guess I'll release it today/tomorrow? Any input at all is appreciated!

Arrays are pretty good for pooling objects because you never delete from it, which is usually the thing that causes issues. You do shift stuff around but not in a way that should cause any problems.

I don't recall Irrational scaling down after Bioshock shipped. Some people left to form 2K Marin, sure, but it wasn't like Irrational only had 10 people after that. The company was always around 80 - 100 depending on what stage of development they were in. Bioshock was also financially successful, and it was 2K's first hit game (critically and commercially), so they weren't about to let anything happen to Irrational. Here is the thing though: if Levine wants to go off on his own and make a game with a small group of people, why does he need to close down Irrational to do it? Furthermore how does he even have the power to do that, seeing as how IG is fully owned by 2K? If a studio is financially viable would 2K just stand around when a madman decides to close it because he wants to do something else? Why not just give him a team and have him do whatever? The thing he's apparently doing doesn't even need to happen outside of the walls of Irrational. He could just move his 15 team members to their own conference room or floor or whatever and they could toil away at whatever he wants while the rest of the company works on whatever other game. That's not what's happening though.

I don't know the logistics of shutting down a studio but an AAA studio that makes one game every 2 - 3 years puts all their potential revenue into a very high risk thing, and if that game doesn't make enough to sustain the company for the development of the next one then they probably get shut down (look at EA and Activision, who have shut down a ton of studios). I think the bottom line with a lot of studio shutterings is that they just weren't making enough.

There is almost no way it was profitable, or at least anywhere near profitable enough to ensure the studio continued to exist. Since the release of Bioshock in 2007 Irrational released exactly zero games until Bioshock Infinite. That's six years. If you're not a studio named Valve or Blizzard you will go out of business if you make one game in six years. The fact that 2K somehow let them continue to function without having a viable product is insane, and Irrational needed a ton of help to even get it shipped. If you assume an average of 300 people working on it in three studios (IG, Marin and 2K Australia) making an average of $50k that's $15m a year purely in salaries ($90m total). If the game sold ~4m copies (as of last July) at an average of $40 of revenue per copy to T2 (I am potentially being generous there) that's $160m in revenue generated from the game. So already over half the revenue is gone just purely from having to pay people a wage. Factor in health care costs, keeping the lights on in any of those studios, whatever other costs are associated with running a company, rent, equipment costs, marketing budgets... there's not much left over to support a studio for however many more years.

This is an awesome thread! I should post more often I guess. I'm making a dumb game for the Flappy Jam, because why not? https://vine.co/v/M7JmeZPwQxa Next step is to make the bird be more than just a green box. Flappy Jam site: http://itch.io/jam/flappyjam

Good news: Respawn is independently owned! Totally counts as indie.

I played this at PAX last year without knowing anything about the game (aside from that it has mechs and is made by the Call of Duty guys) and I came away feeling pretty excited about it, which is sort of weird because I barely ever play big-name shooters any more. I don't know if we played PC or Xbox or what but you had to use an Xbox controller and it ended up working pretty well. I would still always prefer a mouse/keyboard but I didn't totally hate using a controller. It was really fun though! Most of the time you are just running around waiting to call your titan and I'm sure there's some strategy to it as far as coordinating your team but that's hard to do with people who have no familiarity with the game. The difference in feel between a regular dude and being in a titan is pretty cool and you can tell they spent a lot of time tuning that. I don't know what else to say except that I really enjoyed it.

Sean, let's talk about Joe Montana!

Everything is the best

The site is built on a PHP framework called Fuel (http://fuelphp.com/) used for routing and all that sort of nitty-gritty and the Thumblord uses Twitter's Bootstrap (or parts of it) and there's jQuery of course and the HTML player's fallback is jPlayer's flash component but beyond that it's entirely from scratch. No CSS pre-processors were used because I don't care for them. Doug also set up a bunch of crazy stuff on the server level to make everything super fast, though I'm less familiar with that part.

I was surprised I was still able to register this username when I did! Also I beat you by six months, apparently.

Hi

This is the best thing anyone has ever said (and also the reason that Chris currently hates me).

Can you be more specific? As in what do you see and what browser/OS you're looking at it in. Also who is your daddy and what does he do?

My work here is done

Dante's Inferno is pretty much my favorite game subject ever. Also I totally know what the last level will be. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the Divine Comedy (specifically the last zone of the 9th Circle): So, okay, you reach the final boss, Satan, who has multiple stages! The first one he mostly just tries to smash you with his hands and throw fireballs at you. Once you do enough damage to him he slouches back in the background and Brutus and Cassius jump out of his mouths. Brutus has a huge hammer and Cassius has an electric guitar that shoots lightning. They team up and you have to figure out how to defeat them by using one guy against the other (since both of them blame each other for ending up in hell!). After you defeat them two of Satan's faces fall off and he starts hitting you again. When you do a second round of damage he unleashes Judas on you. Judas has a huge crucifix (similar to your own) that he tries to impale you with, doing massive damage when he connects. After a sequence of quick-time events you eventually defeat Judas and Satan's last face falls off. He appears to slump over dead as if you have beaten the game but suddenly he wakes up and reveals his true head, a flaming skull. He smashes his way out of the ice and the final battle is a Shadow of Colossus style battle where you need to jam your crucifix into various hot spots on Satan's body until the final blow is delivered to the back of his skull. His head explodes and suddenly hell starts to collapse upon itself! You then need to climb his fur and make your escape from hell in a sweet timed "escape the collapsing level before you die" sequence. Anyway GOTY 2010!

guys I'll be back in a second, I've gotta drop a podblast

Yeah I played the demo a bunch of times because I found it to be really fun and while portions of the game are like that there are also a lot of areas as Chris described that are insane and pretty much require you kill a dude before moving on. I don't think anyone in the demo had more than a pistol so running past them was trivial. In the full game there are sections where dudes have shotguns or machine guns, many of which will kick your ass even from a distance while you are running full speed. I also found the disarm mechanic (when a dude's gun turns red) to be sketchy most of the time and I ended up just doing tons of flying and sliding kicks followed by a barrage of punches and hoping the guy would die. Either that or I have slow reflexes At any rate I found the demo fun but the full game to be downright infuriating at many points and I just have no desire to pick it up again. I have it on 360 too so I don't even get the benefits of the DLC.