ihavefivehat

Nice! I like the variation in environments. The game play is appropriately frustrating. One small criticism, I can't really get a clear view of the main sprite because it's always rotating. Thus I don't have an image in my head of what the bird actually looks like. Probably putting a still version of it on the menu screen it would fix that issue. Also, I was hoping for more actual poop in the game itself.

Don't be scared! Video game development is more accessible now than it's ever been. Even if you just download Unity and go through a few video tutorials in your free time, you'll have a much greater understanding and appreciation for how games are made.

I voted 'work', because I imagined it inspiring games about mundane tasks but set in ridiculous cyber-punk worlds.

So what really is the difference between alpha and beta? That's something I've never been clear on. And it doesn't help that recently 'beta' has come to mean 'multiplayer demo'.

Thanks!

Cool! Though because I've never tried making a tile-based game, can I ask what 'automatic tiling' and 'bitwise' mean?

Fair enough, I would be in favor of it but then I'm a pretty low-frequency poster as it is.

Ok, but are you sure it's not a hashtag?

I agree, and I think there are already enough strands of discussion in that thread to warrant at least a few new threads. (ie: gamemaker stuff, unity stuff, plus the projects that people are trying to get off the ground).

It sounds like an awesome idea to me!

I've been wondering about that... is there any other way to make a controllable object interact with rigid bodies?

Yeah, those are a couple of glitches. I tried to make a crude path-finding system, but it doesn't always work and sometimes they decide to travel in the wrong directions, namely into the endless ocean. I like to think they're just Columbus types. The bridge thing is so cool that I wish I could replicate it on purpose! They're designed to build 'roads' every time they travel over a tile. (This really just means that they color it grey, and that other people are more likely to travel on it.) So the 'bridges' are just a by-product of a glitch where they accidentally get stuck on a water tile and are forced into a weird path-finding loop that I don't really understand. Thanks! This is great.

Here's another game I've been working on for a while. It takes a photo of your face using your computer's webcam (if it has one). Then it converts the photo into something that looks like a terrain map. After this, a 'boat' lands somewhere on the shoreline and spawns several people which start colonizing your map. Right now they will only build mines, farms, and cities depending on the properties determined by a pixel's color, but in the future I want to make their behavior a bit more complex. In the video below I used Patrick Stewart's face instead of mine because it's the internet.

Nice job on the art, Voxn! Is there a source for information on designing game art in Photoshop? I have the program, but I mainly use it for editing photos. I'd love to use it to actually draw things

I've been intimidated by I've been watching the video tutorials on the Unity website, and I've found them to be really good. The ones in the 'Live Training Archive' section cover all the basics really well.

Not sure I have anything else to contribute at the moment, but it's looking good!

What a great game. The art was fantastic. It had a feeling of nostalgic warmth that you don't often see in this medium. Everything about it was so well thought out and put together with such care... hard to believe it came from a game jam!

Or we could do an escort mission where the guy you're escorting is tailing another NPC, and you have to keep him from walking too close and giving himself away by using kinect voice commands. And clyde, you can absolutely use that song! Just credit it to 'ihavefivehat'.

Sounds awesome! If you need any help from someone with little to no experience in making games, I'm your man. edit: Your description of the music sort of reminds me of this song that I wrote a long time ago for fun. It's probably not exactly what you're looking for (I guess I was a fan of cheesy midi instruments back then), but I thought I'd post it to get some ideas flowing!

Processing is a great suggestion! That's what personally worked for me to get into amateur game-making. I came into it from a visual arts perspective, but after a few weeks it suddenly hit me that I had learned to make games by proxy. I've mentioned it on these forums before, and I don't want to sound like a shill, but this book is fantastic and will get you through the basics and onto more advanced stuff in a really clear and friendly way even if you've never programmed before. (I hadn't)

Thanks! I played around with it a bit, but I could only get it to work with programs that don't use custom assets. This would be a great way to do it, but I think I need to figure out javascript and html first.

Games can be about anything; that's one of the great things about them. It's 100% possible to make a game that leans heavily on writing and doesn't suck. See: interactive fiction.

Here's a game I made a few months ago called Journey of Fate. It's a game in the sense that it uses the vocabulary and tropes of rpg/adventure games, but it's not a game in the sense that it allows user input or interaction. Really, it's an experiment in procedurally generated narrative. There are four characters who you can encounter, and the order in which you meet them determines the interactions that you will have with them. That order is determined randomly when you start up the game. The dialogue is intentionally awkward and goofy right now because this was sort of a mock-up for an idea. Ideally, I'd have someone who can actually write help me out. I'm sure there are a few glitches that I haven't caught yet, but the game seems to work OK for me. I consider it a work in progress, because there's a lot that I could streamline (especially now that I know a bit more about programming), but I haven't gotten around to smoothing out the rough edges yet. Oh yeah, and because I wrote it in Processing, you'll need to have the latest version of Java installed to play it. Everyone loves installing Java, right? If anyone knows a better way of compiling code, please let me know. Screenshot: Mac Version Windows Version

I've become a little bit more soft on judging game writing since I started listening to Tone Control. I think the key is that people who develop games start with an idea for game play, rather than an idea for a narrative. This means that the narrative often first serves the purpose of justifying game play elements, and so the finer points of the writing tend to get all garbled up and stilted. Anyway, it shouldn't be a real barrier to anyone who truly wants to tell a meaningful and affecting story, but at this time most developers have other concerns. And that may not be a bad thing, because there are still myriad unexplored territories within games, and narrative is just one of them. But, I'm sure there are a ton of smart people working on the problem either way. (Everyone involved with Idle Thumbs, for instance. Good job, guys.)

This is an interesting essay where the author tries to establish a serious academic theory of narrative in games. It's from 2003, so it was probably one of the earlier attempts at doing so. I think it's a little bit over-essentialist, but it's well thought out and provocative. http://www.ludology.org/articles/VGT_final.pdf