juv3nal

I suggested "Mars Rover" but somehow I don't think that's going to make the cut.

The only grief I caught was some guy was complaining because (unbeknownst to me) somehow my laptop has a built in mic and it was causing all this random noise, but that was basically my bad. And he did say "thanks" when I finally figured out how to turn it off.

play coop. You can do ZERO building when playing coop and still win missions. I don't think number of enemies scale to number of players. If they do, it's at a rate outstripped by the advantage of having more players.

Join the gamerswithjobs forums maybe? I've been to a couple Vancouver based meetups (which is not to say that I regularly game with those folks as I'm mostly a SP guy) and I'm sure Chicago does meetups too (look for threads titled S/T, S&T, or Slap & Tickle which is gwj slang for meetup). Bonus: if you donate to the site during their annual fundraising, you can win fabulous prizes like me (at #4).

Yeah I already follow that, but I guess I was hoping for the opposite of advance warning as I can rarely watch them live and would prefer a "here is a thing that has been archived and you can go watch now" but if it involves manual work on somebody's part, don't worry about it. I just figured it wouldn't hurt to ask in case there was a way to automate that.

oh just remembered my another idea: a first person puzzle game where your "gimmick" is to momentarily pop out into 3rd person view. So you would be able to move the camera to see around corners, or look over someone's shoulder while they enter in a password etc. Not sure there are enough puzzles you could work around that gimmick for a full fledged game, but for maybe a 15-20 minute long indie thing, I think it could be neat as it would kind of lay bare the intrinsic advantage the player has when playing in third person. Combine it with non-euclidian geometry like antichamber where level geometry only shifts/deforms or whatever when you either are or aren't looking at it (for varying values of looking at: whether the camera or the avatar is pointed at it) and you could maybe have the basis for something longer.

not really a suggestion for the forums per se, but would it be possible to get notification of the twitch.tv sessions in the rss feed? (after-the-fact when they are archived or whatever would be fine too if that is any easier).

oh for anyone else who was curious about the inspiritional letter in defense of space spending (instead of spending to feed starving children): http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Oh weird. Never had a DS, but I'm a little impressed there wasn't lawyer trouble one way or other (no idea which came first) with the PC game strange adventures in infinite space or the sequel weird wars: return to infinite space. They are pretty good, btw (and the first one is free, on the right here). Although the $25 they are asking for the sequel is maybe a bit steep. Actually, on reflection I don't remember that I would have been willing to pay that so maybe I never played it. The first one is pretty good for a kind of short coffee break type thing. It's been a while, so I've no idea if trying run it on a modern OS will cause any issues. edit: Kieron Gillen has a mostly complimentary review of the second one here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_weirdworlds_pc

I've been playing this on ps3 and really enjoying it. I wonder how it plays for someone who doesn't understand Cantonese though. I know there's subtitles for the main plot lines, but a TON of the incidental barks (walking by pedestrians, crashing into a car) are Cantonese only with no subtitle. Some of them are sort of nonsensical and done in this dubious tone of voice like the voice actor knows better, but can't be bothered to come up with something else and/or explain to the Anglo director why they should come up with something better for a random overheard phonecall crowd noise. Having been to HK a few times, they get some parts of the architecture/scenery/look very right, but it feels weird because the way it's pieced together plays hell with my sense of geography (where things are in relation to each other). Also, the subway doesn't exist which is a bit disappointing because the game could use another fast travel option. Cabs are in, but it is not always easy to find one when you want one. edit: also, the radio stations selection is like they ripped my heavy rotation mp3s. It is uncanny, like they were reading my mind. There's a Warp Records station, a Ninja Tune station, and a Daptone Records station. I seriously wondered for a bit if they were pulling from my media collection until I remembered that my media server wasn't running.

I'm guessing not. wikipedia suggest that the nforce 430 is integrated graphics.

I see the potential for the story stuff to get into so-bad-it's-good/unintentional hilarity territory. Which won't be enough to get me to buy the game, but if rest of it is solid, maybe?

Yeah, but I spend more time shooting stuff than playing the TD part. I tend to stick with the machine gun and/or sniper turret because they can hit both air and ground targets.

as I mentioned in the other thread, I'm gfwljuv3nal

yeah unfortunately it does. seems to work ok for me though.

never got into tf2 because I never felt like putting the time in getting repeatedly trounced to get any good at it. This though, I may catch flack for letting down my side, but at least the other players won't be actively trying to kill me. incidentally, it just occurs to me that Valve ought to be pretty darn good at the whole coop thing what with left4dead under their belt.

I am gfwljuv3nal on gfwl if anyone wants to play together. playing with randoms can be an exercise in frustration as I'm often getting booted with a "game state authentication failure".

It should be noted that the steam version comes with what was DLC on the XBLA version. One of the reasons I'm double-dipping. The other being that I'm not an XBL-Gold member so I was only able to mess around with coop on a random free weekend.

I don't have a group to play this, but on the pen & paper role playing front, I recently discovered Eclipse Phase which is available in PDF form for free. http://www.eclipsephase.com/ License details: http://www.eclipsephase.com/cclicense Downloads for most stuff: http://robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs/ It's a science fiction rpg that lifts the idea of cortical stacks and sleeving from Richard Morgan's Kovacs novels (but the setting is pretty different otherwise).

Oh should also mention that unlike traditional TD, you're never standing around just watching your towers kill stuff because you're always running around shooting stuff yourself.

If you play coop, then you can probably find someone else willing to take over the TD duties, but single player, I don't think it's really feasible to entirely avoid it. It's not really traditional TD because you're running around in third person view of your mech the entire time (i.e. not some zoomed out view of the whole battlefield).

It's on steam nao fyi

it just occurs to me that we could use this thread as a clearing house of links to tools/frameworks/apis/devkits I'll start with stuff that's been of interest to me (it's all ways of doing choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook type stuff on the web): http://varytale.com/books/info/about/ http://about.failbettergames.com/about/ http://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescript-intro/ http://undum.com/ http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/ It has basically never been a better time (tools-wise) if you want to be a choose-your-own-adventure author.

I've fiddled around with undum and choicescript a bit as I'm a web developer by trade and studied lit in college so hypertext fiction is kind of in my wheelhouse. Nothing worth showing's come out of it yet though. edit: oh as far as ancient history stuff, I've also fiddled about with text based stuff in java and qbasic and done some skinning for freedom force & morrowind.

world time travel adventure/rpg hybrid. not "oh you go through this portal here to travel to a different time period" but on-demand-time-travel as a power when/whererever you happen to be. travel to the future and peek stock prices/sports scores/lottery numbers for profit. kill powerful enemies when they are still babies or kill their parents. try not to accidentally off your own ancestors by disrupting the flight path of a butterfly. hijinks like that. edit: I am not a game developer at all, but someone should make that. C'mon no one else sees the intrinsic marketing cachet of "baby-murder-simulator"?