I live in a country that has used Metric forever. For some reason, in some areas of construction (two examples off the top of my head are the width of wood pieces and the diameter of pvc tubes) are expressed in inches. The plumber says "I'll put a 3/4 tube" without really knowing that 3/4 means 3/4 of an inch, or that an inch is 2.54 cm. The plumber and everyone uses metric for everything else. So both systems can coexist.
If you do that, you get students very capable of designing complex class hierarchies who also don't know that "continue" exists, let alone what it does. True story. I was writing some pseudocode this last semester. Not one student, but practically all 30 of them, asked about it. At first I thought they were joking. Then I was at a loss for words. I'm talking 3rd year students here.
I'm not the OP, but my Genius VideoCam LOOK doesn't work (I got the driver to detect it according to dmesg but no programs can read from it). I also tested a Logitech QuickCam Exprees which does work but looks *much* worse than it does in Windows.
Back in june I took 4 flights, 2 within the US and 2 to/from the US, in the space of a week. I was randomly selected in only one of these, flying from Dulles to SeaTac - that time I had missed a connection flight and had a standby boarding pass, not sure if it had anything to do.
Anyway, after the metal detector I was informed that I had been selected for additional screening. I was briefly stopped in a funny looking box with a red sign, less than 30 secs later a guard took me to behind the metal detector lines. My hand luggage, shoes and jacket were carefully inspected, I was checked with a metal detector wand, and then I was on my way. The whole process must have taken about 5 minutes and didn't cause me a single inconvenience.
Even though I'm caucasian, I'm from south america, so I could cry "I was targeted because I come from a third world country". I didn't. I also didn't notice people looking at me like I was doing something wrong. Essentially, this was routine, no different than going through the metal detector itself or the brief questions by the immigrations officer. I guess you'll say "that's how it starts" or that it's a matter of principle, but what's the big deal with this?
Price point : I haven't done research but according to most people who have, $19.95 is the sweet spot. More than $20, you lose the impulse purchase factor. Less than $20 and the customer perceives the product as "low value". Or so I've heard;)
Piracy : it's inevitable, and it's always a balance between making it hard for pirates and not making it painful for legit users (see Starfox!). In the end we do what we can to stop casual piracy but determined crackers and warez operators will pirate your games no matter what you do.
Dev cost : our games take 4-5 people to create in 6-8 months. Figures won't apply because we aren't in the US, but you get the picture.
I had a 48K Spectrum and for some reason I didn't try (I wanted to make games with things moving and shooting - I ended up being a game dev after all). What I did was map the choices so I effectively found out what a tree/graph was. Knowing how to reach a particular ending took some of the fun out, of course.
My own favorite was one called... I don't remember, it wasn't an actual "Choose your own adventure" but a copycat, these were hardcover books, wider than the red original ones, an the storyline included an organization very similar to the jedi. This particular copycats may have been made in spain so you english speakers may not find it.
There were also these other Sherlock Homes books which had a random number generator, inventory and stats! Remember these?
We don't compete with the $10M projects. We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers. Casual gamers are way more interested in gameplay (although the production values have been rising over the years) so you can actually compete with a 2 or 3 person team. The key is to "fight" on your own rules, make the limitations work for you instead of against.
You're right that it is a gamble though. Your game may be a hit or a total flop. However there are some elements all successful games share, over the years you gain some understanding about what makes games work. It's still risky, which is why you see so many clones and derivatives. Yes, the casual space is filled with clones, derivatives and sequels as well. The truth is, innovation is risky. Unfortunate, maybe, but true nonetheless.
Re:Money making or attention grabbing?
on
Indie Games Go Retail
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· Score: 3, Informative
In our case, the money is in downloadable games, but retail opportunities do bring in some additional money, and in any case, seeing your game in a box feels amazing:) For example our Wild West Wendy was published in Germany and Russia - see here
It's better still to find something that few people are doing, so being the best, or at least very good, is far easier.
I'm not that sure it's easier. In theory yes, there are fewer people, so it's easier. But do you really put the same energy and dedication to be the best in something you don't love? I think it's not that easy.
Certainly not everyone can be the best, it's mathematically impossible. But everyone should do all they can to try to be the best. The results tend to be a lot better than assuming you're mediocre from the beginning.
Having a negative attitude and assuming you have some kind of divine right to a specific job because of where were you born also doesn't help, of course.
I'm pretty sure Dark Sun 1 and 2 are officially abandonware, but I want more! Since everyone reads Slashdot : over the years I've been working on and off in reverse engineering them in order to make an open source client, to play them in modern machines. It would be excellent to find anyone working on this same project, or even better, an original dev or someone who has or knows who has the rights to the source (if it isn't lost forever).
The other games I loved and I'd like to see in a new edition (hardware accelerated, for example) are Twinsen's Adventure and Twinsen's Oddysey. Anyone has or knows who has the rights? After so many acquisitions I kinda lost the track.
I use ImageMagick extensively to preprocess our games' graphics before putting them into a data file. Source (32 bpp PNGs) are cropped, pasted together in mosaics, their alpha channels and color channels are separated and finally saved in different formats, depending on the usage, the needed quality and available space. All of this automatically, thanks to a Python script and ImageMagick. Think Make for processing images.
They should really open it up. As an independent game developer, I'd love to port some of our games to the PSP, but the barriers to entry and publish don't justify the risk. If dev kits were cheap and you were allowed to sell your games directly (shareware as we do or anything else), there would be a HUGE library of games - some of them good, some of them bad, but customers are used to that risk (which the shareware model greatly reduces anyway). As a result, more PSPs would be sold and people wouldn't complain about the lack of games. The PSP would get some innovative and original games that they wouldn't get otherwise.
Microsoft recognizes this and has done more or less this with the XBLA. Sony should do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Developing games for Vista/Xbox is considerably easier than any other platform in history
Nice blanket statement. Can you elaborate?
I live in a country that has used Metric forever. For some reason, in some areas of construction (two examples off the top of my head are the width of wood pieces and the diameter of pvc tubes) are expressed in inches. The plumber says "I'll put a 3/4 tube" without really knowing that 3/4 means 3/4 of an inch, or that an inch is 2.54 cm. The plumber and everyone uses metric for everything else. So both systems can coexist.
If you do that, you get students very capable of designing complex class hierarchies who also don't know that "continue" exists, let alone what it does. True story. I was writing some pseudocode this last semester. Not one student, but practically all 30 of them, asked about it. At first I thought they were joking. Then I was at a loss for words. I'm talking 3rd year students here.
There are also artists, who try to solve the problem efficiently and in an elegant way. My goal is to reach that state.
I'm not the OP, but my Genius VideoCam LOOK doesn't work (I got the driver to detect it according to dmesg but no programs can read from it). I also tested a Logitech QuickCam Exprees which does work but looks *much* worse than it does in Windows.
Back in june I took 4 flights, 2 within the US and 2 to/from the US, in the space of a week. I was randomly selected in only one of these, flying from Dulles to SeaTac - that time I had missed a connection flight and had a standby boarding pass, not sure if it had anything to do.
Anyway, after the metal detector I was informed that I had been selected for additional screening. I was briefly stopped in a funny looking box with a red sign, less than 30 secs later a guard took me to behind the metal detector lines. My hand luggage, shoes and jacket were carefully inspected, I was checked with a metal detector wand, and then I was on my way. The whole process must have taken about 5 minutes and didn't cause me a single inconvenience.
Even though I'm caucasian, I'm from south america, so I could cry "I was targeted because I come from a third world country". I didn't. I also didn't notice people looking at me like I was doing something wrong. Essentially, this was routine, no different than going through the metal detector itself or the brief questions by the immigrations officer. I guess you'll say "that's how it starts" or that it's a matter of principle, but what's the big deal with this?
GPU? With all the acronyms out there, why did they have to choose a very commonly used one?
Why do you assume that the people building this system didn't think of that?
Price point : I haven't done research but according to most people who have, $19.95 is the sweet spot. More than $20, you lose the impulse purchase factor. Less than $20 and the customer perceives the product as "low value". Or so I've heard ;)
Piracy : it's inevitable, and it's always a balance between making it hard for pirates and not making it painful for legit users (see Starfox!). In the end we do what we can to stop casual piracy but determined crackers and warez operators will pirate your games no matter what you do.
Dev cost : our games take 4-5 people to create in 6-8 months. Figures won't apply because we aren't in the US, but you get the picture.
Good! They have declared we don't exist so we can continue to do business in peace.
Wow, this really has everything. I found the one I was looking for - http://www.gamebooks.org/show_item.php?id=6242
I had a 48K Spectrum and for some reason I didn't try (I wanted to make games with things moving and shooting - I ended up being a game dev after all). What I did was map the choices so I effectively found out what a tree/graph was. Knowing how to reach a particular ending took some of the fun out, of course.
My own favorite was one called... I don't remember, it wasn't an actual "Choose your own adventure" but a copycat, these were hardcover books, wider than the red original ones, an the storyline included an organization very similar to the jedi. This particular copycats may have been made in spain so you english speakers may not find it.
There were also these other Sherlock Homes books which had a random number generator, inventory and stats! Remember these?
No, he fights pirates, so his alter ego should be a ninja.
We don't compete with the $10M projects. We're not after the same markets to begin with - there's a clear separation between hardcore and casual gamers. Casual gamers are way more interested in gameplay (although the production values have been rising over the years) so you can actually compete with a 2 or 3 person team. The key is to "fight" on your own rules, make the limitations work for you instead of against.
You're right that it is a gamble though. Your game may be a hit or a total flop. However there are some elements all successful games share, over the years you gain some understanding about what makes games work. It's still risky, which is why you see so many clones and derivatives. Yes, the casual space is filled with clones, derivatives and sequels as well. The truth is, innovation is risky. Unfortunate, maybe, but true nonetheless.
In our case, the money is in downloadable games, but retail opportunities do bring in some additional money, and in any case, seeing your game in a box feels amazing :) For example our Wild West Wendy was published in Germany and Russia - see here
It's better still to find something that few people are doing, so being the best, or at least very good, is far easier.
I'm not that sure it's easier. In theory yes, there are fewer people, so it's easier. But do you really put the same energy and dedication to be the best in something you don't love? I think it's not that easy.
Certainly not everyone can be the best, it's mathematically impossible. But everyone should do all they can to try to be the best. The results tend to be a lot better than assuming you're mediocre from the beginning.
Having a negative attitude and assuming you have some kind of divine right to a specific job because of where were you born also doesn't help, of course.
It wasn't easy, the final fight wasn't endless, and I don't remember having to brute force anything. Are you sure we're talking about the same game?
I'm pretty sure Dark Sun 1 and 2 are officially abandonware, but I want more! Since everyone reads Slashdot : over the years I've been working on and off in reverse engineering them in order to make an open source client, to play them in modern machines. It would be excellent to find anyone working on this same project, or even better, an original dev or someone who has or knows who has the rights to the source (if it isn't lost forever).
The other games I loved and I'd like to see in a new edition (hardware accelerated, for example) are Twinsen's Adventure and Twinsen's Oddysey. Anyone has or knows who has the rights? After so many acquisitions I kinda lost the track.
Do what you love. Be the best. The rest just happens.
Sorry, the rest is classified.
I use ImageMagick extensively to preprocess our games' graphics before putting them into a data file. Source (32 bpp PNGs) are cropped, pasted together in mosaics, their alpha channels and color channels are separated and finally saved in different formats, depending on the usage, the needed quality and available space. All of this automatically, thanks to a Python script and ImageMagick. Think Make for processing images.
They should really open it up. As an independent game developer, I'd love to port some of our games to the PSP, but the barriers to entry and publish don't justify the risk. If dev kits were cheap and you were allowed to sell your games directly (shareware as we do or anything else), there would be a HUGE library of games - some of them good, some of them bad, but customers are used to that risk (which the shareware model greatly reduces anyway). As a result, more PSPs would be sold and people wouldn't complain about the lack of games. The PSP would get some innovative and original games that they wouldn't get otherwise. Microsoft recognizes this and has done more or less this with the XBLA. Sony should do the same.
If this is Intelligent Design, I'd like to ask who is the Chosen Race -- us or the parasites?
:(
Us, of course. Errr, I mean, you humans. Dammit, blew my cover again