Playing tetris with your inventroy is tedious. If you really want a meaningful cost to carrying everything and the kitchen sink with you assign weights and let the character only carry so much weight around instead of making him fit random shapes into an arbitrary rectangle. The rectangle means you have to move stuff around to fit new stuff even though you have enough open squares scattered in the inventory, weight limits let you pick stuff up until you run completely out of capacity
And that's my whole argument, really. Catering to the whiners ultimately makes better games.
It makes the games better for that "key demographic" but has no effect on the rest of the userbase as the requirements to appease the whiners don't match the requirements for a game to be successful in the mass-market. Put Wii Sports or Wii Fit in front of a group of hardcore gamers and they'll tell you it's bad, tell you to add depth and use the buttons on the controller more (some would even suggest removing the motion controls in favour of button pushing). They'll demand better graphics which cost money. They love artistic games like Ico, Rez and the Mad World game this news is about but these games are total failures on the market (sure, MW hasn't hit the market but honestly, didn't the screenshots give an impression of "niche title" right away?). In short they'll give you ways to make your game more expensive while making fewer people like it. Nintendo got its success this generation exactly by avoiding catering to them.
Yeah because developers get paid forever on everything they make. It's not like most works lose relevance within weeks or months and developers only get a salary from the company coffers anyway, no sire!
All that sums up to for me is "totalitarianism is more effective at suppressing dissent (which pacifism is one form of) than democracy". Well, yeah, that's the point. Sure, dissent weakens the resolve of a nation but suppressing dissent in order to remain strong is the wrong approach. What's the point of fighting the enemy when, in order to defeat him, you become like him? What do I care if my government is seated in Berlin or Washington if it has become totalitarian in order to win the war over my country? Yes, democracy (and freedom) is a weakness but we fight* to preserve that weakness because it is only a weakness to the government and nation, not the people in it.
*=or more accurately sit in our basements writing furious posts on Slashdot about it:P
You can do the NDA thing as well if you want but in both cases you still won't have much because the company could claim they were already working on something very similar and you won't be able to prove otherwise.
Also you can be sure the company will return or destroy your document sight unseen, they don't want suggestions and they don't want any risk of anyone claiming his ideas got stolen.
Even if they steal your idea, can you really get them for it? As has been said, ideas are a dime a dozen and it's very likely that at least 10 other people had the exact same idea independently. Also copyright works on details, if 1-2 things were not done as in your design then would you still have a claim? Wouldn't you have to patent the idea in order to get protection from other people implementing it?
A problem with that genre is that the graphical quality is very visible, you can't hide lower polygon counts behind greater view distances or fast movement, the camera can be anywhere and the player will focus on the enemies. It's one of the harder genres to get to the point where the player doesn't have his suspension of disbelief disrupted by some glaring graphical error and thus not really suitable for indie development which usually means less development resources.
I agree, though I read that X3 supposedly let you start with enough money to buy a factory right away so you can start with the enterprise management right away and I knew a guy who simply won the lottery in X2, bam, instant riches.
There's a game named Darkstar One that might work for you, the hyperspace mechanism is a lot like Elite's (though fuel doesn't need to be restored, the drive recharges automatically over time). What might or might not be an issue is that your wanted status works kinda like in GTA, you build up wanted stars but they decline over time again (though maybe that's a good thing as you can afford doing some piracy without near-permanently fucking your savegame over). The combat controls much like Freelancer IIRC and you don't get to buy a ship (you get alien artifacts to upgrade your one-of-a-kind alien-like ship or something) but since it's very cheap now (10€) it might be worth a look.
Certainly but UI designers that are any good know how to get the requirements for a UI even if they have no idea about the field the program will get used in.
Most opensource projects try to produce something useful, not just ego masturbation. What's the point of writing software when the intended userbase doesn't find it useful?
Code is not a quality test for usability though, someone could be a masterful coder but that doesn't mean he'll give you useful sugggestions for UI improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Playing tetris with your inventroy is tedious. If you really want a meaningful cost to carrying everything and the kitchen sink with you assign weights and let the character only carry so much weight around instead of making him fit random shapes into an arbitrary rectangle. The rectangle means you have to move stuff around to fit new stuff even though you have enough open squares scattered in the inventory, weight limits let you pick stuff up until you run completely out of capacity
Anyway, the game didn't do well because it got bad reviews.
It sold over a million copies actually, one of the best selling Wii games at its time.
And that's my whole argument, really. Catering to the whiners ultimately makes better games.
It makes the games better for that "key demographic" but has no effect on the rest of the userbase as the requirements to appease the whiners don't match the requirements for a game to be successful in the mass-market. Put Wii Sports or Wii Fit in front of a group of hardcore gamers and they'll tell you it's bad, tell you to add depth and use the buttons on the controller more (some would even suggest removing the motion controls in favour of button pushing). They'll demand better graphics which cost money. They love artistic games like Ico, Rez and the Mad World game this news is about but these games are total failures on the market (sure, MW hasn't hit the market but honestly, didn't the screenshots give an impression of "niche title" right away?). In short they'll give you ways to make your game more expensive while making fewer people like it. Nintendo got its success this generation exactly by avoiding catering to them.
I was hoping for a port into a proper engine since it runs badly in fullscreen for me (plus bugfixes might be good...).
Oh hell, don't ask. There's a whole debate about whether they have invisible arms or telekinetic powers.
Of course, Homestar's pants, or lack thereof, is another issue.
Yeah because developers get paid forever on everything they make. It's not like most works lose relevance within weeks or months and developers only get a salary from the company coffers anyway, no sire!
No but life is.
All that sums up to for me is "totalitarianism is more effective at suppressing dissent (which pacifism is one form of) than democracy". Well, yeah, that's the point. Sure, dissent weakens the resolve of a nation but suppressing dissent in order to remain strong is the wrong approach. What's the point of fighting the enemy when, in order to defeat him, you become like him? What do I care if my government is seated in Berlin or Washington if it has become totalitarian in order to win the war over my country? Yes, democracy (and freedom) is a weakness but we fight* to preserve that weakness because it is only a weakness to the government and nation, not the people in it.
*=or more accurately sit in our basements writing furious posts on Slashdot about it :P
You can do the NDA thing as well if you want but in both cases you still won't have much because the company could claim they were already working on something very similar and you won't be able to prove otherwise.
Also you can be sure the company will return or destroy your document sight unseen, they don't want suggestions and they don't want any risk of anyone claiming his ideas got stolen.
Even if they steal your idea, can you really get them for it? As has been said, ideas are a dime a dozen and it's very likely that at least 10 other people had the exact same idea independently. Also copyright works on details, if 1-2 things were not done as in your design then would you still have a claim? Wouldn't you have to patent the idea in order to get protection from other people implementing it?
That and they managed to deliver something that was more fun to people than the garbage they were competing with.
Same as everywhere, buy or rent a place with a few rooms, call it an office and get to work.
A problem with that genre is that the graphical quality is very visible, you can't hide lower polygon counts behind greater view distances or fast movement, the camera can be anywhere and the player will focus on the enemies. It's one of the harder genres to get to the point where the player doesn't have his suspension of disbelief disrupted by some glaring graphical error and thus not really suitable for indie development which usually means less development resources.
Does pole vaulting count as having any of those?
"I. M. Fuchinger"? You could call Moe with that name.
Sounds more like it was just a temporary setting that gets undone after the budget is approved.
Python on a Plane
Constant mouse movement? When I played the beta it was like one movement per minute, hardly constant (or interesting).
I think it's about the other direction, many asian-made MMORPGs just fall flat in the west, possibly because they tend to be too damn grindy.
Strange, no mention of X.
I agree, though I read that X3 supposedly let you start with enough money to buy a factory right away so you can start with the enterprise management right away and I knew a guy who simply won the lottery in X2, bam, instant riches.
There's a game named Darkstar One that might work for you, the hyperspace mechanism is a lot like Elite's (though fuel doesn't need to be restored, the drive recharges automatically over time). What might or might not be an issue is that your wanted status works kinda like in GTA, you build up wanted stars but they decline over time again (though maybe that's a good thing as you can afford doing some piracy without near-permanently fucking your savegame over). The combat controls much like Freelancer IIRC and you don't get to buy a ship (you get alien artifacts to upgrade your one-of-a-kind alien-like ship or something) but since it's very cheap now (10€) it might be worth a look.
Certainly but UI designers that are any good know how to get the requirements for a UI even if they have no idea about the field the program will get used in.
Most opensource projects try to produce something useful, not just ego masturbation. What's the point of writing software when the intended userbase doesn't find it useful?
Code is not a quality test for usability though, someone could be a masterful coder but that doesn't mean he'll give you useful sugggestions for UI improvement.