Wow, the only plans I've seen use throttling to 56k if you exceed your volume, not overage fees. I guess that's a difference between Europe and the US.
Space Invaders is fun to you? I don't need a story but that specific game is just boring to me and it's not because it lacks modern graphics and flash, I first played it when all I had was a Game Boy.
Tower defense is so terminally boring... I guess some people see it as an easy power trip but I'd rather have a more active role. Plants vs Zombies and Iron Grip: Warlords manage TD without making it hands-off or feel like you're shooting peas at steel armor (which is ironic since that's what you're literally doing in PvZ, yet the peas seem like a more potent weapon than all the lasers and missiles in other TDs).
Entertainment isn't constant. Sometimes two hours contain more entertainment than twenty, depending on what's in them. The 38 hours of Borderlands were mostly a slog that make me wonder why I even kept playing (I suppose it's a mixture of addiction and familiarity, something that wastes time without effort on my part) while 6 hours of Renegade Ops were a total blast.
Also then there are games like Binding of Isaac which throw a wrench into any calculation. I paid a fiver for that and played it for 47 hours, others have cracked the 100 hour barrier on it. Got 127 hours on Terraria, 104 on AI War and 96 on Monday Night Combat. All of these combined cost as much as one AAA game.
One problem with the unbelievable barriers is that they're there because the game needs a barrier and because a real barrier would look out of place in the setting. Of course that doesn't apply if your game is set in the mushroom kingdom where bricks can fly and plumbers use pipes as a transportation system.
Even NOLF is from a time where team sizes were already 50-100, it'd be a bit much for a "regular" indie dev, you'd need one of those large indies that look pretty much like AAA studios except they're financially independent.
Scale is an issue there. If you managed to find a team that could work together with you on a coherent vision then good for you but I've seen plenty of freely working teams that had trouble keeping their direction coherent as there couldn't be a real leadership (since the rest of the team didn't want to be obedient to someone else's vision) and the result was a divergent mess of features. Also looking at things like opensource projects the most supported ones are the kind that say "we make game X except open" since that's a clear cause people can rally behind, things that aren't clones require decisions with no clear right answer.
It's easier to make choices like that when you're paying the other guys money to do the things you ask them to.
Starfarer's enemies flee quite readily. If their fleet is too weak to take yours on they will attempt a full escape right away (both on the overworld map and if you actually engage them in combat), otherwise they will try to flee once they've taken a lot of damage (or if you just eliminated all their buddies). I've had quite a lot of trouble fighting the biggest battleships in the game because my fleet would easily overwhelm their escorts and by the time the battleship entered the fight the AI had already gone to the "run for your lives" mode for the entire enemy fleet, making the battleship retreat before I could even engage it.
It's come back into the popular view after Minecraft got big, there are several FPS games with various balances that use a cube-based destructible environment. I don't remember their names though since I wasn't really looking for that kind of game but I played 3079 which is an FPSRPG set in that kind of world (a bit too simplistic though and has some bad design decisions in it).
First person shooter Diablo is a great concept but Borderlands was a very lacking implementation. Only one active skill, little real weapon variety and overall pretty boring (I hear it gets good with four people but I played mostly alone or with one friend). Hellgate London was much more fun IMO since you had a wide variety of active skills and more interesting weapons plus you could customize and upgrade the weapons you found to get specific effects or simply keep a favorite around for longer, in Borderlands you had to ditch them and get new weapons instead.
On iOS there's a game called Mission Europa which is also a Diablo FPS. Last I played it it was rather crashy though. Also it's ugly but that adds to the hellish atmosphere.
On the "what people buy" argument, consider that the individual New Super Mario Bros games sold MORE than individual Call of Duty games (of course CoD sold a lot more in aggregate over the last few years since the games get pumped out faster). It's an old design that most people had simply abandoned (even Nintendo took almost two decades to start making them again) but it turns out still works. Then there's Mario Kart which sells even more.
Both of these are simple, ancient designs that haven't even been made for HD-capable systems yet. They need no realistic physics, no expensive set pieces (that's not to say that they don't do set pieces at all but even the most ingenious designs in a Super Mario Bros game are graphically simple) and no celebrities.
One wonders how many other ancient designs were abandoned simply because they're old, not because they lack market appeal.
Blame Call of Duty. The CoD games sell HUGE (on the level of 2D Mario games) and they extol all those wrong virtues.
Cover based shooting with realistic guns (as opposed to, say, plasma guns and homing lasers) and regenerating health is a very limited gameplay as the player's movements are restricted to where you can find cover and guns are usually hitscan with slightly different DPS and ranges while enemies are all humans with similar guns that are vulnerable to head shots.
There isn't too much you can do with that formula so the development instead focuses on set pieces, big, one-off expensive scenes that are meant to distract the player from the fact that he's been doing the same few actions the whole time. Of course set pieces cost money and just like bad Hollywood movies it becomes a competition who can build the best set pieces which means who can throw the most money at the game.
Me, I like the Earth Defense Force games (except Insect Armageddon, that's too boring and easy). They look "bad" (actually can produce some of the most movie-like scenes in regular gameplay simply because the graphics are more realistically designed plus huge explosions instead of the dulled colors used in modern games) and recycle environments a LOT but they're also extremely fun because they don't give a crap about what a gun should realistically be able to do or how large insects should realistically be. These are budget games especially on the development cost but they provide a TON of fun for a long time by smartly reusing assets and only changing the things that need changing to add variety (e.g. all your rifles look the same but they can vary widely in what they do).
Developer is a catch-all term for all people who work on a game. Not all developers are programmers, in fact these days the majority fills roles like artist as the art has become the most expensive aspect of AAA game development.
If you want to test whether you don't mind low art investment you can try A Valley Without Wind, the art is mostly mixed together from various free model sources as the dev team couldn't afford a full time artist. Many people complain that it burns their eyes...
The German democracy that elected the Nazis was forced in place after WW1 so while it may take multiple attempts and time it's certainly possible to start building a democracy by force.
I'm not sure it's true that the Nazis were efficient, after all they had a lot of trouble with the big boss interfering with well laid plans for bullshit reasons.
Full-on socialist policies (which some refer to as a "nanny state" because the essentials of life are provided by the government) actually free the citizenry from having to worry about the very trials and tribulations that consume the time and energy of a capitalist society: survival.
That was the reasoning behind the first social system and general health care in the world. It was introduced by a liberal (the pro-economy European kind) in order to increase economic activity and prosperity by reducing the impact of those basic worries on the workforce.
Put it into a historical context. The NSDAP arose in the Weimarer Republik, an instable new democracy forced in place by the allied victors. The right wing of Germany in those times was advocating a return to the feudal structures of pre-WW1 Germany and abolishing democracy, most of the parties wanted their emperor back. Also Germany used to be larger before WW1, the right wing wanted to take those lost territories back.
I particularly like the iOS device syncing driver, I've had that thing put all my CPU cores to 100% load when a sync fails (which happened quite often for a while because that wide port on the iPod doesn't grip the plug very well and even touching the cable can interfere with the connection) and the only recourse is a reboot, stopping the service only drops the load of one core, the others stay at 100%.
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Wow, the only plans I've seen use throttling to 56k if you exceed your volume, not overage fees. I guess that's a difference between Europe and the US.
Android also has more marketshare so it kinda evens out.
The German authorities found the docs, Germany doesn't have jury trials.
Dev team sizes, not ingame team sizes.
Space Invaders is fun to you? I don't need a story but that specific game is just boring to me and it's not because it lacks modern graphics and flash, I first played it when all I had was a Game Boy.
Tower defense is so terminally boring... I guess some people see it as an easy power trip but I'd rather have a more active role. Plants vs Zombies and Iron Grip: Warlords manage TD without making it hands-off or feel like you're shooting peas at steel armor (which is ironic since that's what you're literally doing in PvZ, yet the peas seem like a more potent weapon than all the lasers and missiles in other TDs).
Entertainment isn't constant. Sometimes two hours contain more entertainment than twenty, depending on what's in them. The 38 hours of Borderlands were mostly a slog that make me wonder why I even kept playing (I suppose it's a mixture of addiction and familiarity, something that wastes time without effort on my part) while 6 hours of Renegade Ops were a total blast.
Also then there are games like Binding of Isaac which throw a wrench into any calculation. I paid a fiver for that and played it for 47 hours, others have cracked the 100 hour barrier on it. Got 127 hours on Terraria, 104 on AI War and 96 on Monday Night Combat. All of these combined cost as much as one AAA game.
One problem with the unbelievable barriers is that they're there because the game needs a barrier and because a real barrier would look out of place in the setting. Of course that doesn't apply if your game is set in the mushroom kingdom where bricks can fly and plumbers use pipes as a transportation system.
Even NOLF is from a time where team sizes were already 50-100, it'd be a bit much for a "regular" indie dev, you'd need one of those large indies that look pretty much like AAA studios except they're financially independent.
Scale is an issue there. If you managed to find a team that could work together with you on a coherent vision then good for you but I've seen plenty of freely working teams that had trouble keeping their direction coherent as there couldn't be a real leadership (since the rest of the team didn't want to be obedient to someone else's vision) and the result was a divergent mess of features. Also looking at things like opensource projects the most supported ones are the kind that say "we make game X except open" since that's a clear cause people can rally behind, things that aren't clones require decisions with no clear right answer.
It's easier to make choices like that when you're paying the other guys money to do the things you ask them to.
Starfarer's enemies flee quite readily. If their fleet is too weak to take yours on they will attempt a full escape right away (both on the overworld map and if you actually engage them in combat), otherwise they will try to flee once they've taken a lot of damage (or if you just eliminated all their buddies). I've had quite a lot of trouble fighting the biggest battleships in the game because my fleet would easily overwhelm their escorts and by the time the battleship entered the fight the AI had already gone to the "run for your lives" mode for the entire enemy fleet, making the battleship retreat before I could even engage it.
Crap, the last link didn't work... Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJJpMASjPUw&feature=sh_e_se&list=SL
It's come back into the popular view after Minecraft got big, there are several FPS games with various balances that use a cube-based destructible environment. I don't remember their names though since I wasn't really looking for that kind of game but I played 3079 which is an FPSRPG set in that kind of world (a bit too simplistic though and has some bad design decisions in it).
Here's a video of one of those block FPSes
First person shooter Diablo is a great concept but Borderlands was a very lacking implementation. Only one active skill, little real weapon variety and overall pretty boring (I hear it gets good with four people but I played mostly alone or with one friend). Hellgate London was much more fun IMO since you had a wide variety of active skills and more interesting weapons plus you could customize and upgrade the weapons you found to get specific effects or simply keep a favorite around for longer, in Borderlands you had to ditch them and get new weapons instead.
On iOS there's a game called Mission Europa which is also a Diablo FPS. Last I played it it was rather crashy though. Also it's ugly but that adds to the hellish atmosphere.
On the "what people buy" argument, consider that the individual New Super Mario Bros games sold MORE than individual Call of Duty games (of course CoD sold a lot more in aggregate over the last few years since the games get pumped out faster). It's an old design that most people had simply abandoned (even Nintendo took almost two decades to start making them again) but it turns out still works. Then there's Mario Kart which sells even more.
Both of these are simple, ancient designs that haven't even been made for HD-capable systems yet. They need no realistic physics, no expensive set pieces (that's not to say that they don't do set pieces at all but even the most ingenious designs in a Super Mario Bros game are graphically simple) and no celebrities.
One wonders how many other ancient designs were abandoned simply because they're old, not because they lack market appeal.
Blame Call of Duty. The CoD games sell HUGE (on the level of 2D Mario games) and they extol all those wrong virtues.
Cover based shooting with realistic guns (as opposed to, say, plasma guns and homing lasers) and regenerating health is a very limited gameplay as the player's movements are restricted to where you can find cover and guns are usually hitscan with slightly different DPS and ranges while enemies are all humans with similar guns that are vulnerable to head shots.
There isn't too much you can do with that formula so the development instead focuses on set pieces, big, one-off expensive scenes that are meant to distract the player from the fact that he's been doing the same few actions the whole time. Of course set pieces cost money and just like bad Hollywood movies it becomes a competition who can build the best set pieces which means who can throw the most money at the game.
Me, I like the Earth Defense Force games (except Insect Armageddon, that's too boring and easy). They look "bad" (actually can produce some of the most movie-like scenes in regular gameplay simply because the graphics are more realistically designed plus huge explosions instead of the dulled colors used in modern games) and recycle environments a LOT but they're also extremely fun because they don't give a crap about what a gun should realistically be able to do or how large insects should realistically be. These are budget games especially on the development cost but they provide a TON of fun for a long time by smartly reusing assets and only changing the things that need changing to add variety (e.g. all your rifles look the same but they can vary widely in what they do).
Developer is a catch-all term for all people who work on a game. Not all developers are programmers, in fact these days the majority fills roles like artist as the art has become the most expensive aspect of AAA game development.
If you want to test whether you don't mind low art investment you can try A Valley Without Wind, the art is mostly mixed together from various free model sources as the dev team couldn't afford a full time artist. Many people complain that it burns their eyes...
The German democracy that elected the Nazis was forced in place after WW1 so while it may take multiple attempts and time it's certainly possible to start building a democracy by force.
I'm not sure it's true that the Nazis were efficient, after all they had a lot of trouble with the big boss interfering with well laid plans for bullshit reasons.
To be fair honor killings are more common/likely than nazi terrorists.
Yes but they looked at it more like "Children are future manpower. We need that".
That was the reasoning behind the first social system and general health care in the world. It was introduced by a liberal (the pro-economy European kind) in order to increase economic activity and prosperity by reducing the impact of those basic worries on the workforce.
Put it into a historical context. The NSDAP arose in the Weimarer Republik, an instable new democracy forced in place by the allied victors. The right wing of Germany in those times was advocating a return to the feudal structures of pre-WW1 Germany and abolishing democracy, most of the parties wanted their emperor back. Also Germany used to be larger before WW1, the right wing wanted to take those lost territories back.
Additionally Jews were generally unpopular back then, they're a popular scapegoat so it didn't take much to make them a prime hate target.
I particularly like the iOS device syncing driver, I've had that thing put all my CPU cores to 100% load when a sync fails (which happened quite often for a while because that wide port on the iPod doesn't grip the plug very well and even touching the cable can interfere with the connection) and the only recourse is a reboot, stopping the service only drops the load of one core, the others stay at 100%.