Why Vlambeer makes games.
Everyone interested in making games needs to read this article:
http://www.vlambeer.com/2012/08/07/why-we-design-games-playing-with-luftrausers
How many of you have actually gotten to the point where you can start messing with actual gameplay like this? Have any epic stories of similarly crazy stuff you did and why you either kept it in the game or didn't?
http://www.vlambeer.com/2012/08/07/why-we-design-games-playing-with-luftrausers
How many of you have actually gotten to the point where you can start messing with actual gameplay like this? Have any epic stories of similarly crazy stuff you did and why you either kept it in the game or didn't?
Thanked by 1Bensonance
Comments
I tried to make a game once called "ASTRO CAPTAIN BATTLE FLEET". Well I started it to help someone out with sprite manager in Unity. And then the goal was just to get ships shooting each other. I did some weird things on the project... like make a ship procedurally out of 1000 smaller ships that could break apart and either form other (also large) ships, each one with a randomized shiplike shape, or the little ships could scatter and fly around and attack stuff... But the project got slow and bloated after a while (and still wasn't really a game)...
One thing I did enjoy messing around with were the firework-like explosions... In the last stable build the player could cheat to get loads of money and then spawn in ridiculous amounts of enemies... and it got kind of pretty.
Also, in the game we're working on at the moment, at one day we animated all our characters to do the crabcore:
Then again, I'm on 4mb, so it's not an issue to me, but I think it's more about posting 1-2 in-post images, and if there are more, they can be text links or something? :)
I'm sorry, I really wasn't trying to insult anyone - just commenting that 20+ really large screenshots felt a little excessive. Maybe I'm used to the 5 images per post maximum from the Game.Dev forum, I dunno. I'd rather have large screenshots than nothing whatsoever, if that's what you're trying to point out?
Though r.e. the topic: had an awesome experience coding up a cluster bomb, had a grenade and decided to make it a two level effect so that the bomb blows up then the sub-bombs blow up too. Decided to try three levels and by then it is good programming practice to loop/recurse that s**t... when you get to the point when the number of sub-bombs that will spawned becomes a change of a single variable... well you just have to set it to at least 9 ;)
(P.S.: oh how the computer was grinding...)
why would having 3 images help? Just disallow pngs, and make people put a warning in the thread title saying "large images ahoy" (same like nsfw). We make money of digital media, ie, dn't hinder peoples attempts to communicate via awesome screenshots! :D k later I gotta get back to work...
GOOOOOOOOOOOO TEAAAMMMM!!!!!
Maybe we can use this incident as a good platform to work from to discuss what artists would like from the site. Or at least what we, as a community, can do to encourage artist to post things instead of discourage them.
On Topic: I made a game where an evil alien threw trash cans on earth. I put in a "feature" where each can had a chance to spawn another can, and each subsequent can had the same chance. So the natural thing to do was to set the chance to 100% and let each can spawn 2 cans. On that day, the earth was very dirty. :)
The culture of MGSA is a result of the social norms and actions of the people of the community, which you inadvertently created. Given your initial concerns for SAGD I would believe that you would take a role as a community leader of MGSA so that it could fill your vision of what you wish SAGD would have been.
When I had just started posting on SAGD a friend asked me why I am doing it. I answered that "If I want to see any change in that community I cannot just bitch about wanting to see change. I need to be an active member of the community, and by my actions show others how I believe the members of the community should act.
This is not to say that all members of the community should act like me. I have learnt and changed as my interactions with other people progress, but I try to do my best to uphold these values which I believe will help this community grow.
@karuji: What mobile device are you using to connect to the forums? (unless you already are getting the mobile view) What your user agent is. I think for the mobile view (for when Im on my phone too) it would make sense for linking the images rather than showing them and giving the size, would that be fine?
I agree that bandwidth for some can be a bit of a pain, there should be a solution that solves all the problems. I personally really like heavily art oriented threads with lots of pictures.
surely there is something server side that can be implemented to allow previews of images, like store a smaller version on the server or otherwise have text saying "click to display image" and upon clicking it it'll load up the image in-place? I've seen this on forums before (somewhere, can't find a reference atm). I'm not trying to just throw 2 cents to have a say, surely there are things that can be done that would solve both issues. Before we start talking about what is appropriate (both sides have legitimate concerns) we could look for solutions/compromises that would benefit all.
I'm not saying that my 2 suggestions are the best (the preview images that are fast to load or the preview text that pops into image existence on a click), but we can agree (can we?) that we want to have the ability to post a large number of images, but also prevent page loading times/data usage for end users. (as a sub-constraint, especially lower data load for access from mobile devices). I'm not a web expert but this doesn't seem a completely impossible problem to find common ground, or at least attempt to find common ground (conceptually and technically) This is a legitimate worry. This is too. Maybe the decision about the 3 images per post was hasty. And I would also be pretty upset and feel excluded if, after spending some time and effort loading up some visuals that I wanted to show everyone, it were suddenly decided that the rules now change with no consideration of my usage and how I want to communicate ideas. I am not speaking for @BlackShipsFilltheSky, this is how I see the situation. 3 images per post is not the only or even the best solution, but it might have been treated as if it were, and it only addresses one side of the coin.
I think @bevis, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, was pointing out that teeth can come out easily. I'm not a fan of teeth. Situations are rarely black-and-white, and there are almost always solutions to problems that will satisfy everyone. I'm not sure this issue is one about the shifting and forming culture of this very young MGSA forum, not before we've considered that there might be other ways to incorporate all styles of all peoples, no?
Back to the original topic, although I realise this isn't in the exact spirit...
The first multiplayer game I made was pretty terrible. I'd worked at it for weeks. The concept was pretty sound: Team-based space shooter in the vein of SubSpace with different ship types, 3 module slots that interacted differently (2 or even 3 bomb modules made a bigger explosion when you fired, but you lost out on flexibility) and modules as currency that you had to protect and refit at base. The netcode was crap. So crap that when I took it to friends to play for the first time it turned into a nonstop session of them telling me how much the game sucked... Or at least, that's what it seemed like to me. I was building this thing to play with my friends and they didn't like it. End of the fucking world.
TigerMonkey test map thing...
It took me a long time to even think of showing my games to friends after that. But eventually I was working on another multiplayer thing, basically trying to fix the issues that I had seen in TigerMonkey. Monochrome was a top-down deathmatch arena thing with 5 different weapon types, each balanced for different kinds of play and a nifty size = health concept that made getting damaged or overhealed more interesting.
But multiplayer needs testing, so one day I tagged along to a LAN at Aequitas' place and only plucked up the courage to suggest people play Monochrome after almost everyone had packed up already. I just wanted a few people to give it a go and see if it even worked.
After a while people started coming back inside to see what all the shouting was about. They un-packed their PCs and set up again just to join in. The LAN ended up carrying on for a good few hours, just people playing my game. My game. I smiled for a week.