DragonXVI

Seconded on Dead Rising. AI might drive you spare but it's good, harmless budget fun (And the Capcom school of Dialogue, Plot and Voice Acting never ceases) Along the same line (Harmless, Budget fun) could be Crackdown Platform wise you could try the two Tomb Raiders of late (Legend/Anniversary), for someone that'd never played any Tomb Raiders on the grounds they killed you violently without reason, I enjoyed the heck out of both of 'em. Strategy wise you could try digging out Battle for Middle Earth. Dunno how well it ran on 360 but it played well on PC and was a fairly capable RTS. Kameo's kind of hit or miss, some people love it, some people hate it. It's a decent enough platformer with some semi-amusing combat mechanics, some nifty puzzles and some cool but oft-frustrating boss battles. Looks pretty though, even for a launch title. Could also try digging into Chromehounds if Mech Building is your thing. Never got into it myself but I'm fairly certain at one point everyone on Xbox Live was playing it. Avoid Ninety-Nine Nights

I figured someone'd catch me on that, but from what I've seen of the videos and demos, it very much is. It does have a *lot* of new features, concepts and gameplay elements, but the underlying core framework is decidingly retro I guess by Retro I mean "Traditional" ie. 2D Platforming, Slopes, Rings, Loops, Badnicks, Springs, TVs, etc. Stop me if I'm wrong, but from what I've seen of it so far there's definetly retro elements in there.

To be honest, I do say the overuse of the Worlds engine as a bit of a problem. On one hand, many people will take it and do creative and great things with it. On another, many people will see it as doing all the work for them so all they need to do is add some new graphics and they can get away with anything. From what I've seen, Worlds is expandable enough for people to write their own gimmicks and additional game features fairly easily, but you probably need to have a deep understanding of how Worlds works. Many people will download it, look at the source, go "WTF!?" and then decide to just rearrange the test level a little and paste in some new art. It won't be terrible, but it won't be that original. Guess it just comes with the Engine. Back when Static was hot, a lot of people would request engines. Now one's freely available, it's kinda inevitable. Not saying it's a bad thing, just saying you can't really say you weren't preprared for this sort of thing to happen In any case, I'm not using Worlds for either of my Prototypes the now. I'd love to work some test Boss Battles into it at some point (Since I'm downright balls at Sonic Level Design and not afraid to admit it), but I'll admit the idea of making "Another Retro Sonic Style Game" doesn't appeal right now since TFH, RSXG and Nexus are powering on and doing a fine enough job as it stands

Damnit, I've been trying to draw perspective rooms like that in the first screenshot for days now *Steals image for reference* In any case, art style is a little different, but good nonetheless (The characters themselves are recognisable enough, although in the first room the textures are very noisy - Maybe tone down the wood noise a little?). I agree on the font for the menu and the status bar, really needs to lose that "Games Factory Default" look Interesting though, have there been FF7 Fangames before? (Not counting any RPGMaker attempts) Surely...

I'd laugh if they snap off, or become Sentient by the end of the game.and just leave him. It almost looks like a rigging accident, the kind of thing that happens when you don't meld your vertices properly to the bones. Doesn't actually look like (From that screenshot) that the whole stretchy arm thing is intentional But... it is. On one side, "Stretchy Arm Sonic"'ll make a brilliant excuse to thousands of deviant art artists to come up with increasingly more disturbing images.

It is a bit of a Village Bicycle to the Remixing world though (Up there with Aerith's Theme). The poor girl's been remixed so many times it is starting to get a little bit old More so worrying that they've (Sonic Level music in general) yet, in 14 years, managed to come up with anything to beat it Sonic Rush was kinda funky, but not as memorable. In any case, like the Logo. Very apocalyptic, although I think you need to tweak the head a little - There are a few streaks of white that look like Photoshop artifacts rather than detail.

I'd at least hope they follow the same vein as Monster Hunter or FF:CC and allow free Online Play - after all, you're hardly playing an MMO worthy of subscription here, it's 4 player (Or however many you're allowed now) Streets of Rage. And yeah, with Nintendo's history of online hilarity, I'd be hoping they actually pay YOU to use Wi-Fi.

A lot of people working on Sonic projects correctly base their resolution on that of the original platform - Genesis, GBA etc. For Genesis you're looking at 320 x 224 GBA I may be right in thinking it's 240 x 160, DS something whacky like 256 x 192 If these resolutions were good enough for the original devs, they're good enough for us The reason is that the sprites and backgrounds many people use (Ripped from the classics) were created with these dimensions in mind, so you shouldn't be losing any graphical quality - Unless you're doing things HD or with original graphics designed with high resolution in mind. Ideally you should create original graphics (HUDS and the like) with this style and resolution in mind. Also, quite importantly -> The smaller the resolution, the faster the game'll run. Part of the problem is you've got a GIANT screen with a very tiny character. If you end up with too many things on screen later on you'll confuse the player - Keep things small and simple.

I'll admit, the Werewolf sections don't actually look as awful as they thought I would be, but I did have a pretty damn low expectation of them (Why are they ever there?) But at the end of the day, I'm a sucker for repetitive combat button masherry (Ala Dynasty Warriors), so *if* by some miraculous reason they accidentally make it fun, it's another thing about this game I could potentially tolerate. As for the running sections? They're all starting to look identical. Aside from the colour, there isn't really much to set the Chinese level against the (Greek?) one we saw in the previous trailer. Same straight linear paths, same chased-by-a-big-robot section, same unimaginative enemies (WHAR are the gloriously imagined badniks of olde?), same jump-across-something-and-hit-a-spring, same tracks of grind-pipes allowing you to hop between them. etc. Whar are the unique gimmicks for each level? And why are those ruddy rockets back? (Ok, I get it, It's China... Fireworks... etc.) As for the slowdown, I'd argue it's probably more their video capturing than the actual game itself. Even so, I wouldn't imagine the game actually runs like that come release time - Although I'd laugh for about 12 weeks solid if it did. And as always, Trailers, shmailers. If they release a demo as they did Sonic the Hedgehog, that'll do the talking more than their fancy pants, badly captured footage.

It's ok though, for anyone worried you can keep up to date with these handy Webcams of the LHC just in case anything bad does happen and give you the heads up to any immediate Cacodemon/Spagghetification threats.

Easy is overrated! Have you learned nothing from my notoriously broken boss battles? Raises a good point though. While I'd argue to not make things too hard at the start, nor make them too easy, a natural progression of the difficulty curve is expected (I do like my epic boss battles, 'tis true, but if they're "Kinda hard" at the start and "Jesus Chris!" at the end, there's a greater feeling of threat to be had from the boss) The worse thing to do is to make them inconsistantly hard. Who here hasn't played a game where boss difficulty can alter between Unbelievably painful to Easy biscuits and back again? I'm looking at you, De Rol Le.

I know it's probably nitpicking, but when walking into a Top Left / Top Right slope in the overworld area, Link does that fun "Sped-up-collision-sliding-bug" and slides twice as fast as he should be able to go along the wall. Hope that makes sense... Looks the part though, and can't really complain about the rest of the movement yet - Seems accurate enough for a Zelda game.

Diet Fl0w. Diet Diablo. Diet Populous. Diet Civ 4 Diet Star Control. 5 games in one, simplified for your amusment I admit that some of the modes aren't as deep as I'd like 'em, with only the Civ and Space stages being that much fun for me (And even then, Civ stage can be won the moment you get planes). Space stage seems like excellent fun and really it's the main crux of the game, but the game is so unbelievably unstable. No autosave and a habit of crashing every 30 minutes or so (I've had 4 crashes while constructing the spaceship, and around 7 crashes while flying about) means it desperately needs to get itself patched. It's a good foundation of a game though, obviously expansion packs will help expand and add some of the functionality back in (Water dwelling creatures, what happened to those? )

Had 4 people on it over the weekend. Plowed are way through several bosses, argued over who should get what weapon, good time was had by all It's excellent, irrelevent and a good ode to games like Golden Axe. My one complaint though is that with 4 people, and 20+ enemies on screen, you can't bloody see anything that's going on. Your best hope is to hammer the buttons and hope you don't die

Gonna hop into this discussion since it's a similar route of progression I took (Making fangames in TGF -> Going to Uni to study how to really program -> Getting job in industry) First thing's first, as far as I know nobody in the games industry uses GM or MMF to make commercial games (Most people here haven't even heard of it). There's plenty of indie teams that use it to produce commercial games (Hateful Chris sprints to mind... whatever happened to those guys? I also believe one of the Knytt games was done in MMF) Secondly, Python *is* used, but it will depend on the company and the project and it's usually supported by C++ or C#. It's useful for Designers to know a little bit of scripting (Since it's the bit they modify, rather than going into the whole code) so it's actually a useful skill to be able to write good Python or Lua. C++, C# (or Java Mobile developers use it) are your three main targets if you want to be a programmer in the industry, with focus on C++ as the most commonly used one for games development. C++ on its own usually isn't enough to land a games programming job, you'll need skills and knowledge in graphics programming (OpenGL, DirectX), Vector Math and other geometry based physics, good Object Orientated Programming skills, debugging skills etc. And anything else relevant to the position you want (Ai Programmers'll need to know all their A*, FSMs, Navigation Meshes etc.) Designers usually don't need to know much, if any, code at all. They *Do* need to know how to write design documents, requirements, plans etc. And honestly it's one of those vague job descriptions that causes everyone and their mother to produce a book/website telling you "THE 5 TENANTS OF GETTING A GAME DESIGN JOB" etc. Avoid any University offering a course in Game Design - Most companies agree they don't offer nearly the right level of skill required - My advice if you're serious is to read lots, learn to produce maps, diagrams, flow charts quickly and efficiently and well documented structure reports on Game Design. Many companies, if your CV tickles their fancy, issue a test. For programming this'll be a standard bunch of questions that you have to produce or debug code for. Other more design related programming questions may ask how you'd go about writing a solution to a game mechanic. Design tests often ask you to write a Design Document for a mock game idea using a set of parameters ("A game where the player must use X to do Y" etc.) For a QA testing job this is often a combination of an interview and a game debugging session. For the note, a *lot* of people looking to get into the games industry do so by aiming at the QA positions and hoping to "move up the ladder" as it were. QA from most companies is generally given lowest importance and filled with students eager to be in the games industry (Some companies do take it seriously though, and employ skilled workforce) but it's the "Best Way In" most of the time. Regardless of your choice, check out GameDev and GamaSutra as you go, and don't aim too high (ie. The Big, AAA name companies ) initially - Aim for the little guys first. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Don't see what all the fuss is to be fair, It was 4-5 odd years between major Mario Releases and 4 odd years between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Why is everyone still surprised that Nintendo are keeping this sort of release period up? What exactly are we missing out on? Emulators don't count because you can get emulators on just about everything these days (Granted, of varying orders of functionality but still ), but give me a list of the top 10 reasons

The article seems to kinda degenerate into a "I don't really like these kinda games" from the interviewer, but the initial pages are pretty useful. When my team was coming up with level design for Dare we had a big pile of comments from Rare who told us in no uncertain terms that our level looked like ass They mentioned that a level should lead the player subtlely to their goal, and even things like the placing of lights affects which direction the player'll want to go (Putting great big arrows all over the floor not withstanding ) Moral pretty much is, people should never get lost in a level. Even if your level has backtracking it should make sense to the Player that that's what they should be doing (Something lighting up, cheap cutscene showing what the button did, audible noise of a door opening that was previously blocked etc.) A good point with the short term goals though. In Sonic this can be anything from reaching a button to extend a bridge, defeating a badnik or climbing up some falling platforms. The long term goal (At least in terms of the individual levels and without mentioning the plot) for Sonic is pretty much "Go right/forwards, and reach the end" with fairly audible blocks in which the Player stops and either has to solve a puzzle, destroy all the enemies in the area, find a button etc. (Very noticable in the recent games)

Hmm, Ogg Vorbis requires some filters to play on DirectShow based players. Not sure what you're using to play 'em in MMF but you may need to get some additional stuff installed to let them play using external things like Media Player If it hasn't already been suggested, check out http://www.xiph.org/dshow/ and grab the Illiminable DirectShow Filters If that doesn't work? Hmm.

Now that's what I call an intro tutorial Although it is a bit of an Info Dump as opposed to the more common "Help as you Play" tutorial, for demo purposes it's definatly better than all those "OMGHERESTHECONTROLSONTHELOADINGSCREENBYE!" ones I've had to enjoy on Xbox Live cough

Elelphant looks good, reminds me of the ol' Clucker from Wing Fortress who just sat there distributing bullets to your face. If I had any complaint, I'm not overly sure about the "aiming the trunk" animation. Maybe because the trunk's fairly small compared to the rest of the sprite, so it's a fairly small animation while the rest of the sprite is inanimate - Wondering if it should take some kind of "Firing stance", moving the rest of its body (Granted I don't think any classic Sonic badnik really has a "Firing Stance" but still...)

Can't really be any worse than This now can it?

There are a variety of sneaky things you could do for limiting objects before you try spacial partitioning or streaming. Continuing on from LarkSS's idea, If you're using common patterns (ie. for Rings in a circle of 8 rings) you could easily just use one object instead of 8, and when you approach the object, use code to generate 8 rings in a circle then destroy the object (A "Ring-Ring-Spawner" if you will. Not exactly efficient or pleasant, but a basic enough idea (Although doesn't solve the problem of mass-producing objects at run-time if you overuse it) Blaze is a Half-Life fan, halfway through the level there should be a long corridor and a nice big "LOADING" segment

Lifebars eh? The tricky part comes with (I'm assuming) having one above each enemy that represents their health. You *can* do this with some sneaky Value/Unique Object Reference NUmber sneakery, but for now I'll outline the basics of health bars since I don't have MMF with me right now. You'll need 2 objects, a "Health Bar Back" (A large black rectangle that represents the size AND border of a ful health bar) and the actual Bar "A nice red bar. Now, you'll need to store 2 values in your enemy - Current Health and Max Health. With this, you'll be able to do the math ( Current_Health / Max_Health ) which'll return a number between 0 and 1, where 1 is when the enemy has full health. Now, MMf2 can resize objects, so you can do something like: Always/Every 0.00/Constantly/HealthBar is visible - Set Position of HealthBar Back to Enemy.X and Enemy.Y - Set Position of HealthBar to HealthBar_Back.X and HealthBar_Back.Y (change this to center it if you wish - Set size of HealthBar object to height of HealthBar Back, and Width = (HealthBar_Back * (Current_Health / Max_Health ) ) This scales the health bar to maximum size when the enemy has full health, and makes it pretty much invisible (Width of 0 ) when the enemy has no health. As I mentioned, the tricky part is creating a health bar for each enemy and "pointing" it to the enemy it's attached to so it can get its Position (So it stays above) and its Health (So it resizes). I know MMF2 gives each object a kind of ID Ref number and you can get objects by this number, so it could be possible to link objects together this way.. Chances are there's a better way though, so I'll let someone else explain one

It could also be worth thinking about it like this: Instead of the level rotating, the level stays put, but the GRAVITY of the world is constantly rotating. The level orientation is rotated based on what the down force currently is, and then you throw a constantly rolling Sonic in there. Ideally MMF2 would allow you to have camera rotations/transformations but until someone says otherwise I'm going to assume it doesn't. An alternative is the "Rotating Level" one - You *could* potentially try to rotate and position every tile (T'would have to be Active Objects, which also kicks this plan in the nuts) using Matrix Transformations, but I suspect without some proper partitioning the CPU would cry bloody murder.

Easy thing to do would be to just have a special "Concept Art Gallery" unlockable or some such if people wanted to see any doodlings or renders you'd done, and it adds (Nice and cheaply) to replayability What's the deal with the music?