Since so many people got a kick out of my Awesome! brand paper towels, I thought I’d juxtapose them with my Optimum Power cereal:
Awesome. Just awesome.
Last time Minimalist surprised everyone. This time, Tower did. It’s weird how surprising it is when it was voted upon!
The IRC channel is filled with talk about what can be done. I spent the first 30 minutes eating dinner.
I made vegetable stir fry and rice. The rice came out surprisingly well. I also put hummus on pita, and then put the stir fry in it to make LD-approved sandwiches. I washed it all down with tutti-frutti flavored Jarritos.
I’m not sure what to do with the theme yet.
I know it’s a bit hokey, but since the Olympics are happening today, I thought that Ludum Dare needed its own pyrotechnics.
Enjoy the Ludum Dare Opening Ceremonies!
I’m cross posting my Ludum Dare posts here and at LudumDare.com.
I only managed to get it clean enough to sit in comfortably a few weeks ago.
Yes, there are three separate chairs in a small room.
While SolHSA’s tips are useful, and mrfun’s tips are hilarious, I decided to post my own list of tips for Ludum Dare.
Here is the summary list:
- Be prepared.
- Meet the competition.
- Whatever you think will be easy, do something simpler.
- “You can only code fast by coding well.”
- Have fun.
In about 15 hours, the theme for Ludum Dare #12 will be announced and the 48 hour game development competition will start.
Once again, I’ll be using C++, SDL, Makefiles, and vim. This time I will be practicing my unit test fu, which may or may not be a mistake in a coding competition based on speed. We’ll see. My office is actually cleaned up, so I can avoid the back pains of using my couch for the entire competition.
Good luck to all who are participating! Let’s make some games!
Oh, and I guess there is some other global competition starting today, too.
Categories
Playing Older Games
For some reason I woke up this morning wanting to play a game I haven’t played in years. That game is The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse
If you’ve never played this game, probably because you think you’re too old for Mickey Mouse games, you missed out. This game was surprisingly well made and had a number of my friends in grade school and high school asking to play it. These were the same friends who would pop you in the face if you dared to question their tough guy image.
My favorite level was when Mickey donned the mountain climbing gear. It was like playing Bionic Commando! Rather than go through all of the obstacles, I enjoyed falling below the (floating?) mountain and swinging my way below the level. You bypass everything, and there was something satisfying about knowing I did.
There are other games from my past I’d like to play today. I want to get back to my save game in Homeworld so I can continue through the series. I still haven’t finished any of the Wizardry titles. Conquest of the Crystal Palace music still gets stuck in my head occasionally. I want to get my Atari 2600 out and play Berzerk, one of my favorite games from my childhood.
While new games are constantly getting released, there are still some older games that never get old for me. How about you? Are there any games you still play long after it disappeared from store shelves and the game-playing public’s mind?
[tags] games, classics [/tags]
Raph Koster linked to a Forbes article complaining that casual games aren’t exploiting the long tail.
Well, duh.
Indie game developers seem focused on making games that will be accepted by the portals. They think, “If you don’t use the portals, how will anyone hear about your game? Making a game that the portals won’t take is the Kiss of Death. Well, except for all the successful games that don’t use portals. But those are exceptions, of course. They don’t prove anything.”
The portals only take a few types of games. If you make a casual RTS, good luck finding a portal that will take it. They’ll argue that their customers aren’t looking for that kind of game.
Well, who cares if most of their customers aren’t looking for that kind of game? The point of the long tail is that each game is just a database entry anyway. It doesn’t cost any more to offer a wider variety, and you still make the sales. Half of Amazon’s sales come from its major hits, but the other half comes from everything else combined. Imagine if Big Fish or PopCap offered more than match-3 and hunt-the-item games.
But then again, the long tail is really only a big benefit to the portal anyway. Being part of the long tail might mean more customers, but as Cliffski has complained many times, if you sell through a portal, the portal gets your customer’s info. You don’t. All you really get is a portion of the sale, and maybe that is a sale you might not have had if it didn’t get the exposure the portal provides.
[tags] marketing, long tail, casual games, indie [/tags]
A few months back, I wrote about how I couldn’t use Flash for game development, mostly because of the poor Gnu/Linux support. The comments to that post have since made me rethink this position, but I’m still researching my options.
Unfortunately, my only real options are Flash and Java. I went to the Linux Game Tome forums and asked for advice on web-based game development. The opinions were mixed, as expected. Some people love Java, some people hate it. Some people didn’t like the proprietary nature of Flash, and some people said that it’s the nature of the web to support Flash.
The Indie Gamer forums had a separate thread going about online 3D game development, and it seems that there is an overwhelming vote in favor of Flash. I questioned how people could dismiss Java so quickly considering Jagex created Runescape, which was the top MMORPG until this past year. People seem to think of it as an exception, but I think it shows that Flash doesn’t have a monopoly on browser penetration. Adobe will tell you that 99% of browsers have Flash while less than 90% have Java, but when it comes to people who will play games in a web browser, do those numbers still hold? Jagex doesn’t seem to be hurting from not using Flash.
In general, Flash is the most ubiquitous platform, and I’m sure its Gnu/Linux support will get better over time. Java’s browser penetration isn’t that far behind, though, and it isn’t clear if it is at a significant disadvantage. Both have open source development tools available for them, but Flash is still a proprietary platform.
I still haven’t made my decision, and I could avoid this decision by choosing to make a persistent browser-based game (PBBG) instead. Still, I’d like to make games that are easy for others to play, regardless if they are using Windows, Mac, or Gnu/Linux. For now, I will continue to make desktop clients.
[tags] web game development, indie, flash, java [/tags]
I forgot to post about it yesterday, but Jay has posted part 2 of his Quick-and-Dirty Game Marketing Tips.
[tags] marketing, indie, business [/tags]