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Maybe you can find more jobs to apply to on this site
http://www.ukwda.org/netcareers.asp

I wouldn't advise you to start living in your car - as you say, it will probably only bring more problems. If I were you I'd see if I could get a loan from someone and then focus on getting a place to stay - looking for a job is hard enough without having to worry about where you sleep.

Nikolas, I felt just like you a while ago, and when I asked about it on these forums, luckily someone was around to calm me down a bit. In fact that person was you 

Just take a look at >this thread<. I'm going to quote you and just give you your own advice back: "the answer is to just do the best you can". I appreciated your advice back then, because I was feeling very guilty, like you are now, not realizing that I was in fact doing the best I could, which of course isn't very much, but it still might make a difference for a few people.

I think the feelings of guilt and incompetence is what makes it very easy for people to scorn (or just forget about) these issues. It's much more comfortable. On the contrary, flooding the poor areas with cash is not a good idea, because improving life conditions also requires a change in mentality which can only occur gradually, which is why I think supporting some of the larger relief agencies is a good idea, because they have coordinated strategies that take the political climates in the recipient countries into account, whereas the smaller organizations may be limited to operating in areas and with people they know, regardless of other factors, such as political reliances.

Not that it isn't difficult to find out which relief agency to donate to. I suggest doing a bit of reading on their sites - most of them have case studies and in-depth articles on what's going on - if they contain some observations that you find truly relevant, go for it and donate something, if you can. If you can't, it doesn't make you a bad person, imo. You know how you feel, and just raising your kids with that sense of responsibility will be a kind of improvement.

Well, I hope you can take your own advice, I know I did

Good luck w/ python, I've used it for scripting before, and it's not that hard once you get used to the syntax. 

Documentation and tutorials:
http://www.python.org/doc/

There's also pygame, a set of free python modules for game development:
http://www.pygame.org

... but so far there has been no bulletproof definition. Why? If you're not able define a concept that you come across on a daily basis then something is wrong, don't you think?

I'm not sure I think there's anything wrong with that. There are plenty of things in life that we can't define - in fact we can't define anything in the physical realm, only pure abstracts like mathematics or similarly self-referring system. And even those have their paradoxes. The rest is approximation, although it can be very very good approximation, even to the point where we forget that it's approximation. We trust we know what for example a glass of water is, even when science continues to find smaller particles that make up the small particles that we used to think water was made of. We can still drink it, freeze it, use it for all kinds of things. the same is true with game design. Even if the chemistry of game design (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?page=1) is still at its alchemic state, we know enough about games to make games, and theory is only needed and interesting because it inspires 'new' ideas about games, they don't have to be definite or final.

If you look at a factor like 'surprise' in a game, I'm sure you'll find it necessary for a good game. Any game starts a psychological 'game'  of player expectations and strategizing and has feedback routines that let the player experience  rewards or punishments for certain types of behaviour. Magic moments appear when the game succesfully surprises the expectations that it has established, like when something extremely complex grows from a simple system, or when all the not-so-evident clues are laid out Sherlock Holmes-style to suddenly make perfect sense. But we can't come closer to defining surprise than saying 'something unexpected'. If we agreed to define surprise as narrowly as for example 'a head-crab in an air-duct', nobody would be surprised when they encountered it, and so it wouldn't be 'surprise' anymore.

If you look at other media, like painting, literature and movies, they have evolved from artists making partial assumptions about what the media essentially is, and then challenging those assumptions, trying to go one step further. Of course some artists could have also followed their intuition, and not an exact theory of what would be new at their time.

So my points would be: we don't need definite theories, only new ones, and as soon as something starts to look definite, there will be that much more focus on testing it, which will eventually reveal the exceptions to the rule, which will then become the basis of new definitions. We'd do better to make new, fun and interesting games in the meantime, instead of lamenting the lack of a final final theory by which all our problems as game designers would be solved. That said, I do find theory occasionally inspiring - it keeps adding stuff to my designer's toolbox.

Well, I don't believe life is a play or a game except metaphorically, which is to say that there are game-like elements in our interaction with each other. Perhaps our understanding of the concepts of 'rules', 'challenges', 'risks', 'goals' and 'fun' in games can be expanded if we examine these phenomena broadly. We have to go to the limit of our understanding of things in order to discover something new. There will never be a 'final theory' of fun or anything similarly complicated, but there will be 'new theories' that can provide new ideas for actual games. I'm not overly interested in linguistics, a necessary evil - in fact theory and definitions only ever attract me when I sense they may provide a new idea for a game or a feature.

I'm not going to go for the bullet-proof theoretical definition of a game, just mention some aspects of games that have been overlooked or not satisfactorily explained to me in game theory:

We sometimes start games with people without there being a 'name of the game'. Anything, a phrase, a dialogue, any kind of challenge, can carry its own implicit rules and goal and stakes - sometimes the recipient takes up the challenge, and some sort of game evolves. Some may think it's too broad a definition, that it's the game of life, that can't be boiled down to anything functional, but I think these kind of games are important to game studies, because they're what games are going to evolve into when AI gets good enough to catch up. The thing is, we're triggered by all kinds of things as individuals. Some things, remarks, situations, call for a response. From us, depending on our focus and our temper. We involve ourselves, and there's always a risk and a goal involved. Our very interaction has risks and goals, or the refreshing disregard of either. Or they aim for humor, which is perhaps a goal in itself. We start games all the time. Any reply may be a challenge, if someone's up to it. We always want to win, to be right, abstractly - however we chose to define right. In the game of life, we're not all playing by the same rules, nor from the same starting position. Perhaps it's logical. Since starting position is unfair, we feel we have a right to influence the rules of the game or make adjustments, if we can get away with it. So according to one player's rules, the game may be already won, but the other player will find some way of changing the rules and the properties of the pieces, however abstract, and prove that indeed the game is continuing. Perhaps the good thing about actual games, in the sense they've been discussed in this thread so far, is  that they have definite rules and that they can in fact be ultimately won - something that never really happens in real life games.  Perhaps, because we play so many complicated games with each other, in which the rules are ever-changing, we need simple and solid games to establish  our sense of measurability. To re-establish our trust in logic and the rational. Maybe we need games because they let us lose or win in a fair setting, as opposed to the unfair settings of life in which we usually play?

15 years from now...



      Revenge! Revenge!

Reminds me of the band "God Machine", they made some fascinating music about 10 years ago. One of their songs was about a "Dream Machine". Personally I think "Mystery Machine" is too long and not very nice to pronounce, it sounds like the beginning of a looong explanation. How about Imachination or some wordplay on mystery and machine to make the name shorter and more powerful?

But hey, come to think of it, don't take advice from me on this, at age 15 I was playing in a band called "Wet Dream Material", I since moved on to "Wardrobe".

There's a lot more to level design than entertaining your friends... there are all sorts of rules and principles that one needs to learn and follow (or not, as the case may be, but as with everything you have to know the rules before you can break them). It's a field of its own and not to be dismissed lightly as "a bloody form of entertainment". If you ever hear/read one of the really good level design guys talk/write about how they work, it's fascinating. There's a lot more depth to it than people realize.

I agree. game/level design can be hard, especially all the math involved in balancing a complex game. Sure it's all about fun, but you spend alot of time solving equations to achieve it. Try balancing a game like StarCraft with three very different competing species, without any math or theory. Part of good design is the grace when something enormously complex is made seem easy and intuitive. But it doesn't mean designing it was easy - it often means a lot of extra effort was put into it. I'd recommend Game Architecture and Design to all game designers. It covers a lot of ground without losing sight of the basic entertainment aspect.

Ok, glad if you made it work.

Hitdetection with platforms may happen before or after the update of hero's position, so sometimes it will only detect the hit when the hero has already been moved down, so he'll land 'sunken' into the platform. That's one of the problems with synchronizing and having multiple onEnterFrame functions - flash isn't told which onEnterFrame to update first on each frame.

You can fix it by either writing separate functions for everything and then having just one onEnterFrame in the movie, that call the other functions each frame in the exact order you want things to happen. That's probably the better way of doing it, especially if you plan to extend the game a lot. If you don't want to rework all scripts like that, you can make an extra check in your script where you have the

if (_root.platforms.hitTest(_x,_y,true)){
//add following line to script as is
while (_root.platforms.hitTest(_x,_y,true)) _y--;
}

It's a hack and not very optimal, but just tells flash that if there's a collision between hero and platform, the hero should be moved slightly upwards, until there's no longer any collision. In that way you'll always have the hero slightly above the platform he lands on. It's fast enough you wont notice the gradual upheaval that takes place. It'll just seem the hero landed a bit higher. Pixel-perfect adjustments (if you want the character to touch the platform just slightly) can be made by adding 1 or 2 to the hitTest _y parameters, or by moving the registration point of the hero MovieClip up or down slightly.

Have fun

EDIT:

I was just rereading my post, and while the solution works, the explanation I gave is wrong in this case. You don't have enough simultaneous onEnterFrame functions for flash to mess up, instead the hero sinks into the platform because he's falling with a speed of more than one pixel per frame. So the hit-detection may happen when he's already fallen into the platform. But as said, the above fix will work regardless.

You can put the script in the hero movieclip timeline where you have most of the script already. It can replace your previous

if (Key.isDown(Key.CONTROL)) {
//do stuff
}

part.

I missed a closing bracket } when I pasted the script. Just add one at the end, and it should work. 

hey vict0r, I had a look at your fla file, and it looks fine, although for games you usually want to do all scripts on the main timeline instead of on the individual movieclips. It's easier to find the code that way, especially if the game gets complex with many movieclips.
Also, if you have arrays of lasershots and enemies and animations that need to update in sync, you usually have just a single main-style function on the timeline, that then calls all other update functions for movieclips  on stage.

Here's a laser-shooting script that'll fit right into your movie (in my test of it at least):

Code: ags

if (Key.isDown(Key.CONTROL)) {
   laserCounter++;
   var temp:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip("laser"+laserCounter,_root.getNextHighestDepth());
   var temp2:MovieClip = temp.attachMovie("laser", "laserContained"+laserCounter,_root.getNextHighestDepth(),     {_x:_root.hero._x,_y:_root.hero._y-30,left:_root.hero._xscale < 0 ? true : false,speed:15});
   temp2.onEnterFrame = function(){
	  //trace ("updating shot"); 
	  if (this.left){
	  	  this._x-= this.speed;
	  } else {
		  this._x+= this.speed;
 	  }
	  if (this._x < 0 || this._x > 550){
		  //shot flew offscreen, so remove it
		  this.removeMovieClip();
	  }


                  //ideas for hitTest scripts
	  //do hittest if there's just one enemy on screen
 	  else if (this.hitTest(_root.enemy)){
		  trace ("enemy hit");
		  //take damage
		  //_root.enemy.hp--;
		  //this.removeMovieClip();
	  }
	  //do hittest with all enemies in array of enemy movieclips
	  //for (var j in _root.enemies){
	  //	if (this.hitTest(_root.enemies[j])){
	  //		trace ("laser hit an enemy");
	  //	}
	  //}
	
 };

For it to work, you must also right-click the "laser" movieclip in the library, select properties, check the "export for actionscript" checkbox and type "laser" in the identifier field. This allows you to attach it directly from the library by that name, instead of duplicating it (where it has to be somewhere on stage already).

You said you didn't want someone to do it for you, so I'm not going to do the rest. But the script is basic for a lot of the things you want to do, where it involves adding or removing new movieclips dynamically and giving them custom update functions.

Hope it helps.

Calling All Cars! looks cool. It's funny, the other day I found an amateur game demo called Perfectus Volatus on newgrounds, and it reminded me very much of the classic Nitro for Amiga, that I loved to play back then. So naturally I gave encouraging critique and I'm hoping they will develop it more. Calling All Cars! seems to have some of the the same feel to it. Too bad I don't have a PS3.

What Jaffe says is not extraordinary, it's what most independent developers believe, but its always nice to hear it from an accomplished developer. Fun how he breaks out of the big time game development career race and decides to develop a more fun racing game with smaller cars.

!MNc99 Just keep at it and, as you said, give more thought to your next game.

You won't be able to make very solid adventure game interfaces in flash with just gotoandplay() statements, but you could play some AGS games or check out AGS itself to get some inspiration while you're learning more actionscript.

I just stumbled upon this adventure game made in Flash. Makes absolutely no sense to me so far, but interesting to see how a different dev tool affords different style and interaction. Too many cutscenes, too little interaction imo. Also the first Flash game I saw that has a traditional adventure game gui (look at, get, walk to etc.)

If anybody avoids getting elctrocuted here, please provide the spoilers

Shabba Dee - The Wrong Face

Very good style and nice choice of colors.

I'm not too fond of the black outlines either, unless perhaps the room is seen through a crack in the wall from the adjoining room or something. Another small detail is that the cracked glass read to me as lightning outside the windows at first. A little darker, or a bit of opacity on the glass might make it read clearer.

Ok, new version, probably final. Thanks for the suggestions you guys, I used some of them.

Ok, here are two version with eyes, both heavily inspired by Medical Waste's paintover. I'm still not sure I think either of them is an improvement, in comparison. Any opinions?

Ã, 

Babar, you're right. I'll see what I can do. Probably also what esper meant about the shoulder region being wrong. Not sure I can make it better though.

Thanks for crits, I made some changes to details in this version:



* New wing texture - more leathery.
* Tail twisted slightly to the right, curly effect.
* Front claw details.

I tried putting eyes in there, but it looked odd if they were visible from this angle. Maybe paintovers of the face could give some suggestions on how it could be doneÃ, 

Also, my attempts at shoulder blades seemed to put the figure off balance, so I think I'm going to keep that region as it is, supposing the shoulder blades are under the wings, like supposedly the right side claws are under the body or wings.

Buckéthead: you can use it for coloring ball, but it's a rather big sprite so some would-be contestants might decide they don't have time for it. I would love to see alternative colouring and paintovers though.

Here's a dragon I've been drawing. It's supposed to be a boss monster for a top-down perspective rpg. I feel I need some fresh eyes on it, so any advice is welcome, especially on how to fix the scaly areas on the wings, as well as the face:



Also, here's the lineart in case someone wants to start from scratch. It's heavily inspired by an old citadel figure, btw: