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Depends on the browser I suppose...

I submitted this post by pressing tab then enter (it does tab me into the subject bar like custard says, but submits when I press enter in there.)

That is very lazy though, I've always pressed preview, read over my post, then pressed post, with a mouse!

Quickly taking the lighting further than the first edit...  I'll suggest some shading tips since you asked, perhaps something will be useful.

I'd recommend choosing colours that are further apart. It's difficult to add volume with very similar shades. Also look at converging the colours towards the colour of the lighting in your scene. For this edit I've gone more yellow, like warm sunlight, but any colour can work - just don't think trees are green and rocks are grey, because that's not always true!

The most important thing in shading is identifying your lightsource. You can't shade 3d objects without knowing where the light is. Trees are 3d like anything else, and because you can't think in terms of thousands of leaves, think about the parts of the foliage as distinct shapes, tufts, balls, depressions, etc, and shade accordingly. You can do any number of textures for foliage, of course, look at different sorts of trees blur your eyes a bit, and identify the patterns they form.

On the original image you have light colours in the middle going out to darker ones on the edges (or vice versa), which is a technique people call "pillow shading". It's not a realistic shading technique generally, and unless you think your graphics look good in that style you should probably look at more natural lighting. Essentially that means picking the direction the light comes from, and putting light shades on one side, and dark on the other, not dark on both sides and light in the middle.

Yeah I'm assuming it's much like the classic game packs you get on consoles sometimes, where the games are emulated (just because it's cheaper than updating some ancient source code that may not have been written in a portable fashion), but it's done so well you wouldn't know.

The only drawback is that the system requirements are higher for emulation than native code.

The rule Helm mentions is usually stated as the ideal age for a man's partner, rather than the minimum ethical age.

Wait... that seems to be the same thing, carry on.

Game designers come from such varied backgrounds these days, but they're usually already respected people within a company that ended up with the position after being at the company a fair amount of time, so I don't think the earning respect issue is a big one.

I feel partly the same way. As it is now, I'd rather work under a great artist or an experienced coder than someone that had no practical skills besides coming up with nice sounding ideas. Artists are good at high concept and of course visual design, coders will often think about the game mechanics in a more analytical way which I think is a very helpful approach. That's not to say I don't think game design is a distinct and valuable skill, I just think it's hard to sell yourself specifically on your abilities as a designer right now because few people have much of a theoretical background, and the larger part of industry would rather people that can create the same game as last time, with some minor changes, than someone that can construct a balanced and compelling game from nothing.

I hope (and expect) that some day Game Studies/Ludology/whatever will be a respected area of research and a necessary basis for a professional game designer. The iterative methods have certainly led us to some nice playable games, of course, I just think less bone headed brute force tactics will end up making better games. For now, yeah, practically any reason to respect the designer is enough. It's annoying getting paid less than people that aren't good at anything.

ps: I actually study for a degree in "Computer Games Design", which a lot of people find amusing, even people that love games. A lot of people seriously think liking games and not being an idiot is all that's necessary to be a designer. I'll freely admit that Games Studies is in its infancy, but I find it very useful in unravelling what makes games work even now.

What is it with gamers?!

Link to find out who the hell he is.

Yeah, seems like most people going right into artist/audio/coding jobs based on qualifications and portfolio have a much better time of it. Yufster is doing it the RPG grind way, which is good at least for the blog, because it's more interesting to document.

Missed 11 European countries (including totally obvious ones like Russia), and I couldn't think of 21 states somehow. It's really hard to think when you are staring at a clock. I expect things would have come to me easier if there was a blank map with the state borders marked, like on the Europe quiz.

I think from a geographical perspective knowing American states is quite a bit more important than knowing the areas of Greece (or the counties of the UK). About seven individual states have larger populations than Greece, and the majority are larger in area. That's not to say they're as culturally important as Greece has been for millenia, but I'd expect people to know them as much as I'd expect people to know the small countries in Europe.

So you want someone to be able to press a button in the game, the game to load an address in the user's web browser, and minimize or lose focus?
It could confuse some people I think, especially if they are running full screen, and as GarageGothic pointed out, even if they download the installer and install, then go back to the game, the sound won't work until they quit the game and start again.

I suppose the sensible way would be something like having a button that opens the installer link, and quits the game, and then add a checkbox (perhaps on by default) at the end of the installer process to run the game again.

That shouldn't be too difficult, as long as your installer software allows it, and it seems like most have something like that. It would need a pluign made but it'd be very basic.

It's kind of scary. the fixed term contracts thing is the least encouraging part. If I didn't know a few people who were quite happy in their game development jobs I'd give up any plans to do similar work... hope I can find somewhere decent once I finish my studies.

The blog is good by the way, don't know if anyone mentioned that.

I don't think writing a launcher program is easier than writing a plugin, it'd be much the same code.
Probably right about the voice not being noticed before an update though, so it's a good idea.

Only if someone can write the plugin for you. Perhaps you can find someone to that.

How is your speech 140mb? that's something like 6 hours of decent quality ogg, are you using too high a bitrate? Speech doesn't need to be as high as music.

We worked on a crappy game for a week or two and it has 50,000+ downloads. But then we did put "rape" in the title.

I make games for various reasons. One is that it's quite interesting to me, because it's a relatively new medium, the technology is freeing up what we can do all the time, and so little thought has traditionally gone into game design, so it's one of the few areas you can break new ground in as someone working at a hobbyist/independant level. Another reason is that I would like to do some sort of computer art/media/design work professionally, since it's what I study, and indie games are a good place to develop all manner of skills in that area. I certainly do hope that I make games that people will play and enjoy, and that's for the same reasons most people publish their work, for recognition, to earn a living, to have an increased sense of accomplishment, simply to see their work making people happy, to get girls, etc.

I think I'd still make games if only 80 people downloaded them, for the first two reasons, but I don't think that's typically the kind of numbers I see on most good free games... many get hundreds of thousands of downloads, and tens of thousands are very easy to attract without any/much publicity effort. If something only has 80 downloads it's either not linked to anywhere noticable, or the screenshots and writeups seem very boring.

He's probably the most popular and well known person making original freeware adventure games. Not that he doesn't deserve praise, because he's done some nice stuff and most importantly finished it and got it out there, but he's hardly overlooked!

What do you mean pre-AGI graphics? it's about the best looking AGI game, and one of the last ones produced. To my eyes it's at least as visually compelling as any amateur VGA remake I've played, and quite stronger in many ways.

And that's really the only problem I'd have, the amateur part. I don't think a remake would necessarily suck at all but I'd rather no remake over an incompetant one, and when it comes to it, I'd rather a competant person design their own games.

Perhaps it's because I'm more into visual arts than the average player but there's not a whole lot of added graphical value in the amateur VGA remakes for me. They almost universally suffer from poor composition (due to basing the layout on the original less realistically represented bgs), on top of which is layered repetitively textured surfaces, everywhere, and sometimes even what looks like straight up noise.

On the whole they are less effective to me than the better few AGI games, which are admittedly almost graph like in their simplicity ("here is a tree, next to it is a horse pulling a cart, a man in a hat is walking along") but perform better than the usual vga remake style, which tends to give a very consistent and monotonous rendering when compared to the more lively imaginings I get from the originals. I have no problem with people taking something and showing me their own intepretation of it, but most remakers seem to approach the task with a painting my numbers strategy - wood areas get this texture, grass gets this texture, water is this blue, and overall it's like a machine did some advanced upscaling, there's not a lot of new information, and there's much less room to imagine it in for yourself.

I only mention it since you asked for reasons people might dislike the idea of a remake, and I know a lot of people enjoy the amateur remakes so I'm not arguing that they are pointless. I especially agree that there are many gameplay fixes and improvements people could make, too, and the best remakes do a lot of that (like KQ2VGA).

Obviously from all the discussions we've had on the topic there are people that like remakes and there are people that don't. Nobody is going to be (or should be) discouraged from making them if it appeals to them personally, but I'd encourage original stuff if you're sitting on the fence, making your own stuff is fun!

That's quite an uninformative error message if it's simply that javascript is being used... I'd assume some kind of code with special priviledges was being installed. The question then is why does our script trigger it, when for example the JS on these forums doesn't?

Edit: It seems that the warning is issued when the script is actually called, and on the forums that is when you press the preview post button (maybe other places, I haven't checked). It does look dodgier if it appears before you even press anything I suppose... maybe we can remove the JS stuff from the wiki.

Edit: Well the script that runs on startup is the google ads stuff, and unless AGA wants to remove the ads I don't think there's much that can be done to get rid of the prompt. Browsing with IE on these settings pretty much every site I go to has the same message...

Hm, if I turn IE's settings up to max I get the prompt too, wonder what it comes from... the only thing besides mediawiki on there is the google ads and they are ok on most sites.

Why would there be any kind of activex control on the wiki? I don't get any warnings in IE there... and I can't find anything to trigger one.

Explaining the official policy on posting in old threads there would be worth it I think, it's impossible to guess... it's one of the areas that we're not even sure of ourselves sometimes. Obviously bumping up a 2 year old game with no new information isn't a good thing, but there are many cases when bumping an old thread might be better than making a new one, especially in the tech forums I think.

I'm not sure how to word the policy myself.

It was in spirit, but the plugin does work, so kind of no...

Edit: here's a choppy video of the test app, it's not very interesting: http://caverider.com/ags_wiimote/ags_wiimote.html