itch.io

Wish I could provide better feedback but it doesn't happen super consistently, the 3x3 puzzle is just the worst one for it. If it helps at all, the pieces that go in the middle of the top and bottom rows are the ones that, for me, almost always fail to connect. It happened some in later puzzles, but never before that puzzle.

Just got past it, by just trying to connect them repeatedly? Is this a glitch or did I just brute-force the puzzle? (It's the 3x3 grid level)

I don't understand the principle behind the puzzle where sometimes pieces that should interlock won't connect. Am I missing something obvious?

The specific dimensions are a lot less important than just maintaining a consistent pixel size. As for what dimensions you want, it's going to depend on your art style. Some styles look sharp at an ultra-minimal scale, as small as a 5x5 tile. Sometimes you want detail, and you might want something that pushes 32x32 or larger.

Very distinctive look. If it were isometric, this would look just like a 90's CRPG, and I mean that as a pretty high compliment.

The short answer is "no". 

The less short answer is "yes, unless someone tells you to stop". 

The long answer is "it is ultimately at the discretion of the rights holder whether or not to enforce their copyright against you, but they will never not have that right, regardless of whether you are selling the product. You will need to look into whether the thing you are making a fan game of has rights holders who strongly enforce their rights, or are more permissive, and whether this permissiveness depends on the fan game being not for profit. Making a fan game is never 100% safe, since even if a rights holder has a policy of permissiveness, they still can retract that at any time, or even apply it on an individual basis, since it is not a legally binding concept. It is not a good idea to sink effort into a fan game because most rights holders are not permissive, and will send a cease and desist with zero warning."

Great points!

Somewhere on my long to-do list is a game that's Freelancer in an off-brand Star Fox setting.

Yeah. Twine is HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

If it's a fairly standard visual novel in terms of the structure, then I actually think that Twine might be a viable option.

"once"

Holy cow, this is super-high quality. I've already got a bunch of my own projects on the go, but if all you need is a programmer, I'd love to collaborate with you on this.

Unfortunately, overhauling the level design means overhauling the control.

Not in the sense of the basic controls and what they do to the car, but more that I need to give the cars some kind of functional suspension system, and get rid of the paradigm that assumes the car is only under control if it's on level terrain or a hand-placed slope.

A new devlog, on how I'm overhauling the level design. Again.

I'm just really not feeling like the game will be fun if I see it through to completion with the level design that it has. It's just not nearly as fun to drive around in the city as it needs to be. I'm honestly not happy moving forward with the game until the prototype is at a point where it would make people say "why would I want to buy the full version, this is already loads of fun as it is".

This does mean though that AI driving is going to be delayed again. 

Itch is primarily used by solo devs and small-scale dev teams, so the only way there is going to be mainstream-level graphic detail is if either A) the game is extremely short and minimally interactive, or B) it's made with purchased assets; neither of which is a particularly popular solution. 

You say that like Steam actually pays attention to what developers do

Absolutely. There's no good reason for Windows devs to use .rar when compression to ZIP has been built into the OS since XP.

I found it hard to control, but on a technical and artistic level it is very impressive.

Any thoughts on possibly allowing off-site image hosting for situations like this? In the vast majority of cases it can probably be worked around, but I was just wondering if you'd considered it.

Very nice stuff, you've definitely got a knack for cute pixel art. The moon and the trees especially look great, and Santa's sleigh and reindeer show a really strong ability to communicate imagery with the bare minimum of pixels.

Looks amusing. My only suggestion would be that the area surrounding the arena is way, way too bright. It's a really vibrant shade and it draws the eye way more than the actual gameplay area. I think something like a burnt orange would still communicate lava wihout being so distracting.

My personal opinion is that there's no point in releasing on Steam unless you realistically expect non-trivial sales. If you're releasing cold, with no serious marketing and little interest following you, then all you're doing is spending $100 for the privilege of drowning in a more prestigious sea. 

Major update.

Massive refinement of the gore gameplay, including Manual Transmission, Boost That Actually Works, and Dynamic Camera Awesomeness, just to mention some of the stuff in today's huge update.

Oops, should have checked the link before assuming it would work. Fixed the link now.

I'm reasonably good at delivering lines (here's my ouevre) and I'm looking to volunteer my services to any project that otherwise can't afford voice acting. I have high-quality recording equipment.

Neat idea. Don't know if I'd make use of it, but it is a neat idea. You'd definitely want the final value and increments to be user-specified, though.

I'm asking for a portfolio. 

What's your actual professional experience in internet marketing?

Hi! Are you a native speaker of Quebec French, who's willing to provide consultation on a project set in Quebec? Because I need help to not make myself look like a moron!

This will be a fairly low-scale consulting, basically just a pass to make sure I'm communicating what I'm trying to. I'm OK with the project having bad and cringeworthy French, since that actually kind of works with what the setting of the game is going for, and because I'm into bad translation stuff like that when it's in English. 

You will be compensated, especially if I decide to explore a full French-language translation and you're open to it.

Wow, you are really good.

Hey, are you from France or Quebec? Because I'm looking for a native French speaker to consult on my game project.

Your initial post did not say that you can have both, and your opening paragraph explicitly states that you think these two are in direct conflict. When I made this post I did not see your post where you elucidated that in your proposal they would not be mutually exclusive.

If the system works in this way, then I've got no strong philosophical objection to it. My only suggestion would be to have "neither" as an option in addition to "both", since I think trashgames would pretty comfortably fit in that category.

At this point my real critique would be that I don't know how effective it would be at addressing the problem you're trying to address. The artgames tag already exists, so if the problem is that you're having a hard time finding art games, then how would adding a different way to tag your game as an artgame fix the problem that people aren't tagging their artgames as artgames?

And what about the backlog? The majority of content on any free-to-upload platform is going to be hit-and-run uploads, stuff that the original creators are no longer maintaining, so probably the vast majority of games released before the new feature is introduced will never be updated to use it.

I'm having a hard time understanding what the problem even is that you're trying to address.

If you can choose both, and assuming these aren't tags but a separate system, then that kind of incentivizes everybody to choose both to increase the number of search results their game turns up in, but itch's culture isn't quite that mercenary, so let's just set that aside.

Choosing both definitely makes it less objectionable, but it also seems like it would make it less useful. I just don't foresee a system like that pruning too many results unless you search for games that exclusively use one tag.

The issue isn't people being defensive Because Games, it's that there is a massive gulf between games that can be classified as purely commercial and games that can be classified as purely artistic. Just because you can point to games like Call of Duty or Gone Home that fit very neatly into one category, that doesn't change the fact that many games, maybe even most games, especially on itch.io, are an awkward fit for either.

Where would you class Hyper Light Drifter? Or Pillars of Eternity? Or Dark Souls? Or Monument Valley? Where would you class something like a basic flash game, where there's no serious artistic intent, but no possibility of making money? Is there anything coherent in calling Mystery of Time and Space a commercial game? 

I get that sometimes you're really just looking for games with serious artistic intent, or games that are mindless time-wasters, but what you're proposing is that somehow all games be categorized into a binary classification that immediately forecloses on any room for nuance.

It is really demented that Unity doesn't have a built-in dev console accessible in builds. This isn't the kind of thing that should need to be hacked together by the end-user, it's an industry standard feature.

I passionately hate this idea and would never, ever use it, for all of the objections raised above. I am never not being "artistic" when I'm making my games, but I'm also rarely not considering the commercial feasibility of the project.

I absolutely understand where you're coming from as a consumer, I get the spirit of what you're asking and I don't think it's stupid, it's just that as a creator I would firmly object to having to classify my projects one way or the other.

A minor update today.

Most of the work I've done since the last update is under-the-hood and not yet implemented. AI Driving is a pain in the butt.

To give you some tips for things to look into:

It's a really good idea to learn about Unity UI layout formatting. Mobile devices have a very diverse range of aspect ratios and resolutions, so you want to make sure that your interface always works, no matter what size the screen is. 

As a general thing, because you're making a simple straightforward game that's going to live or die by its gamefeel, you should definitely watch Jan Willem Nijman's talk, called "The Art of the Screenshake" for really great tips on how to make games feel more responsive to user input.

Some less visceral tips for making a game feel more professional: ease the player into and out of play. Going directly from the main menu to being in the midst of play feels abrupt; give the player a few moments to prepare to begin giving input. And when the player hits a game over state, provide some kind of transition to the score display. It's a small thing that makes a game feel 100x better.

How exactly are you controlling the culling? That's something I'm really inexperienced with in Unity.

In my honest opinion the worst thing about Unity is that it gets touted as being usable to people with no programming experience. Because it sort of is, you can definitely make stuff work with only a beginner level of coding knowledge, but unless you've got an actual background in programming, a lot of stuff is going to be completely invisible to you, especially when things go wrong.