Messages

1

Support / Re: ETA on Patch for WS and other Mac goodies?

« on: November 29, 2008, 11:51:10 am »

Wonderful news!  Thanks. 

2

Support / ETA on Patch for WS and other Mac goodies?

« on: November 29, 2008, 05:18:47 am »

I bought the game just last week, and found out about the latest Mac version having many extras the Windows version doesn't.  Any ETA on those changes being implemented to the Windows version?    I'm wondering why they aren't already available actually?  Hard to find any info other than "coming".

Also I'm having some weird registration issues on my laptop, it worked fine on the desktop, but that's for another post (and from the history of the forum, something I should PM Alec about).

3

General / Re: Gamepad utilities.

« on: December 27, 2007, 09:52:47 pm »

Try Xpadder -- it's better than JoyToKey IMO, interface is a little odd at first but makes a lot of sense intuitively when you think about it.  But the best thing is the features you can bind, JoyToKey's mouse bindings  don't allow for as much customization.  ANd yeah, Xpadder is free.

4

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 18, 2007, 11:42:45 pm »

I think the long-term answer to piracy though is to make games free and make money through advertising. A lot of popular free Flash games make hundreds of thousands of dollars for their creators through advertising. I just hope Flash improves enough that games like Aquaria will one day be possible to make in it.

A modern, avarage video game has the budget offfffff... a couple million dollars. I think.

Advertising won't do it. Making video games is very expensive, about as expensive as a cheaper Hollywood budget. A decade ago, one could make a game from scratch (engine and tools and everything) and have a roomful of staff to be enough for the job. Nowadays, you can't.

3D made video games very expensive, especially with all the new, fancy and shiny graphic features that you have little use of.

Small or more simple games like Aquaria is a great exception and shows that simple, low-tech games can still be modern and great. It's just not the commonly held belief among publishers, and sadly, gamers.

As for Flash, I am no Flash Master, but I do think that it has its limitations and problems.

His idea isn't that bad, free games filled with advertising (if it fit in the world/was tasteful, or if you had a commercial interruption like television shows...

I mean, there's a lot of made for TV movies that NBC makes (for example) on one of their sister channels like Sci-Fi.  Take the recent Tin-Man as an example.   Games could reach taht point if their popularity continues to climb.  If games were free to download (avoiding the cost of publication and distribution), and had tasteful ads on billboards in the game or commercials during loadtimes or even 2 minutes of commercials every 20 minutes or when you went through a loadscreen/menu (pausing the action in the middle would be bad unless itwas already paused).

Not many games can go the route of ads in game that woudln't be disruptive though.  Sports games would have no issue, and games like Hellgate London wouldn't bat an eye at putting up mountain dew or taco bell ads on the billboards and ad spaces in the world.    Anarchy Online is an MMO that gets away with it too because it's got places in the world that had virtual ads anyway.  Now they just play 7-11, Mountain Dew, Simpsons whatever...very unobtrusive.  Of course you cna choose to pay and not get that.

Maybe a program where you say you'll participate in market research for companies for X amount of hours to be able to play the game for free.  Or your commercial viewing would be limited ot 6 months or something (set amount of minutes viewing commercials) to pay for your product.  It's quite feasiable in many games. 

But for a game like Aquaria, real-world ads would really disrupt the flavor of the world, and the only opportunity to interrupt would be at start of the game, and during loadtimes between stages (maybe 30 seconds of commercial gauranteed, while it loads in the background).  The question would be, do the creative minds behind the game want ot have that sort of interruption in their game.  It would be gauranteed money for them from the advertising company so that would be good.  But it would compromise the creativity a bit.

5

General / Re: Sue Michael Bay Campaign!

« on: December 17, 2007, 09:24:01 am »

I'm surprised some people are reacting with comments that lead me to believe they thought Drift was being in any way serious.

You know jokes aren't funny when you start to explain it don't you? >_<

6

General / Re: Sue Michael Bay Campaign!

« on: December 15, 2007, 08:09:26 pm »

I mean, check this quote out "That is the dirty secret no one is talking about. That is why Microsoft is handing out $100 million dollar checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu Ray. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."

Come on guys, is that blatant or is that blatant! He's obviously played Aquaria and stolen "you will see the truth" line *nods* he even used the word "time"! Blatant copyright infringement right there! I say we get him, join the Sue Michael Bat Campaign! We can call it SMiBaC! yes?

I might be with you...if he hadn't said that a couple weeks before y'know, before Aquaria was playable for anyone but beta testers.

7

General / Re: Questions about full version & improvements

« on: December 14, 2007, 08:12:53 pm »

How on earth would you use a mouse and a gamepad at the same time, every gamepad I've ever used require two hands, how would you move the mouse?

Simple, just replace what your left hand is doing when using WSAD with the gamepad (or right hand if you're a leftie I guess).  It's not that hard, and unless your controller weighs like 50lbs it shouldn't be a problem.  I've done it a few times -- unfortunately in this game when you use a joystick, your mouse cursor locks onto your body...so you don't get the benefit of aiming behind you while moving in a direction or locking on to enemies easily and swimming circles around them.

Still, its possible, but pretty useless since the cursor locks.

8

General / Re: Incredible !

« on: December 14, 2007, 02:06:01 pm »

No offense Alrik, but you almost seem paranoid. It's $30. It's not like some big bad internet criminal is going to steal your bank information, spend all your money, come to your house and murder your family. But if you really want to make your life so difficult then go ahead...I guess? lol

What are you gonna tell him in two weeks when he's recovering from a stab wound and all of his family is dead?  Huh?  What then!? :-P

PayPal is nice, it's true.   But I can understand his caution if he's never purchased anything online.  That first time it's hard to swallow that lump in your throat.

9

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 01:42:54 pm »

Copy protection, of ANY kind, is pretty much useless anyway. It will be cracked, no matter what you use. In the end, it's really just a waste of time.

More importantly, a waste of money too.  The best kind of protection against the laymen is a simple cd-check (as the game boots check a file on the disc to make sure the disc is in).  Obviously this game doesn't need the disc (downloadable) so that wouldn't work for it.  Don't think anything could be done to stop it short of requiring people to buy it on disc.

But seriously, any amount of time spent developing some sort of protection, or worse paying another company for their (ultimately failed piece of security)  just doesn't seem worth the dividends invested, especially given the speed that things get pirated.  Even DRM is failing the record industry right now.  Just no hope against the will of hundreds of thousands of pirates (if not millions).  At best a company like 2K got about 2 weeks with Bioshock and it's fancy protection that makes it so I can only install it 5 times before I have to call and give up my first born to the security company for another chance at installing again?  At worst, companies have leaks before the game even hits the stores.  So I guess you can count yourself lucky Big-Blot/Alec; it took a few days and you didn't pay an insane amount of money for protection like Bioshock.

Hopefully this game will sell like Bioshock though :p.  I really look forward to seeing it launch on PSN or XBLA, even though I own neither PS3 nor X360.  That would be one service that couldn't be as easily pirated (mod chipped people could do it easily, but less machines are chipped than PC's can play pirated games .  Plus I just want to see how it would be accepted on those platforms, I hope it would sell well.

I really want this game to come to Steam though.  I just feel better buying digital-download-only games through there.  So I'm still holding onto the hope that I will be able to get it there,  but the demo was fantastic (and honsetly, about 2 hours is crazy!  I hadn't played a demo that long in years.  They're usually just 20 minutes long at best).

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Games / Re: Games We've Loved...

« on: December 13, 2007, 07:54:26 am »

Tried not to read anything in the thread first, so as not to have other's choices floating through my head.

-- Dig Dug -- Pump it little man pump it!  This game was great and I really don't know why, but I can remember it clearly.  I'd stay inside for hours just pumping the monsters full of air and making them pop.  Somtimes I'd torture them and pump em up, but not all the way, this way they'd be stuck there trying to blow the air out as I carried out my devious plans to bring the dirt down on them all.

-- Phantasy Star IV -- this is a tough system to choose one great game from but seriously, this is the best jay ar pee gee I have ever played to date.  It's more expanisve than anything I've played before or after, and the tale told still holds up well today (I just finished playing it again, though I may be a bit biased in that assesment).

-- Super Metroid -- without question, the best action/adventure/platformer in the world.

-- Symphony of the Night -- the 2nd best action/adventure/platformer but with rpg elements so I guess it's the best action/adventure/platformer/rpg in the world :p

-- Ridge Racer Type 4 -- this game had an insane amount of cars, cool designs that you'd never see on the road and concept car creators probably picked for the game.  Great GREAT sound track.  My favorite car racing game ever

-- Wipeout XL -- my favorite future craft racing game ever, another great soundtrack, but cleverly designed tracks and a nice challenging AI make it worthwhile unlike the rest of hte Wipeout series.

-- Ico / Shadow of the Colossus -- The visual style of these two games is so surprisingly good it could be called art, especially so for Ico with it's often times amazing camera angles and arenas.  The games are equally as artistic in their design, very little spoken about the world and characters, everything I learned I had learned through intuition.  Carefully guided intuition of course, crafted masterfully by the designers.  Both are a one of a kind experience independent of oen another, and together they show just how much talent Team Ico has.

-- F-Zero GX -- Sega and Nintendo making a racing game together was bound to be amazing.  The speed on this one still blows me away, and everything is so smooth, it may not be the fastest ever hovercraft racing game (I can think of a couple more that are insanely fast) but none can match the liquid smooth animation of this in motion.

Now for some PC games...
-- Stonekeep -- a real dungeon romp, but in real-time.  Not many games are dungeon delvers and real-time.  The story was fantastic too for taking place in one extensive underground labyrinth with mostly repeating tiles.  It moved kind of like turnbased games do, up back, turn left or right, but attacking was realtime and enemies could move whether you were or not.  A wonderful wonderful RPG with a very intuitive leveling system that was probably before it's time.

-- Terra Nova -- a great science fiction game, similar to Mech Warrior, but more along the lines of the power armor defined in Starship Troopers.  Loved it.   Great weapons and thrilling battles.  One of the many reasons I am sad that Looking Glass no longer is around.

-- Fallout / Fallout 2--  Love em both equally, probably my first 'mature' videogames.  Such a wonderful combat system, equally a wonderful dialog system, this game actually had choices that impacted the world...few RPG's today can say the same.  I'm scared that Bethesda won't be able to pull off the magic that made these two so great with Fallout 3.

-- Planescape: Torment -- one of the most diverse and creative PC RPG's I've had the joy of playing.  Such a brilliantly crafted story, and characters were equally as interesting as they were varied.  Really would like to play an updated version or a sequel, but will probably never happen

-- Descent / Freespace series -- both have little in common besides some famiiar faces in the developers/publishers booth, but both are undisputited.  There hasn't been a great space sim shooter since this game came out, and even before it, the best were X-Wing/TIE fighter.  Freespace smoked em, and Descent brought true 3D movement like no other game before and after it.  I still remember the LAN gaming sessions in my high-schools AutoCAD lab.  yeah I was and still am a geek, shoulda been out chasing girls, but instead playing games with the rest of the geeks :p.

If I go into handhelds I'll take even more space so I'll leave this at that.  Of course there are many other games I loved throughout the years, but I tried to limit myself to just one or two per generation in the consoles and only a handful of my most respected titles for PC games.  I can't really say anything too recent as I haven't had enough time to really digest their experience and know if I really will be playing them years and years later.  (yeah I still play each and every one of these games; if they're not installed right now the disc is right next to my computer/entertainment system to do so at any time).

11

General / Re: Question about Sprite Work.

« on: December 10, 2007, 03:11:21 am »

Hi, I've noticed that the sprite work in the game was very beautiful.

However I've been hearing (especially now because of Street Fighter IV) that sprite artists are very rare to come across. 

I'm just wondering if you needed sprite artists to create this game or you just imported skins for the sprites.

I don't really know how to explain what I'm asking so I hope I was clear enough.

Basically how did you do the sprite work?

I think I know what you're asking, you want to know if they drew it by hand and imported the artwork into the engine and have the game animate the characters.  yes would be the answer to that, at least as far as I can see.  True sprite work is pretty much done for, it takes far too long to make something in high resolution by sprites, let alone full on animations (especially in a fighting game with over 30 frames per each individual action, heck even just breathing takes about 15-20).  That's a lot of hard work if you want sprites that are 600 pixels tall for example.

Of course I didn't make the game, but it looks to me like everything was drawn and animated within the game.  Similar to making 3D models and then animating them, defining the points that bend.

Speaking of which, I'd love to see Naija's head follow the cursor when clicked.  When I'm swimming around and she's always looking 90 degrees away from the direction she's headed it feels a bit strange.  I imagine that wouldn't be too difficult to implement, though it may require a whole new skin (not sure what her neck would look like if it rotated around looking at the cursor.