Taylor

Haha, oh man. I am actually tempted. I'm trying to make a "full" game out of Metritron atm, though...

Maybe this could be part of another FPS. You play through the level but afterwards you have to clean up your mess before you can continue. Of course you could skip this with micro transactions... Also later levels will be set in a ketchup factory, blood bank and slaughterhouse.

Make it multiplayer and don't let people communicate through traditional means. It'll be like Dark Souls Journey with mops.

Hopefully this'll bring a little influx of players and the tutorial matches won't be people with 200 wins calling everyone noobs. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

In fifteen years time are we going to be rebooting all the reboots?

I think the main wall with modern stuff was people expect total conversions? I hated finding leaks and following the leak worm that coiled itself around your level freaked me the fuck out.

Sounds like a tough break. I imagine studio politics in a flat structure are going to run riot.

Journey was funded by Sony but it's an indie game because it's arts.

All the Final Fantasy Tactics games after the first (albeit best by far) are based in the Final Fantasy 12 universe, but you don’t really get to explore it in the same sense. I thought Final Fantasy 12 was pretty cool but if you used the Gambit system well you can automate so efficiently it almost looks like FF13 (just kidding, of course, FF12 isn't a single corridor for 99% of the game).

So, I made another game in 48 hours but this time for Molyjam 2013. It was based on this quote from Peter Molyneux: "We've got tons of graphs and data coming in, and looking at that is the most inspirational thing I have seen as a game designer, ever." Molyjam Page (with download and stuff): http://www.molyjam.com/games/58 I'm sticking to my philosophy that if you can’t draw, and you've got to make something in 48 hours, you should keep adding boxes until it looks good or you can’t see. I'm not sure which one I accomplished.

Apparently FF8 had a PC release. And you could easily emulate both of them now. Also, I remembered this trololololol

Why do they gather up the press just to say "Kinect is a bit shit, eh? Oh well, we've spent a lot of time on advertisement delivery"?

Uh-oh, looks like I'm going to be that guy. I did enjoy FF8 although I liked FF6-7 and FF10 a lot more. There was just a lot of silly things like how the magic system made it optimal to never cast any spells, I broke my square button boosting summons, and there was that kind of needless plot twist that makes no sense. Yeah, you know the one I mean. Why was that a thing? Also, towards the end of the game you seal off a lot of content because of reasons and I don't like it when the end-game isn't a point where you can go and complete all important side-quests you may have missed. Although Omega Weapon was cool, so it wasn’t as weak as FF9’s end-game where you worked towards fighting a badly textured marble. Get hype. I did write a bit on how FF9 is literally two Hitlers but let's just say I wasn't a fan and, in general, final bosses:

It has aged in places, I mean even in its own generation the comical square characters were out-dated, although I believe the PC version has mods that let you swap them for the high-poly combat models. Mechanics and story wise it's easily one of the best and it's usually FF6 and FF7 are tied for "best final fantasy" by sane people. It's definitely worth picking up if you're interested, especially if you've only been exposed to modern final fantasy and want to see what it was like before it was poop. The materia system is probably the best magic system they've done and it's really fun to play around with. So brave!

It's about how the Portal 2 style egg-hunt teaser was designed, how it was definitely solved within sixteen minutes of their predicted time, and a bunch of unpredicted side-effects from people getting answers wrong. Hard to tl;dr, just go through it if you find that interesting. It is nice for there to be something worth reading on gamasutra for a change.

I think it's exclusively a League thing. I don't think in Warcraft (and therefore DotA and DotA2) it's possible to lock the camera, and you wouldn't really want to because controlling more than one unit would be rather awkward (League's solution to this is limiting you to one extra unit you order with alt, which has no active abilities and rubber bands if it gets too far).

Sorry, I don't really follow By default League locks the camera onto your character and you can't scroll around. Ideally you want to unlock it and position it so you can see more of the 'danger area'. I know people who play with it locked and complain when they're top-side because they can't see people below them.

Well, everyone is finding League stale right now (it's a meta-conforming, gap-closing bruiser with no resource!) so it’s a good time to try and jump to something else. I think everyone appreciates that DotA is the deeper and richer game, but you need to go through that comp-stomping initiation process. To be honest, even with Leagues shorter skill ranges it’s better to have the camera unlocked and biased towards where the action is. Getting used to controlling your character in the side of the screen is a pain, though. I've been forcing myself to play characters like Enchantress so learn the jungle and micromanagement. Fortunately, I have no subjected people I don’t know to this yet.

Well, you can't keep increasing game budgets, leave gamers with the bill, and expect the whole thing to not crash. That's lacking foresight. We're already seeing mass layoffs every other month, even with the whole industry running on contracts now to stop the headlines. I actually don't follow why Call of Duty needs competitors with bigger budgets to power its own success.

can someone explain to me why this is silly? why can't those developers make shorter games instead of having kamikaze-budgets? should consumer rights suffer just because some game developers experience the negative consequences of having a risky business model? We're going to keep increasing game budgets and offset the costs by making consumers pay more. What could possibly go wrong?! I mean, it's not like there are successful indie games out there making millions, or successful long-running series that are still using the same out-dated engine after five games. Increasing development costs is the only way.

Everything is going to be digital at the end of this gen anyway.

I'm trying to wean my friends from League of Legends. ... into DotA2

I finally went back to La-Mulana and finished it. While playing I’ve created a small journal of puzzle combinations, notes, tablets, half new language and symbol meanings. I know this isn’t for everyone, which is why Uncharted focus tests have presumably prompted them to tell you the answer to “puzzles” on the approach, but I found it pretty fun. Honestly, I did brute force some puzzles and peek at a guide a couple of times. These were actually obscure enough I didn’t feel like I’d thrown away hours of puzzle solving by cheating, especially because the second time even the people who had solved it had no idea how it worked. There are other challenges like beating it under ten hours, beating the bosses without using sub-weapons, beating it on hard and a secret field. That’s probably two separate play-throughs with a bundle of frustration, though! I know Metroid and Castlevania aren’t a million miles away but La-Mulana feels pretty unique. Obviously it’s based on Maze of Galious and is inspired by many other games but the core experience feels pretty original.

I can think of a few games were not doing the QTE still kills the dude but you get less reward. Ex: In Bloodforge you'll always kill the guy, but you miss out on combo hits and currency compared to mashing the button. I'm fairly sure this is how it works in Ryse, but it isn't reported because Kotaku. I don't mean to defend this either, I think it was pretty rubbish in Bloodforge and the justification was being "casual friendly." Ultimately if your goal is to not frustrate the player maybe consider not having quick-time events because they're shit.

Skullgirls lead programmer/designer is working as an advisor and pushing his NDA to the limits: http://www.twitch.tv...xed/b/416685045 -> 2.27:00 Doesn't sound great... (He's also answering questions on SG so story-time has some stoppages).