I am very much against feigned surprise, but this just a symptom of the underlying personality. Ban one thing - and the personality will find other ways to manifest itself. It's better, in my opinion, to just have an unspoken rule like "respect your coworkers" and make sure to help arrogant people improve their social skills (sometimes those people don't even realize that their behavior is causing grief to others).
I've just recently watched a very good documentary about ants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-gIx7LXcQM .
They are a truly amazing organism. Does anyone know of any ant games? I thought it would be cool to have a strategy game where you build an ant colony, defend it from disasters and attackers, etc.
Slightly off-topic, but can someone recommend a good book about typography? I mean more about the history of typography, less about how to design new fonts.
Very cool. A suggestion: move the help bar (that teaches the concepts) to the left side. I think it will feel more natural there. It took me some time to notice it.
Do you plan to extend that to learning javascript too? That would be really nice.
I wonder why they came up with a new library instead of contributing to box2d directly? Unless they had to break box2d's API (but off the top of my head, without looking at the code, it's hard to see why they would have to)
Reminds me of the Anti-PowerPoint Party[1] (which was linked to on HN at some point). I would also like to say that I personally find whiteboard presentation much easier to follow. I taught a little bit too, but used slides, because it was easier. Maybe banning computer slides isn't such a bad idea...
That doesn't sound too bad... It's definitely not the same as using psychological tricks to coax people to pay. As long as the game is not designed around getting your money, it should be okay, I think.
Sure, there is a place for in-app purchases. But there has to be some moral code involved. I think that in general, paying for consumables is bad, but paying for extra (permanent) features is fine. There may be exceptions to this. There's this website, http://honestandroidgames.com/, that has its own moral code but it is quite restrictive (must have no ads, must be either free, paid or free with a single IAP that unlocks the full game.) I wonder if it is possible to come up with a more flexible moral code for game monetization.
God, this is devious. While reading it I was thinking, "where does the sarcasm part end?" but it never did. I mean, as an aspiring indy dev I can understand the need to make a living, but this is in the same league with casino money. I really hope this is just a phase, and people would collectively understand that these games are designed to take your money, and that they're not worth it.
As a result, noise is reduced and we end up with a cleaner picture -- just as we would if we had one big imaging sensor instead of two little ones.
But the two lenses are taking the picture from different angles, and with different focal lengths! I don't understand how matching of pixels is possible without an error greater than the noise they are trying to remove... It definitely can't be equivalent to one large sensor, as they claim. Unless they can somehow route the image from one lens to both sensors? Is that even possible?
I personally appreciate your comment (and upvoted it too), Not sure about the downvote. Could be someone's mistake (those buttons are way too tiny on mobile.)
Off-topic, but I must say that this site handles resizing very well. I really appreciate it when a website seamlessly transitions from desktop-size to mobile-size layout. Sometimes I just like having my browser window shrunk down (or zoomed in for viewing from farther away), which means that with most sites I have to scroll horizontally, which is not very usable.
I (naively) hope that eventually people who prefer microtransacions will realize what a waste of money it is, and start paying upfront. But seriously, maybe a good solution would be to design the in-app purchases in a game so that instead of endlessly paying for consumable items, one would pay for actual game features. That way, you can play the basic game for free, and then start "constructing" the full game piece-by-piece by purchasing individual features. For example, an RPG where you can play the warrior for free but then pay $X each for additional characters. Or a "dungeon-keeper"-style game where you can pay to unlock more types of monsters and tools.
The last mobile game I worked on at a (now defunct) company, started out as an innovative open-world exploration / action game (See http://www.slantsixgames.com/games/strata-scavenger). I can honestly say, having had first-hand gameplay experience with it, that this game could have been a standout in the mobile game crowd.
Unfortunately, the day came when our CMF (Canadian Media Fund) money ran out, and the company had to look for external funding. Needless to say, publishers are not interested in this kind of game. They expect simple gameplay, in-app purchases, social features, etc. It it very hard, in the current mobile game climate, to come up with truly deep and innovative games. I applaud each and every indie dev trying to do so.
EDIT: edited link above to point directly to the company's website
Just finished game #3, died 83 times (wasn't too hard after playing Super Meat Boy :)). Some ideas: add two more controls for increasing vertical and horizontal velocity (i.e. holding "shift" will make to box go faster and jump farther, and holding jump longer will make it jump higher. And then add more levels that exploit those controls!
Nice games. I like the simple visuals. Played game #2 for a bit. One specific comment: Holding "up" fires at the maximum rate (pressing up repeatedly doesn't fire any faster). Also, there is no downside to constantly holding up. So you probably should either (1) eliminate the up button and just auto-fire all the time, (2) have a fuel mechanic that will force the player to conserve shots, or (3) make it worthwhile to press up faster. And if doing so, move the fire button to space or something similar, because it is hard to repeatedly press up while moving with the side arrows.
I think that for games, where the UI isn't probably going to be native, there is no (major) reason not to develop cross-platform. Engines like Unity or libgdx let you do just that. Other than testing, I don't see how iOS compatibility would require significant effort over an existing working Android game which was written with a cross-platform engine.
Chrome on Windows 7 bug report: back button doesn't work, mouse wheel doesn't work (scrolls at infinitesimal speed), touch-screen style controls which don't work well with a mouse (click&drag, besides not being intuitive with a mouse, is also broken because it navigates to the selected item on mouse button release)
I agree. When my family and I lived in Vancouver BC, we didn't own a car for 3 years, and we have little children. It actually worked quite well. We rode buses / walked / biked to work, rode buses for weekend trips (Vancouver is great in that regard. You can even go to a lot of hiking/skiing spots by bus). And for the occasional out-of-city trip we used a Zipcar. I think that overall, the time you would spend taking care of your own car (repair/fuel/clean/etc), balances out with the time you spend walking/waiting for buses, etc. With the added advantage of physical activity when being forced to walk or bike instead of drive. It is hard to resist the temptation of using a car when you own one. Another advantage of the bus is that you get to do stuff while commuting. I used that time to read books. And I think I've read more books in those 3 years than what I had the 10 years before.
An anecdote: One of my professors, Dan Gordon, authored a paper [1991 Gordon and Chen] which was used in Doom's engine implementation of BSP [1]. He was quite happy to learn about it from me, some 15 years later :)
<blasphemy alert> Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.)
On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety in world-class intellectual matches, similar to what exists in physical sports. Something like a "board game Olympics".
Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word 'boring' was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...