I don't think you should outright simulate every single micro settlement. You would need a way of approximating that is very simple, for example there are X banks so it generates X gold per turn. And run the more complex sim each time you are about to zoom in on a settlement in order to update it. It doesn't need to exist until a user views it.

Hey there. Glad this has been helpful for you.

1) Yeah, sleep can go wonky on some systems. If you don't use it, then your loop is going to max out your CPU, if you do then your CPU usage will only be what you need but on certain systems your frame rate will fluctuate a lot (older Windows mostly, I think). You could always include an option on which to do (for laptop users it really sucks to max the processor, your battery use goes haywire). Timer is just not the best way to do things, it specifically says its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Would be fine for non-gamey things, though.

2) Fixed timestep is not "more accurate" than variable timestep. You should do whatever works for you. Or even just do both. Fixed timestep is very useful for stuff like physics simulations and networked games because you know everything is updating at specific intervals. Variable timestep can result in a smoother experience for very high frame rates and doesn't give you a frame of latency like fixed timestep. Neither is more accurate or more processor intensive.

In fixed timestep, your update loop is supposed to happen at even intervals every single time. This normally would force your renders to happen at exactly the same times as the updates. That means you're updating way too much or your FPS is way too low, generally. By making the renders variable (and one frame behind), you can update to any FPS with no issues, and still keep your fixed timestep.

To come back to what we were talking about macro vs micro:

If the macro has a different timescale than the micro, then you should simply slow time while you're zoomed in, and speed it up while zoomed out. Then say 10 years pass, you could zoom in again and a lot would have changed. If the AI is sensible with building or even better if the player is able to set broad trends it should follow (I want emphasis on industry, I want emphasis on research) then it would continue down those trends in the player's absence. Also, if you're building in California or Japan you don't need to see all 25 million or whatever residents. Just show the important stuff. Military / science buildings, food facilities, etc. And maybe you could also say it's just representative of the larger whole.

For example, in Master of Orion 2 you would only do anything based on groups of a million people. They might look like 1 person, but fictionally they were 1 million. That works fine.

I don't think the two game types necessarily conflict with each other. I think you just need to keep them relatively independent. For example, you could have the country-to-country stuff happening at an extremely slow time scale, and have some aggregate of local stats affecting the country stats.

Here's an example of what I mean:

In the modern world, each person controls a country. So there's the US and EU and Russia and whatever. Connections between these countries are tenuous and diplomatic. If you want to attack another country, it will involve a bunch of small-scale battles, except for some macro-scaled weapons like nukes. When you drill down to the economy in California, for example, you'll find it has a lot of software studios built, farmland, whatever. You can increase the farmland in a given area to increase the overall output California gives, which affects aggregate incoming food for the US. Then you can trade wheat with Japan to get more computer parts.

If you decide to invade Europe, then you recruit your army from your country and go to attack Portugal. This is a zoomed-in point of view in Portugal, where you are able to destroy military supply depots, or civilian areas (lowering the macro opinion of other countries of you).

etc. etc.

The game would require a massive amount of balancing and would take a whole lot of time, but as long as you keep the macro simple, like of like in Crusader Kings 2, then you are okay allowing more detail at the micro scale. A player could theoretically never do anything to a micro region and just leave it running as-is, but if he decides he needs more wheat or whatever he can go in and manually build some more farms.

He used to do wonky backflips. I have no animator on the team, so everything is paid for or canned. Makes it really hard to do iterations on animations.

Here is the first gameplay trailer.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/CUA4q_5KE5o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/CUA4q_5KE5o?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Yeah, we plan on ramping difficulty much better than the demo does. And the slow-mo in the 3rd level is super easy to add all over (as well as cinematic camera effects), we just haven't put them anywhere yet. Theoretically the game and levels will feel much more alive in the final version than it does now.

We also have plans to make levels where you are looking Bones in the face while something is chasing him, and you need to use walls and jumps to slow the thing down. Plus one where he opens a chest and you're sort of tower defensing him. Lots of possibilites to use that mechanic!

Yep, I agree with both you guys. The setting is pretty lame and the programmer art is quite crap. But most Unity games don't have programmer art unless they're unfinished games... many of my Java games have programmer art.

You can try out our demo here:
http://deathboulder.com/try-out-the-alpha-build-of-dbb-yourself/

And here is the second to last episode:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/MULtqNfK4-s?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/MULtqNfK4-s?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

The walls are rainbow because that has been my temporary programmer art since the 48 hour prototype.  We're replacing them finally like right now, actually.

The vote right now is for who you want to be kicked off, not for your favorite. That's why Cheap Shot is so far ahead. It's just a much less developed game than the other 3, and he didn't do exactly what the judges asked in the overnight.

My challenge actually was not "make it less frustrating," that's just what they felt like putting there. It was, "improve the flow, reduce back-and-forth" which was partially due to challenge (walls suddenly killing you without warning, etc) but was largely just due to level design. That's why for the challenge most of what I did was just build a new level, and refine a few things (like make crushing walls just always activated so you can see them beforehand).

@cheatsguy, yep I totally agree. Honestly it had more of a plot going into that but I hadn't bothered with it due to having a 60 second presentation, and wanting to focus on gameplay. The main character is a dummy but he's meant to be lovable and he risks his ass in order to save his missing wife. Nothing groundbreaking, but the interesting bits should be in the details. There won't be any spiders or beetles in this, and the temple locale is just one of 5. You also go into a government facility (think Metal Gear), a crypt / castle ruins, Atlantis, etc.

Here is the overnight challenge.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/eXbL2akrxQA?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/eXbL2akrxQA?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

And have a look at the new Kickstarter.

Hey friends! I've put my game up on Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grandendroit/death-boulder-bones

I would be oh so happy if you'd pass this along to your various networks and / or back it. Help me realize my indie developer dreams and quit my job working for the man!



And please retweet this.

I think for the most part you need to know people. My boss at that company had worked with a big guy from games who was able to make the connections. But even without those, I'm pretty sure you can send it an application like you can to anything else. The big difference between games and books I think is that you only need to pay one guy to write and you don't need to create any assets or anything. The cost of making a book is also relatively cheap (although promoting it is just as expensive as anything else). Games require massive teams and a whole lot of money. My boss was asking Capcom etc. for $500,000 up front and then a percentage of the profits. This from an untested studio. Most publishers were pretty cool to us, but Sega was super frank about it. They took us into another room and said, "this is the sort of game we publish" and indicated The Conduit in all its beauty.

I don't think it helped that I was the main engineering representative at these talks, and I was 22. Our lead engineer, who had worked on Halo and a number of other high profile games, worked remotely.

The guys working on Cheap Shot are enjoying all the "WTF" reactions to them winning and are going to bill their game as the worst ever. Could work. I worked at a company once where we billed out game as the "dumbest game ever" and brought that pitch to Capcom, Sega, and more (for publishing). We didn't get published.

Well that's what happens when a game is in development for 5 years. But I actually had an extremely difficult time figuring out how to play the game (that was within 2 minutes, however).

Episodes 3 and 4. I'll be in the next episode (coming out in 7 days).

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/GRNeOiVL2Ko?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/GRNeOiVL2Ko?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/rt68GfdmN_8?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/rt68GfdmN_8?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

And as I said when I posted Unity's "made with" list there is a ton of stuff there that doesn't look like Unity either. This is why I said it was an ignorant thing to say. But as someone who is currently using default shaders and particles, I don't think I'll be in the group that is different than the norm.

As for indie games taking risks and such, I agree that's BS. But, I think indie games are able to take a single vision and really go for it, which can never happen with big publishers. There is constant compromising and many decisions made for the sake of time and money, rather than to make the game better. An indie in his garage can theoretically release a game whenever. I think this is a simplification, but it ends up causing more interesting games to come out of indies.

But you can't tell what's interesting about these games from the episodes, anyway. Certainly you can't from mine. So the viewers are complaining before they even know what they're looking at.

I've got 3 artists and just me. 3D is expensive work (in terms of time). I do indeed use the built-in particle and lighting systems, but all the art is our own. I also haven't written any custom shaders. So I can see you noticing stuff like that, but I also have seen plenty of games where I say, "wow, that's Unity?" Admittedly these are mostly 2D games.

As for arcadey versus "deep" games, well, for me it depends on my mood. When I have the time (which is rare), I love to be absorbed into a game for hours. Like Assassin's Creed, Crusader Kings, etc. More often I am playing on my iPhone and it's some game where I can quickly get my fix. My goal is to make a game that can give quick fixes but that you could theoretically play for hours. I don't think these are mutually exclusive.

I did play the brothers' game (Ring Runner), and I had a lot of issues getting into it because it was so extremely complex. I've got no doubt that there is incredible stuff under the hood there, but I personally think that even a complex game should not present you with any options until you understand what they all are. There is a reason the level up system works so well - you can learn one ability at a time, you're not presented with a level 100 character that has thousands of options.

It's all about the happy medium. Arcadey games don't have to be shallow crap, and deep heavy games don't need to require hour plus play sessions. Unfortunately with a 12 minute episode you're unable to see that complexity going on with the various presented games. Most of them are very good offerings in one way or another. As for my game, they showed the judges saying "can you keep this fun for a long period of time" because that's the only negative thing they had to say and they needed drama. Now people are repeating the same thing back. I can tell you right now my game doesn't suffer from that at all, and they only really had that comment before they actually played, but editing can make it look like whatever they want.

Huh, lots of Unity hate here. Seems pretty ignorant to me. Have you guys actually used it? Does my game look like a "Unity game?" Why? In my opinion, Unity just does a lot of the annoying stuff for you, but doesn't constrain you in any way unless you're lazy. Just look at their game list, I don't see anything that makes all these identifiable as "Unity Games." http://unity3d.com/gallery/made-with-unity/game-list I would argue it's more that without much effort you can make a game that looks like X. Without engines, your game is going to look more variable. But if you're actually polishing a game and giving it character, then it's not going to look like X. Obviously DBB still needs polish at this juncture, but I still don't see what about it makes it "Unity-like."

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time since working on making it engaging in the long-term. One of those changes was to make the story actually interesting. The general plot is that rather than the spirit just being a glowing skull thing with no personality, it's actually Bones's wife. And the whole reason he's running blindly into all these temples is not to collect cash but to figure out what happened to her. That's certainly a little cliché, but I think the supporting bits of the plot make it more interesting. But since this not an endless runner, I actually have a lot of ability to put story in, and I studied creative writing along with computer science so... I don't know why I didn't do it earlier.

Plus, you'll be getting new powerups every few levels that will change the way you play the subsequent ones. Kind of like how Braid added a new time mechanic every world. We'll see how it goes. :-)

Jaffe swears a whole lot and is extremely opinionated. But he's a very good guy, and I think he actually gave out more compliments than anything else. I liked his style better than Lisa Foiles's for example because all I ever got from her was positive stuff and so I still don't know what she might have wanted from my game. I totally didn't notice Jenova saying "I don't buy that shit," but yeah. In context, I imagine it was fine. I'll bet they did a lot less click mashing than they showed, too. Similarly, I think the decision was significantly more lopsided than it appeared on the episode. I obviously wasn't in the room, but I was able to hear words here and there as I waited 20 feet away. One reason I don't look that excited in the episode is because I was 95% certain I had won.

The bug he encountered in my game he encountered repeatedly, and basically was able to play for 20 seconds only. That's why he got so pissed. Interestingly enough, it was this that made me figure out shortly thereafter what the problem was. It had appeared completely random before, so I had no idea (and that's why I submitted a build with that issue in it). Seeing one person get it multiple times in a row meant it was some kind of behavioral / input thing, which led me to discover it was caused by a half-implemented feature that starts when you press the Up or Down arrow key. I think Jaffe kept expecting to use those buttons so naturally pressed them immediately, whereas the other two didn't. So anyway, I think his reaction made sense, although he obviously didn't sensor himself.

You guys both make good points. The biggest issue is the playtime limit. My game also does not have enough charm and polish yet, and the other game was very pretty. I'm now working with 3 artists at once in attempts of alleviating how sterile the game feels.

What's wrong with these judges? Jenova Chen's Journey won GOTY all over the place. He is a brilliant storyteller. And Jaffe has several million+ sellers under his belt; he's just as brilliant at gameplay as Chen is at presentation. Lisa Foiles may not be a game dev, but she plays a lot of games and has a good idea of what makes them good.

In response to you, I think David Jaffe said it best on Twitter:

I'm not saying you're wrong to like story-based or Japanese games more than other types of games. What I'm saying is that this specific game is not a particularly good offering in that department (at least not yet). She knew she only had 2 minutes to present, just like I did. So I made a couple levels that had 50%+ of the game mechanics in and I refined them. I timed myself. I timed other people who had never played the game before. Guess how far they got? Exactly to the end of those 2 levels. Did she not prepare or did she simply think that her game would be sold on a text box alone? Either reason is her own fault. Her presentation looked to have potentially interesting mechanics in it, but those were completely invisible from the actual playthrough.

Like Jaffe said, I have no idea if the story is epic. I just know that the first few minutes of the game are extremely dull, with like 6 different images, no animation at all, and thousands of words to read in the same text box that never changes. I also don't know if Rena is experienced as a game dev or not, but the biggest lesson I've learned in modern game dev is that you get the user interested right away. You can never hope for them to devote more than a few minutes to deciding whether a game is fun or not. The carrot on the stick is a necessity, whether it's because they want more of the gameplay to expand or they want more story. Same goes for a novel, a movie, whatever.

She mentioned that her game was inspired by Professor Layton. Well, watch this video of the first few moments (go to about 3:00 in) to see how you do it right. A mystery is immediately presented. The user is gripped. Where is the apple? Even before that, an envelope is passed to the boy from Layton. What's in that envelope? For someone who purports to be inspired by this series, she really didn't seem to take the right sorts of inspiration from it. And that's okay, because her game is still in development, just like mine. But due to the limited format of that aired episode, it looked like her game was being stifled by the judges and like mine only won because it's immediately and momentarily fun. If you were actually there or had played both games, I'm guessing your opinion would be different.

I apologize for the length of that. I'm sensitive about my game, and I'm kind of pissed with how that episode was put together. I think it's misleading and paints a golden halo around her game. I'm less responding to you and more responding to the hundreds of similar YouTube comments that I can't professionally respond to. :/

Yep, my game is no infinite. There are finite levels and a finite story. Like I said, it's basically Braid except a runner and with indirect control. And I doubt it will be as good, but let's cross our fingers.

Haha thanks for the comments guys.

Rorkien:
All your points are totally legitimate. There is a lot of quick programmer art in there, including that screen which I threw together in 5 minutes (trust me it's better than a line of text saying to hold space). It's pretty difficult to get part-time artists to output enough stuff to make the game polished, especially in a 3D environment. Polish is the big thing it needs now, as the gameplay is mostly done. The sounds are also from the first 48h LD compo when I made them in a few seconds too. I like the humor of them, but they really need to be drastically reduced in quantity and upped in quality. I'll probably use sound effects for most of it then occasionally play a voiceover.

I think you'd be surprised at the game, because from this video it looks like just another casual runner. It has much more in common with Braid than Temple Run. Every level has some kind of puzzle (although the ones these judges played are basically not puzzles at all) and since you can reverse time it's less about twitch skill and more about figuring out the right way of doing things.

And here is episode 2, which features me.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/yh5lDGL7Dhs?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/yh5lDGL7Dhs?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

I would GREATLY appreciate it if people would post comments about the potential etc. they see in the game. I mean, be totally honest, but I'm pretty disheartened by the ignorant "Temple Run ripoff wins" comments that are coming in nonstop. It's the same setting as TR, because they are both Indiana Jones ripoffs. Plus, I started this game before TR ever came out.

Since I'm putting up a Kickstarter soon, public perception is super important. If the comments are more balanced I would be oh so happy.

Also, please vote here:
http://www.ign.com/wikis/next-game-boss/Vote

Haha this thread is giving me chuckles. I sort of expected this reaction from other game devs.

I don't feel that I'm selling out, and I don't think you should have that opinion either. Maybe you would personally, but how am I selling out? More or less I did a game jam with TV cameras on. I love game jams. And I like attention. So. It was fun.

I think the most important thing that came out of this is that it really lit a fire under my butt, as well as the other people on the team. We were kinda sorta slowly developing this game in our spare time, without any direct goals or planned release dates. When it was going to be on TV suddenly, I spent the month leading up to it busting my butt and making the game 3x better than it had been before.

And now I've set a Kickstarter date, a release date, and more. I have websites up, Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc. I'd say that's pretty darn valuable for me.

Plus, I got valuable feedback from Jaffe and Chen. That's awesome.

Here is episode 1. Note it started with 4 1v1s, so I'm only in one of the first four episodes. That one will be next week (the 29th).

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/6qekBpZt1co?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/6qekBpZt1co?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

As for you anti-reality TV peeps... why would Egoraptor do that? He's already a celebrity. I did this to get eyeballs on my indie game, which is by far the biggest thing you need to get. Your game can be crap, but if 1 million people see it you're going to do better than an unadvertised Shigeru Miyamoto game.

We're putting a Kickstarter up in the next couple of weeks to attempt to channel some of these people to our game. Let's hope it works. Anyway, there was a lot I didn't like about this show, but there was much more I did like. Everyone was respectful and the other devs were awesome. It was cool meeting the 3 judges and they're all now in dialogue with me about my game and future - that's hardly necessary of them. True, the format is kind of crap. With  4 1v1s it means if the second best game happens to be matched up against the best game, they're still considered "last" place. Similarly, allowing games of all ends of the spectrum (least devved was only 2 weeks, most was 5 years!) that is horribly skewed. How can the 2 week game ever possibly compete? And the judges got literally 2 minutes to play each game. Uh wut?

BUT. 300k people watched the last season. I expect more will watch this one. Eyeballs! That is totally awesome, and worth way more than the paltry 10k prize.

The trailer for the season is up! The first episode will be out on the 22nd.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/qsSJjUzfIYI?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/qsSJjUzfIYI?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Post that again when you're not the top of the page.

It's used for having fluidness beyond the speed of either your logic or frame updates. Generally, your FPS is going to be quite variable, so you need to calculate exactly how much you want to move things based on how fast or slow the last update was. In variable timestep, you need to interpolate the logic because it is able to run at any speed. In the case of a fixed timestep, you need to interpolate the drawing, because the logic is locked into a certain speed but the drawing is not.

Any download? Applets basically don't work on Mac OS anymore.

Yeah, where's Riven to pounce on people posting inaccurate stuff? 

The former won't do anything, the compiler will be better than you at optimizing stuff like that in 99.9% of cases. In fact, all you will accomplish is obfuscating your code and wasting time on premature optimization. And it's micro optimization, which is even worse because it's usually wrong.

If you really want to get picky, I'd say having a while( true ) anywhere in your code ever is a poor idea. It's just bad practice to purposefully put an infinite loop anywhere, because if you have complex logic for the break or return statements inside you can mess things up and miss an edge case. Then you're borked.

As for the latter, as far as I know those memory amounts are correct. But, using a byte or short or whatever rather than just using an int is still a premature optimization most of the time. If you're allocating a massive state array or something, well okay. But otherwise, why bother until you need it? Most systems have gads of memory now, and in games your bottleneck is going to be image and sound assets, not random variables in memory.