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Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
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The Lord taketh from her tits and giveth to her rear.

You misspelled "plastic surgeon".

As if you're an expert on th-

latest


Oh. Nevermind.

On a related topic...

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CryptRat

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This is somewhat funny : https://medium.com/@eigenbom/how-to-take-7-years-to-ship-a-beta-4fcfc2428d88
So how can you take 7 years to make your game? Here are some important tips and tricks for taking your sweet time.
How to take 7 years to ship a beta.
It’s been almost 7 years since I quit my last job. Back in 2011 I was a freshly baked postgraduate in Melbourne. I was entering my 30's and the indie game renaissance was in full swing. When my contract ended I decided to leave academia and pursue my own path in game development. I then began working on a game called Moonman. Fast forward some long years and that game, now called MoonQuest, has just been released on Steam Early Access and itch.io.

So how can you take 7 years to make your game? Here are some important tips and tricks for taking your sweet time.

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Build Your Own Engine
This is probably the most important part. If you’re a curious soul and need to understand how every little part of a game works, then this step is quite easy. Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component system, and texture manager, to name but a few. By this stage you‘ll have a fully functioning non-game.

To extend your development time even further consider using a language that introduces a major version upgrade (like C++11) partway through your development. Just try to resist refactoring.

Don’t stop at creating your own engine. You can also create your own tools, like a custom sprite editor, because all those other sprite editors out there do not do exactly what you need.

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Have An Unclear Game Idea
Before development be sure to have an unclear image about what kind of game you are making. This will lengthen both your engine development time and your game design time.

For instance, say you want to make a game with an infinite world where the player can keep walking in one direction and never reach the edge of the world. You will need to build a decent amount of technology to support that. A couple of years later you realise (from a game design perspective) that, no, you don’t actually need an infinite world. Throw away all those data structures and algorithms that you’ve built. The 3 months you spent building a fluid system that works on an infinite grid? Throw it away! A simple array of fluid cells will work!

Your game idea doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if it did it’d probably evaporate because it’s so amorphous. This benefits our time-stretching goal in the following way: by constantly monitoring similar games that are released you can simply change your game to be less like them. Do all those games have “sandbox” in the description? Just make yours an anti-sandbox with a specific goal, that’ll surely differentiate your game in the market. Are they all moddable? Throw away any ideas of modding and instead focus on providing more unique content. Or something like that. All that matters is that the idea for the game is in flux, constantly adapting to the market — to the extent that you cannot even write a single paragraph explaining what it is.

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Run A Crowdfunding Campaign
Inevitably you’ll run out of money. You could release the game sooner, but that’s the opposite of our goal, and so maybe you could run a crowdfunding campaign?

First set aside 3 months to prepare, it’s very important to get it right. You’ll need a great trailer and to spend a substantial amount of time marketing your campaign. The feedback you get will be fantastic and everyone will be super nice and encouraging. If your campaign succeeds you’ll now be able to spend that money to speed up development and ship the game sooner! But beware! To take 7 years to ship a beta you really should spend that money not on making your game sooner, but making it … better.

Bonus time here can be accrued by offering physical crowdfunding rewards like t-shirts. This is conditional on your perfectionism as you may decide to print them locally so you have more quality control. Definitely do this.

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Constantly Blog About Your Game
Forums like TIGsource can be a great way to make friends and get encouragement and feedback on your game. Developing a game by yourself can be lonely work, and thus you may find yourself creating a devlog. Good news! This is a great way to consume all that expendable time you have. Be sure to post frequently and in-depth about your game, to win awards for favourite devlog (because of all that time you are spending not making the game), and to end up with one of the biggest and most viewed devlogs. This is definitely your goal.

Bonus temporal adjustment points can be obtained by posting retrospective parody articles to Hacker News the day before your game comes out.

Do All Your Own Testing
Every product needs testing. Every feature needs to be tested. By you. Under all conditions. On all platforms. Remember: if you change one thing then all other things must be re-tested because you may have broken something.

Warning: Crowdfunders and friends may offer you the opportunity to get some additional testers in. I made this mistake and shortened my development time, but you should definitely not.

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Do All The Side Things!
As the years pass you’ll no doubt be very bored working on the same project, day in and day out. To make sure you are working on that same project for many more years it’s imperative that you take on numerous side projects.

With endless game jams now available you could definitely spend a few days working on a side game. Maybe a parody game called No Mario’s Sky? Be careful though, because it’s likely your silly made-in-three-days games will get more press than anything you will ever do commercially.

Game development involves many different disciplines and you should definitely try to master all of them. My preferred way to learn is by finding an online community and involving myself in the competitions and events they hold. If this sounds too simple then you could always start your own community. Maybe it’s called Pixel Dailies and has become so big it requires 2 full-time moderators. Well, I guess you have the time to spare!

Conclusion
Those are just some things a developer can do to delay a project. Some more ideas are running an unconference, releasing an iOS game, making an infinite star wars crawl generator, creating twitter bots, and … well … you get the point.

I hope this article has inspired you to take your sweet time, and I look forward to seeing all your side projects, engine discussion, crowdfunding campaigns, game blogs, and constantly shifting game ideas. Tweet me at eigenbom.

Oh, by the way, I did mention that my game MoonQuest is out now on Steam Early Access and itch.io, didn’t I? I did all those things I mentioned above but I got there in the end. And, in hindsight, I wouldn’t change a thing.

But I promise my next project will be quicker.


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Mikeal

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https://twitter.com/appabend/status/1022497495081865216

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Thief 2. The atmosphere is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of University-level game design, most of the details will go over a typical player’s head. There’s also Garrett’s cynical, detached nature, which is deftly woven into his characterization, as well as the areas drawing heavily from industrialist architecture, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these levels, to realize that they’re not just fun- they demonstrate something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Thief 2 truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Garrett’s existential catchphrase “I gotta pay the rent this week” which itself is a cryptic reference to Dostoevsky’s novel "Преступлéние и наказáние". I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Steve Pearsall’s genius wit unfolds itself on their computer screens. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a Hammerite tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- and even then they have to provide proof that they’ve beaten Expert mode (preferably with less gold than me) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Interesting: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ing-on-foreign-exchange-with-yakuza-total-war

Sega capitalizing on foreign exchange with Yakuza, Total War
Sega Europe exec John Clark says audiences in Asia and the West are increasingly interested in games from the other region's developers, but for different reasons

Yakuza is an odd franchise. Not just in terms of tone and narrative (although those certainly qualify), but in how anachronistic it seems for a franchise from a major publisher like Sega. Yakuza is a series of single-player games with a steady drumbeat of sequels. It doesn't feature multiplayer modes in any significant way. It is not a game as a service. What little downloadable content has been offered for the series is either free or inexpensive and limited in scope.

Despite flouting the latest trends, Yakuza has proven itself to be plenty sustainable. Since the first Yakuza debuted in 2005, there have been seven mainline games, five spin-offs, and two Yakuza Kiwami remakes of the oldest titles in the franchise. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz at E3, Sega Europe executive vice president John Clark said the series' success points to a growing appetite in the West for Japanese-developed titles.


Yakuza is succeeding in the West by not changing the content to suit its new markets

"From my experience of Japan as a market, what we see is something that to us is very traditional publishing and development: Single player, story-led, sequel, sequel, sequel," Clark said. "And it's something that works in Japan. What's happening here is that the Yakuza franchise is being brought to the West and it's not being changed for the Western market, in terms of the gameplay.

"We're not turning every Yakuza title into an open-world Yakuza game. That's not what's happening. We're representing the Japanese IP, the Japanese road map, the Japanese content to the relevant audience within the West. And whether there's a need to change that or not, I don't know. But it seems to be successful and it seems to be working."

Clark said the interest in Japanese-developed content has been clear over the past 18 months, particularly in digital storefronts like Steam. (Sega last month announced plans to push a slate of Japanese-developed PC games, including Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Valkyria Chronicles 4.) Interestingly, Clark believes the success of Sega's Japanese-developed games on Steam is having a beneficial impact on sales for other platforms as well.

"We've seen the growth of Japanese IP on Steam on PC; that never existed before," Clark said. "And it surfaces across other formats as well because gaming is now a social entity. You have your friends lists and you see what your friends are playing and it encourages you to dive back in to the games you maybe missed before or games you stopped playing. So we've seen that network effect of games being played on different formats now driving overall awareness."

Over the same span, Sega has also seen an increased appetite for its Western-developed content in Asian markets, China in particular.

"If you look at premium downloads via Steam, I would say 18 months ago China would have been a top 30 region for us. Today, it's a top 5 region. The growth from Steam has happened in the last five months, and it's been significant. It's been incredibly impressive."


Total War interest in Asia is growing thanks to a new entry set during China's Three Kingdoms period.

Part of that is due to a growing market for PC download-to-own titles of the sort Sega offers. But Clark said the company has been trying to encourage that growth as well by "just taking small steps to show a little bit of care for the Chinese market." That means not just localizing games into simplified Chinese, but making sure they are putting localized store pages up on Steam, pricing things for the local market using local currency, and accepting local payment methods.

"It's more accessible," Clark said. "It's more appropriate for the local audiences in terms of localization. And it's just more accessible. And with the support of more Chinese publishers and Chinese entities, it's only going to get more accessible. We're talking about, I don't know how many, 1.3 billion people? That's a huge potential gaming audience and a demographic that's building its technology awareness, its connectivity, its social media and the way music and movies are downloaded and payments are being made. It's a huge growth area."

As for what Western-developed content works in the Chinese market, Clark said Sports Interactive's Football Manager and Creative Assembly's Total War are two particularly strong franchises in the region. The latter is only likely to get bigger as in January, Sega announced Total War: Three Kingdoms, a new edition of the strategy franchise set during an era of Chinese history frequently depicted in the media of several Asian countries.

"Simply put, we've noticed the scale of interest back towards us change," Clark said. "It was always there. 'Hey Sega, you've got some great franchises, let's take them to China' was a conversation that was always happening. But when we announced Total War: Three Kingdoms, that was a step change in terms of the resonance we were having with any Chinese partners. It lends itself really well. We can learn a lot. That is certainly a key title for us in China."
 

Max Edge

Guest
Interesting: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ing-on-foreign-exchange-with-yakuza-total-war

Sega capitalizing on foreign exchange with Yakuza, Total War
Sega Europe exec John Clark says audiences in Asia and the West are increasingly interested in games from the other region's developers, but for different reasons

Asians like feminine women and good, original , complex gameplay. I feel lack this two principles which founded video games in Western games. And excuse me now, I must back to my Fire Emblem, I had to do a few tactics battles and paring cartoon characters.
 

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