Pixel Perfect

Best of luck Chris, sounds like a great opportunity.

Good luck with the rest of your course and your graduation traineeship, seems like only yesterday that you started!

Some things in life never change ... there are those who do and those who don't ... and the irony is that it's inevitably those who don't who criticise the most. Anyone who entered the competition and managed to complete a mini game in just one week deserves respect. The fact that they have highlighted possible issues with the game engine too is an added bonus. Kudos to you Aggror ... innovative entry (the winning one in my estimation) and interesting blog.

How true this is, however, I wouldn't let it concern you as this realisation, combined with determination to put in the hours required to wear this hat effectively, is really what becoming a successful Indie developer is all about. Too many people these days want everything done for them and totally misunderstand the scope of Indie game design; which is great because it means those prepared to remain open minded and open to hard work and knowledge/technique acquisition eventually rise out of the masses and go on to do great things. An interesting read Mike, I wish you well on your journey. It's a journey I'm still enjoying after many years although not got to the 'do great things' stage yet

What's excellent about it ... I think Josh is playing the old gypsy cup trick here with all the price changes and no one can see the wood for the trees. For an existing LE2 user no price reduction on upgrading to just the Windows version! So that's a big thank you to all your previous LE2 windows only developers. But wait, it gets better. What about those who bought LE2 on the basis that Josh promised it would be cheaper to do that and upgrade than buy just LE3 new. Well they really got hit because it just cost them $200 more to get LE3 base than a new user. You can do the rest of the math yourselves, but trust me, they don't gain anything at all but loose at every stage apart from simply breaking even if they upgrade to all three.

Congrats Don't forget the LE2 bug fixes though

It's a law of diminishing returns. Normally far better optimization is achieved by optimizing your own code routines after profiling your code to see where the real time is being spent. It may never need optimizing, that is a real possibility if your code is written well. As already stated the gains are very small for the types of optimizations Canardian is proposing, especially in a game engine where so much time is spend in rendering cycles etc! Nothing wrong with implementing these things from the start but if you haven't its not really worth going back over your code. Generally speaking, imho unless absolute performance is critical maintainability should always win out over performance practice. For most applications CPU cycles are in abundance!

I'd keep asking yourself the question then because people/entire institutions have been asking these same questions for years There are many articles/videos which attempt to analyse just what makes games addictively playable and highly attractive available on line, so studying these helps built the bigger picture I guess, along with your own feelings about games (assuming your experience mirrors many others). The game certainly should excite you and make you really want to play it; otherwise it's unlikely anyone else will want to. However, having all the right ingredients is often still not enough, effective marketing, visibility, and luck all play a part and some of those factors are not under your direct control

Great, so your using a keyboard and there is no noticeable latency even with just your on-board sound card. Might take a look at Native Instruments then. I'm interested in the Abbey Road Drum samples too as I have a Roland Midi Drum Kit which would benefit from some better samples. Cheers Chris

Thanks for the feedback Chris. Yes, I've been thinking of adding to my current sound modules. They are all hardware units at the moment, either standard rack mount modules or soundcard based; so no issues with latency there. The last time I seriously tried software emulated sounds I had too much issue with latency for me to concider it viable. If I can't play it live from an instrument, either a keyboard or a midi guitar then I'm not really interested. But that was some time ago and computer performance has improved greatly. The sound quality of modern software synths is superb, I just need them to respond quickly enough to be able to drive them from a real instrument. What are you using as the input device/instrument?

Hey Chris, if I wanted to drive Native Instruments from a midi input what sort of latency am I looking at?

Very nice Chris. It's so easy to tell when a real musician has composed the music, even when using electronic tools, as opposed to the myriad of 'computer' musicians we get these days! This has soul and feel to it. Great job!

Same with my adventure game. Nice to get away from all the emphasis on violence! To add some interest the player does have spell casting ability in order to defeat would be enemies ... prepare for the return of the 'Chicken Morphing Spell' amongst others

Looking really cool Chris and Roland, excellent work. I really like the outline shader graphics style and the scenery looks great! Will be interested to see how this develops.

Good advise. We all benefit from hindsight but it's inherently never acquired until after it's required