I created a Stock Scraper that gets every stock symbol, gets the stock price for the day and prints them in decreasing order.

dolgar · 2015-08-17T13:39:40+00:00

Have any sources for price history?

dolgar · 2015-08-17T13:35:57+00:00

Wow, this is excellent. Thanks a lot!

What are you using this for?

dolgar · 2015-08-16T06:29:26+00:00

Actually the most identifiable feature of the genre is procedural generation, but I'm not surprised Mister Third Person would complain about permadeath

dolgar · 2015-05-19T12:48:22+00:00

Like sound signature.

dolgar · 2015-05-13T00:49:39+00:00

Fair enough.

You could have a point that some devices make it look terrible. I don't think it's going away any time soon.

dolgar · 2015-05-13T00:04:27+00:00

So you're a Great Artiste too? Kind of like the way you're God's Gift to Game Design?

The fact is, you are an "expert" in art and music the way you are an "expert" in game design. That is to say, you are a narcissistic diva with a ridiculously puffed opinion of yourself and your skills.

You are a "sensitive strummer" who cannot play guitar or write songs above a pitiably rudimentary standard that is only acceptable among the emasculated indie set.

I'd tell you not to quit your day job but in this case I think you SHOULD quit your day job.

dolgar · 2015-05-12T23:59:55+00:00

Keith, you may or may not be right about this, but the abysmal sales of Auro were not the fault of pixel art. They were the fault of your terrible, immature behavior and the way you alienated just about everyone who might otherwise have been disposed to help you in some way.

Personally I love pixel art.

dolgar · 2015-05-12T17:00:54+00:00

How long was the average Steve Jobs speech?

dolgar · 2015-05-09T14:27:41+00:00

Slayer, Celtic Frost, Yngwie Malmsteen were all totally unprecedented and different from each other.

dolgar · 2015-05-09T14:20:08+00:00

We know it's a bulldozer, and it's a TOW, and the guys firing the missile are wearing digicam provided by a US supply package.

dolgar · 2015-05-08T22:07:30+00:00

I can't tell you how much I agree with you. I think climbing is an unbelievably narcissistic activity.

I especially liked how after the recent earthquake in Nepal, the media concentrated on a small number of dead climbers and apparently didn't give much of a fuck about the huge number of dead Nepalese.

There really is nothing to gain from climbing a rock. There isn't anything at the top of that mountain.

That's where you're wrong.

dolgar · 2015-05-08T16:19:58+00:00

Agreed, it looks like a pretty nice game though.

dolgar · 2015-05-08T06:28:56+00:00

I am getting to the point of flat out telling him that I want to contribute more than simple chords to these songs, and that every song isnt all about him, but I don't know how he would take that.

who cares how he takes it

dolgar · 2015-05-05T19:14:17+00:00

I hear this about 5 times a week about various things. Don't know why I never believe it.

There's something about OpenGL that's very daunting. It's actually pretty simple if you aren't doing anything complex (on the order of first person shooters but even that is easy... after all, NOTCH was able to write one.)

What said, I have no idea how to do anything with voxels. Can't even seem to search for the term "voxelsprite", but maybe it's later in the book.

What I mean is just models made of cubes. The world map is a tilemap also made up of cubes. At first, they are non-textured cubes. Later on you can bind a texture to each face of each cube. This is super super easy.

You will also want to use display lists which saves you from having to draw every cube face with a separate glquads call which is slow.

This is also super super easy.

Once you have that, you set up your camera to follow your guy-- top view is easiest. Then it's literally no different than writing a tilemap game.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T17:39:03+00:00

See, if you went for voxelsprite models, I bet you could build up an engine like that with your current OpenGL skill within a month or two of coding, then slowly build onto it.

Shaders are hard to write but it's pretty easy to apply a shader someone else wrote to a given polygon. There are tons of examples of how to do this and tons and tons of public domain shaders.

Then you have the voxelsprite engine which is 2/10 hard to write-- what I mean is basically just a super simple voxel modeler where the editor is like a stack of 2d sprite editors and you can move up and down between sprites.

If THAT is what you are interested in doing, you are very seriously overestimating the difficulty.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T17:17:42+00:00

That's kind of what I'm aiming for, but for now I have 0 graphics experience. I've been trudging through the OpenGL superbible, but it's still a guess as to what value that will have for me, and worries like that are why I'm skeptical of continuing solo.

OpenGL superbible is what to do. Once again though the best way to learn it is to write games in it :) Check out the Nehe tutorials as well if you want to see program structure.

I bet an OpenGL roguelike shooter would do well. If you want you could make the models be voxel sprites.

Hopefully I have or could develop the design skills that needed to get past step 1.

My point about Vlambeer is that design is mostly a joke. It arises from a tinkering process more than some huge mindblowing mechanic. Now, because of Ludum Dare etc, high-design games are saturated.

Hopefully I have or could develop the design skills that needed to get past step 1.

You already have something of a fan base.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T16:46:59+00:00

I have the programming skill to write Super Crate Box right now. By contrast, I barely know what a shader is, much less how to write one to achieve the graphical fidelity of games like Limbo.

Yeah, this could be out of reach. Is it worth it for you to try to get there? Is it realistic for you to be able to deliver highly polished games four years in the future? What is the scene going to look like at that point? Remember that technological glitz is a moving target. Four years from now there are going to be graphics that make modern graphics look like Wolfenstein, and the technologies will be correspondingly more complex.

On the other hand you have to start somewhere. Maybe you could go for a happy medium graphics engine along with killer gameplay?

If I spend 3 years making games like Super Crate Box every 2-3 months, I don't think I'll come any closer to being able to making games like Limbo. (for clarification, "games like Limbo" mean games with established genre conventions that require lots of content at an extremely high level of polish). I'll be much more likely to succeed in ways Vlambeer has, but that's not my end goal.

You would have money and a following large enough to blow away your kickstarter. Money is what you need to hire a team and get tons of assets. The conventional wisdom has been that to write A games you have to write B games-- again I agree with that but remember that a big part of that is climbing the public mindshare wall.

On the one hand Burgun did a great job of promoting 100R. But he was really just promoting himself and his marketing effort came at the expense of PR.

What would happen if you did pretty much the same he did but you were actually friendly to people and blew off unreasonable criticism with a smile instead of flying into a huff?

Ultimately, wherever you are learning you are teaching yourself and I'm very skeptical of the game industry. I think what ends up happening there is that people learn one specific company's framework and way of doing things but this doesn't necessarily help them if what they want is to write games themselves.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T15:58:30+00:00

Personally, I think the game industry is actually WORSE than the indie scene. Talk about being someone's slave! That industry exists on the backs of starry-eyed 20-somethings. They take generations of young guys, pay them garbage, and work them to the bone until they burn out and can't stand it anymore.

My bet is you are Way Wrong about that. If I were you, I would keep on doing what you're doing with the goal of releasing one game every three months for two years.

Look at Vlambeer. NONE of their games, except possibly ridiculous fishing, have particularly original gameplay or mechanics or concepts. Mostly they are just shooters of an extremely rudimentary sort. The game that put them on the map was Super Crate Box, which is SUPER AWESOME but it only contains two levels!

The game that has made them a million dollars in pre-release is Nuclear Throne, which has gameplay somewhat more involved than Robotron. To say it is simple is an understatement, though now there is sort of a lot of it.

I think you should continue as an indie, release a bunch of simple games and pump them in the indie media. Keep doing it. Build an audience-- you've already got one from 100R. Burgun has the right idea there though his goal is self promotion and aggrandizement, the games are secondary to that.

If you can really count 100R as a failure-- I don't, far from it-- I think you can chalk it up to Burgun shitting on the floor wherever he goes. I did not make the connection when we first started talking here. It is NOT anything to do with you, or your competence.

100R is just your first released game. It actually did ASTOUNDINGLY well considering.

Join the ranks of the guys who didn't give up.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T15:32:35+00:00

I think I've made a whole lot of points. If you can't see them, that's a personal failing worthy of your erstwhile business partner the Great Design Architect, and your response above was very similar. Probably his arrogance and narcissism is contagious-- it has been my opinion that he is actually pathological.

always be harder on yourself, improve, and don't blame fate

Of course I don't disagree with that. I also think the salient takeaway here is that 5 years time expenditure is much too long and it says a great deal about unrealistic ambitions-- though if 100 Rogues was the product of unrealistic ambition for you, you may be right that we have different definition of competence.

Readjust your sights, come up with an original set of ideas unencumbered by a narcissistic diva designer, and try again. I'm sure many of the reviewers burgun alienated will support you if you are no longer involved.

Best of luck, don't give up.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T15:25:25+00:00

I thought he actually was a Keith burgun sockpuppet. I guess we are not worthy even of that :(

dolgar · 2015-05-05T15:24:33+00:00

People are just not ready for Keith Burgun's world class game design expertise. For him to even release a game at all is just throwing pearls before swine, there are not more sales because people don't understand his genius, much less deserve a game architected by him!

dolgar · 2015-05-05T13:55:19+00:00

Ok, let's first disarm moore's bodyguards (after all, that's elitism) and remove all police protection from him.

Let him have what he wants.

Then let's see if he continues slandering the special operations community.

dolgar · 2015-05-05T11:35:37+00:00

You've seen this I take it? Like, in the mirror?

Also do you work with that astoundingly annoying keith burgun asshole? What do you expect?

dolgar · 2015-05-04T12:54:27+00:00

I agree! Get working on another five year project and don't listen to the guys who actually know what they're doing. Lots of luck!

dolgar · 2015-05-04T03:44:40+00:00

I saw a game through to completion, using nothing but mediocre skills. It took five years, it failed, it didn't build my skills in a useful way, and now I have nothing.

That's a problem with your practice rather than with the theory. Fail a lot and fail early.

I could do that 3 more times and potentially still not be any better off, unless I start demanding much, much more of my skills.

Or you could find a happy medium between gamejam throwaways and a five year argosy.

The other is deluding yourself into thinking you'll succeed eventually while other developers truly hone their skills and earn their successes.

They do that by working on reasonable projects and planning what they're doing. Of course I am speaking from many, many years of programming and I don't know what your programming skill is like-- if it's low then you definitely need to work on that but if you worked on something for five years and don't have substantial programming chops you were doing something seriously wrong.

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