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VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

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Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#121

Post by umvi »

pdpi wrote: post #72

Oh gods. VVVVVV's core mechanic is that you don't so much "jump" as you just flip gravity, and you only get to do so when your feet are firmly on the floor. This leads to some very interesting designs. The stage "Veni Vidi Vici (Doing Things The Hard Way)" is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game. Just a tiny little block, trivial to jump over, but the lack of a jump button means you have to.…

> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game

That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste. Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative).

The Celeste Chapter 9 golden strawberry though... that has got to be the most evil collectible I've ever seen included in a mainstream game. I would bet To put it in perspective - to earn a golden strawberry you must beat the level without dying once. If you die, you are sent all the way back to the beginning. This isn't too hard if the level only takes 10 minutes to beat like Chapter 1. However, Chapter 9 took me over 4 hours to beat and I died over 1,000 times. And not only that, if you manage to beat Chapter 9 without dying, you are transported to a secret extra level (that you've never had a chance to practice). You have one chance to beat the secret extra level without dying - only then does the game award the golden strawberry.

I can't even fathom the amount of time and practice required to accomplish this feat. It must be up there with some of those insane Mario Maker levels.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#122

Post by cookiecaper »

ddevault wrote: post #119

Ethan Lee worked on this! Ethan Lee is an awesome person. Ethan is probably the single biggest contributor to gaming on Linux, and he's always worked in the background. Thanks Ethan, you rock, and deserve more credit.

Maybe I've just been out of the scene too long, but can't let mention of Linux gaming luminaries go without Ryan C. Gordon of Loki Games/icculus.org. For many years, if there was a big project coming to Linux, Ryan Gordon was likely to be the wizard behind it.

His homepage: http://icculus.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_C._Gordon

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/icculus

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#123

Post by BinaryIdiot »

jandrese wrote: post #91
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Roblox was a game... is it also a game making platform?

Most of the Roblox games are user created. It ships with Roblox studio. Just remember that the average age of a Roblox player is like 8, so in-depth RPGs or complex sim games probably won't get a lot of traction.

Unfortunately most of Roblox games are just attempts to siphon your money by buying Robux. Their target market, kids around 8, beg their parents for Robux so they can buy some stuff in one person's game.

It's incredible how much money they make through tactics that make many of their games not really enjoyable unless you spend a lot of money in them.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#124

Post by SquareWheel »

alvarosevilla95 wrote: post #118
SquareWheel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF. Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.

To be fair I see a fundamental difference between changing a words pronunciation and meaning.

That's true enough.

Related, the definition of gif has actually changed for some. Instead of a specific file format they use the term to mean "soundless looping video". Admittedly even I have a hard time swallowing that definition.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#125

Post by klodolph »

ehsankia wrote: post #109
klodolph wrote: post #58

It’s always great to be able to study the source code for successful, released, real games. I will note that this is actually the source code of the C++ rewrite! The original game was written in Flash, and this version was apparently written by Simon Roth. My impressions: The source code is a bit of a tangle here. There are magic numbers ( https://wiki.c2.com/?MagicNumber ) all over the place, plenty of god classes (…

> This is not really out of the ordinary for successful, released, real games Well said. A lot of people will nitpick and talk big about how they would use proper abstraction and write very clean code, but probably none of those people have ever had a successful indie game out.

To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack, who has put out a few games.

What I’ve seen is that it’s hard for someone who’s not released a game before and supported it post-release to know where and how you can sacrifice code quality for a faster development time.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#126

Post by marcosdumay »

chasing wrote: post #32
tombert wrote: post #22

You know, people like to crap on Flash (and there are valid reasons to do so), but I really miss how quick you could get a game built with it, while it still felt like "real" programming. With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two. I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated…

Flash was awesome and it's can't be overstated how much it empowered the indie game community in the aughts. Seems like people crap on it not because of the tool itself but because Adobe dropped the ball and let it become a crashy, resource-hogging mess, aligning powerful people (like Steve Jobs) against it.

People crap on Flash because of the sites made on it. It wasn't for games nor videos.

Adobe had a site building tool that was more productive than ASP, but only barely so, and created sites that would break on about every computer. The few times they were working, they would have completely non-standard UI elements, including buttons and links, and break nearly all interaction modes.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#127

Post by Marazan »

azhenley wrote: post #33
tombert wrote: post #22

You know, people like to crap on Flash (and there are valid reasons to do so), but I really miss how quick you could get a game built with it, while it still felt like "real" programming. With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two. I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated…

Flash was great and I haven't found a direct replacement yet (GameMaker Studio 2 is the closest I have found). I pumped out 8 Flash games about a decade ago that generated enough ad revenue to cover all my bills for a few years! I miss how easy it was. Another huge win is how effortless it was to distribute Flash games (they spread like wildfire after I uploaded it to one or two sites).

It's not the loss of Flash per se (as there are plenty of rapid game making tools targetting HTML5 about) it's the complete collapse of the supporting infrastructure.

Mochi Media closing was huge. I went from getting a steady trickle of money for games I wrote to nothing.

As far as I can see there is no Mochi for HTML5 games. Every portal is its own closed environment.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#128

Post by djur »

SquareWheel wrote: post #114
joshuamorton wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood? A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF. Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.

Seems more like calling a JPEG a GIF.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#129

Post by jimmaswell »

chasing wrote: post #32
tombert wrote: post #22

You know, people like to crap on Flash (and there are valid reasons to do so), but I really miss how quick you could get a game built with it, while it still felt like "real" programming. With Flash, I felt like a nice "one-stop-shop" in a lot of ways; you could draw your graphics, animate them, and code them, and you could get a simple game made in an hour or two. I haven't tried Unity or really any other dedicated…

Flash was awesome and it's can't be overstated how much it empowered the indie game community in the aughts. Seems like people crap on it not because of the tool itself but because Adobe dropped the ball and let it become a crashy, resource-hogging mess, aligning powerful people (like Steve Jobs) against it.

I feel like Google simply didn't like users having such control over extending their browsers' functionality in ways that are harder to track, so they started the anti-flash bandwagon by abusing their browser's market share to kill it along with all other add-ons (a continuation of their death grip on what extensions are allowed and making unapproved extensions not available to the average user either), leaving a vast graveyard of significant, great content unavailable to the average web user. The golden age of web functionality was the period of HTML5 and Flash both being supported at the same time and Firefox having full support for NPAPI and the old extension system including allowing unsigned extensions. Now we're stuck suffocating in sterilized walled gardens almost everywhere we go. Android still lets you install third party apps for now at least but I bet the days of that are numbered too. Sad state of affairs for users all around.

Re: VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now

#130

Post by mey »

umvi wrote: post #121
pdpi wrote: post #72

Oh gods. VVVVVV's core mechanic is that you don't so much "jump" as you just flip gravity, and you only get to do so when your feet are firmly on the floor. This leads to some very interesting designs. The stage "Veni Vidi Vici (Doing Things The Hard Way)" is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game. Just a tiny little block, trivial to jump over, but the lack of a jump button means you have to.…

> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste . Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative). The Celeste Chapter 9 gol…

You may be interested in the TAS (Tool assisted speedrun) of Celeste from AGDQ 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEcv7BD1q9o

ADGQ 2020 is currently going on.

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