Or off to the side if you want. You should be able to choose where to put it in the Options, just like you can choose what keys you want to use for the commands.

Eh, maybe. Actually, I think I like Howitz's original idea with just having the effects on the screen change to different shades of colors to indicate health was good. We may still allow a health bar, but not by default. Nonetheless, we should try and make the effects as indicating as possible, so the player doesn't necessarily need the health bar to know what kind of health he has.

That's what I've been trying to say: it doesn't exist by default, but if you turn it on in options and hit Q, it shows up.

In other news, I hear Joris is coming back...he wants to help out with graphics.

Joris is back? Really?

Didn't he leave the site a while before I arrived?

He left years ago. I showed him what we have for the project though, and he says he might want to help make it. So, look out for him in the next few days.

btw, this is page 7 of the forum. also known as

THE BIGGEST FORUM OF THE SITE!!!!!(to my knowledge)

and oh yeah, i saw joris too. i didn't know who he is. cool creeper avatar, though.

Thread, not forum.

Very busy, will post images later.

Joris? Never seen him, but then again I never went looking in any old threads...

It'll be cool to meet one of the "original goofans".

I was on the site for about a year before becoming Albino Pokey, and I saw him on the old NotWog2 project. Didn't he have a Flash SWF logo with Goo Ball eyes on it as his avatar?

Yes. His user id is in the six-hundreds! Even my original is early 3000s. He's old, man.

If I'd waited 5 minutes when making my account, it would have been number 6666. I actually checked: a few strange, never-posting users did create accounts right after mine.

Randomness. Please comment on my XML proposal.

I did.

I joined a few months after him, and I'm in the 2000's.

Anyhoo, back on topic: I think that Howitz's ideas are awesome, but I want to make a few pointers:

-Some people really like a number on HP. You'll have to have a number on it anyhow for the game to be able to tell how much HP you have, but put it in the options someplace to enable/disable it. Some players like stuff like that, some don't. If you make the screen-edge flashy thing good enough, players probably won't care, but my big point for this is: CUSTOMIZEABLILITY IS ALWAYS A GOOD THING IN GAMES. A key config screen is a definite must. When I first started playing Minecraft, I changed the inventory key to E, since it was easier for me to use, and since I didn't have to look down each time I opened the inventory. Turns out, Notch eventually realized this too, and changed the default key to E. Make sure your default key combos don't require players to ever look down at the keyboard. That totally ruins the gaming experience. For example, Howitz suggested LCTRL for opening up a menu. Bad idea. My pinky doesn't reach that far when my left hand is on WASD. I'd have to look down to see what I was doing, and that would probably be in the middle of some big boss fight when I was about to get slaughtered. Also, if you're going to make an option to turn a HUD on/off, don't make it a key right around where the player is going to be pressing. They may hit it on accident, and it just clogs up prime space where you should be having keys that players use a whole lot. My guess is that players won't turn it on/off a ton, so burying it in a menu is a good idea.

-As for screen-border-flashing: If it's done well, this is a great idea. But sometimes this isn't done well. In some FPS's I've seen, practically the entire screen except the center goes red, giving the player tunnel vision. That's terrible. Make sure you don't obstruct the players' view AT ALL, and make sure the flashing/whatever isn't overly distracting. If the player is dying, it's probably because they're in a really intense area, and they'll want to be able to concentrate on what they're doing rather than straining to see through a mostly-red screen or finding themselves distracted by a flashy screen border.
(For the record, the only FPS game that I've ever liked was DOOM 1. I despise FPS's for reasons like this. A lot of modern-day FPS's try for epic realism and succeed, at the cost of terrible gameplay, pathetic controls, worthless storylines, etc. Never sacrifice gameplay for realism! It should ALWAYS go the other way around. You mentioned Cave Story earlier; in one part of it there are these ghostlike creatures shooting bubble-looking thingies at you as you try to climb a tattered wall. Realistic? No. Fun? Heck, yes. That was one of the coolest parts of the game; and I think I've already mentioned the sideways-gravity for the powerups there; ingenious.)

-To mouse or not to mouse? That is the question, and it depends entirely on what sort of game you're making. Don't rule out the mouse from the very start; If the player is using WASD and spacebar, where should their right hand go? This is an important question. Trine, Minecraft, and Terraria make great uses of the WASD and mouse combo, and it's pretty much standard in all FPS games. Aiming with the keyboard is ridiculously impossible, unless your player can only shoot at four angles. Make sure that your game mechanics make sense, and make sense for how the game itself works. There's nothing better than key combos that work perfectly with how the game is made, and nothing worse than clunky controls or a bad key configuration. Keep in mind that players may change it anyhow; I personally changed Terraria to mimic Minecraft closer, as I'd grown used to Minecraft's controls. But if I'd been playing Terraria first, I'd probably change Minecraft's controls to match Terraria closer. Make sure that it's set up in a way that makes sense, and keep in mind that players may change the key config willy-nilly anyway. If your controls are perfect for the game, however, players will see how much thoughtwork you put into them, and probably won't change them at all. They'll also look on you highly because of how much effort you put into making the game fit together. Controls are important!

-Key combos for spells: Really good idea, and I like it a lot. Try to keep things as simple as possible, though; I hate having to go into a game and memorize a zillion strategies and complicated commands, because chances are I'll give up in frustration because I've forgotten something important that was required to get past the first level. Aquaria, on the other hand, pulls it off brilliantly with the song system. You start out just swimming around casually. After a few minutes of gameplay, you come across one simple song that's easy to remember and execute. Later, you come across another simple song, and so forth. The complicated songs are saved until far later in the game (hours of gameplay later, really), and the time between learning songs is really large, so you have a chance to practice each one and remember it. There's also a handy menu just a keypress away that'll show you all the songs you've learned so far, and play them back for you in case you forgot. These things together make a fairly complex gameplay mechanic simple, nonfrustrating, and easy to use. Not to mention ingenious and fun.

-Also, and this is important: WATCH THE KEY COMBOS YOU USE. What worries me is what you've said so far about "pressing the up and down arrow key at the same time, then releasing to cast x spell". I don't know how you usually use the arrow keys, but pressing both up and down at the same time is completely impossible for me. I generally have my right index on the left arrow, my middle finger for both the up and down arrow keys (Since up and down are generally mutually exclusive), and my ring finger for the right arrow key. Pressing up and down at the same time would involve pressing my hand flat on the keyboard (Which is bad ergonomically), or using my index finger to press the down arrow key (Which not only is difficult, but it would make it so you couldn't use the left arrow key in that combo). I'd encourage you to think out specifically what combos you'd use, and make sure they work in real life.

Overall, though, I like your ideas. Sounds cool so far. Keep it up!

Good point about the arrow combos! I hadn't thought about that!

Anyway, when you press a spell combo key, it should show a little arrow key diagram up in the top right of the screen until you release it, showing which key does what. The one you're pressing glows sort of: fire burns brighter, water splashes frantically, etc.

Ah, yeah, that's a good idea, AP. Reminds me; I didn't give my two cents on what Howitz said earlier about the menu being below the player:

-Don't make the player block the menu. I know you don't want the menu to block the player, and that's an important consideration also. But if the player can't see what he/she is selecting, there's no point to the menu in the first place. If this is a quick menu that pops up for an instant, or if it's a unobtrusive sort of menu (See the radial menu in Secret of Mana), or if the game pauses while the menu is open, or that sort of thing, the menu blocking the player should be a nonissue. However, the player blocking the menu is a big mistake; should the player have to move to be able to see what menu item they're selecting? No indeed. Secret of Mana had fairly small menu icons, so they didn't block much, and the game also paused, the rest of the screen darkened so you could see the menu items easier, and that sort of thing. Very good idea. If worst comes to worst, you could always also make the menu semitransparent, so the user can still see what's going on, or make the menu appear around the edges of the screen (or at least in a wide diameter around the player) so it doesn't block anything terribly important.

This is almost sounding like Kirby, for heavens sake! Maybe we should just have the mouse instead. A hotbar of sorts, scrolling with mouse wheel or #'s, or is that too much like Minecraft?

I personally despise the scroll-with-mousewheel or number-keys control scheme, for several reasons:

1. I have this very nice mouse. It's nice except sometimes the wheel glitches and thinks I scrolled it. It's highly sensitive, I guess, maybe a little too much so. Anyway, this becomes a huge problem when you're mining an obsidian block in Minecraft and it accidentally scrolls to another item. Suddenly, your precious time spent mining the block is utterly wasted. Worse yet, it seems to like to scroll down, so it switches to the compass and I get teleported someplace entirely different. To be sure, this isn't the fault of Notch, but some mousewheels are more sensitive than others, and sometimes scrolling a single notch on a mousewheel can be next to impossible, depending on the mouse.

2. So use the number keys. And that's what I do. And hate every second of it. Why? Because of what I discussed earlier; it forces me to look down at the keyboard. As a game developer, your goal should be to make an immersive game, so much so that the player doesn't realize that they're in a game and that they don't even hear their Mom yelling at them to get off the computer. Forcing players to take their eyes off the screen isn't a good idea. And it isn't just my fault that I haven't memorized where the keys are; I've played Terraria and Minecraft for quite a long time, and still have to look down to see what key to press.

3. As for looking down, sometimes I play late at night in a darkened room. It's very nice, but if I have to look down, I have to strain by the light of the computer screen to see what key is what. This makes a bad problem worse.

So my two cents are that the numberkeys+scrollwheel should always be avoided. The control scheme is the only thing I dislike about Minecraft, really.

I'm the opposite in both cases, I'm used to my keyboard( as well as my mousewheels. Maybe my mouse is less sensitive than yours. Anywho, you're right. That control scheme can get annoying. So, back to our original plan with attacks/abilities being arrow keys?

I want to avoid using arrow keys for that purpose. But not harmful to throw out ideas, right?

Actually, I honestly think we should think this a bit over. We are going into something so bluntly that might cause us to end up scrapping everything we thought of.

An RPG with Puzzles, yes? What kind of puzzles?

I'll get more into that and post some sketches as well when i come back some time today.

Maybe not puzzles, just quests, maybe just linear maps, going to other ones, with the occasional hidden hunting ground here and there.

I LUVS HIDDEN STUFF!

The problem is hiding it right. Cleverly-hidden stuff is brilliant, but some 'hiding methods' quickly become cliche. Same thing with puzzles. I love a brilliant puzzle (Like in Braid), but some can quickly become overly difficult. Trauma from the Frozen Synapse Bundle has some great puzzles, but it's a fairly easy game. I vote for puzzles, but I'm fairly terrible at making them.

I might have a go with a puzzle or two, once we got the engine going. I don't think I'm great at it, but sometimes I have some good ideas.

Like I was saying earlier, one example of a good puzzle might be like so:

- You go through what looks like an impossible dungeon-type area, filled with traps and monsters.
- Their attacks miss and the traps backfire.
- You get into this strange room.
- The ceiling collapses behind you.
- You find a scroll for a time travel spell. (Remember, scrolls are one-time-use magic items, like uncombinable potions)
- You travel back in time.
- The scroll reappears, the chamber is intact, and there's an invisibility cloak/potion/magic item lying on the ground.
- If you use the scroll again, you create a paradox and die (it's destroyed, so your past self can't find and use it)
- You have to travel back through the dungeon, invisible, and sabotage the traps and weaken the monsters. (Rust spell on weapon, poison, etc.)
- You have to get out before your past self runs into you.
- If you fail to put anything in the right state for your past self, you create a paradox and die.
-

I had a puzzle/RPG kind of game idea written down somewhere...but it deals with a lot of physics. If you guys want to hear it, I got a story and stuff down for that already.

Physics is good, and much easier in 2D than 3.

I have some code written up for physically simulated projectiles from a different project. I'll make it into a C++ class and post it.

Well here is my idea for more of a puzzle game than a fighting game:

You are basically an inexperienced mage, who can wield only 1 power at the moment: The ability to create blocks of ICE, anywhere, with the click of the mouse. You may use the properties of this ICE BLOCK, such as the fact that it is ICE and will MELT. This magical Ice lasts 3 seconds, and disintegrates afterwards. Placing it in fire will cause it to disintegrate as well. It is also a BLOCK. You can step on it, use it as a weight, etc.

You later receive other spells that can have a double purpose. For instance, a fire ax spell that is thrown by the character, has significant drop, sets things on fire, but is still an AX.

All this will have to do with specific properties and physics to create the puzzles. Defeating enemies will also be a puzzle: DO it wrong, and your chances of dying are greater.