367 replies to this topic

[chance]

Thank you, I was just about to ask a mod if they could stop the flame war in here.

What flame war? You got some criticism. So take it under consideration and see if anyone else has the same issue. Better some objective critique from NPT, instead of frothing, wide-eyed admiration from your fanboy, iPacMan.

Anyway... Overall, this issue was better. Still a bit bland, frankly. But you guys are moving in the right direction. So I'll keep reading.

[BretHudson]

Thank you, I was just about to ask a mod if they could stop the flame war in here.

What flame war? You got some criticism. So take it under consideration and see if anyone else has the same issue. Better some objective critique from NPT, instead of frothing, wide-eyed admiration from your fanboy, iPacMan.

It sounded like one was about to start between NPT and Broxter, in my opinion.

Anyway... Overall, this issue was better. Still a bit bland, frankly. But you guys are moving in the right direction. So I'll keep reading.

Thanks, it really means a lot to hear people believe in us.

Also, for everyone reading, indie(Function); had a huge meeting (2-3 hours, lost track of time). We discussed methods we're going to use to make the radio and magazine better, and talked about all the feedback we've received over the last week and a half. We're seeing how we can use it and ways we can achieve these requests, such as more opinionated news. The meeting was a good one, and we're planning on making the radio and magazine WAY more appealing to listen/read.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

[iPacMan]

What flame war? You got some criticism. So take it under consideration and see if anyone else has the same issue. Better some objective critique from NPT, instead of frothing, wide-eyed admiration from your fanboy, iPacMan.

Anyway... Overall, this issue was better. Still a bit bland, frankly. But you guys are moving in the right direction. So I'll keep reading.

No, i think if you read my comment you would see it was pretty balanced.

I do agree with you though, there needs to be a bigger push in terms of how the content is delivered, but they are moving in the right direction nonetheless, as you stated.

And i look forward to hearing more about that Flash thingy.

[iPacMan]

Also, for everyone reading, indie(Function); had a huge meeting (2-3 hours, lost track of time). We discussed methods we're going to use to make the radio and magazine better, and talked about all the feedback we've received over the last week and a half. We're seeing how we can use it and ways we can achieve these requests, such as more opinionated news. The meeting was a good one, and we're planning on making the radio and magazine WAY more appealing to listen/read.

That's real good news, looking forward to that.

[Nikc-Nack]

I just returned from my camp and will be back in action on the magazine. Broxter seems to have done an excellent job while I was away!


Nikc-Nack(magazine manager)

[Desert Dog]

New Yoyogames Staff Hired
Not new, and some pretty silly speculation, including how they were going to get paid.

Ignoring the fact/assumption that he's working on games that YYG's will publish, and ignoring the grant YYG's received for creating new jobs, you decide to inform me that YYG's will 'get the money from us', and probably plan to raise the price of GM 'again'.

Minecraft hit by Hackers
I don't play Minecraft, and I don't care(sorry) and I'm sure that those who play Minecraft will know all about this.

If you want to cover indie games, how about Desktop Dungeons? The original version was made in GM, and is currently the only version available(including a Mac version) but their remaking, in fact, remade it in Unity, and it's set to release soon. Pre-orders are available, it looks.


/end rant. I see too much of Minecraft.

Anyway, lots, and I mean LOTS of punk content.

Good to see plenty of game reviews.

vk stands for virtual keycode. It isn't just for the directional keys, like vk_right, but also most of the typical keys.. vk_enter, etc.

They are integer constants. You 'could' just write keyboard_check(4) or something, in fact, in fact, you essentially *are* writing just that.. but being human, you understand vk_right much more clearly than a bunch of numbers..!
(that 4 I used was just an arbitrary number pulled out of nowhere. It's not the keycode of the right arrow key)

If you wrote, say, keyboard_check(ord('A')); what that does is take the ascii value of the character 'A' (which is 65) and returns it. You could write keyboard_check(65) but ugh, that's ugly. Only machines understand numbers!!

GM doesn't have vk_A, or vk_etc. But it's got virtual keycodes for most of the random keys like shift and that. You can actually definite your own vk_A constants if you wish.

...anyways...

It was nice to see something on GM coding. What I'd like to see, is rather than yet another basic coding tutorial, but rather, to share a particular 'trick' you do. Whether it be how you get that glow effect on your Space ship(yes, I'm looking at you TV..), to how you work your bullet collisions perfectly, or something like that. Since this isn't a GM specific magazine, maybe that isn't appropriate, though...
Ooh, I know, maybe you could interview TheSnidr! Or convince him to write a guest article. He makes those cool fake3d engines, maybe he could tell a bit about his work&methods,(and inspirations) and link to his engines, of course.

I have to agree somewhat with NPT about the text. At 100% zoom, the watermark+text does make it a bit harder to read. Zoomed up it's no issue, but I like to read further away...

Yeah, good magazine, like all the game reviews, although I skimmed most of 'em for now. I'll go back and read them later.

Edited by Desert Dog, 21 June 2011 - 07:03 AM.

[ugriffin]

There was no flamewar there. The truth is that denying the problem and going all 'oh well, too bad for you' isn't the best way to respond to people who are interested in the magazine and are only trying to help!

A simple fix is an alpha'ed rectangle under the text so as to improve contrast without killing visuals. And, I'm afraid I don't know what I'm doing... I'm no graphic designer (maybe I should take a course or two! Hehe). But I do know that I had problems reading your magazine too.

[BretHudson]

It was nice to see something on GM coding. What I'd like to see, is rather than yet another basic coding tutorial, but rather, to share a particular 'trick' you do. Whether it be how you get that glow effect on your Space ship(yes, I'm looking at you TV..), to how you work your bullet collisions perfectly, or something like that. Since this isn't a GM specific magazine, maybe that isn't appropriate, though...

We plan on doing stuff like that for future issues, but for this one, we wanted to promote the first step into GML, rather than just step right into advanced programming. We actually plan on having 3-5 tutorials in each magazine, with tutorials how to do it in multiple languages, such as GML, FlashPunk, Drag-and-Drop (not a language), Java, and HTML5 when that gets bigger.

Ooh, I know, maybe you could interview TheSnidr! Or convince him to write a guest article. He makes those cool fake3d engines, maybe he could tell a bit about his work&methods,(and inspirations) and link to his engines, of course.

That'd be interesting, we might do that.

A simple fix is an alpha'ed rectangle under the text so as to improve contrast without killing visuals. And, I'm afraid I don't know what I'm doing... I'm no graphic designer (maybe I should take a course or two! Hehe). But I do know that I had problems reading your magazine too.

Hopefully Broxter/Nikc-Nack will take that into consideration. I don't do any design work, but that makes sense to me. Hopefully that's how it could work.

Thank you everyone for your feedback, we're glad that people are willing to take the time to help us improve our products.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

[Broxter]

New Yoyogames Staff Hired
Not new, and some pretty silly speculation, including how they were going to get paid.

You should try reading some of the newspapers we have here in the UK...

I have to agree somewhat with NPT about the text. At 100% zoom, the watermark+text does make it a bit harder to read. Zoomed up it's no issue, but I like to read further away...

OK, no problem; that can easily be fixed for future issues. Thanks for the feedback. I honestly have no problems at all reading at 100% zoom; perhaps, for you, it's the combination of a high monitor contrast and how busy the background is.

There was no flamewar there. The truth is that denying the problem and going all 'oh well, too bad for you' isn't the best way to respond to people who are interested in the magazine and are only trying to help!

I appreciate that NPT was trying to help but he should seriously take a chill pill, as it were. On reflection and in hindsight, I realise I was ignorant of his feedback and that it was good feedback. For this, I will now sit and look at Bret's avatar for three days.

Edited by Broxter, 21 June 2011 - 10:16 AM.

[NAL]

Loved the (drastic) increase in quality in every aspect. Longer, written better, and much prettier.

Having said that, I'm skeptical how long you'll keep a magazine of this size going weekly. Every other example seems to have been weekly for a month, then monthly for about three months, then either disappeared or just released issues arbitrarily. If you could keep it going at this level and frequency though, it would be amazing.

Good stuff.

[Nikc-Nack]

Check out our freebie page!
Freebie Page

[BretHudson]

Loved the (drastic) increase in quality in every aspect. Longer, written better, and much prettier.

Having said that, I'm skeptical how long you'll keep a magazine of this size going weekly. Every other example seems to have been weekly for a month, then monthly for about three months, then either disappeared or just released issues arbitrarily. If you could keep it going at this level and frequency though, it would be amazing.

Good stuff.

We're planning on proving everyone who has doubts wrong and that it'll continue to go at this frequency. We have a rather large team with us (14 people currently), not all of them write for the magazine, but some of them do and when each of us do an article, that's about 10 for the magazine. We already have the design down, we'll just make modifications and put in our new content and it'll be done! So, for now, it should be pretty easy to keep up with weekly releases.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

[BretHudson]

indie(Radio); broadcast 3 live on air! http://en.1000mikes....show/indieradio

EDIT: The show is now over and has been uploaded. Link can be found on the first post in this topic.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

Edited by bretboy129, 25 June 2011 - 10:31 PM.

[chance]

The show is now over and has been uploaded. Link can be found on the first post in this topic.

My favorite part (and least favorite part) was hearing you stumble over such "big" words as obfuscator. You had similar trouble with complex game names like "Magnetico", and in another broadcast with "Innocuous".

Just teasing, of course. The show was OK. Not a replacement for a magazine issue, but it's fun to hear the people who write it. Just hoping your radio show doesn't take much time. Because I'd rather see more time invested in your magazine.

[BretHudson]

The show is now over and has been uploaded. Link can be found on the first post in this topic.

My favorite part (and least favorite part) was hearing you stumble over such "big" words as obfuscator. You had similar trouble with complex game names like "Magnetico", and in another broadcast with "Innocuous".

Haha! Yeah, being deaf in one ear doesn't help either. It's alright, it adds a little humor to the show!

Just teasing, of course. The show was OK. Not a replacement for a magazine issue, but it's fun to hear the people who write it. Just hoping your radio show doesn't take much time. Because I'd rather see more time invested in your magazine.

It takes an @$$load of time. Usually 3+ hours to record (not including planning time), and 3-4 hours to edit. We do put a lot of time into the magazine as well, and we have a rather large team.

We are trying to put more and more time into the magazine, but right now it seems as if the radio is of more importance to the team. We're having another meeting this Monday, and we'll be organizing the team more, so we'll spend less time figuring things out and more time doing things, such as writing magazine articles.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

Edited by bretboy129, 26 June 2011 - 12:50 PM.

[BretHudson]

indie(Magazine); Issue 3 has been uploaded. Check the first post for online viewing and download links.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson

[chance]

Glad to see another issue... reading it now.

Your explanation of an "obfuscator" is horrible. And not referring to word's common meaning, suggests you don't know what it means.

In common language, obfuscation is used to conceal meaning by making things sound overly complex. For example, instead of saying "sunset", I'd say the "temporal event signaling our nearest star's descent in the Occident, below the visual boundary between Terra Firm and the celestial heavens".

In programming, obfuscation does something similar by replacing resource and variable names with overly complex names to make it unreadable. So the variable "max_count" might become "ur85kk90_7_44j". They also do things like remove white space, and append several line of code.

So, for example:

if (max_count < limit)
{
v_speed += 1;
noise *= 1.1;
max_count += 1;
}

becomes:

if(ur85kk90_7_44j<r886_u74){t8i_3mmbj+=1;kb09_0_00o0*=1.1;ur85kk90_7_44j+=1;}

It only takes a few words to provide useful information -- instead of just saying "An obfuscator is basically a program that code is run through that mixes it up".

*****
In the new website article, you said "YoYoGames will force more users to revert to GameMaker 8.0/8.1". Here's a tip: the word "revert" usually means going back to a previous condition. GM7 users cannot "revert" to GM8, OK? A better choice here would be "upgrade".

*****
Reading the game reviews now. They look pretty good, so I'll comment again later.

.

Edited by chance, 27 June 2011 - 05:07 PM.

[theweirdn8]

@chance agreed.

What did you think of radio?

[iPacMan]

Reading it now fella's, chance thanks for that post on Obfuscation.

[BretHudson]

In the new website article, you said "YoYoGames will force more users to revert to GameMaker 8.0/8.1". Here's a tip: the word "revert" usually means going back to a previous condition. GM7 users cannot "revert" to GM8, OK? A better choice here would be "upgrade".

Did I seriously use the word revert? That was not intended, I'm sorry, I wish I could fix that.
-Bretboy129 ~ Bret Hudson