Gemini000 wrote:

similar to the effect Power Rangers had on the Sonic The Hedgehog SatAM series... >_>;

Power Rangers was a weekday show IIRC... A Saturday-only show can't go against that, and ABC never had good saturday morning programming until 1996-97 with the better Buena Vista-produced shows...

Fox Kids was a dominating force in 93-94 along with Amazing Spiderman and XMEN. Before the WB channel started the Fox Kids block had Batman and Animaniacs even along with it. A one-day-of-the-week furry cartoon based on a video game going against established game canon has no chance against that. Power Rangers is just a scapegoat of the fanbase.

Ironically it was the Fox Kids block that had the SEGA promotions and sweepstakes, including the later Saturn one which used Sonic Xtreme footage 😀

</offtopicbutsomepeoplemisrememberthe90s>

I think Magic Carpet II's bombing had a lot to do with marketing. I remember two-page ads with REALLY TINY screenshots at the bottom making it hard to explain what genre it even is in. The early demo with a very unexplained interface (no tooltips at all) probably doesn't help matters either.

leileilol wrote:

Power Rangers was a weekday show IIRC... A Saturday-only show can't go against that, and ABC never had good saturday morning programming until 1996-97 with the better Buena Vista-produced shows...

Actually, Power Rangers ran on Saturdays too, not just weekdays. :P

leileilol wrote:

I think Magic Carpet II's bombing had a lot to do with marketing. I remember two-page ads with REALLY TINY screenshots at the bottom making it hard to explain what genre it even is in. The early demo with a very unexplained interface (no tooltips at all) probably doesn't help matters either.

Despite my having purchased a few PC Gamer magazines around the time the game came out, I never knew about the sequel until I saw the EA Classics box of it on a store shelf while out in a mall for $20. I was specifically in the store to buy a new game so the moment I saw that I didn't even have to look at all the other titles. 'twas one of my most spontaneous game purchases ever. :B

I still have the box too but it's hiding away with my other game boxes in a much larger box somewhere following the move. :P

YouTube continues to be ridiculous. They're now asking me to prove commercial use rights to monetize Episode 48... which is already age-gated due to being a graphically violent game... which means it can't even BE monetized and I don't even get a tab to adjust monetization settings... seriously... >_>;

Don't be surprised if that particular episode disappears off of YouTube in the next few days or so and I end up having to re-upload it or something. I'll have to remember to manually disable monetization before setting age-gating on future videos with mature content to avoid stupidness like this. :/

Gemini000 wrote:

YouTube continues to be ridiculous. They're now asking me to prove commercial use rights to monetize Episode 48... which is already age-gated due to being a graphically violent game... which means it can't even BE monetized and I don't even get a tab to adjust monetization settings... seriously... >_>;

Don't be surprised if that particular episode disappears off of YouTube in the next few days or so and I end up having to re-upload it or something. I'll have to remember to manually disable monetization before setting age-gating on future videos with mature content to avoid stupidness like this. 😒

Remind them of the fair use exemption which allows the use of clips in review programs, documentaries, and such.

sliderider wrote:

Remind them of the fair use exemption which allows the use of clips in review programs, documentaries, and such.

Something I mentioned not terribly long ago in this thread:

Gemini000 wrote:

And that's really where it gets tricky. YouTube wants "commercial" use rights on 100% of your material, which is not the same as "fair" use rights. My reasoning for having commercial use rights for the gameplay I show is that because I had recorded and performed the gameplay footage myself, it cannot be reproduced exactly the same way by another person. Live action and voice recordings should be obvious, since they're my voice and my body so I get to decide what I do with them. Music in the background either belongs to the game being shown or is music I created on my own accord.

If you read through their policies, video game footage is supposedly NOT acceptable for monetization, which is strange when you consider the sheer number of people who've had monetized game footage on YouTube for years now, so I take it to mean the same thing Blip means when they say they don't allow it, in that, Blip doesn't allow RAW video game footage. Review-type material and parodies are OK on Blip. That said though, I've yet to see if my reasoning gets my videos under question on YouTube monetized or not as every video that's in question at the moment is STILL in question, a couple of which are now several weeks past their initial upload.

Though as I've also said before, I believe the process changes somewhat once you end up under someone else's banner and they start to control the rules of what is and is not allowed to be monetized... but that just makes it all the more confusing and convoluted when you consider YouTube's message about demanding proof of commercial use rights threatens to take down videos that don't comply with their monetization policies, when theoretically, they could just disable monetization for the video instead.

...and as I'm sure I've mentioned by now, their policies are numerous pages long, spread out across more than one branch of Google, some of which contradict each other, some of which are generalized and not specifically related to YouTube, many of which just aren't spelled out very well, and if you have any questions about their policies and manage to hunt down their customer service eMail address, (which is hidden away EXTREMELY well), they won't actually "answer" them and will instead point you back towards the same policies you had questions about as though you never read them in the first place. x_x;

Ancient DOS Games Filler #31 - End of 2013 Update is online!

Just a short little filler to answer a few questions on camera and let people know how the last couple months are gonna play out before regular episodes of ADG resume in January.

Also, I want to apologise to all of you guys for all the ranting I've done about YouTube lately. As I've said multiple times now, it's just really high stress using their system and there's not really a lot of places where I can vent about it. I'm doing my best to stay open-minded about the place and time will ultimately tell how it turns out.

I also recorded the live action for this video prior to the recent problem I mentioned... go figure. :P

Gemini000 wrote:

Ancient DOS Games Filler #31 - End of 2013 Update is online!

It seems like Blip may be having some trouble today, I got a "Currently unable to play this episode" error when I first loaded the page. On a reload it did start up, but Blip had muted itself for some reason.

kolano wrote:

It seems like Blip may be having some trouble today, I got a "Currently unable to play this episode" error when I first loaded the page. On a reload it did start up, but Blip had muted itself for some reason.

I got that too immediately after uploading, then it worked muted, and then it worked fine. Probably just a glitch of some kind. *shrugs*

Ancient DOS Games Filler #32 - So You Wanna Make Games? is online!

This has definitely been a long time coming, but now that I'm getting questions about getting into game design at least once a month, I figured it was high time to make such a video. Not to mention this is the first time one of my completed games has shown up on the show. (Space Fortress 2 was never actually finished.)

I don't tend to talk about the games I've already made all too much because they're highly out of date and are in desperate need of some updating. I'd been putting off updating them because I wanted to finish a new project first so that I'd be in the right mindset to properly update them, but because of how many design troubles I've run into with Vectorzone it's pushed all of that back as well. :/

I'm making at least a little progress every day though and I'm actually expecting to get back into coding either this weekend or very soon after, which is good. ;)

I considered a career in game development early on, but talking to people that actually do it professionally put me right off.

Long, tedious, thankless hours, watching the same sequence play out over and over and over and over, looking for any kind of inconsistency resulting from umpteen billion permutations of prior actions. Days, weeks, months, developing and troubleshooting some glut of code to prevent the player from falling through the floor when he pulls a lever from the wrong side on a Tuesday. AAA game development isn't the glamorous, fun thing your inner child wants it to be. It's rotten work, in rotten conditions, for rotten pay.

So you're spot on, when you say make games YOU would enjoy, work with people YOU choose, do it YOUR way, and don't involve money.

Oh don't get me wrong, every major project I complete in the future is something I will be selling, not giving away for free. Because Ancient DOS Games is ultimately a niché show, I don't ever expect to make a livable income off of ad revenue on it. (Though I'm not adverse to it becoming that popular either.)

This is why I'm continuing to make games and why I'm trying as hard as I can to solidify the Vectorzone design. The process hasn't been very beneficial to people who want to try the stuff I make due to the lack of playable alphas and such, but it's been very beneficial to myself and I've been learning a surprisingly huge amount of stuff the whole way through.

To give an example of how someone with 20 years of game design experience could still be learning new things: A couple major technical problems I solved with the Vectorzone design in just the past month include perfecting the fragment shader that creates the glow effect so that it looks the way I originally intended it to. (Basically, the solution was gamma correction.) And I also solved an extremely challenging problem with scaling the graphics in the game to provide the sharpest looking lines at all scaling factors. (50%, 100%, 150%, 200%, etc., looked fine, but it turned out I had to use slightly different math for factors of 75%, 125%, 175%, 225%, etc.)

I was actually going to get back into coding today, but I managed to get sick for more than just a few hours for my first time this year, so I've just been playing a bunch of Skyrim instead. ^_^;

I haven't watched your latest filler yet, but:

You ought to look up Rachel Morris on YouTube. She's also done some videos on getting started with game development, some of which mention both Allegro and other SDKs. Maybe you guys could even team up or something.

Gemini000 wrote:

Oh don't get me wrong, every major project I complete in the future is something I will be selling, not giving away for free.

Hey, you were the one doling out advice, I'm just agreeing with it! 😉

Besides, three out of four ain't bad. You make games you like, you work with people you choose (even if that's just yourself), and you do things your way (retro style, tracker music, etc).

SquallStrife wrote:

Hey, you were the one doling out advice, I'm just agreeing with it! ;)

Besides, three out of four ain't bad. You make games you like, you work with people you choose (even if that's just yourself), and you do things your way (retro style, tracker music, etc).

*nods* That really is the most important thing is, if you are gonna design a game, design it the way you want it to be and have fun making it, otherwise it just becomes tedious, boring, infurating, and usually creates a final product that isn't enjoyable by anyone.

Money should only be a factor if you yourself would pay money for the game you're making. And then you have to realistically ask yourself, "How MUCH money would I pay for this if someone else made it?"

There's actually a good guideline to follow given indie games nowadays, in USD:

$5 = Anything simple but addictive
$10 = Anything simple in execution but with lots of content and/or features
$15 = Anything complex with detailed story elements and many features, or a simpler game with multiplayer support
$20 = Anything complex with multiplayer support

And if your game is real-time 3D instead of 2D, add $5 to $10 on top of these depending on how complex the 3D is. (IE: Usage of sprites, special effects, number of different models, model animation style, etc.)

That's just a guideline of course and only really qualifies for indie-level stuff. The moment you start getting into the kind of graphical quality and gameplay complexity of a AAA commercial title, prices of $40 to $60 start to become justified from the massive amount of man hours which go into them, but now you REALLY need to deliver a solid product or people are going to be incredibly angry about how much money they wasted.

Good video. The focus on discussion of non-technical aspects was interesting.

It seems to me that it's not a bad time for indie developers to try to break into the business, as there are many smaller online retailers (like IndieGameStand) that are willing to sell some pretty small and/or obscure stuff for a buck or two. There's also Greenlight, but you'll never be greenlit unless you have an external marketing presence to get enough people to vote.

HunterZ wrote:

It seems to me that it's not a bad time for indie developers to try to break into the business, as there are many smaller online retailers (like IndieGameStand) that are willing to sell some pretty small and/or obscure stuff for a buck or two. There's also Greenlight, but you'll never be greenlit unless you have an external marketing presence to get enough people to vote.

Minecraft was the big breakthrough. The extreme popularity of Minecraft, coupled with its low cost compared to typical commercial titles (especially when it was still just in its Alpha and Beta stages), helped jolt people into realizing that independent developers are actually able to make some really good stuff. Steam first, then GOG later, subsequently tried experimenting with adding more indie titles and the response was overwhelmingly positive, so now they host even more indie stuff.

The simple fact is, it's never been a better time to be an indie developer. The places one would normally go for commercial titles now host indie games, and indie games are so much cheaper than commercial titles that people are more willing to give them a chance.

...but, the saturation outside of commecrial development channels is extreme. When I was doing research into tower defence games to see what kind of features had already been attempted so I could come up with something original for my own tower defence idea (which I'm probably not going to get to... oh well) I discovered that for every 1 tower defence game that's at least half-way decent, there's no less than TWENTY that are not. And that's just tower defence, never mind every other possible genre of games out there. >_>;

Still, so long as you know what you're doing, you've got a much better chance to break ground now as an indie developer than just a few years ago. If you don't know what you're doing, well, that's what learning is for! ;)

Funny that you mention tower defense. Or of all the games in that genre that I've really enjoyed at all is probably Revenge of the Titans. Well, Orcs Must Die was decent too, I guess.

BTW, Clint and I FINALLY got another video done together! Basically, we play a couple rounds of Worms Revoluiton against each other just for the heck of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fhb0XGfTb8

Mind you, I was kinda laughing like crazy into the microphone the whole time... I'm not used to live-recording stuff and truth be told, I'm actually really easily amused by things. Something I definitely need to work on if I'm gonna do more live recordings with Clint or other people in the future. :B

Youtube bullshit or not you already have 1300+ subscribers. Also mobile support since it's on YT. Yes YT has been very frustrating, so much so jamming spoons in one's own eyes might sound soothing. 🤣

*nods* I'm aware that for all the troubles I have, there's plenty of people out there who don't see the Google+ requirements as a bad thing, nor do they have troubles with the YouTube system. Despite my initial dislike for YouTube based mostly on second-hand information, numerous fans wanted me to start uploading there and thus I figured giving YouTube a shot myself was in my best interests and my fans best interests. The worst that can happen is they take my channel down for stupid reasons. Sure, they could completely disable monetization too for stupid reasons, but that effect would likely be recinded at some point once I can get on board with a company that handles the ads themselves, Retroware TV being one example though there's several others too. :B

My sticking with YouTube despite all the Google+ BS going on has nothing to do with hypocracy or money or any of that, and everything to do with what my fans want out of the show. After all of what's happened, I still prefer Blip as a video hosting service, but some people prefer YouTube and I want to do my best to get as many people interested in the show as possible. :)

Actually, one of the lead people over at Allegro.cc (the forums I participate in for the game programming libraries I use) recently started watching the show and compared it to "crack cocaine" in that he ended up burning through over 2 GB of bandwidth watching numerous episodes in a row! XD