Hey you two! Yohji and Headgrinder! I love the fact that you guys are willing to get into this pretentious literary stuff. I say that in all seriousness. I recognize the possibility that we could get into some stupid egoistic "my literature you-know-what is bigger than yours!" and so on... Yes, I get that could happen. If we try to communicate about this sort of thing, it's not liable to be wholly pure and useful discussion. However, I think some really interesting conversation about art and about how to convey meaning is possible here--where good and useful things could happen--and I'm game for returning to this topic again and again to talk about that if you guys are. I have quite a few things I think would be interesting to throw out there about how I reacted to your individual commentaries. Later, I'll try to find the time to type them out, as I want to see your further comments. And yes, for Christ's sake! Let's bring Leopold Bloom in here!



One quick further idea along that vein, then: what if the level is not supposedto be a fully immersive story-like experience (say, a Great Expectations or a Catcher in the Rye? What if it's not one of those experiences where you suspend disbelief and actively believe it's a real world? But more like an interactive art piece in a museum where the viewer is largely aware of their own participation and the author's presence in the work? Could that change how you see what I did? (Though, to claim that was always my intent would be to lie and say I wasn't at one point intending for this to resemble one of those classical works that're all immersive. If I said I didn't want the world I created in there to feel like a world, that would be a further lie.)

@Headgrinder: Gave you a bit of a response by PM, for one, in the form of this: http://catandgirl.com/?p=2035. I think I fixed that glitch in the very next version. The link should be to that one, now.

@Yohji: Did my psyche thing seem to work well for you in play? Also wondering if the confusion issue was cleared up.

http://nifflas.lpchip.nl/index.php?topic=3852.0

I have some questions (and a couple comments here and there) for you three who've answered so far, because I think some of these answers could provoke some interesting conversations useful for me (since obviously I care about my own work), if not all involved parties;

Hmpf: Thanks for the praise--though like everyone else I tell myself not to be prideful and whatnot when someone compliments me on my work, I can't seem to help it here. Thanks for the ego boost, anyway. Trying to reuse old tilesets in interesting ways is what I was going for, indeed, and I'm glad that, for someone whose repertoire includes Falling Water, it seems worthwhile.


Yohji: Whoops, I forgot to mention that the level is incomplete to the point that there are some obvious voids and warps that haven't been fixed up yet. That'll be fixed later, once it's done. Again, glad to hear that you thought it was stunning and well done authentic landscape work (makes me sound like a gardener!), and of course I love you for all that. Thank you.
     But I'm more interested in your criticisms, to be sure--I was going for a very Shadow of the Colossus-y vibe here, with very few animals very far and few between... but I may add some more to the green area and take your advice, there.
     And about the incongruous background/foreground elements; do they distract you so much that the level doesn't feel like a "place" so much as a construct? That would suck for me. I'm hoping they're something only mildly noticeable, like the rather geometric nature of the cloud formations in the regular levels.
     I was much more disappointed that you felt lost, though; really? I mean, if you really just felt like you didn't know or care where new stuff to see was, then that's certainly an issue. But I wasn't really sure when making this level that that's what I wanted. I decided that I'd make the bottom of the world blend into the top, knowingly giving the audience a chance to get completely off the "track," ruining linearity, too. Here's a couple questions, then, with that insight: If you knew there was no real need or point to progressing in any particular way, would you care if it was maze-like in the way you describe? Would you care if you got lost? If you answer no to both those questions, then still, I do care, at the very least, that you don't feel uninterested if you get off the path you were on; did that happen?


Salmoneous: Again, the SOTC look is what I was going for, here. It's not really supposed to look all that complex and beautiful, any small part of it. It's, in fact, supposed to look somewhat barren.

Really? I was able to beat the thing with a dang laptop mouse...

I believe I saw somewhere that someone called this scarier than Silent Hill 2. I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly a disturbing game in a way new and apart from Silent Hill or Resident Evil, for that matter. It will probably freak you out pretty good if you play it very late at night. It is, all in all, a very very interesting look at what you can do with a run & gun game.

Latest version, as far as I could tell: http://www.dessgeega.com/AuSable_1.2.zip

http://sites.google.com/site/dreamsidemaroongame/Home/download

I'm posting this for two reasons: one, it looks fantastic in a very Knytt way, and two, I am unable to play it due to some OpenGL 2.0 issues or something and I want to see how it works for you guys.

Enjoy it, if you can.

Is there actually a procedure to making a Dragon Noir? Is there some sort of checklist you can go through to use to tell someone how you made it? Can those intuitive creative processes be verbally distilled (can they be put down on paper)?

How do you pace a game? How do you make sure you've got a perfect balance in terms of level design to keep things interesting, fresh, compelling (utilizing differing graphical styles, differing methods of traversal and movement)?

Those are some questions I'd like to have answered.