Personal advice - please read before playing

I started out taking photographs for games as early as in Knytt Stories. You will find photo based tilesets in the library, and check "Gustav's Daughter" for an example. It was back then I realized I could use photos in games, and started capturing, though not much. Sometime in the development of NightSky I started to use photographs as background for the game. I also decided during NightSky that I wanted to create a game much more around photographs, though I didn't know what that game would be back then. I purchased a digital camera and started to photograph for a whole lot for future games. The library is still growing, and I'm using it a lot in The Great Work, and KnyttWaDF is using even more photos than Saira. I try to not re-use photos too much in different games, but sometime it may happen.

I'm familiar with how short Nifflas's games usually are, but I guess I've been hoping that they would start being longer, for two reasons:  1, that he started charging for them, and 2, that he's moved away from pixel art.  I know pixel art is very time-consuming, and when he started using photos for backgrounds instead I thought, that's too bad because I love Nifflas's pixel art, but at least this would free up some time for him to make the games bigger/longer with more areas.  When Saira was released I was pretty surprised at how short it was, considering its price and the use of photos for graphics.  But I guess I was still holding out hope that NightSky would be a longer game, since it was so long in development, and again, didn't require making pixel art for each area.  (Now that I'm playing it I'm actually even surprised at how few photos there are so far.  It's mostly just gradients and black foreground.  I thought a couple years ago Nifflas said he was collecting tons of photos for use in this game.)

Photos doesn't make the game creation process faster. It's much more time consuming to design a detailed world even when not drawing every pixel. Often, just opening Photoshop and draw a few pixels is so much faster. Saira have a complex system of several mini-puzzles, each taking time to program, vector animated creatures, a radio simulator, and so on. NightSky was not longer in development than any other Nifflas game, I spent a year on it, but it was difficult to get all those physics puzzles together. It's basically really hard to create a game. I'm one person, sometime getting help from others (sometime even a lot, like with with Yann, Chris and now Agneta), but I still carry the heaviest load myself. I'm extremely efficient wasting minimal time on planning and things that doesn't go into the end product. I'm very hard and fast working. It's not easy to design a game.

Well, since KnyttWaDF will be using photos rather than pixel art and the level design won't be as tricky as with games like Saira and NightSky, maybe that game can be really really long.  (hint hint.)

So, what do you want me to do?
* Take away quality
* Increase the development time
* Don't make the game so long

You're not getting a longer game unless I sacrifice something else instead.

   My apologies.  I think my comments came across differently than I meant them.  I wasn't meaning to be critical, but just expressing my wish that your games, which I enjoy so much, could be longer (not just demanding this, but meaning it simply in the sense of "I wish it could be".)  I do realize how much work and difficulty must go into making a whole game by yourself.  It's something I could never do.  Again, I didn't intend what I was saying to be taken as a complaint.    (Also, my last post was before I saw the second part of your previous post.)

For the record, I am loving NightSky so far.  I could never come up with ingenious physical puzzles like you do.

I'll shut up now!  

I guess I should be a bit nicer. I've never worked in a team bigger than two people simultanely working full time on the game itself (though I've got a lot of help with contributions like Knytt Stories tileset and music, or KnyttWaDF photos).

I really want to create longer games. However, I need a bigger team. It'd be amazing to work with like four more skilled developers; a full time programmer, two people with level design & graphics skills, and a sound/music person (who can also design levels when there's no sound work to do). I guess I'd be the game designer, but also still do all kinds of things like I do now. We could probably do amazing games. A small indie game dev studio would be a dream come true to me! Perhaps the future can offer this!

Until then, I'll always have to compromise about quality, length, or development time. You're right about one thing though, KnyttWaDF have the potential to be longer than Saira and NightSky. With Saira, I had to design a complicated level format for all the display layers, and a system to display and animate photos from parameters, and become efficient with blending the photos into the graphical look, as well as just learning to get rid of the backgrounds of the photos as fast as possible. With NightSky, I had to learn for the first time how to work with Physics. What's different in KnyttWaDF is that I'm only doing things I know pretty well and have streamlined, so I can make it larger. I don't know how much yet though.

A small indie game dev studio would be a dream come true to me!

Why just a dream though? What makes it impossible?

It's not impossible, it just is not realistic this day, month or possibly even year. As I said though, perhaps the future can offer this!

Well, good luck. Your work deserves it.

Not sure if this is the right place to post but here we go.

I tried the demo and it was kind of weird seeing the levels and things in them that everyone was speculating about way back when I was on the forum many moons ago.

One odd thing, I clicked on the settings exe file and after that norton wouldn't let me run the game. It was convinced it was attacking my pc. I just uninstalled it all, re downloaded the demo and it runs ok now. Re-running the installer I downloaded the first time wouldn't work. So I was forced to get another copy before norton would let me run the game.
What does the settings exe do ? 

I didn't finish the demo, I found the dificulty spiked very high in some places and I was playing the same parts a dozen times so had to stop lol. I'll give it another go but some of the puzzles are really easy to mess up and then your forced to repeat previous parts just to replay the bit you failed. I'm not great at 'precise' gameplay so it's prolly just me being rubbish at it maybe. 

I also noticed some of the puzzles seemed like some of the levels people made with a physics game creator program on the old forum. I remember nifflas asking us to think up idea's.

I couldn't help but peek at the tilesets in the games folder. And that made me think of the nightgame tileset I made back then too !!!

It's great to see something that caught my imagination back then released, I just need to
try to not be quite so useless at playing it, hehe.

And on last blast from the past memory ..... when I saw the snake and the the cannon .... I couldn't help but chuckle as I can remeber back to those both being talked about back then also.

Maybe I should have a go at making something here on the forum again..... Hmmmm, I never did finish making Skyfalls.   

What does the settings exe do ? 

It allows you to:

• Choose whether the game runs in a window, pseudo-fullscreen with black borders or "true" stretched fullscreen (some options aren't available in all cases)
• Configure the keyboard controls
• Adjust the volume of music and sfx

And wow, I didn't realize so many people got to beta test this game while the rest of us were waiting so long for it!   

I at least was (once again ) one of the "last-minute"-testers, so I waited only a few days less than you.

Same here.

I waited only a few years less than you.

I waited only a few years less than you.

And this is what you've been doing since then.

Haha, you've seen nothing yet of Jace's weird NightSky skills