Spewer

DAMN! THE TWO COMMENTS ARE NOT THE REAL ISSUE. THE REAL ISSUE IS THE OVERALL NEGATIVITY ON TIGSOURCE LATELY. LOOK AT THE CACTUS COMMENTS. LOOK AT THE COMMENTS ON JUDITH. HOW MANY TIMES WE HAVE TO REPEAT THIS?

Okay, that was fake yelling.

Let’s continue this on forums or wherever else.

the point im making here is that you have no idea what it feels like to make something then have someone be a dick and bash your work for no reason other then to make himself feel better.

and again.. i not talking about this post. this is about the over all negative comments being made on tig and other indie blogs these days. this post as just a launching pad for these things.

but in all reality, a real critics opinion is only valid if they have a real understanding of what they are critiquing.

anyone can give their jackass opinions about something.. but that opinion only holds up if they also have experience in the subject..

Let’s go back a second. This whole thing all started with this:

“the first two comments: this place is becoming more and more a place to bash indie games, thanks for contributing to the r3volution. Your comments need more personal attacks on the developer, though.”

Which was completely unwarranted considering that those two comments were just general comments about the game itself and were not personal attacks or anything like the sort posted on the comments section about Cactus, Judith, etc.

Anyway, let’s stop this. This is completely pointless. And at this rate, we’re pretty much beating a dead horse now.

IN THE ASS.

Also: WASD

I find it interesting that almost without exception EVERYONE in this thread interpreted ‘I’d like to see a game you’ve made’ as ‘YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO AN OPINION UNTIL YOU MAKE SOMETHING BETTER’.

Some people just love the self-righteousness like crack cocaine don’t they?

You trolls are all dicks. You should get off the internets.

kthxbi

Kobel. It’s a red herring either way, and besides I wasn’t even expressing an opinion but rather sticking up for those trying to express contrary opinions.

I just finished. Thanks for making a neat game dudes!

I wish my guy would jump every time I pressed the jump key, not just when he feels like it.

Pretty fun nonetheless. I’m on level 38.

Judgespear, why would I be “pulling a strawman”?

I think it’s worse to know somebody really thinks my game sucks, than to suspect they are just dissing it because they dislike my “internet persona”, or are out to hurt me.

“The mature thing would be to accept the fact that you can’t please everyone, not get worked up over something which you can’t really do anything about.”

What the fuck, I’m not a five year old. I don’t get worked up over it, I know you can’t please everyone and I’m not trying to, but if you had ever made a game and had it criticized online you’d KNOW what we’re talking about. It’s not about how mature you are or aren’t, having people throw crap at you or stuff you’ve spent a lot of time on IS more or less hurting. I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s still not something I enjoy. If you don’t even realize that, why are you taking part in the discussion?

“I’ve got hurt feelings, I’ve got hurt feelings…”

“Shouldn’t tell themselves”

“Didn’t you just say in the Glum Busters thread that you don’t care about gameplay anyway? Why isn’t that valid when the comments are bashing a game instead of orgasming over it?”

“It’s art/protest; And as such you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Do something better; aka unless you’re one of the chosen ones or our fanbois, shut up.”

I realize language is subtle, but it helps to give the other person the benefit of the doubt in their claims and not to make them out to be crazy.

Saying that you don’t really understand the problem with nasty comments if you’ve never been personally attacked for a game you made isn’t equivalent to saying you can’t hold negative opinions about a game or that you should shut up if you’ve never made a game.

Saying that you value the atmosphere in a particular game more than the gameplay and enjoyed the game just for the environments alone doesn’t mean you don’t care about gameplay or were orgasming over a game.

Expressing profuse enjoyment of a game isn’t just “the opposite” of a personal attack on a game’s developer. The opposite of profuse delight isn’t “hating” a game, it’s not enjoying a game, being frustrated or bored by it. There are many games which I don’t enjoy, there are many games that frustrate me or bore me. But that doesn’t lead me to hate the game and its developers.

So in simple words, what I have the problem with is when someone *hates* a game and its game developer just on the basis of not enjoying their game. You can not enjoy a game or criticize it without having to hate on it.

Anyway, I’d prefer further discussions to go on in the forum because this post is getting old and I may not check it again: there are a couple of forum threads about this in the forum, so please respond to me there if you feel the need to.

The stupidity of the majority of these comments is depressing and embarrassing.

I kinda get where you’re all coming from with the accusations of back-patting and so on. Western society encourages being a dick to everyone else to get ahead, so it is understandable that you’d interpret a community in which people try to be nice to each other as being a sort of circle-jerk.

It’s still a completely incorrect analysis of the situation, though, and, as understandable as it is, it’s a shame that you see the world in that way. You’re missing the point. Yes, the members of TIGSource (and the general community of indie developers) do tend to try to be pleasant and friendly with one another and, yes, they tend to be willing to help each other out rather than going into direct competition with one another. That *doesn’t* mean that they never criticise each other’s work or activities – it just means that any criticisms are (usually) made in a constructive, intelligent manner which, essentially, is not overflowing with dickishness.

Try to imagine that you can bear to be nice to other people and you’ll find that they might even be able to bear being nice right back. Most of humanity’s problems would be solved if people just wouldn’t be dicks to each other. That’s probably never going to happen, but that’s no reason not to try to help the cause along.

Raiten: Just making a joke, man. Calm down.

tl;dr version:

It’s good enough that I would pay for a retail version, if the issues were ironed out.

I bothered to get to the last level, yet my reception is actually worse now. It feels like it’s supposed to be a puzzle platformer, but the platforming elements are a bit broken, and the puzzle (?) solutions are obvious.

Flying through white spew, braking yourself with liquids or thrust, making jumps with thrust, jumping off of black spew… all these things and more are fiddly and often frustrating. The platforming is whimsical: often you’ll do the exact same thing twice, fail the first time, and succeed the second, for no apparent reason. I don’t find it fun.

I can only take this as a high-quality proof-of-concept, not a good game in itself.

^I also like physics based gameplay. My favourite puzzle game is The Incredible Machine, and I enjoyed such aspects in (e.g.) Half-Life 2 and Portal. They all easily get off with less fiddlyness though, probably because they deal with chunkier objects.

The problems in Spew don’t stem from a basis in physics alone. I’ve never seen fluid dynamics integrated with gameplay this tightly before, and it comes off as flakier than it could be… which I’d expect given the novelty.

I also appreciate the value of unpredictable outcomes in games, but not when A) they’re just razor’s edges between absolute success and failure, B) the player learns nothing from the event (remove either of those and it’s alright).

Not that it has anything to do with the discussion at hand, but IMO the future of physics games is integration of engineering with gameplay.