The breathing fire thing IS part of my original vision. All your questions will be answered and your doubts put to rest when i release a more refined version of the game. Get ready!

With any luck, i may be able to offer both versions for the public event next month …

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My suggestions, unlike the ones you mentioned, are SMALL and can ALL be implemented within 1 hour. You’ve already got the code for the ships and sailors, dump them in an array/collection and away you go. Don’t create a new type of sailor, just instantiate more of the existing walking sailor (and stop him from moving 8 out of 10 times). I believe most of my other suggestions can be implemented by deleting or tweaking existing code (no need for new graphics or substantial rewrites). You can quickly implement the ideas to see if they improve the game, and keep them if they do.

I find tips like “have the dragon breath fire” entirely unhelpful since:
a) No thought was put into it
b) It could take a substantial time to implement.
c) Once you added dragon breath fire, next up is dragon breath ice

Here are some equivalent ideas:
a) Let me build my own monster
b) A Cruise Ship should sail by with tons of ladies sunbathing on deck.
c) Record my game so I can play it back and upload it to my friends
d) Use ragdoll physics for the sailors and aforementioned cruise ship passengers.
e) Have an iceberg come out that crashes into the monster. Using my head, let me lob broken pieces at the ships.
These ideas are yours free of charge!

Plus, does adding fire really add anything to your game?
i.e. If I can already destroy the ship with my tongue, why do I need fire?
i.e. I’m already spitting, chewing and tonguing, how would the player even choose fire?
i.e The game is short by nature, is lack of weapon variety even an issue?
i.e. Would TOJammers have stopped abandoning your game if you added fire?

It’s worth noting that my seagull “idea” is the most infeasible idea, and bordering on being crap as a result. I was figuring a 2 frame flapping V would be easy enough to do, which is why I suggested it. The seagull wasn’t the important part (it doesn’t suprise me you thought of it). What’s important was that when I click, I tongue. Switching to spit feels like the monster missed my click (since he’s not tonguing).

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“Time and again, i’d hear this: keep the fun part of the game, but take out the challenging part. ”
“Do game developers know what players want better than the players do? i’m not sure.”

These hint at a broader issue. If you’re creating games for a business, and are targeting a market that isn’t game developers, then game developers don’t know what’s best. If you’re creating games for yourself (a la TOJam, a la my Hobby), you should create games that YOU want to play. If you think it’s fun, it should be in your game. Not only will like your game (no matter how crappy), but you’ll remain passionate about it. i.e. If you want scoring and timers in your game, put them in your game.

It doesn’t matter what I or anyone elses thinks, there are plenty of games for us already. The games I remember most are the ones where the developer relentlessly stuck to his/her vision, and kept honing it. If you don’t think an idea is good, that’s all the justification you need to get rid of it. In that respect, games are starting to resemble music and film. Remember the immortal words of Maestro Fresh Wes, “Stick to your vision”.

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I agree that more people are talking more about fun versus challenge. However, I don’t think it’s a shift, and it’s certainly nothing new (i.e. Bizarre Creations spent a long time deciding how much of Project Gotham Racing was available right away). The market is simply expanding, and different people want different things from games. The “new” style of non-challenging casual games (“I should be able to see everything regardless of my skill level”) will eventually replace existing TV shows and Movies. It’s also worth noting that some games are finding success by moving in completely the opposite direction. “I Want To Be The Guy” is unbelievably hard and patently unfair, but is very successful thanks to the expanding market of people who understand the language of games.

Games are going to be bigger and more prevalent than anyone imagines. There will be more game categories than Movies, Music and TV COMBINED. It’s scary how big games are going to be, which is why some people are demanding a new word to represent games. Eventually, we’ll move past the basic terms like “fun versus challenging” to “romantic comedy versus intense drama”.

Given all of that, I’m not sure why people think that games targeted at the 20-30 year old male market, that finds hard challenges fun, are broken and need to be fixed. Those games are fine for their market. People should really be talking about how they can expand the market further, so there’s an audience for less challenging games. Nintendo, EA (Pogo specifically), Oberon Games, Digital Chocolate, RealArcade are all doing this, and it’s working.

i’m frustrated that i didn’t even *see* your game at the end of the event, let alone get to play it. That’s the way it goes – it’s such a mad, crowded scramble on Sunday night, and i always miss at least half the stuff on display.

i took a look at your screenshot – i DO remember sitting down with you as another pair of eyes while you figured out that your missing text problem came from not embedding the font.

At that time, i suggested you embed small letters, capitals, numerals and punctuation. You took me by surprise and asked me whether including the 95 “Basic Latin” characters wasn’t the same thing. i said “no” because at the time, i thought that character set might have included accented characters like é, but dig it:

http://jrgraphix.net/research/unicode_blocks.php?block=0

So the accented stuff isn’t in there, but there are a few wasted characters in the top two rows. i think that’s why whoever trained me told to include just the four character sets. i’m sure it works out to a few milliseconds of load time, but life is short! :)