Lessie

Personally, I find all the academic hand-wringing about “what defines a game” (not to mention the more ubiquitous, gatekeeping, “that’s not a game!”) of little value. Gone Home is a worthwhile experience to me, regardless of what someone chooses to call it. When I am interacting with a game, I’m not thinking of the formalist definition that may or may not be on the box - I’m immersing myself in its world, and trying to get something out of it.

How do you design Gone Home's playability? With game-making rules.

What toolset do you need to have to experience Gone Home (besides a computer)? The same you do to experience any puzzle game.

It's a game. Not because if fits some magical definition of "game" that people believe was handed to us by the skies, but because it is similar enough to other things we call "game".

But now let's talk about that fancy-pants definition of game: are people even aware that "failure state" is not actually a thing that practially any game has nowadays (strictly speaking), right?

Say you're playing Deus Ex, and then you die. But wait, you did save your game! And then, just like that, you haven't failed anymore. Sure you lost some progress, but you haven't retained that "failure state" per se. The same applies to Super Mario World. And even Spelunky only has a limited failure state, as in when you die you don't lose any of your achievements or high scores. You just lost a bit of potential progress through that run.

so something i wanted to do in isaac that we couldnt do mostly do to flash “sprites on sceen” limitations were large rooms and large mobs.

the 1st thing i talked to tyrone about when listing out my dream additions for rebirth was larger room sizes… and last week that became a reality. 

im still experimenting with what can be done with larger rooms.. but boy does it change things a bit. larger room types are of course more rare than small ones, the rarest being 4x4 rooms with larger mobs like this…

but they are by far the most fun, and dificult. its crazy what giving the player/enemies more room can do for the game.

can you imagine a double wide room where you fight 2 bosses at once… because i can.

we are also currently working on polish, if you look close at the gifs above you might notice a few new details, moving grass, pieces of paper, tiny animated mushrooms. as the weeks go by we hope to have the caves dripping wet with small streams of water, puddles you can walk through, dust falling from above and tons of other subtle details that will really make things pop.

we have even started experimenting with non-enemy creatures with basic ai that inhabit rebirth. you can see a few fruit flys and other bugs flying/crawling/dying around the room. im quite happy with how things are coming together.. what do you think?

i wanted to show some of the full screen effects today but the god rays were making the gifs over 20mb :) so i think next week i might have to move to full videos.

lessie2d replied to your post: I kinda wanna figure out how to do web…

PHP is more of a backend language tho, I feel javascript is a lot more suited for games (still not my cup of tea, tho). But wait, can’t you do the game on python and embed it on a webpage or something, or did I confuse it with something else?

The most requested item combo in rebirth i get is… moms knife + XYZ. so this week i want to show you my knife… + moms eye… 

but what happens if you get lokis horns!?

but what if i get triple shot + the tiny planet + my reflection too!?!!?

BUT WHAT IF I GET ALL THESE + BRIMSTONE!?!!! well that will have to wait till a later date… 

and for those if you screaming OP! you are correct, but keep in mind there are well over 350 items total now and each item has a “weight” or rarity associated with it as well as new more specific item pools.. so getting these combos is very rare.. but still possible. if you can get them you deserve to rip through the game! (and probably win the lotto)

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in other news, binding of isaac rebirth got the cover of the latest CG Magazine! (along with a very nice little article about myself and what a jaded curmudgeon ive become :) )

 It is undoubtedly amazing to get the cover of a respected magazine, however the most surreal aspect is the fact that the cover art was hand drawn/painted by a personal hero of mine, Sam Keith.

most of you probably know Sam from The Maxx (the comic and yes also the mid 90s mtv cartoon of the same name). i grew up reading only a hand full of comics, Lobo, the works of R Crumb, random weirdo indie comics/zines but my personal obsession was The Maxx. getting to talk to Sam let alone having him do a cover for something i made definitely takes the cake when it comes to surreal situations i never thought were possible.

this piece will actually become the box art for Rebirth’s retail version, and i might even print it as a poster around release… its such an amazing cover and such a huge deal that Sam took the time to make it for me. 

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and last but not least i have something a ton of you have been waiting months for… 

Binding of Isaac Tarot decks have been reprinted and are on sale now!

this 2nd edition deck features a slightly new box, isnt limited and not signed.. but includes the full deck and costs a bit less than the hand signed/number limited run we sold a few months ago.

this edition isnt limited, but we dont have a shit ton of them in stock right now so buy them sooner than later. we sold over 600 in 12 hours last time.. so get them while you can.

BUY NOW! $40.00

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we are also testing out a random 2 card tarot reading using stickers featuring 22 of the major arcana.

BUY NOW! $6.00

also GREED IS BACK!

BUY NOW! $40.00

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 and last.. ill leave you with a screen shot of a gift from Simon (lead programmer of rebirth), the binding of isaac level editor… sorry kids, this ones just for me ;)

I'd like to reinforce his tip where this development pattern is more adequated to a game where you have a lot of object creation and destruction all the time. Usually applies to bullet hell shooters, but other shooters may also benefit largely from it. Another good example is when spawning particle effects, but I think Unity already does that for you with an appropriat Component.

I already ran into problems in my code using this pattern, so my best (uncalled for) advice for you is to code the game normally, without the object pool, but still using an abstraction for object creation, where you can quickly plug in a pool later to check out if you get any performance boost.

More like "Vlambeer apologised for leaving a very negative interpretation of their work open. Polygon went around pretending like people 'choose' to feel offended (going against what Vlambeer had just said) and that being offended is the only consequence of things such as the holocaust or the violence against women in our current gaming culture (which it isn't). Several segments of the internet spoke up and lazygamer.net thought it would be a good idea to classify that response as 'personal attacks' and singling out a particular person in the discussion and framing them as 'that one hypersensitive feminist, amirite folks'."