Inspirational (or just fun) games

General (non-technical) Off-Topic
#21

This could be a bad thing to admit here, but about the only thing I’m playing these days is Fortnite on a PS4. I occasionally fire up Sphere Games Studio’s “Merge City” (a Corona app!) on my iPad. We’ve started playing a little D&D 5e on the table top recently as well.

My life is so busy, I don’t know which way is up. I’ve had to create a personal Kanban board at home… No time to play. One of the biggest issues, getting back to Richard’s OP is it takes too much time to find anything to play in the mobile world. 

I was thinking about trying to make an idle clicker, and I downloaded probably a dozen examples and felt they were all pretty bad (SGS’s Merge City is quite good btw!).

Maybe I should refocus on Unicorns and pretty colors…

Rob

#22

Haha, brilliantly honest. There’s definitely a very fine line though as a developer between wasting your time on a game and actually playing something as part of the career. I mean, if none of us spent any time at all playing other developers games, what the hell would we end up producing?

#23

I’m from a different era than most people here and it definitely jades my idea about what is good and what isn’t. I grew up in an era of text games played on the school’s mainframe or machines that sucked quarters out of your pocket. Two of my favorites were Tempest which had spinning wheel/dial for a controller and bad things radiated out of the center and you had to blast them before they got to the edge. The other was Missile Command which was played with a trackball and 3 buttons. Pop the Lock was a great mobile game. And as sad as my other comments Candy Crush Saga was a big time consumer too. I’m not that ancient (in my mind at least). Still Fortnite fits my current gaming style. Drop in, play for 15 min, maybe complete a challenge. Epic does a good job of keeping it fresh without an involved storyline that I have to try and remember. This week they are even doing a cross-over with Borderlands. An area of the map has been done in cel shading and with buildings and objects in that art style complete with Claptrap! And I think that art style rocks. Still it’s not conducive to helping conceive that next killer mobile title!

#24

Let’s be brutally honest. :smiley:

It doesn’t really matter what games someone plays as long as they are enjoying it.

#25

I remember Tempest. We had it on the MSX or Spectrum or something… not sure now, but either way it was after the arcade machine era. I’m a tad too young for that myself but often feel I’d have been more at home growing up in that period. Those early programmers became my role models and as a procedural coder who likes to build things my way instead of using existing frameworks, I’d have thrived being among those early innovators.

Instead I live in a time where AAA studios would only be interested in me as a tool developer, and it’d be the game ‘programmers’ using my tools that take all the credit. Sad.

That’s why I like Corona though. It’s perfectly reminiscent of those procedural days, coding with nothing more than a keyboard and a basic instruction set, but it’s not actually that basic and restrictive. The simulator, the built in graphic libraries, the cross platform compiling, etc - all of the modern day goodness without losing that proper traditional programming methodology. Brilliant.