I just finished a house in california and i enjoyed it quite a bit. It was really interesting and fun to figure out how the game worked. I hope it does well in IGF!

My game "A House in California" is a finalist as well, which I'm super thrilled about!  I haven't been to GDC/IGF before so I'm looking forward to that experience.  I'd love to meet any folks on this board in person if you're attending!

Yeah! I remembered you were on this forum and i was going to congratulate you! Congratulations!! That's fantastic! Congrats to Jeroen as well!

Hi there! I saw "a house in california" a couple of days ago, but haven't gotten around to playing it yet. It looks very interesting! I look forward to hearing thoughts on the forum.

I really like the aesthetic of the game, it's fantastic!

badvibration:
It was meant to be a metal box Perhaps it had bad physics sounds or not good enough art?

Like i said i don't remember it clearly, it's been awhile. So it might've obviously been a metal box, but for some reason i though i should be able to smash it.

-Also, there was a box which I think contained a  battery for a machine, but it needed a special machine of its own to open, the machine didn't seem to be in the general area and the box couldn't be moved too far. Fortunately there was a nice deep pit nearby to drop it down. I suppose that may be a bit illogical (the battery could well have broken too) but it felt like good improvisation. (Getting the machine to work after that was unnecessarily complicated and quite annoying though.)

Yeah i remember this one too, although i just didn't like the whole puzzle at all. If i remember right it was kind of a wooden box, which would signify i should be able to crack it open with the crowbar but i couldn't. And there were multiple boxes so i went around trying to crowbar all of them to no effect. I do like that you had to drop it down the pit, but i had to resort to a walkthrough to realize that's what i was supposed to do, and then a needed the walkthrough again to finish getting the machine to work.

It seems as though programming in "natural language" would not only be hard to create but also, I think it might even be harder to learn than regular coding. There's too many multiple ways of saying the same thing, not only replacing certain words with others, but using a completely different sentence, as well as the many different dialects that people use. It would probably make you relearn your own language, certain habits and sentence structures, in order to make it work properly/efficiently. I don't know that's just what I think.

That last paragraph should have had more of a point. Somehow my thoughts always get lost in translation between my brain and my mouth/writings. 

haha don't worry, happens to me all the time.

Code bubbles looks intriguing. I like the way you can use it to re-arrange the code and how it connects multiple bubble to an adjacent one. It also seems much cleaner for analyzing segments of code and editing it, but is that all it's for? I mean, do you have to import your code into the IDE first and then open them into the separate bubbles so you can further work on them? That's what I got out of it anyway, it's a really cool idea and allows for much cleaner programming, but I don't see me using it. Hopefully people expand on this idea, like Erik, and make into something marvelous.

Ahh thanks, it's much clearer now, I might have to try it out.

3DVIA Virtools / 3DVIA Studio

These look interesting, but I'm totally baffled by the website and what each of the different tools are for.

I couldn't agree more. I love applications like Max msp, pure data, and reaktor for making music. They allow me to create sounds and sequences that wouldn't have been possible without the visual programming, and they don't make me deal with ridiculous syntax errors. I truly wish they had viable options for this in game design (Quest3d looks swell, but its price and not being cross-platform turn me away). I mean imagine how many more people would get into game design if they didn't have to deal with code. Not just artistic minded people, but just different types of people with new and refreshing ideas. Look at the program Alice. It's a visual programming application designed for teenagers/young adults, specifically females. Now I don't know if it actually worked and their community is full of young women or not, but imagine all the different worlds/games that would be created if more things like this existed. We'd have more people that could really push the boundaries of games into new directions.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing code on occasion because it makes me feel smart, but after awhile the repetition and the errors I make really drag on me and my creativity.

I look forward to Amnesia, I played penumbra overture awhile back after purchasing the humble indie bundle and while it wasn't a favorite of mine, I was intrigued with all the things you guys are doing with the horror genre and actual gameplay mechanics (the actual pulling of doors is really immersive for me).

-DotA --> This is actually the game I played by far the most. I played it in some different teams and with hundreds of different players from all over the world. And I thought a lot about, though a lot of these thought went were about possible tactics, by far not all were- It is through this game and through its community, that I learned about quickly forming a team to achive a goal, about group dynamics in short time intervals (a game takes roughly 1 hour) and also in long terms (A team exists for month and often breakes apart when the players develop at differnt paces, a important match was lost, or someone experiences great changes in his "real" life ), it told me about the possible consequences of blind greed, of being indecisve for too long and also of doing more than one thing at a time .

I too was a hardcore player of dota. There was a straight year in my life where it was pretty much the only thing i looked forward too. I would constantly think about it, and in school whenever we got computers, i always happened to find myself at dota-allstars.com. It's funny really, because had Dota not come up, I would've never considered that it taught me something, but looking back on it, I've realized that I learned quite a bit. Not so much about teamwork and achieving a goal as lunatuna did, but rather about myself and games. Like I said I spent a dedicated year playing it, but even though I have practically nothing to show for it (aside from a few old friends), I don't regret that year of my life. It's not like in an mmo, when I decide to stop playing for good and then I look back and wish I had spent the time doing something else, something productive. I realize through Dota, that I would be perfectly happy spending the rest of my life playing a game, even if to some it'd be meaningless and a waste. Just the sublime experience that I encounter while playing has meaning for me. That's why I'm so in love with the thought of notgames, it's non-linearity, and maybe the aspect of a notgame never ending (michael brought that up in one of the threads).

I agree with Michael, in that I wish they had kept with the virtual character development aspect of it, rather than the game. I think it would be really interesting and sort of fun if you had your own virtual person that you could talk to and maybe enjoy playing a game of chess or go against(maybe that's too complex, but something of the sort). That's what I thought Milo was going to be when it was first introduced at e3 and I was excited, but after seeing this, I don't think I am.

I don't know if any of you have heard of the Grow series, but a new one was just released called Grow Valley and it's quite a joy. Basically you click on one of the several attributes at the bottom of the page and it changes the outcome of the civilization depending on the order you do it. It's rather short, but it offers some fun re-playability. Play it here: http://shingakunet.com/school/9000226898/9000283703/special/ ... I think this would classify has a notgame, plus it's fun to watch the little minions work!