Here's my newest update: A friend of mine bought me the Steam mega ultra Indie pack for Christmas, and it's awesome! But his primary purpose for buying it wasn't for my enjoyment, and he admits to this too. He wanted me to try out other indie games and compare and contrast programming styles, features, gameplay, graphics, what have you. and it's working really well I'd say. Aside from some conflicting feeling about what makes up an indie game (should it be artsy? should it have a great story? should it be something reminiscent of an early 90's arcade game?) I've come to an overall conclusion: The game is built a specific way because someone wanted it that way. That is to say that these games are so thought over and built, and rebuilt, and rebuilt that they -ideally- are released in the image of the creators true idea. So why is it that sometimes the game doesn't function the way it's supposed to, not bugs. Esc buttons for instance, why not close out of dialog windows... close pop ups, pull up a main menu by using the esc key in the right context? The second part of my conclusion is a much deeper and hate filled one, Functions are not included in games not becuase the programmer can't do it, but because they won't do it. Either it's too hard or there's too much programming involved, or they just don't care enough about how regular people play games. Frustrates me, just saying... if you're going to spend all this time making the game exactly the way you want to, don't leave it unfinished, even little features like an escape key, or a "Help" button on the main menu can be the difference between your game being played or it just sitting on someones -cloud- shelf.
I'll be updating later, I've gotta finish up some implementation of buttons and a little more escape key action :)
