It came to me in a late night trip, overlays should have shadows!

Giving them more depth and making them stand out alot more. Yay for cheap graphical effects that'd you'd only use on GM.

I've pretty much dropped the idea of reflections, bump maps, bloom and all that fancy crap. They don't make a game I keep seeing people waste there time trying to make fast working ones. Luckly for those who want do such things theres at least three add ons for GM that make certain things possible.

However though, its beginning to set in that the true art of making games has never been how much you can do so much as what you can't do. Perhaps thats why so many new major industry games are either just clones of another or just look pretty but play weak. That and original looks that were created from hardware limitations in the past have been cast down for the indie community to take up.

Personally I've been designing games since I was 12. A book of grid paper and I was set to plan one out, programing knowledge or not. Of course back then the easiest programing language was GW Basic. Thats the kind of basic in which you had to index your code.

1

2

3

4

…

And so forth. Things certainly have changed in the last 17 years. I've never learned C++ beyond basics and life sucked up all that free time I had used for designing, stories, ect. Course I don't feel that all is lost since I haven't forgotten or at least kept notes of old projects that I may bring back to life. The Crawl is actually a fairly new idea even if it was spawned maybe 6-7 years ago. It was just a concept back then. Rick Jason was actually one of my first games and I had made several top down rpgs that were pretty decent for the time, but alas lost in the many hard drive crashes that have plagued my life. My advice, backup often, make a new file for each major change to your project, since you never know when you can f___ something up badly.

I've seen tons of promise in the GM community, but maybe its still too young to start seeing some major games pop out, although a few seem to be well on the right track. I'm sure most of you know which ones, I can't recall names.

Thats all.