AVEE'S PROFILE

I don't know about beginners, but as someone who's been composing for years yet never managed to learn music notation, this guide is very easy to understand. I'll refer to it in the future.

Would it be possible to add a music file to every step of the Strange New World tutorial? To hear the piece being built progressively might help our understanding further.

I have come from the future of this article to isolate this spot, because I feel like more than anything else I say anything in this article, following the advice in the above paragraph is the most crucial thing you can do. Play with the music. By all means, waste type making gibberish songs you think sound cool. Try and replicate your favorite pieces of music. Do the Terminator theme. Try to recreate your favorite Final Fantasy songs. Legend of Zelda. Super Mario Bros. Arrange your favorite cartoon themes. Try to do some Daft Punk. Obsess over this. This more than anything is going to help you understand how music comes together.

That is absolutely true and wise advice.

It's almost like it writes itself! I don't know how it works for other people. I can't help but think that maybe I think really strange, but when I listen to my pattern, I can sort of start to hear other instruments accompanying it, and I quickly get a very firm grasp of what my song sounds like.

Indeed. I'm going off on a tangent here, but I don't know if that comes from experience, from how strong you feel about your music, how connected you are with it, or some other obscure reasons. Once the skeleton of a music track is set in place, it often seems like the accompanying melodies and chords just pop out of nowhere and fit like puzzle pieces.
Maybe it's similar to when we internalize popular patterns and chords, and then correctly guess the next notes of a song we listen to for the first time.

A lot of truths and good advice for beginners here.
Making clean black outlines is the most tedious part of any drawing, I think, and those How to Draw books and tutorials can really kill one's motivation when you're a newbie. And when you zoom in on many top-level artists' works, you often see how rushed or messy some areas and lines are.

If I may add one of the best advice I ever followed was to "draw from life".
In other words, use real persons and scenes as reference (or at least photos).
Don't draw from other artists' works (unless you're doing fanart or want to replicate a given style, of course) because they might not know how to replicate the human body or a landscape or whatever 100% faithfully.

Very interesting read! Great job and thanks for sharing.

I'd really like to read a more in depth analysis focused on the active individual... RMN as a collection of individuals as kentona puts it.

One thing I would disagree with is that hype is the enemy of the community.
When a game's quality is perceived to be low, hype can be blamed for the game's popularity, as we've seen in this case.
However, hype also brings more attention to a game, and with it more varied opinions and valid critique, which is an undeniably positive consequence.

I don't think Pom was ever hyped in the sense of being aggressively marketed, but it definitely benefited from the large audience of a popular youtube personality.

While I understand the concern behind this article, I disagree with the point of view.

If a game is 50% completed and has a download, that means that the second half of the game is vaporware. There is no guarantee that the game will actually be completed and that a new download will be released.
Therefore I must consider the available download as being 100% of the game so far. It is 100% of what's available, what exists.
This is still true if you release a tech demo that features 5 minutes of gameplay and nothing else is ever added to it. That tech demo is a finished, completed project.

Now if both a demo and the completed game are released and available, I believe that the demo should not receive any review or rating because it's an incomplete product at this point.

I must also add that I am not fully in favor of ratings because of how subjective they are to both the reviewer and the reader. The review itself, what you write in it, has infinitely more informative and objective potential than the rating.
I would rather encourage better reviews for any kind of download.

author=Sailerius

author=Avee
Amen.
As long as there will be shitty games made on VX Ace, Unity, Renpy, Flash, etc. no argument will ever stand against the use of older engines.

Except their no longer working. That's a pretty compelling argument against them.

When was the last time you played an RM95 game?

I just played one. They still work on Windows 7 and it didn't require any special mode. Just run the executable and play.

My point is that only the quality of the games matter. The engines don't.