Coz

Anyways the loose idea is that you play as a doctor or nurse in an alternate reality whereupon the medical professionals are actually pirate robbers that lie to people in dialog trees while stabbing them. Memorizing and telling consistent lies is important, and switching 'characters' is a key way to getting the conversation points and keeping your lies consistent, that you are doing the opposite of crippling and killing them with weapons and fancy smoke.

Sounds like you got this idea out of a crazy dream Your idea sounds like doctors and nurses is just another name for pirate robbers in your dimension, so they are not doctors / nurses at all =P

Sounds like a game where you are evil in a non-physical way. Maybe it would be fun in a political game


By the way, how come you were going to write on kotaku? as far as I know, they don't have forums, just a blog.

Do more creative stuff.

Like forsandifs said, play games.  Read books again. Push your boundaries. Listen to music you usually don't like.

Personally what I do when my creativity seems to run out, is to get on youtube and watch a game videos, trailers, playthroughs or whatever, though I have the tendency to watch more indie games since they often are more experimental. If I have an vague idea of what I want, I search for videos of that kind of games. This has the bonus that I don't have to spend 10 hours playing just to be creative, a few minutes are enough.

heh, the game did remind me of Chip's Challenge

I only went on until lvl 7 or so, but maybe you could teach the game mechanics in fewer levels? there were some pretty obvious levels that seemed boring to me

Also you should implement a high score system of some sort, maybe based on the number of steps, since otherwise there's not much of a point in tracking them.

I also loved how the Wizard 'likes to see people solve puzzles'. Made me chuckle.

Edit: also, it would be better if you made movement by keeping the key pressed faster than it would be by tapping the key. Otherwise impatient people like me will tap the keys and get tired of it.

The word 'MENU' also needs more contrast between the letters. Either separate the letters, or change the colors of the outline or the inside of the characters.

A 1 - 2 minute wait to play again after I die sounds like a recipe for frustration. If you save the previously made character, you can just
load the save and modify any stats, which should take a few seconds instead.

Accumulable score points would allow progression, even if the player doesn't improves, making the game more casual.
Achievements sound more hardcore, since I can't get a stronger character just for playing time.
So it depends on your target demographic.

I would feel like I'm being cheated just by being offered the addon. This is what I figure the game designer was thinking:
"I'm going to make a game so hard, that people who want to win will have to buy this addon! ~cue evil laugh~"
In this case you better make your game extra fun. But if you have a bunch of addons, and this is just one of them, I might think differently.

Check http://armorgames.com/play/10373/hack-slash-crawl
It's a dungeon-crawl game where you get achievements at the time of your death for future characters. Lots of room for improvement,
gameplay isn't as fast as you want it, but it might help you go in the right direction.

Okay so, Euler angles works fine except when the object has to pass from the -180 to +180 degrees boundary( because the smallest angle between my desired direction and the current direction switches signs ).

So I took part of Eric_Brown's method, I used a vector pointing forward in local space, rotated it by the orientation Quaternion and one pointing in the desired direction that I want, but instead of using a quaternion, I got the perpendicular vector between them using a cross product, normalized it, and multiplied this by the angle between both vectors, which resulted in a 3D vector representing proper torque.

For the special cases where the vectors are parallel, I multiplied the components of the forward and desired vector, and if any result is negative, then the vectors are opposite, so it's an angle of 180 degrees. In case it was 0 degrees, I would obviously apply no torque.

In the case of 180 degrees, I apply a torque of 0.001 radians per second through the Y-axis, since there's no way to figure out the right path. The direction will get fixed in the next frame anyway, and it doesn't introduces and visual artifacts.