Yesterday was very interesting though. There is a game design / production competition being run which Dr. Default and I've entered. There was a lecture on in IT Tallaght yesterday for the participants on how to design games. Only four people showed up in total and neither of the other two guys had any experience with game dev. They both seemed quite enthused so they might come up with something interesting. The lecture itself was very informative. It mostly revolved around how to brainstorm efficiently and how to analyze the design to check for major flaws.
The brainstorming method we were shown was very simple. Draw a basic scene. A few hills or a tree. Then just get everyone looking at the image and throwing out small ideas, like "you could be a worm", or "apples fall from the tree". Then you just draw everything in onto the image as they are called out. Then you step back and work out the fine detail. If you don't like the idea chuck it and pick another background image. It works well.
Anyway, I think the next game is going to be a side-scroller assuming our current idea isn't thrown out within the next few days. It will be more complicated than Maul Ball but still should be very achievable in a relatively short time frame.
I'm still playing MapleStory. I created a new character because I'd messed up the stats of my other character early on and only realsed it a day or two ago. My new character is "strozilla". I'm currently a level 8 mage.
