Well, you all have to admit that my main character is the best one so far...

Not in, great giveaway!

Congratulations!

I used to have a morbid fascination with watching "turn or burn" evangelical outreach videos, and trying to imagine the mindset of the people who saw the world this way. I'd like to make some kind of adventure game based simply on the premise that they are 100% correct about how the universe works, and then exploring the consequences sans commentary - sort of like Niven's Inferno, but with no attempt to justify or condemn anything.

Hey congrats!

Advice:
1) Studying isn't the only thing to do in college, but it is "a thing" you should do. Make sure you spend time going to parties and in study groups.
2) Subjects that bore the fuck out of you now may be deeply and personally important to you years down the road. Having a minor grounding in something you may not see as useful or care about that much is easy in college, and you never know when a basic knowledge of something like philosophy or anthropology will enable an experience or personal growth you might have otherwise missed. So treat it as liberal arts even if you don't have to.
3) You'll never be around as many open minded people again. Remember though, they are almost all young, and therefor will be ignorant on some things. You can't have everything, but you can take advantage of being exposed to tons of different people, views, and socioeconomic backgrounds. This will never happen to you again depending on your chosen line of work.
4) Debt sucks, seriously, work hard to avoid huge student loans, eat crackers for some meals, have room mates, etc. Don't buy stuff you cannot afford on money you don't have. Even private student loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, this is nearly the only kind of debt treated this way, so treat it as a very useful, but very dangerous object.
5) You are selecting instructors as much as you are selecting classes. Make sure you check their syllabuses, some things smack of lazy professors (e.g. high amounts of grade being dependent on being physically present is usually a bad sign). Ask other students, check any syllabuses they keep on file in the university library, and even check past years' tests (again: library), if you don't find these they are probably lazy and use the same tests over and over again.
6) University is not a trade school, if you want a trade school, stop now, withdraw your acceptance and go to one. I highly suggest if you were under this conception that you take a bit and consider what you want out of this, if the best thing you can say is "a good job" trade school will save you 10s of thousands of dollars and hand you several years of your life back as real work experience.
7) This last one is a personal opinion (more so than the others): any graduate degree that costs you money to pursue is not worth it. You should be payed to do graduate level work (you teach for it and do other things). If you have to pay for it, it is a sucker's bet. Yes, this now applies to law school too. The sole exception is medical school, and only if you intend to pursue a specialty and not general practice.

Thanks for the giveaway, I hope you enjoy your university life, it's unique and you only get it once:)

Gratz - I'm in

Congrats! A similar question was asked... uhm, I think twice in the past, and anyway in both occasions, my answer was to create:
"A Star Wars Jedi Knight game with a stealth third-person perspective a la Splinter Cell series or Hitman series, but with RPG statistics."

Big congratulations, ellynandroid. I remember getting my college acceptance letter and being relieved with that phase of anxiety being over. I hope you enjoy your time in college, and make sure to attend class and study in between hanging out on the GOG forums and playing the amazing GOG games. ;)

That said, my dream game would something like a love letter to the entire pastime of gaming itself. I enjoyed adventure games the most growing up, so I fondly remember the command parsers and blocky graphics in things like King's Quest. What I'd love is to craft a game in which you start in a text-only environment, then after a few tasks you're in a black and white graphics environment (like "Mystery House"), and then progress to a 16-color command parser interface, then VGA point and click, then hand drawn animation point and click, then 3D, and so on until bringing the interface, graphics, and technology to the modern era and beyond.

Story wise it would involve something with alternate realities and multiple lives. It'd be like the protagonist of the text-only game accidentally finds himself or herself (let's call the protagonist an AFGNCAAP - ageless, faceless, gender neutral, culturally ambiguous adventure person!) in a different reality. I'd of course love the different settings to be strong homages to different classic games. Maybe there would be a rift in the gaming world's space-time continuum, and in order to fix it you have to trace the rift through each game world as explained above. The latter stages of the game could even be first person 3D, and it doesn't have to be limited purely to adventure game or point and click mechanics.

It's a little crazy and way too ambitious, but if I had a huge company, endless supply of money, and constant level of energy, I would do it!

Thanks for the advice, there! :) I really appreciate it. Don't worry, I've made a huge effort to be ready for when the expenses really start to hit. :P

Oh my god, I want this to happen. That is an absolutely awesome idea.

Not entering, but congrats – I'm sure it was an acceptance which was well-deserved. What school are you going to, and what do you want to major in?
Sounds like the game you want is Independence War (which runs really well in Wineskin with zeckensack's Glide wrapper installed under winetricks, if my testing with the demo is any indication).

Thanks! :) I'm going to UTAS, studying psychology.

Already have it :). The joystick doesn't work in Wine/I-War - in fact, the joystick code for Wine-Mac only goes back to dinput. It doesn't cover winmm - the code isn't even there for the Mac. So pre-1999/2000 games still don't work (unless a very new version has fixed this?). Over a year ago, someone finally got post-2000 games working in Wine with a joystick and apparently the code to get dinput working on the Mac shouldn't be that different from Winmm, but alas it hasn't happened (but I haven't checked recently). Wine on the Linux side works fine for joysticks on all ages of game.

I have tried it on my Windows side and while it is close to my "ideal" - the game I would program if I could - there is a certain type of gameplay that I think would work well, but no one has tried yet. The details of how mine would be different is a little tl;dr and there are several games out/being developed which might delve into it. Star Citizen looks like it will also have Newtonian physics (or close to it) and there are few smaller games I haven't tried out there. But if I could make a space sim, I have a very particular vision of how it would play and I think it would be kind of neat.
You know, that does sound like something an indie game company could/would actually pull off. Seriously. Nice idea.

Oh, that's interesting. I've done some dabbling in education psychology, and behavioural psychology through my present program; it's a pity that my psych courses are somewhat useless. Still, Psych is a really fascinating field...I wish I had more time in my undergrad to take some psych courses.

Hmm, how recent is this? For shits and giggles, I installed my "extra" copy of Freespace 1 from the Interplay PWYW sale and much to my surprise, not only did it work well in WINE (Using 1.5.15 in Wineskin, IIRC), but it worked very well with my Logitech Extreme 3D. Then again, FS1 may have been written with dinput support, even though it came out in 1998.

You also might be interested in the (fairly obscure) space combat sim Terminus, by Vicarious Visions, which had a tri-platform Win/Mac (OS 9)/Linux release. It had a heavy focus on hard-core Newtonian physics, and even had dual joystick support. The rudimentary OS X PPC port is still floating out there, I think.

I know it!

I've had a lot of people telling me that I shouldn't do psychology, that I should go into medicine or "hard" science instead (I hate that criticism of psych so much, it's not physics but it doesn't have to be), because they think I'm wasting my score — as if a number is cause for me to change all my life goals. Suddenly all these people who are trying to be supportive are all like "I could really see you as a doctor!!!!" But I am crazy passionate about it, and changing to something else would be a huge mistake for me I think. Getting in is an absolute dream.

/rant :P

Congrats on the university acceptance, I'm still in high school.
I would like to win: Real Myst(2.99 within the time span of the giveaway), Shadow Warrior(2.99) and Flatout(2.99).

I have difficulty coming up with one specific game( I have other ideals than the one I will mention) but here it goes. I would like to make an open-world game that is very realistic, one that builds upon the base that games like Ultima 7(NPC patterns) and Skyrim have. The world would be massive(like say Daggerfall only with a detailed world), the combat would be very realistic(limb loss, one hit kills, intelligent and realistic AI). The population of the game would change like in real life so the NPC and animals in the world do not re-spawn but instead have to mate(the whole mating thing isn't necessary to show though, not sure how that would be represented).

The logic of the real world could still be manipulated, for example the player would be able to possess a magic pouch or backpack that would allow for the carrying of many more items. In the game you would have numerous professions, the world would not revolve around the player. The player could live as a simple baker, or a some other mundane occupation while an NPC hero is out killing dragons. You would be able to destroy any building you see using weapons or tools that would have an effect on buildings(an axe could bust up people's tables for example), the buildings would collapse like in Red Faction: Guerrilla, no scipting.

If the player dies and has a child they can jump back into the game as their child. I'm not sure how time would work, I think it would be necessary to make it pass significantly quicker than in real life of course. Over time technology will develop(or be developed by the player) and guns, hell maybe even tanks and helicopters would end up in the massive world of this game. Or the world could actually just end if the population doesn't survive the plague, or some other great calamity that can happen with the right conditions.

When it comes to graphics I actually don't really care much about the game looking good, I would rather it be possible to simulate all the aforementioned awesomeness and have decent Sims 2 or Gothic 2 like graphics. Of course there are other awesome things I can get into but that's the basic ideal.

I actually think it would be possible in a few years or so, if the graphics were not so important to people these days. I have no ideal how to program games(yet) but that type of game would be awesome.
EDIT:I changed the games in the wishlist.

Possible - I haven't checked myself in > 6 months, but I've kept tabs on the bug report and haven't seen any progress, but maybe it's because no one has simply noticed or reported the bug fixed?

Here's the bug report: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18424

God I haven't looked at that stuff in awhile! :)

It's also barely possible that FS1 used dinput. The dev who came on for I-war: Defiance had thought the original I-war used a very early version of dinput too, but wasn't sure. So it is possible by 1998 that dinput was there. Although ... I could've sworn I tried FS1 awhile back and couldn't get it to work, but maybe that was also before dinput was fixed. I should try again and with some of the others I knew weren't working: Red Baron, I-War 1, any DOSBox game in WINE - I was just seeing what would happen (I think SDL code for standard DOSBox doesn't use dinput either).

Cool. I'll take a look. Someone also mentioned Star Shatter: The Gathering Storm. Sounded cool too.