Messages

1

Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: How much does it cost to pay a background artist?

« on: 15 Apr 2013, 10:33 »

If only I had great graphic skills... £100 a background 

People with talent so very often sell themselves short... If you had great graphic skills you'd be selling yourself very short cranking out backgrounds at $100 apiece, unless they were quick 2-3 hour things of course.

I'm often on the receiving end of quote queries where someone wants me to make a Gears of War quality game character for $50, seemingly not realizing it takes roughly 2 weeks of full time work at $40/hour.

Most people aren't used to dealing with professional freelance artists, and they don't realize that if you are dealing with a serious professional you have to expect to pay roughly twice as much for his/her time as you would a full-time employee. Why? Beacuse it works out best for both parties. After the artwork is done you don't have to keep paying him for dead time where he isn't working on anything (and don't have to lay him off), and as a freelancer you have to make twice as much as a full time employee to compensate for periods where there's less work, adding to your retirement fund every week, medical costs out of your own pocket, paying your accountant, sometimes your lawyer, etc, etc.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Status of the Double Fine Adventure

« on: 04 Apr 2013, 10:46 »

I quite like the graphics even if it's not embracing me fully, so to speak.

The issues they are having on the tech side sounds like normal professional game development. I've worked with a few proprietary in-house engines and what most people don't realize is they are usually not as polished and nice to use as AGS or Unity. Usually they are in some kind of half-broken state throughout development patched together with band-aid until the last couple of months or so when someone finally realizes the game has to be released at some point. Also, there's quite often not documentation available, and if there is it's going to be dated and incorrect.

The impression I get from watching the videos is that their hearts aren't completely in it, but that is just the regular fatigue and burn out that's kicked in. Still, looking forward to playing the game! I'm sure it's going to be fun.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Thinking "aloud" re: public domain

« on: 27 Apr 2012, 09:34 »

Eric, if I were you I would just make the game, release it on the Internet (for free, of course) and worry about any greedy copyright laws later. If you have a creative idea like this that isn't entirely based on being lazy, you shouldn't let something like that get in your way of expressing yourself.

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AGS Games in Production / Re: A Science Fiction Saga [upd. 27 DEC 2011]

« on: 10 Apr 2012, 08:33 »

Quick update, as I'm still getting inquiries.

For the past couple of months I've been doing, and still doing, freelance work to fill the war chest with gold to keep working on this thing. It's by no means abandoned, quite the opposite, but for the moment it's slow progress as spare time is rare. My goal is to get back on this full time as soon as financially possible!

Having slowed the pace down has given me a new perspective, and I'll be doing some changes for the good of the game. Mainly I'll be looking for some feedback, so main focus will be to get a build of a 30 minute slice ready, polish that up to release quality, hopefully with voice work, and release to the community primarily for opinions on how the graphics, animations, UI, gameplay, etc, holds up.

Screenshots are all well and nice, but assuming people have time, I'd like to put something playable into their hands. I'll give more info later, so no need to commit to anything just yet

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Modules & Plugins / Re: MODULE: BACKGROUND SPEECH (with animation&sound!) v1.0.1 (for AGS 3.2+)

« on: 23 Feb 2012, 10:21 »

And-or was kind enough to mail me his version (as MegaUpload is gone), and gave me permission to upload it and link to it here, in case anyone needs it:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sf3el98nssz734e

Note: He mentions, "although it might not be exactly the same version as I might have made some improvements".

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Beginners' Technical Questions / Re: Importing mask for walkbehinds/walkable areas doesn't work!

« on: 03 Jan 2012, 12:28 »

I've never had PNGs work, but a BMP usually does the trick for me.

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AGS Games in Production / Re: Anastronaut [New Trailer][Beta Testing]

« on: 30 Dec 2011, 20:47 »

I love that trailer, it makes me want to play the game so much. Just the kind of game I think I'd enjoy!

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AGS Games in Production / Re: A Science Fiction Saga [upd. 27 DEC 2011]

« on: 27 Dec 2011, 17:46 »

anian, you're absolutely right, the story isn't the most original one. After all, it's basically Futurama, with a twist of Farscape. To be honest, I tried to be more original in the earlier iterations of the game, but I tried too hard and ended up with a story that was contrived, and convoluted. In the end I stuck with something easier, that I enjoyed working with and building characters around

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AGS Games in Production / Re: A Science Fiction Saga

« on: 27 Dec 2011, 17:01 »

merlin86, thanks, and yeah this will be a commercial release Don't worry, though, I won't charge more for it than I'd be willing to pay for it, myself, and I'm a bit of a cheapskate...

Haven't got much new to show yet, most of the stuff I'm working on now would spoil the story too much, but here's a walkcycle of a privateer/scavenger/pirate vessel captain. The speed in the GIF isn't quite right, though:

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AGS Games in Production / Re: A Science Fiction Saga

« on: 23 Dec 2011, 11:43 »

DaveGil, CaptainD: Thanks, guys :)

Pikmeir: It's not at all a stupid question :) I've spent a lot of time working on my graphics workflow, and while this isn't the place to go through it in detail, you can just use any 3D package, such as Blender for instance, and render out basic geometry with some basic material (various reflectivity, textures, etc) and do post work in pretty much any 2D editor. There's no secrets or anything, just basic 3D and 2D retouching. As I work on this I keep saving material for a "making of" since I always get a kick out of other people doing that, so hopefully the game will contain a "making of" section. If there's time I plan on having a "developer's mode" with commentary, as is common (thanks, Dave, for making this a standard :P), and hopefully I'll be able to show things visually. E.g. how some of the backgrounds were constructed.

But that is heavily dependant on time... Right now the biggest time sink is me having to go back and redo backgrounds as I've gotten better at certain things, which results in a variation in style that looks a bit jarring. Even now there's an apparent difference in style between e.g. the yellow tinted world, and the rainy streets, that I want to avoid if possible.

Iliya, Pikmeir: Thanks :) Earliest middle of 2012. Translations? Right now I'm not really planning on having it translated, but thanks for the offer nonetheless :)

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AGS Games in Production / Re: A Science Fiction Saga

« on: 19 Dec 2011, 09:43 »

: Thanks

cosmicr: Thank you! ETA-wise.. right now I'd have to say "2012", broadly. I have a schedule that I've worked out based on how long things have taken so far and it puts a release in late Q2, earliest; but I have some story elements that are a bit like voluntary "sub quests" that mostly serve as learning more about the universe and the main character. I can rip a few of these out to cut down on development time if I start to lose interest and risk not releasing.

Hehe, the old car is Mr. Car that Anderson drives today The odd slightly more futuristic cars are in a colony city whose technology is more present day-based due to limited resources / being far from rest of civilisation. There's also a city where flying vehicles are the norm, and upper class citizen have personal teleportation pads

LUniqueDan, selmiak: Thanks. A general response is that I'll try to get some alpha and/or beta testers that wouldn't mind giving the game a try early on and spoiling the story until everything is finalised, hopefully this will lead to things like that being addressed and solved.

One of the things that I'd like to do, that I didn't put into the features as I'm not sure I'll be able to do it, is give the user the option to choose font sizes (normal/large), and pick between a handful of cursors as well as pick a more simplified user interface than the verbcoin (with hand, eye, mouth, foot). Just having an interact/examine interface would make it more fun for certain players.

With less interactivity there'd be less death for the player. For instance, there's one segment where kicking a suspicious looking box will kill you, while carefully moving it by hand ensures that you live. In comparison there's also a segment where you might want to kick something away quickly, instead of taking the time to reach down, pick something up, and throw it away by hand.

FrancoFranchi: Thanks, I hope so, too! Some aspects are actually quite a bit like Futurama. I think I might be misrepresenting the game a smidge by using too much tongue-in-cheek language describing it. In fact it should be quite a dark game at times, but I try not to be tasteless and gross just for the sake of it.

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AGS Games in Production / A Science Fiction Saga [upd. 27 DEC 2011]

« on: 18 Dec 2011, 19:43 »

Time to make this thing more public. Introducing my tentatively titled title:

A Science Fiction Saga

(name subject to change)

The Story

What if a regular guy suddenly finds himself millenia in the future, in a world--or universe--that he doesn't understand, and which surely doesn't understand him?

This is the situation that Anderson Kane finds himself in when an incident at work turns his life upside down, inside out--as well as a few multidimensional variations--as he is forced to quickly adapt to a way of living the rest of mankind has evolved into for thousands of years.

Walk, stumble, fall, teleport, hyperspace, and wormhole your way in Anderson's white sneakers through various solar systems, interstellar spaceships, colonies, and alien outposts; uncovering an unsettling truth about the human race that will put you, and newfound friends/enemies, in a not entirely welcome spotlight.

Sometimes you just want to know what your place in the universe is.

Some features and "features"

• A story that will (hopefully) make your moral compass spin a bit.
• Characters that bring the universe to life.
• Dialog- and event-based puzzles.
• Not many puzzle-puzzles.
• Interaction interface reminiscent of Full Throttle's (and more recently Gemini Rue's).
• Uncomplicated action sequences to break up the pacing of the game.
• A buttload of different areas to explore.
• More ways to die than is the norm in today's point and click adventure games.
• A change of outfits regularly so you never get tired of looking at Anderson.
• Not really recommended to a younger audience.

Updates?
I will post updates here from time to time, but there will be more regular information being posted on my twitter account (@eastman). Feel free to follow me there if you want some more behind-the-scenes stuff

Early Screenshots
(some of these are early workflow tests)

UPDATE 27 DEC 2011

Just a little walkcycle of one of the NPCs:

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Why isn't there a serious, modern Adventure Games engine?

« on: 15 Dec 2011, 13:29 »

The 'Import Multiple Sprites' thing uses the last options you used for a normal import, including the Use Alpha Channel setting

I tested this just before I replied to cat's post, and that's not the behaviour I got. A Normal import of a PNG excluding the alpha channel resulted as you would expect, but a Quick import afterwards of the same file resulted in it keeping the alpha channel.

I'm sort of going off topic with this one, though.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Why isn't there a serious, modern Adventure Games engine?

« on: 15 Dec 2011, 11:14 »

AGS can import a series of images in couple of clicks now, so where do you save time?

Last time I tried this, it didn't work with alpha channel - also, in a 32bit color game it is kinda annoying to always have the messagebox if I really want to use alpha channel...

If you quick import a series of PNG files with transparency they import just fine (they just look wonky in the sprite browser). Also, doing it that way there won't be a message box popping up asking you things. It's how I usually import sprites, even if it's just a single one.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Why isn't there a serious, modern Adventure Games engine?

« on: 10 Dec 2011, 18:56 »

Yeah, I wasn't thinking they'd release it for the masses, unless they set up some kind of licensing arrangement, but that's a hassle that might be more effort than it's worth to support.

Just brought it up as it could perhaps inspire anyone who's looking in what it takes to cobble something new together

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Converting MP3 to OGG

« on: 06 Dec 2011, 17:20 »

What happens is basically the same as what happens with a lossy JPEG that you save into different formats. Easy to see what happens with a visual demonstration:



In this case you might as well just save it directly to TIFF/PNG/TGA and skip the BMP.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Why isn't there a serious, modern Adventure Games engine?

« on: 05 Dec 2011, 11:59 »

Unsure how many have noticed this, but Theo/Skygoblin left AGS and developed their own adventure games engine, Gobby, for the development of The Journey Down HD, and the blog post outlines some stuff that might be relevant to this thread.

I searched this forum for "gobby", which brought up an unrelated thread, so I'm guessing this hasn't been discussed much yet?

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Advanced Technical Forum / Re: Modal AGS

« on: 30 Nov 2011, 23:51 »

I experimented with this a few weeks ago since I played Skyrim in a borderless fullscreen window, and it was fantastic (google SBW.exe and Skyrim).

It's just an AutoHotKey script that you can compile into an EXE as a launcher for your game.

The code I had launched my AGS game, but this is basically the same thing, found a sample code on some forum. Ctrl-Alt-F will fullscreen your windowed game and remove the border and title bar:

[code]!^f::

Screen_X = %A_ScreenWidth%
Screen_Y = %A_ScreenHeight%
   
WinSet, Style, -0xC40000, A
WinMove, A, , 0, 0, Screen_X, Screen_Y
;WinActivate, A
return [/code]

Problem is it stretches the game to fit the screen. I'd rather just play a 640x400 game at 2x nearest neighbour with black border,  but I have no idea how to do that.

Second problem is if you alt-tab into another window and then re-activate the game by clicking on the window with the mouse (instead of alt-tabbing back), you lose all mouse interaction with the game until you alt-x and restart the game.

I would prefer something built into AGS for this, but honestly, an AHK script might just do fine with some tuning and we wouldn't have to wait for any official builds, after whatever fork is chosen, and things are organized enough.

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Modules & Plugins / Re: MODULE: Tween 1.22 - Create fluid animations for your GUIs, objects, etc!

« on: 29 Nov 2011, 23:14 »

I tried that, but changing repeatedly_execute_always to repeatedly_execute in tween.asc didn't make any difference. The little ships in the background still animate when the game is paused. Been trying to figure out exactly what is going on here, but so far I'm drawing a blank.

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Modules & Plugins / Re: MODULE: Tween 1.22 - Create fluid animations for your GUIs, objects, etc!

« on: 29 Nov 2011, 14:25 »

I'm using object.TweenPosition, and when I invoke PauseGame() or pause the game when a GUI is visible, the tween animation continues to play.

So I have the player freezing as I bring up the inventory, but all the objects in the background keeps animating, which looks really weird.

Is this regular behaviour, or have I screwed something up?

I'm on 3.2.1 and this is the code snippet I use in room_AfterFadeIn():

[code]oBGShip1.TweenPosition(9.0, 509, oBGShip1.Y, eLinearTween, eRepeatTween);[/code]