Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Kickstarter for Lady Sabre, webcomic I edit

« on: 06 May 2013, 20:32 »

Awesome! Backed.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: BlueCupTools� Podcast! Grundislav and 304! Episode Ten!

« on: 25 Apr 2013, 14:21 »

Good job, but... NEED MOOOOooooore!

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General Discussion / Re: Thousandth Post

« on: 22 Apr 2013, 22:04 »

Ah, I miss Helm. He was the best in all the regularly appearing religion/philosophy flame wars. (Do we still have those?)  Without Helm, I don't think there would have been a Linus or Resonance.  He said something very nice to me after I made Anna in the OROW that encouraged me to make more games.

Congrats on the 1000'th post Baron!  Looks like I hit 1000 five(!) years ago.  I don't post very often any more (and when I do, it's always about Resonance, I know, I know) but I'm still on the forums pretty much every day.  When I'm at work and need to browse the web for a bit to refresh my brain, for some reason my fingers automatically type a 'b' and press enter in Chrome's address bar and the auto-complete takes me to bigbluecup.com/yabb.  I'm glad that old link still redirects to the correct address.  It's like a reflex.

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General Discussion / Re: [ICEY]So what makes a good RPG in your opinion?

« on: 16 Apr 2013, 19:33 »

Oh, thank you for that, VWG.  That was excellent.   

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Completed Game Announcements / Re: Gemini Rue

« on: 11 Apr 2013, 16:29 »

Got it last night!  Looks great on iPhone 4s and iPad Retina!  Gorgeous job, guys!

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Writing Software

« on: 29 Mar 2013, 20:58 »

Twine's great.  I started using it to make a quick outline of a game and then I just started writing things in too much detail and suddenly it was a Twine game.  I should finish that sometime...

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Writing Software

« on: 29 Mar 2013, 19:27 »

Hey, I was looking into different software packages to use while writing my next project since Google Docs, while convenient for sharing and collaborating, sucks for writing branching and conditional dialog.

I've had my eyes on articy:draft and it looks great, but waaaaay out of my budget.  (Though it's on sale for a decent price on Steam right now, and I may pick it up.)  I'm planning on giving the 30-day trial a go this weekend.

I also stumbled upon Chat Mapper during my searches and it looks great AND IT'S FREE (Edit: for non-commercial use).  It looks perfectly tuned for writing adventure projects, with branching dialog, and some great export options allowing for voice actors' script printing and translation.  Looked pretty neat. 

These would have come in handy during Resonance's development. I didn't use AGS' built in speech or dialog systems, so Janet had to write a special little program to parse through all the code, number the lines, and create voice actor scripts.  Not to mention the confusion and complications associated with formatting a branching and looping dialog on a flat Google Doc in a way understandable by all.

Any one else tried any similar software and have recommendations?

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: An idea for AGS Awards 2013

« on: 28 Mar 2013, 16:44 »

There's a Cow of the Year award?  WHY DIDN'T I WIN IT?

Ok, seriously, sorry to derail the thread...

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: An idea for AGS Awards 2013

« on: 28 Mar 2013, 15:37 »

I couldn't even photoshop in all the trophies BECAUSE MY HANDS WERE FULL OF TROPHIES!

Edit: Avatar updated.

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Completed Game Announcements / Re: Cart Life [v 1.2 Released Jan 18]

« on: 28 Mar 2013, 15:32 »

This was so awesome!  I was watching the live stream and "whoop"ed loud enough to wake my wife.  Dude won $30,000!  Great speeches, too!

Now, since Hofmeier let me in on the super-secret idea for his next game to me at Indiecade, all I have to do is beat him to it and rake in all the moneys and awards! Mwahaha!

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: An idea for AGS Awards 2013

« on: 28 Mar 2013, 15:25 »

Haha. "Not to say Resonance didn't deserve those awards, but..." I feel like the mafia or something. I'm going to break your legs if you suggest I didn't deserve all those awards!    We can discuss the suggestions in this thread on their merits without worrying about my feelings, you guys!

I don't know if Commercial vs Freeware is the solution, but I do agree that having one game sweep the awards makes it less fun. (It also makes the winner not know how to address that without sounding like a dick. So, sorry if I sound like a... well... dick.)

I like the jury idea (either in the nominations or final voting phase) and it might work as long as the jury is diverse enough and really dedicated to playing all the games.  I remember this being suggested several years ago as well and supporting it.

The awards should be fun, first and foremost though, and having a jury might make it less fun for those not on the jury.  But still, just voting for one title across the board en masse is less fun.

Edit: Besides, we have to change the rules now so that Resonance will forever remain the winningest AGS game of all time.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Ceremony on Saturday night!)

« on: 24 Mar 2013, 16:36 »

Again, thanks to the organizers! And thanks to the voters!  Super excited that XII games won XII awards in MMXII!

I thanked my team plenty of times last night, because Resonance was a team effort all the way.  Especially Shane and Nik who were there from the start pushing me along and giving great feedback and suggestions.  Huge thanks to Dave and Janet for taking the project on and getting it to the finish line. Could not have finished without them.

And special thanks to Kinoko and Josh Roberts (Chapter 11 Studios), whose Cirque de Zale and Adventure Architect articles (respectively) led to me finding Adventure Game Studio.  And thanks to the Big Blue Cup Community!  It's still the only online community that I've ever really felt a part of.  When I was living in Japan in 2004-2008, I spent so much time in these forums and it felt like my home away from home away from home.  I think I've been to three or four of these award ceremonies since then, and I've always hoped to some day win that top prize.  Mission accomplished!

I'm working on writing a Resonance sequel. I can't say for certain when or even if it will ever get done, but I look forward to sharing it with you when that day comes!

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Ceremony on Saturday night!)

« on: 23 Mar 2013, 20:20 »

I thought the server had exceeded the maximum number of users and that a different client wouldn't make a difference...

I'll switch into windows and give XChat a try.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Ceremony on Saturday night!)

« on: 23 Mar 2013, 20:15 »

I'd love to accept them, but I can't get in.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Ceremony on Saturday night!)

« on: 23 Mar 2013, 20:09 »

Terminated...

It's exceeded the number of users allowed.  Why aren't we Google Hangout-ing?

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Ceremony on Saturday night!)

« on: 23 Mar 2013, 18:31 »

Crap crap crap. So... I might be a little late.  I'm pushing my wife to move it.  We're an hour away from home and she doesn't understand the dire importance of the occasion!!!  No time to change into a suit!

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: Resonance Design Document (Resonance spoilers abound!)

« on: 14 Mar 2013, 20:42 »

Glad you guys are enjoying it!

Snarky: This document was intended for the whole team, but wound up being more for me than anyone else.  I needed to think the whole thing through and lay it out so I could get the bird's eye view of it.

When I was requesting work from ProgZ or Nauris (background artist), I would create a new thread in our super-secret development forum (one thread for each character, one thread for each background) and create a more specific description of what I required from each asset (often quoting directly from this document). 

Usually I was too specific and over-explained everything (often to the point of it causing confusion!) but eventually we'd get there.

For example, for Anna's building exterior which you brought up, here was the forum posting with image (using hide tags because it's big, not because it's a spoiler):

This is a tall background.  The example I've attached to this message is 320x880, but any height will do.

After Anna wakes up from her dream in the middle of the night (in the night background of her apartment that you just finished) she hears someone in her apartment.  She will push the bookshelf in front of the door and climb out the window.

Outside, she finds herself on the fire escape of her building.  She lives on the third floor of a four story apartment building.  Each level of the fire escape has one window.  There are ladders leading between each floor.  The top floor and bottom floor have retractable ladders for security.

Gameplay:

Just so you understand what's going on:  Anna will climb up to the fourth floor, but she'll find the ladder is not extended up to the roof.  The mechanism that cranks the ladder up is missing the handle.

Unable to proceed, she'll try going to the ground floor.  So she'll climb down to the third, and then second floor.  There, she'll find that the ladder is broken.  Cranking the lowering mechanism does nothing.  However, she can take the handle out of this mechanism.

She can then go back to the fourth floor and put the handle from the second floor into the mechanism and crank up the ladder.  The mechanism pulls up a rope that loops over a pulley mounted on the roof.  The rope pulls the collapsable ladder up to it's full extended position.

Anna then climbs up to the roof.  As soon as she arrives, she hears a crash.  The person in her apartment has broken through the bookshelf and is in her room.  He climbs out the window and begins climbing up to the roof.

Anna can check the roof-access door, but it's locked.  The window, however, is broken.  She takes a piece of glass and uses it to cut the rope holding the ladder up.  If she does this before the man reaches the roof she's safe, if not, game over.

Once she's cut down the ladder, the roof access door will burst open to reveal Bennet the cop inside.  He rescues her, etc.


The description

The building is relatively clean.  She's a doctor, so she's not living in the same kind of squalor as Ed.  However, this is the fire escape, and who cleans a fire escape?

Roof:

On the roof is a pulley mounted on some kind of metal structure used to support the ladder when it is pulled up.  The ladder only pulls up to the lip of the roof.  The rope that leads down connected to the top of the ladder should go straight down for ease of programming.

Also, there is a roof-access door.  The small window on the door is broken.  A piece of glass is removable.

Fourth floor:

The window on the fourth floor is borded up.  Anna will say that the room is under renovations.  There is a collapsible ladder up to the roof, and a solid ladder down to the third floor.  Don't worry about making the ladder collapsible.  Just draw the ladder, and I'll probably just cut it into three pieces and make them kind of slide or fold down onto each other.  The rope from the top of the collapsible ladder should go straight up (as vertical as possible) for programming ease . 

There is a small mechanism next to the ladder.  Initially, there is no handle connected to turn it, but when it's connected, it can be used to pull up the rope to lift the ladder.


Third floor:

The third floor contains the open window to Anna's apartment.  It should be pretty dark inside, but maybe we can make out some shapes.  There is a solid ladder on each side, one going up, one going down.  If you'd like, maybe Anna has some flower boxes out there or something to pretty up the place.


Second floor:

The second floor has a window as well, but it is shut and there are bars over the window.  It should be dark inside, no one is home.  There is a stationary ladder leading up to the third floor on one side.

The other side has another mechanism with a crank (that anna will later remove)  But the rope from this one is hanging over the edge loosely.  The ladder that it would normally connect to is bent and broken off slightly below the fire escape.  There is no way to get down to the ground.


Ground floor:

There should be a significantly threatening drop from the second floor to the street below so that Anna wouldn't risk it.  Other than that, whatever you want to go down there is cool!  No need to make it too detailed, the camera will likely only pan down there for a second or so.  You can make it engulfed in darkness.  No need for too much work down there!


Layers:

Since there's so many things Anna can go behind, it would be helpful to have many layers.  The bars and rail on each landing of the fire escape should have its own layer.  The floor of each fire escape should have it's own layer as well since anna could go under/behind it while climbing the ladders.  Thanks!


That's it!  Does that all make sense?  Definitely ask any questions if something is unclear!

We would then have some back-and-forth and sometimes go through a couple sketches before proceeding to the final product.  This was one of our earlier backgrounds while we were still working out a system.

This is definitely a case of me being too specific. My over-explaining of everything occasionally led to confusion with members of the team, particularly with Janet (sorry Janet!). I had to learn to be more concise, while still being specific and getting my vision across.  I just had so many details in my head, I wanted everyone to share them with me!

On the flip-side, descriptions for ProgZ were usually too simple ("Ed bends down to pick something up while facing right") and he occasionally asked for the full details of how I'd use the animation (emotional state of the character, etc.) so he could add his own flair to it, which he does brilliantly.

And was the entire game planned to this level of detail before you started implementing/prototyping anything? In other words: as you were working on this document, what else did you make towards the game?

Yes. I wrote this during the month of March 2007.  It was last updated in April 2007.  I got ProgZ and Nikolas on the team in April, and spent April, June, and July entirely on implementing the user interface.  It took me about three full months of part-time work to build my own inventory system including LTMs and STMs and my own dialog system.  Nauris joined the team thereafter and we had Ed's apartment (first room of the game) put together pretty quickly and that led to lots of tweaks to the system.  Once it was done, we continued with the rest of the game.

I hate TV shows where they are clearly "making it up as they go" and wanted to make sure I knew the whole story and game before I put one line of code down.

Another question, if you feel like talking about it, would be changes that happened earlier on in the creative process. Were there ideas you had in earlier drafts of the design that were removed or changed drastically before this version of the document?

I started writing the story of Resonance in high school as a film script (a really crappy one, I'm sure).  I've long since lost it, but the idea stuck with me.  It was originally set in a post apocalyptic world where the nation is made up of vast deserts with lush domed cities setting up a theme of dichotomies.  Instead of Resonance being the force pulling the MacGuffin particles together, it was to be "spin" and "counter spin".  The game was to be named "Spin/Counter Spin" with the first half being called "Spin" and the second half (after Anna's death and Ed's betrayal, when the plot's course changes drastically) would be called "Counter Spin".  This was all working into the dichotomy theme. 

I changed it to Resonance very shortly before writing this document because the media had just started using "Spin" and "Counter Spin" as buzz words for political jargon and I didn't want to be confused with that.  "Resonance/Counter Resonance" never had the same ring.

The character of Eddings always had the first name Tolstoy, though.

The particles, by the way, were heavily inspired by the novel Artifact by Gregory Benford.

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Resonance Design Document (Resonance spoilers abound!)

« on: 14 Mar 2013, 15:30 »

Let's get this out of the way upfront.  This thread will be loaded with Resonance spoilers, so stop reading if you haven't played the game and don't want to be spoiled.  I'd rather the thread not be cluttered with spoiler tagged text.

It's my birthday.  And as my gift to my favorite internet community, I'm releasing Resonance's original design document.  This document was written in March of 2007 and became the jumping-off point for the game's development.  During development, the game obviously morphed and changed, deviating from this original document, but it's interesting for me to read through it now, six years later.

I thought this document might be interesting or useful to people who are trying to write and plan their own game. It provides some insight into how I plan out puzzles and mapped out the story.  If nothing else, it might serve as an example of how NOT to do these things.

Anyways, have at it.  Let me know if you have any questions.  I'm open to discussing anything about the game or this document! Ask me here or on Twitter.

• Resonance's Original Design Document

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: GTD: Picking up objects

« on: 14 Mar 2013, 15:10 »

I'm definitely in the camp of letting them pick it up even if the use isn't readily apparent.  If a character refuses to pick something up, I generally forget about it as soon as it's out of sight (especially if it's as insignificant as a rock), so I won't think to go back to it to get it when I do need it.

Although, I'd say the best design should strive to have the player discover the problem before finding the object that solves it.  So, if you need a rock, it would be best if the game introduced you to the window that you need to break ("I need to get through here. Now if I only had something heavy enough to break it...") before you pass the pile of rocks.  This can be done either geographically (put the window close to the entrance to the room, while making the player walk and scroll the room a bit before discovering the rocks.) or by structuring the game around it (looking in the window plays a cutscene which opens up access to an alleyway where you find the rock needed to break the window).

I am 100% guilty of bad design in this regards! Live and learn!

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Adventure Related Talk & Chat / Re: AGS Awards 2012 (Voting time!)

« on: 12 Mar 2013, 13:27 »

I always thought that things filled with milk would have little staying power unless you keep them refrigerated.