The Lake of Reflection [50% complete]

[parmeisan]

Synopsis: Three friends go hiking in the woods, only to mistakenly enter the land of the fae, a shadowy reflection of our own world.  Before they can return, they must discover something new about themselves, find out what happened to a missing faerie, discover the truth of the past, and make a difficult choice.

• Puzzle adventure game.
• Short-to-medium in length. (It's my first AGS game, so I'm minimizing the number of screens (5-10) and animated characters (3ish) but I'm not sure how much exactly that will translate to shorter play-time).
• Verb coin interface  (Thanks to Electroshokker!)
• Two endings
• 1024x768 with a relatively unique style (I don't know yet whether that first part is good or bad).

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As of February 4th:

Puzzle design	62%	(I may make the game longer.)
Sketching	50%
Character Art	36%
Scene Art	24%
Menu Art	69%	Fonts, and possibly save menu?
Fiddling/Learning	15%
Dialog	0%
Entrances/Hotspots	0%
Puzzle Coding	0%

Totals: Spent 32 hours so far, best guess 87 hours remaining; 27% complete

Hoping to be done by February or March 2012, but I tend to be rather optimistic.

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And some bonus, in-progress images:

Discovering that the best way to make it look 3D is with folding.	My first attempts at making Lindsay's sweater - and a sketch of her in the background.
Setting up to create the forest background.  I wasn't making 20 different trees!	I'm probably going to update this later, but my first attempt at a tree with a mirror.

EDIT: Changing the name to match the screenshots.  May change again at some point...

[Ezekiel]

I like the cutouts. I don't think I've seen that before with AGS. 

[Slipshod]

This looks awesome! I like the construction paper look, very creative! I can't wait to play it when it's finished.

[Anian]

This looks interesting, not only the art style but the story as well.

How come you use a mirror for making backgrounds?

[parmeisan]

I guess that wasn't clear, huh?  I used the mirror on that image only.  Once I like how it looks, it's going to be in the title screen, and you can see it's in the inventory menu as well.  It's because of the theme "reflection", ie the friends begin at a cabin called Reflection (I'm a little undecided on "Lake of Reflection" vs "Hills" vs whatever, though), they end up in a reflection of our world, and a mirror will be used to solve at least one puzzle.

I'd also like to note that although this isn't the Critic's Lounge, if you have something critical to say, don't hold back!  As my first AGS game, I will need as much feedback as I can get - and as it's not my first game in general, I can take it.     Once I get a playable version out, I'll start a proper thread there - right now, it'd probably be flagged as spamming.

EDIT: I just saw a mod tell another guy that criticism doesn't belong here.  Ah well.

[Eggie]

Looks sweet!

[Radiant]

Since you seem to be using a verbcoin, please add keyboard shortcuts as well. They can save the player a lot of time.

[Construed]

Wow, Very interesting concept, Cant wait to see where it goes 

[parmeisan]

Well, I'm still working on this.  Some days it feels like I'm making a ton of progress; others, not so much.  The characters have all been animated standing and walking in four directions (and re-animated, and re-animated... the current iteration is not perfect, but will not be updated again until the rest of the game is much further along and I know for sure that it needs it).  Each character has a different speech colour, font, colour of mouse cursor and colour of verbcoin.  (Inventory updates still to come).

So, changes to the previous estimates as of February 26th:

Character Art	99%
Menu Art	80%	(Unique inventories, possibly a save menu).
Fiddling/Learning	90%
Entrances/Hotspots	5%
Puzzle Coding	5%

Totals: Spent 77 hours so far, best guess 48 hours remaining; 62% complete

Spent far too long on animations, but still hoping to be done by March 2012.  Maybe April.  (Yes, you saw that coming, didn't you?)  But I have a lot of "new" things to start and potentially discover that I've underestimated.  

Here's a video demonstrating recent progress.  Warning: It's probably pretty boring if this stuff isn't inherently interesting to you.


On a different note... As a heavy keyboard user myself - Radiant, your suggestion sounds excellent.  Do you (or anyone else) have thoughts on which keys to use?  Is there a common way to do it?  I am thinking maybe keys 1-5, as "L" for look, "T" for talk, etc would be annoying for users who want just one hand on the keyboard.

Cheers!


EDIT: Oh, and I'd meant to include this... it really highlights the imperfections (for me, at least) but it's kind of fun to watch:

[straydogstrut]

Looking really, really good! All that effort will definitely be worth it

[Ghost]

This looks so awesome! The "imperfections" you mention make it even more charming; it's clearly a hand-made, cool look. Can't wait to play it!

Do you (or anyone else) have thoughts on which keys to use?  Is there a common way to do it?  I am thinking maybe keys 1-5, as "L" for look, "T" for talk, etc would be annoying for users who want just one hand on the keyboard.

There are some standards, but I'd prefer easy-to-reach setups over keys spread all over the keyboard. There aren't that many actions in you verbcoin, so I wouldn't mind "learning" a new setup.
You can, however, assign multiple keys with the "or" operator:
oneKey || anotherkey

[Anian]

This is still looking great, though you should have a strong static light when grabbing frames of character animations, otherwise it might look incosistent.

You should probably take something that similar to keys in other games, not just I, L, T, E (inventory, look, talk, examine) -> maybe use A, S, D, E etc. which are used for FPSs for example, the hand kind of automatically knows how to position for that. Playing with one hand may be easier, but there are not really that many under 18 games that are made only to be played with one hand.   So don't really worry about that part.

[Grim]

Loving the @overhotspot@ font! Also, I must admit it looks pretty cool and very original. One suggestion- try adding idle animation for characters to make them look more alive. Good luck!!!

[parmeisan]

Oooh, I'm really liking some of these ideas.

I do want to stick with one hand keyboard if possible, because one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse is a very popular playstyle for a lot of games - certainly I think the easiest way to play would be navigate with the mouse, but shortcuts with the other hand.

Re: the lighting... I... er... learned that the hard way..    I thought it would be enough to just have the blinds closed, but it wasn't, and now am stuck animating between 11:30 and 1:30 or else it looks different.  Appreciated, though.

[Ali]

Looks great!

I tried stop-motion animation for the first time recently, so I admire your patience! The flickering is a lot less noticeable in the video than in the gifs. They look a bit orange, is it possible the white balance on the camera isn't right for the lamp you're using? Or is it just the gif compression? The camera isn't set to auto-expose is it? I think you could sort out the flickering quite quickly in photoshop / gimp anyway.

Good luck!

[Eric]

This looks so awesome! The "imperfections" you mention make it even more charming; it's clearly a hand-made, cool look. Can't wait to play it!

Couldn't agree more with this. This looks beautiful!

[Blue]

I can imagine it must have taken a long time cutting out the little pieces and putting it all together. But it looks really interesting and fresh.
Looking forward to playing this one :-)

[gaarias]

Just wanted to mention: That first picture looks creepy.

:o

[Joseph DiPerla]

This looks amazing and will probably definitely win some kind of award in the AGS Awards 2012! Keep us posted.

[parmeisan]

@gaarias: Which part of it?  Do you mean the character?  I thought she looked way creepier in the second picture!

I was just coming by to say that the last few weeks have seen very minimal work, as I got very busy with other stuff right around the same time I ran out of brown paper.  (5 different kinds of construction paper packs and none of them had brown; the clerks looked at me odd when I asked them to order some in for me, but they did it...) Anyway, I've been eager to get going on this again and the paper just came in.  I'm done for tonight but here's some new stuff:



PS. I am expecting to have a bit of a demo out soon.  Hope it stands up to the high expectations I'm hearing!