Last Flight of the Starship Hindenburg

[KodiakBehr]

Hi everyone.

I've been lurking this site for about seven or eight months now without saying anything, mostly because I thought it'd be neat to properly introduce myself with a completed product.  I am a professional in my late-twenties who stumbled upon AGS one day and found a delightful new hobby that has sucked away much of my free time.  The AGS community is one of the most friendly and welcoming I have ever seen, and I'm amazed at how many great works are produced simply for the delight of sharing a story with friends.

Anyway, enough blathering, you came to see the game!

LAST FLIGHT OF THE STARSHIP HINDENBURG

An unknown calamity has occurred on interstellar cruise-ship Hindenburg, and its crew is not responding on any channel.  The ship is traveling at high-velocity on a collision-course with Earth, and as the nearest Coast Guard vessel in intercept range, you have been tasked to assess to regain control of the situation.  This dark comedy adventure is best described as one-part Starship Titanic, one-part System Shock.

Highly recommend you play this game in windowed mode.  Your mileage will vary with widescreen.

I would consider this game to be more on the difficult side of things, but you tell me.

Download "Last Flight of the Starship Hindenburg" here. (48MB)

FEATURES

Over 40 rooms.
Tons of parody.
Sound and music.
An entirely bizarre SECRET ENDING for only the most neurotic of players.

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GAMEPLAY INSTRUCTIONS

Whether it's riding on the Ghorophods on Rigel IV , ice-skating on the frozen wastes of the Warton Expanse, or sipping reds and whites in the first wine bar in space, you've never taken a cruise quite like this before!  And you can start your planning right here. In this manual, you'll also find out about our destinations, our ports, our cruise tours, our fleet - everything you need to know to plan an unforgettable cruise vacation. So let’s get you started. At the Main Menu, click “New Game” to begin the game.

You can access the Main Menu again at any time by pressing the Escape button. From the Main Menu, you can save, load, or exit your game.

Clicking the left mouse-button once on these objects will move our hero to them.
Clicking and holding the left-button will reveal two buttons â€" “Look at…” and the context-sensitive “Interact/Pick Up” the object. While still holding down the left-button, move the mouse over the desired option and then let go.

In this game, you will never enter a situation that you cannot get out of. You can feel free to walk, look and interact with objects without penalty. Just try not to upset the other guests.

Your Inventory

Right-click your mouse. Great! You found your tablet! This represents your inventory and will be populated with all of the objects you collect on this adventure. In the event that you have collected more objects then can be presented on the screen at any one time, arrows will appear to take you to additional screens. There is no limit to the number of objects you can carry.

To exit your inventory, move the cursor to the outer boundaries of the screen.

At any point while accessing your inventory, you can left-click an object to put it in hand.

An inventory object in hand can be clicked on any other object in your inventory (if you want two objects to interact with each other), or can be moved the outer boundaries of the screen (thereby dismissing the inventory window), and clicked on anything of interest in the room.

Elevators and Ladders

After summoning an elevator, the door will open. We here at Star Alliance trust you are familiar with elevators and their operation. However, to our guests from high-gravity
worlds, here is a primer.

In order to use the elevator to get to another floor, you must select “Enter Elevator” as an interaction, rather than simply walk up to it. Likewise, when a ladder is available to climb down, you must select “Climb Ladder” as an interaction, rather than simply walk down it.

And that’s it. We look forward to seeing you soon!

PRO TIP:
It may be a little finicky finding the “hotspot” of an object in hand so the game understands that you are using it on something in a room. Note that these “hotspots” are always located in the centre of the object.

PRO TIP:
You can also look and interact with objects in your inventory in the same fashion as you can in a room.

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Bugfixes

25/07/2011 - Save and load interfaces now available upon start of the game.
26/07/2011 - Removed placeholder content that was never supposed to make it into the public version (oops!)  Note that this has reduced the size of the game by 10MB.

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CAVEATS AND APOLOGIES

Alright, now in the interests of full-disclosure, this is my very first attempt at a game and in retrospect, there are a number of game-design decisions that I would have handled differently, knowing what I do now.  

Also, I will confess in advance to the following cardinal sins: I had intended for this game to be 100% hand-drawn in Paint.NET but as I am not much of an artist, it was simply too difficult to pull it off while keeping the game (moderately) attractive. So I cheated in a few places. The basic protagonist animations a result of an extreme paint-over performed last year for an earlier attempt at a lower-resolution. Some of the deceased bodies, also, are paint-overs that are not kosher.  Some images have been used from the public domain.  The sounds are all in the public domain, but only about half of the songs are, the remainder being stumbled upon randomly (if I could cite them, I would).  I would imagine that the television animation in the first-class room is owned by some media company or another. My apologies to them in advance, but Oprah belongs in space. These transgressions are an embarrassment and in poor taste, and they kept me from wanting to share this work with you all for the past couple months.  Considering that this is a lesson-learned that I do not intend to repeat, that I have no intention to profit from any of this and that I am being straightforward about it, I am hoping to be spared from excessive vitriol.  But I can always take it down if need be.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this.  Let me know if anything doesn't work.

Best Regards,

KodiakBehr

[Saren]

It looks great, especially for a first game! I'm downloading it right now.

[theo]

Looks very ambitious! I like the "cutscene" art. Will check it out when time permits!

Congrats on releasing your baby. 

[Anian]

The character and the backgrounds don't seem to be in the same style or resoulution, but I'll give this one a try.

[LUniqueDan]

Cyclopean cyborgs, I'm soooooo  sold! I really like the aesthetic. Downloading for Tonight.

found a delightful new hobby that has sucked away much of my free time.

Welcome aboard KodiakBehr!

[Tabata]

Boaaah  :o â€" that seems to be interesting stuff - *downloading* 

Not to forget: Welcome to the forum

[KodiakBehr]

The character and the backgrounds don't seem to be in the same style or resoulution, but I'll give this one a try.

You got me there.  My first attempt was in 320x200.  I liked the protagonist, but was frustrated with the BGs.

Thank you for trying it out, though.

[Ghost]

This dark comedy adventure is best described as one-part Starship Titanic, one-part System Shock.

Awesome combo. Now add a dash of Dark Star, and you've created something like Tony Hawk's Jedi Knight Guitar Hero: Awesome Incarnate.

Really, this sounds very good, and I like the clean art style. Consider yourself watched by a ghost.

[Tabata]

@KodiakBehr
We are still on "the run".

Since you are new to the forum please allow me to give you the little hint to look in the thread for hints and help over here  .

[KodiakBehr]

Ah, sorry.  On it now.

[Anian]

So far, it has a good atmosphere and is pretty funny, but the resolution differences, pretty obvious lack of play testing, and some other details (like the character doesn't scale when entering the elevator, some rooms seem emptyish etc.) show lack of polish, but I guess this all could be contributed to "first game syndrome".
Overall it's not bad and shows potential imo, looking forward to your next game.

You say you don't draw that well, so who did the intro comic style sequence? (and you should've made more of those, like when you first find a body, when the medicine locker is opened etc., would've added so much to the experience).

Btw I got this error when I tried to leave the starlight gallery (the room from you can go to casino, shop, disco and tailor shop):

An error has occurred. Please contact the game author for support, as this is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS.
(ACI version 3.12.1074)

in "room7.asc", line 13

Error: SetCharacterSpeedEx: cannot change speed while walking

p.s. and yeah, for some reason I can't load the game unless I go New game and then after a bit of intro I go to menu and try to load, weird.
p.p.s this is REALLY annoying:

Spoiler

on the bridge the lights off/on puzzle is hard, but what's messing with my head is that I can't exit the helm control screen after I enter it...where's the exit button?

[close]

[Saurabh]

Sounds interesting, will check it out.

[Darius Poyer]

I tried to play it, but it was hard to care about anything. There's a core game-play issue with adventure games as it is and I think you could easily have optimized game-play by just creating context sensitive clicks, and having the inventory on screen instead of occupying the right click with that function. Something like left-click to use, right click to examine is more than enough.

I have a problem with the graphics as well. I don't mind shoddy graphics at all, but I'm always bothered when pixel-resolution is ignored. And here I see it being ignored within the same sprite, and for the protagonist even. Out of all things, the thing you have to look at all the time should be soundly designed and executed.

Beyond all of that, the principal issue for me in the writing. It made me want to stop playing like nothing else. I didn't ever want to engage with the on-board computer ever again after that first interaction. If there's anything an adventure game needs, its good writing or an engaging plot.

What makes me hopeful is that you seem to know this already. I hope you make something better in the future.

[KodiakBehr]

Thank you both for the feedback.

To answer your question anian, the introductory comic sequence was drawn by a very talented artist who offered to do it.  In hindsight, I agree that more of these, evenly dispersed throughout the game, would have added to the experience.  I'll look into the errors and everything else that has been experienced.

Darius, your complaints have been noted, particularly those involving the writing and plot.  I cannot say if I will make something better in the future, but this certainly was a learning experience in the present.

[NickyNyce]

For a first game, you did a good job, you had me playing for hours, that's got to say something. The lack of responses to inventory combining and using your inventory on the environment gave the game an unpolished feel, I think if you clean up these these little things it will really help polish the game up. Players always want feedback when looking at things and trying stuff.

Welcome to the forums by the way, hope to see more games from you.

[SarahLiz]

I don't mean to duplicate, but I got the exact same error as anian (just fyi), and also cannot load a saved game unless I go through the entire intro again--that is very time consuming.  And, like some of the others have said, the different resolutions on the graphics bugged me...but I can definately get past it.  The gameplay, storyline, and plot are great, and I'm enjoying the game.  Right now my biggest frustration is that I'm stuck...I'm "that" person that always wants the Walkthrough...  :          


Sarah  

[KodiakBehr]

I can certainly fix the "having to go through the whole intro again" issue after work and put up a new executable, same goes for the helm control exit option (identified by anian).  Both are clearly careless and should be easily resolved.

I'm pleased you're enjoying the story.  I'm happy to throw up a complete walkthrough, but anian appears to have solved it in no time at all.  This is disturbing, because I thought I made it hard-as-hell!

[KodiakBehr]

You can now save and load from the beginning of the game.

Also, the helm can be exited by moving the mouse to the top or bottom of the screen.

[Shadow1000]

I just completed the game. I really enjoyed it. The only thing I would comment on is the interface but other than that, the humour was good, puzzles were at a good level, no pixel hunting, etc.

@KodiakBehr:

The Today's Special reference was NOT obscure! I loved that TV show when I was a kid!

Kudos on a great game; especially for a first!

SHADOW

[KodiakBehr]

Ha!  Wonderful!

What IS obscure is the ridiculously hard-to-find secret ending.

Anyway, thanks for the support.  I've learned a ton of lessons.  Next game is going to be very, very different!