fantasy scriptment feedback

[kjeevah]

hi

im in the process of planning and making a fantasy adventure, with a twist in that your actions and conversations give you a good/evil ranking, which affects your character's appearance, and also affects later quests/story branches/which ending you see.

i havent done any creative writing for about 10 years so im pretty rusty, here is the scriptment so far:

http://www.ian-hamilton.com/CHAPTERS.rtf

any feedback would be muchly appreciated, espeically if anyone has any ideas for making it more humorous!

[kjeevah]

anyone?

heres an early mockup if you are interested:

http://www.ian-hamilton.com/screen.jpg

[Mordalles]

wow, that is one beautiful background. instant jealousy.  this is one game i will be looking forward to. i haven't read the rtf, but i will.

[kjeevah]

no jealousy required, you could easily do it - it's just one of my reference pictures with a vector tracing filter on it!

[Venus]

I've just started reading the script till chapter 4. I'm not sure whether I realy want to read on, since this whole concept sounds so wonderful that I don't want to spoil it for me completely.
The beginning is really humorous. I just love the main character's motivation. Very nice parody of the usual RPG stuff. I also like the treeman puzzle very much.

Overall, this sounds like a wonderful game. The mockup looks great. The character design fits perfectly. The background, even though it is beautiful, could be a little more cartoony.
The idea of the good/evil ranking also sounds really nice and interesting.

Keep up the good work. I'm really looking forward to the finished product.

[kjeevah]

thankyou! the game is still at an early stage though, e.t.a. may 06! do you have any suggestions for what you've read so far? ideally i would like it to be a bit more towards sam'n'max style of humour!

as you are interested in the good/evil rankings, here's an early shot of the character's appearance, there will actually be 7 different levels, this shot is showing the most good, most evil, and neutral ones:

http://www.ian-hamilton.com/ranking.jpg

[Nikolas]

The art is wonderfull, and the goblin looks great in all three phases!

I'm pretty sure that you can incorporate a lot of humour with the BGs, or with moment stuff like that! *Nikolas snaps his fingers!*

I mean humour cannot be always defined from beforehand and of course you may come up with some other puzzles and make the whole thing much more interesting...

I confess that I read the first 3 chapters and then the ending... (Bad Nikolas!)

But I'm really eager to see this game come true. And May 06 sounds fabulous, let me tell you. Go to the Productions Forum and check some threads two years old...

[Mordalles]

no jealousy required, you could easily do it - it's just one of my reference pictures with a vector tracing filter on it!

vector tracing filter on it? i have no idea what that means? could you give us a short tutorial. i mean, it just looks so awesome! and the character as well. can't wait to play this game!

[kjeevah]

certainly, its dead easy. the way i did it for this mockup was to start with a painted image and then run a filter on it in a program called XaraX, which is a vector illustration pgoram, like adobe illustrator, corel draw etc. This filter was to translate the image into rescalable vector based solid blocks.

HOWEVER chances are you wont eb either a. starting from a painting or b. using xaraX (although flash also has the same trace-to-vector function if you have it) but the same effect can be very simply done in photoshop.

Exact slider values arent included, as they will vary depending on your source image.. just have a play around and see what looks best.

basically.. start with a photo, as below.



then, convert it to painted style, using a filter in photoshop such as watercolour or paint daubs - as stated above, experiment to see what looks best for your particular photo.



anyway after you have an image that looks like it has been painted, ie no little phot-type details that will confused the next part of the process as its only a low-iq computer thats gonna be processing it all that's left now is to convert the smooth shaded bits into lower-amount-of-colour solid blocks. This can be done with the cutout filter in photoshop, again experiement with teh sliders until you have a nice cartoon style look, as below.



additionally, if you so desired, you could always try outlining some of hte major shapes to give a mroe cartoony look aswell, as iv very roughly started to do below.



hope that helps!


obviously as the purists here will no it doesnt compare to a really good hand-drawn image.. but it can produce something reasoinable in a minimum amount of time. Persoally, to keep my dev. time down, i will be taking my own photography forÃ,  all the locations, then photo-shopping in all the ncessasry scene elements, then processing them in something like the way above to make them fit in

also i'd recommend adding on some more highlighting etc yourself to make up for the inadequacies of the filters, and something like removing the sky and putting in some nice monkey isnland style twirly clouds ouwld be good too. basically this doesnt produce perfect imagesÃ,  but its a nice shortcut to getting the basic composition and initial shading out of the door.

(p.s. sorry about the terrible typing, I'm pretty drunk)

[Mordalles]

yay. thanks, kheejav! that will help a lot!

[Theme]

Dude, thats amazing

o/

[kjeevah]

alternatively, for a more realistic, detailed look such as the backgrounds found in Fable (telstar 96), skip the cut-out filter - ie. use the paint daubs or watercolour, and then proceed straight to the outlining as below

[kjeevah]

behind schedule, isnt that a surprise?? guess an adveture game was a little harder to make to the standard i wanted to than i was expecting

anyway its about half done i reckon, which is still pretty fantastic going considering how long it takes other people and especially considering im using my own scratch-built engine.

everythings all designed and planned, just gotta finish making it. anyway the engine is done, and main character, and alot of the world itself, if you wanna have a random wander:

http://www.ian-hamilton.com/adventuregame/2.html

the red circle stuff is intro placeholders, just click through till the last red circle has gone and hten youll be in control of the character. as there isnt the stopryline implmented to drive your chater appearance, ive included a good/evil slider to demonstrate what it will look like.

[Kweepa]

That's a pretty neat engine! Looks like you can do a lot with flash.

Since this is the critic's lounge, some criticism:
* the world seems very linear
* it's quite hard to navigate because the rooms all look quite similar (until the town anyway)

And some questions:
* you say the engine is done - is there any text? conversations? mouse overs? animated objects?
* is it a context sensitive one click does all game?

Nice work so far. I think your half done is optimistic, but I'd like to be proved wrong!

[dsg_charly]

Great, it's great.

Now the crits:
- The village gives a modern feeling, even they're old fashioned.
- The waterfalls are too static.
- Some of village rooms look too blured.
- The non-clickable areas are annoying. Even if it's not walkable, you could move the goblin to the nearest point of where you clicked.

Anyway well done. I wonder how far can go this engine.

[kjeevah]

cheers for the quick feedback guys! by half done im including all of the research and planning, which was quite extensive.

the areas should be more distinctive once the non-player-characters are in place, and yes the waterfall will be animated! i have a bunch more background areas processed and ready to go in now too, after some missioning around in the town you get arrested and thrown in jail in the castle, then after some adventuring in there, revisit town later in the day when it's raining, then go for a trek through the countryside for the finale.

is there any particular area you are thinking of regarding the modern look? and blurriness?

and yes it is context sensitive one click for the most part, apart from conversations and also being given a good / evil choice when interacting with stuff!

did you like the good / evil versions of the character?

[Phemar]

Wow, where do you live? Great scenery if you took all those photos yourself

[Snowflake]

Will the three different versions of the character be visible the whole time or just when receiving good/evil points?

As a sidenote, I think it would be funny if the good character had a silly grin on its face which would show its single rotten tooth or something 

[kjeevah]

theres actually 21 not 3, itll be a sliding scale that will gradually change depending on your actions, so if you are a bastard all the way through then youll end up looking totally evil etc etc

also no most of the photos i just bought from i-stock, i did take a couple though, including the magic shop in town - i live in oxford, england, which has plenty of old buildings for source material!

haha the tooth idea sounds good