Adventure Game Studio

Looks fantastic! Downloading to try later this week!

Congrats on the release - looks interesting, I'll try to find time to play it.  I like the idea of mixing fantasy, reality and sci-fi.  Your graphic style is nice too - and any game that has on its feature list "silliness" deserves a look! :-D

LOL! That guy looks like Steve Ince!!!

This looks great. Congrats on release.  Downloading now :-)

Quote from: Mods on Mon 02/12/2013 23:51:26
LOL! That guy looks like Steve Ince!!!

Wow you're right... it's quite uncanny!!

(http://www.steve-ince.co.uk/StevePhoto2.png)
(http://folk.ntnu.no/stolpnes/Breakage/GameFile/juggling.gif)

This game looks really good. There are plenty of nice animations and altogether the graphics are very consistent. Well done in that area!

That being said, the game fails completely in immersing me and that is because of the lack of sound. Sound and music is a must have! I'm sure you could manage to find a talented musician for this game. I'll give it another go when/if that happens!

Thanks for the feedback. Would be nice to hear some more from those trying it out :)

Quote from: Pablo on Tue 03/12/2013 15:53:06
That being said, the game fails completely in immersing me and that is because of the lack of sound. Sound and music is a must have! I'm sure you could manage to find a talented musician for this game. I'll give it another go when/if that happens!

Music and voice acting is a larger task for me to organize than graphics and programming, which I can do by myself. Maybe, as said in the original post, sometime in the future. However I'm from a generation of gamers who played games without much sound, and rarely voice acting, but I absolutely see your point.

At this point in time I don't see this as that massive a project on my part. Depending on feedback I might rethink.

Edit: I've had voice acting in mind though, and the speech animations are tried lip-synced to the letters "said".

The graphics and puzzles in this game are excellent and I'm really enjoying it.

Unfortunately, the game crashed and I have to start from my last save, which is quite some time ago.

The crash occurred when I was

Spoiler

in the room with the clouds and aliens, clicking on the large console (spelled consoll in the game). I had just picked up the small cloud and tried pressing buttons on the console and it crashed

[close]

SHADOW

Well, I had my doubts about this game when I first started it. The lack of sound is one hurdle to get over, but this also means that you must rely entirely on the text which seriously needs a proofreading and a good edit to make it more viable...

This being said though: After I played for a while (and had gotten over those first two hurdles) I started finding myself really, really enjoying the game!

Its puzzles are, for the most part, very good: Not too difficult/not too easy kind of level mostly...

The characters are all fittingly quirky and weird. The depth of character suffers a little from the text problems mentioned above but the visual look of the characters is just so lovely that this can be forgiven...

This brings me to the game's strongest point: All of the artwork is just gorgeous!!! You can tell that a lot of effort, love, and talent on the part of the author went into every background, character, and object in the game, and also a quite warped imagination as well: I found myself wondering not a few times while playing what kind of dreams this dude has (laugh)...In places the art style is very Seussian, and quite Burtonesque in others. This is meant as very high praise indeed.

So, if you can get past a couple of hurdles, this game is very well worth playing and should be greatly enjoyed by adventure game fans!

(Suggestion To The Author: I'm guessing that English is not the author's native language, but actually the English is not too bad: It's the tons of misspellings and typos that really are the problem. Maybe the author should go over the text with a simple spellchecker, recompile, and upload that version? It would really go a long way towards fixing the text issues, and I think the game deserves it. Just an idea...)

Quote from: Shadow1000 on Wed 04/12/2013 02:54:22
The crash occurred when I was

Spoiler

in the room with the clouds and aliens, clicking on the large console (spelled consoll in the game). I had just picked up the small cloud and tried pressing buttons on the console and it crashed

[close]

SHADOW

Thank you.

Spoiler

It seems hard to reproduce the two crashes reported (had one reported at the castle too), I'll look into the code if some random event triggers something, but in the console-room there really is just looping non-blocking animations... If your crash is similar to the one in the castle, it didn't happen on your second go?

[close]

Quote from: Mandle on Wed 04/12/2013 05:25:14
/.../ seriously needs a proofreading and a good edit to make it more viable...

(Suggestion To The Author: I'm guessing that English is not the author's native language, but actually the English is not too bad: It's the tons of misspellings and typos that really are the problem. Maybe the author should go over the text with a simple spellchecker, recompile, and upload that version? It would really go a long way towards fixing the text issues, and I think the game deserves it. Just an idea...)

Thank you for the feedback :)
Did just that with one of the testers last night (local time Norway) when I became aware of my caffeine-induced laziness at late night writing. Exporting the dialogue gets an error, so it had to be done quite manually.

Also fixed some minor glitches, and adjusted the play-time estimate. When I play through for testing myself, I tend to skip a lot of dialogue. Lesson (hopefully) learned.

Quote from: Etumretniw on Wed 04/12/2013 09:28:15
Thank you for the feedback :)
Did just that with one of the testers last night (local time Norway) when I became aware of my caffeine-induced laziness at late night writing. Exporting the dialogue gets an error, so it had to be done quite manually.

Also fixt some minor glitches, and adjusted the play-time estimate. When I play through for testing myself, I tend to skip a lot of dialogue. Lesson (hopefully) learned.

Cool! That should go a long way towards making this game as good as it deserves to be!

One other thing to look out for, which won't show up with a spellchecker, is things like "to" vs "too", "their" vs "there", "you're" vs "your" etc. I noticed a few such issues in the game...

Otherwise: Congratulations on a great game! I really enjoyed playing it! Hoping to play more games from you in the future! :)

Quote from: Mandle on Wed 04/12/2013 09:42:35
One other thing to look out for, which won't show up with a spellchecker, is things like "to" vs "too", "their" vs "there", "you're" vs "your" etc. I noticed a few such issues in the game...

Should be gone now. Manual process and all that. Also the "off" vs. "of" family of errors.

Awesome!!! I will totally download the game again and play it through again!

Quote from: Mandle on Wed 04/12/2013 15:54:08
Awesome!!! I will totally download the game again and play it through again!

There are three possible achievements to gain. Won't say what, and don't know if you got any on your first playthrough, but might slightly increase replayability.
One is a sign of OCD, but the other two should be possible.

I've tried to fix a random crash at the castle. Being random I don't really know. Few experience it, but I made a go at it. Also: found 3 more "to vs. too"s hiding in rarely seen dialogue.

Quote from: Etumretniw on Wed 04/12/2013 17:04:47
There are three possible achievements to gain. Won't say what, and don't know if you got any on your first playthrough, but might slightly increase replayability.

I got only one of the achievement trophies...Intrigued now though as to what the others might be...

Quote from: Mandle on Wed 04/12/2013 17:38:48
I got only one of the achievement trophies...Intrigued now though as to what the others might be...

I'm guessing it was the one worth getting, where combinations are involved, the other two are more by chance.

Now that I've completed the game, here are my comments:

The two strong points of the game are the art and puzzles. As others have pointed out, the creativity in designing the environment is excellent. One poster compared the art to Dr. Seuss and in many places I have to agree. The "weirdo" definitely looks like something out of Dr. Seuss, for example. I can only imagine the amount of time and effort it took to design that many rooms and characters to perfection.

The puzzles were excellent. Designing well-thought out puzzles that will make the player think while are yet solvable is probably one of the biggest challenges in developing a good game. This game has a very good balance, especially in a non-realistic, quirky environment where anything could happen.

As far as weaknesses, posters including the author pointed out the lack of sound. My recommendation is not to bother with speech acting. Some appropriate background music and appropriate sound effects would have brought up the value of this game immensely. There are so many things that happen in the game (crashes, things falling, etc) that can have some sounds that really would have taken the environment to the next level.

My other concern is that I found that there was a lot of inconsistency in the game. Almost every room was like another world and context. This may have been somewhat deliberate to give the game its quirky feel but I found it somewhat jarring. In a similar vein, the game had almost no story. The crazy worlds are sort of explained a bit all the way at the end but there didn't seem to be much of a plot or thread that progresses as you proceed in the game. In my opinion (people are free to disagree, of course), a thread or plot is what really draws the player into the game and makes the difference between a "game" and "a collection of rooms with puzzles you have to solve to proceed".

That said, this is definitely one of the best "first games"  I've ever seen! I look forward to more games from the author in the future.

SHADOW

Hi
I completed the game; outstanding! I really liked it a lot. Given there is no music and sound - even better, it makes the download manageable.
Congratulation to such a good game.

Some observations...
I was able to get the ball from the first statue twice (after I used it).
I was stuck in the castle in the little window; I was able to exit by pressing exit on the ground, but after that the character animations went wrong, changing being assembling items or teleporter flash.
I didn't know I had all pieces to the map; maybe a hint there?

Quote from: TassieDevil on Sat 07/12/2013 14:33:00
Some observations...
I was able to get the ball from the first statue twice (after I used it).
I was stuck in the castle in the little window; I was able to exit by pressing exit on the ground, but after that the character animations went wrong, changing being assembling items or teleporter flash.
I didn't know I had all pieces to the map; maybe a hint there?

Thank you for the feedback :)

The re-spawning of the ball (and the ruby) were fixed in an updated version (those downloading now will have v. 1.4.5.0).
The castle window is the only way back, the exit shouldn't have worked, actually. But I see what went wrong and I've fixed it for further versions. I'll swap the file (I'll wait a bit and see if more observations of glitches come in), and post a note of it.
Maybe. They are actual pieces from the map but it might be hard to see when they will make a rectangle.

Quote from: Shadow1000 on Wed 04/12/2013 23:28:06
As far as weaknesses, posters including the author pointed out the lack of sound. My recommendation is not to bother with speech acting. Some appropriate background music and appropriate sound effects would have brought up the value of this game immensely. There are so many things that happen in the game (crashes, things falling, etc) that can have some sounds that really would have taken the environment to the next level.

My other concern is that I found that there was a lot of inconsistency in the game. Almost every room was like another world and context. This may have been somewhat deliberate to give the game its quirky feel but I found it somewhat jarring. In a similar vein, the game had almost no story. The crazy worlds are sort of explained a bit all the way at the end but there didn't seem to be much of a plot or thread that progresses as you proceed in the game. In my opinion (people are free to disagree, of course), a thread or plot is what really draws the player into the game and makes the difference between a "game" and "a collection of rooms with puzzles you have to solve to proceed".

Thank you for your comment :)

Sounds: Maybe. But if I do that, I'd probably want voice too.
Inconsistency:

Spoiler

It's sort of the theme of the game. Many of the rooms or sets of rooms are fragments from other worlds and contexts, with some bridging between them. There is no more plotting going on than the protagonist's "hope" this might be just in one enclosed "test area", and that normality is reachable. It gave me a lot to work with creatively with puzzles and characters, as well as being the story I went for. As the cloaked one sais at the end: "You really thought you were the hero of a Tale of Adventure, didn't you." :)

[close]

Quote from: Etumretniw on Sun 08/12/2013 09:46:23

Inconsistency:

Spoiler

It's sort of the theme of the game. Many of the rooms or sets of rooms are fragments from other worlds and contexts, with some bridging between them. There is no more plotting going on than the protagonist's "hope" this might be just in one enclosed "test area", and that normality is reachable. It gave me a lot to work with creatively with puzzles and characters, as well as being the story I went for. As the cloaked one sais at the end: "You really thought you were the hero of a Tale of Adventure, didn't you." :)

[close]

Well, that was certainly accomplished! The creativity was brilliant and the game was overall very enjoyable.

Cheers

SHADOW

Finally I was able to finish this nice game!

I had a lot of fun with all those puzzeles and hope it won't be your last game.
Very well done and entertaining - it would be well worth to add some sounds (nod)

(http://www.smileyvault.com/albums/userpics/12962/bravo.gif)
Congratulation for the release of such a fine game!
Really something to be proud of!

Quote from: Tabata on Wed 08/01/2014 15:23:23
I had a lot of fun with all those puzzeles and hope it won't be your last game.

Thank you.
It probably won't be :)

Having received quite encouraging comments, and Breakage being made pick of the month for April, I decided to do something about the main grievance: No sound or music. So now it has sound and music. And some voice.

The music has been created by Kristin Burdal (https://soundcloud.com/fruluna), one of the master's students in musicology at the university where I live (I actually work at the Department of Music there, just to give more disbelief to the lack of sound in the first place). I created the sounds, and some of the voice acting together with a friend of the female persuasion. The different creatures have some random sounds/sentences at the start of a conversation, and there is voice when the forth wall is broken.

So, as this has been something that came up in almost every comment, I choose to bump this now months old thread to point attention to the update, in the best tradition of ask forgiveness instead of permission. As I feel it might come forth as an almost new game to some who missed sound, or didn't play it at all because the lack of it.