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Now that you guys talk about it I think I remember every other door being locked. I guess I can tell my brain to stop nagging me about it now!

Eric!

Hey pals!

Last night I was in the car thinking of something else entirely when Maniac Mansion popped into my head and my brain urgently asked me:

"Can you pick up the meteor, climb into the drained pool and then fill the pool with the kid and the meteor down there?"

I did not have an answer for it and I do not own Maniac Mansion to find out!

Any takers?
Eric

*The only reason I could see not being able to do this is if you can't switch characters when you go into the meteor's room.

TO THAT I ask, what if you microwave the radioactive water and leave it in there, grab the meteor, head for the kitchen and then open the microwave... I guess you're wearing a rad suit... DAMN!

One teeny tiny point. I can tear open AAA multi-million dollar games and access their player models, sound effects, textures and everything. Trying to continue to protect the art and scripting that people made for their AGS games might not be something that needs to be a priority anymore? [or in the past?]

Hey there, so the reason behind Insta-Game was to just give people the beginnings of a game and give them tutorials on how all the art was made and make the style simple to emulate. Turns out people don't really want this at all it seems. While games were made with it and Dave Gilbert and Cornjob even used it, it's just not useful to most people.

RoN worked because there was energy behind it and a collaborative town being made, that too eventually ran out of steam but Insta-Game didn't have any steam to begin with. I think RoN is the most successful an Insta-Game like set up will get.

However, in other communities that make different games other than adventure games, Insta-Game like packs work great. If I made a bunch of tiles and baddies and running and jumping animations, someone could knock out a platformer with some interesting new mechanic that they wanted to try out. Adventure games are so... different... in that sense that it seems people need custom art not ready-made art to make a game.

PM people in the future if you want to talk to someone directly, please.

If you want crit I would say the colors you use to shade the skin are really close to one another and some characters don't even have shading on them, like Ug.

Pick a common direction for the light to come from and then shade your sprites with that. Say if the light was from the upper left, shade Ug so that the shadows are on the lower right and then shade Amber the same way.

icey games, do you want crit on these sprites?

There was an episode of the Garfield and Friends cartoon that involved people trying to figure out a good tv show to make around Garfield and they had a big computer that when they pushed a button it gave them a random situation for a show. One of them was 3 friends and a cat explore a spooky mansion where a meteor landed or something like that. The drawing that they showed was 3 people standing by a fence and in the distance up a hill was a mansion.. A Maniac Mansion.

This is something I've wanted to communicate for a while, GarageGothic. I have never traced a perspective line in my backgrounds or really any of my drawings since I had to in college. I don't mean to say this like I am super awesome and don't need perspective lines just that I feel my drawings get the point across.

I'm more concerned about if the background is doing it's job well than if it is being drawn well. This background does the job it was tasked with doing.

Only looking at these 2 images and none others from Cruise for a Corpse or Holmes I would say that the second image is much more intimate while the first is very detached and flat. The lowered camera angle provides the most towards this effect. It is like I am in the room and watching this happen.

While they are both in a doll house perspective I think the second image engages me more as an observer. Also the perspective is not perfectly flat like in the first image and the "camera" is zoomed in more which makes everything larger.

A quick search on google gives me this:

http://www.places-to-go.org.uk/Photos/sherlock_holmes_study.jpg

Which I feel would make a wonderful background properly lit and arted up for a game and does some similar [though more advanced] things with composition like Cruise for a Corpse.

Jess and I are confirmed no.

I... I apologize...

Hi there, I wanted to say a thing I think.

My girlfriend Jess and I were talking about this and one thing that came up that I wanted to mention is that in typical adventure games with dialog trees there is the game play mechanic of "exhausting all dialog options". The first thing you do when you are stuck before trying all inventory objects on each other and then all inventory objects on every hot spot is go back through and make sure you've spoken to everyone until there is nothing left to say.

Therefor there are no optional dialog trees as soon as someone gets stuck in an adventure game.

That is my main point, the rest of this dialog is optional:

While we were talking I started seeing all characters as treasure chests. Say you're playing a game and you walk into a room and there are 3 treasure chests, you run up to each one and open them and search them and gold comes out! WOO! Gold! However the door is locked and won't open... Hmm, can I push the door open... Nope... I already searched the treasure chests and no key came out. Let me check a walkthrough... Apparently I am supposed to keep searching the treasure chest until the key comes out. Why would I do that?

The main reason we exhaust dialog options is because we are trained to play adventure games that way. Every time you walk into a new room and there are things that can be talked with you are trained to walk up to each one and talk to it until it stops talking back. I question if this is a good thing.

In no way do I choose to invoke the idea of realism "In the real world people wouldn't talk to you if you just walked up to them!"* but I do see it as a direct halting of game play. What little game play there is in adventure games is diluted by dialog and walking around. While I won't get into my concerns with walking in adventure games I think that dialog is a great way to tell the player a lot of things while they stare at a static screen and read the text on the screen faster than the voice actor can say it. It is also a great way to bore the player**.

When I walk into a room in an adventure game and there are 3 treasure chests NPCs standing there I cringe. I am going to have to exhaust the dialog options on each one of these NPCs in order to continue with the game. There is no game play during this time, just exposition. I don't even get to steer the conversation because the conversation is repeatable until I have exhausted it. I thought I was going to be solving puzzles and tricking security cameras and stealing evidence from a gangster with a stuffed bunny under his hat but instead I am reading dialog about how a man (that just wants a glass of water so he will give me his knife) feels about the city he lives in. And then I will have to do it all over again with the woman selling flowers on the street and then the vegetable cart man.

While it is easy to throw this out there and think you've solved someone's problems... Here it is, "Show, don't tell." I know I know, all your problems are solved you're welcome!

Also, to speak on this really quickly "People don't need that extra info, but it's like I feel that I've gone through all the trouble of thinking of this shit so I want to give players access to it." Man ain't that the truth. This is something I struggle with in story telling and it's VERY easy for me to say to someone else "It's not necessary, cut it. You spent time thinking of it because you needed to to develop the world in your head, the player does not need it." but if someone tried to tell me that I'd politely say thank you and insist in my head that if ONLY THEY KNEW how cool it all was they'd WANT to read it. So in that case I guess make it mandatory?

Eric

* though I do disagree with Progz, if I asked someone in the real world where the library is they would more often than not just say "over there". If I asked Jess or my mom where the library is she'd say the same thing. If I asked a more meaningful question like "Do you remember your first time going to a library?" I would expect more, but anyway

** me

Yeah this is the most overtime I've seen at the 5 years I've been at this company so I can't really complain!

Hello! I have been absent from the internet for a while so here's the deal...

1.) I have been having to stay at work very late and some weekends are about to become mandatory

2.) Jess has left her job because it was horrible

3.) I don't know about us being able to attend Mittens anymore

I need to discuss it with her one last time to make sure we are actually deciding what we are deciding but I just got some time now to get online so I figured I'd update people.

Mittens 2011, how does Mexico sound, guys?

Jess and I will pay you, let me just get this comic convention out of the way first! PLEASE

Hey guys, how about just leaving Harq alone? What are people trying to accomplish? You don't like his thread or him, don't post in it maybe?

Continuing to tease or insult someone when it is clear that they are annoyed does not sound very mature to me either.

We are attached at the genitals so yes

I'm going to confront my art lead right..... NOW! BE BACK WITH UPDATE

UPDATE:

I am going to put in for the time off now and it should go through the approval process just fine, I am a strong definite

I need to make sure I can get the time off and then I will update

Poor implementation of dead ends is not a reason to never explore the subject again, right?

However, to be stuck in a walking dead and not know it, is not good design as far as I am concerned. An unwinnable situation in just about every game is considered failure. You lost the game. To design the game so that the player has lost but not to tell them so is generally poor design.

Generally when placed in an unwinnable situation a game is designed to understand this and it offers you a restart icon or alerts you that while you can still move around you will not progress. Or the gameplay makes it obvious that you are stuck and a restart button is ever present.

I've never played The Immortal but I watched a long play of it and it changed my life. For some reason it really affected me and made me think differently about games and game design.

http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/The%20Immortal/

I've been meaning to read this but I recommend checking out a non SA trying to be funny Long Play since I found the game unforgiving and hard!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvVFnGYuv_M