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Ok, I'm working on an as-yet-unannounced 640x480 adventure game. It's in the early-art-creation stage and I was recently working on the sprite for the main character:

I'm reasonably happy with it but I'm having trouble drawing hands, as you might see. Any tips  / examples people can give me on how I can make these look any better?

Also, of course, you're general observations on the style and any other flaws you've noticed are welcome.

The eyes: windows to the soul. Windows? Argh. Well, if I'm supposed to be able to tell something about someone from their eyes, what about their desktop?

This is mine at a random moment snapped last night and hastily converted to JPG this morning:



I actually have two desktops (I dual boot between Windows 98 and XP Pro. Which comes in handy occasionally) but XP's is always the better looker.

In the top left, we have Winamp 5 belting out Supergrass at an unnecessary volume. Possibly an indication of my musical tastes but definetly evidence that I really hated Winamp 3 but liked what you could do with it.

The background stands testament to the fact I'm waiting in muted anticipation for Thief 3 to come out and hence feel the need to stare blindly at concept art while I'm working away at something or other.

Startbar-wise I've opted for one of those windows skinning utility thingumabobs to make things look a little more exciting for me to look at. Yay.

Icon-wise, note my desperation to cut down the amount of crap on my desktop. This has obviously completely failed to generate any results since a good 6th of the screen is still covered in 'em.

We have a selection of 3D applications, ranging from 3DS Max 5 for my Uni work to Maya PLE and Gmax, which were downloaded because I was curious.

We also have a plethora of RPGS filling my precious disk space along with the odd FPS, utterly fantastic 3rd person action game and - surprise - some adventure gaming content by way of Broken Sword 3, AGS and ScummVM (which I'm currently using to play Day of the Tentacle and Beneath a Steel Sky). That icon hiding in the bottom left is for Thievery - the Thief multiplayer modification for Unreal Tournament - which is quite good.

Ok then, what does yours look like? Display 'em as a JPG and try and be sensible with the file sizes, ie. mess around with compression in PSP (or whatever you use) to stop things getting ridiculous. Mind you, saving as a jpeg in MSPaint on XP seems to produce a better compressed  file size for me that PSP does (116k compared to 121k). Hrm.

If you don't have any webspace to upload images to then try www.photobucket.com, which comes in fairly useful.

Extra points if you're running an OS that's older than the hills. Resist the temptation to photograph the top of your desk in an abstract display of literal humour.

Of course, if admin objects to obscenely large pictures (see above) then feel free to blast this post into the stratosphere.

Ok. I give up, I'm willing to resort to asking for hints.

I got this game a couple of days ago but still haven't gotten very far. Where on Earth is everyone on day 1? I met the guy in the room with the fireplace, found the woman upstairs but have no idea where everyone else is. Argh. I get the feeling I'm missing something painfully obvious.

Ok, bought this a couple of days ago, just finished it. It's utterly brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even the bits that weren't so good.

Some painfully obvious block-pushing puzzles ("Oh no! Not again!") and some out of place arcade sequences but when we take a look at the bigger picture we see a veritable masterpiece.

Ok, its not the greatest adventure game in the world but I love it: the intro made me cry tears of joy act the fact the series was back and it was doing it with style. The graphics are fantastic, the humour spot on, the puzzles are rarely irritating and all have a logical answer without being frighteningly easy. Thoroughly enjoyable.

A few people had misgivings about the control system but its pretty good. Controls are always quickly on hand, although the directional keys are relative to the camera and not the player, which was a bit irritating since left can suddenly become forwards..

The credits music is worth waiting for too. Blinding.

Anyone else played / purchased / plans to play it?

Not sure where exactly reviews should go but I have the urge to vent my proverbial.

A nice lengthy (ish) review of Kings Quest VGA for you. So, grab a cup of warm, leaf-infused liquid and read. Then post back and complain or something.

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Let me set things straight first, before I warp things beyond recognition: I know a good thing when I see it. A game that is released to the general public for free, made by a team of dedicated artists, coders and writers is a good thing. So, in fact, was this girl I once loved. She was smart, she was funny, she was beautiful. She was an utter bastard.

Um, sorry? What was that?

She was a complete git. For all her good qualities, she managed to completely defy convention and still be a bad person. I almost feel terrible being able to label her as such. For months I tried to force myself to accept her at face value - as the intelligent, wonderful person she was - but there was just one facet of her personality that tainted the rest, poisoning her very being.

To cut a long allegory short, King's Quest VGA is Verity King.

The graphics are a sight to behold. The music is lovingly crafted. The dialogue is well voice acted. Yet - and a part of myself is still trying to force me not to say this - the gameplay is so bad I can only loathe, hate and despise it.

There. I said it. I hate this game. This game is so bad, were I to throw it into the abyss of my own despair, the abyss would throw it back.

At times, gameplay reaches such a level I doubled up, laughing at how glaringly bad it is. Within the first six seconds of play after the introductory sequence I was dead. I was utterly astonished. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Established gaming theory states to go easy on the player early on and increment the difficulty as the game progresses. You're not supposed to just *die*. There at least has to be a good reason. Maybe even a warning, perhaps? Nope. The game then goes on to effectively ridicules your apparent stupidity.

It doesn't stop there either. Attempts at exploration are also rudely interrupted with the ever-present onset of death, be it at the hands of a gingerbread-loving witch, falling off overgrown plantlife or being flattened by a rock for absolutely no justifiable reason whatsoever. What can the player possibly gain from dying so often and so pointlessly?

It almost makes it hard to believe how much of a breath of fresh air games like Monkey Island were to this. I can't say I was around to play KQ in it's original incarnation, but perhaps that's a good thing. I am, to an extent, free of the shackles of nostalgia. Free to scrutinise the game for what it is, rather than what its status as a groundbreaking title has lead us to believe it to be. As a piece of nostalgia KQVGA succeeds. As a game it fails.
This is a valient attempt to fuse the gameplay of a prehistoric adventure with the graphical prowess of games made many years later, producing something that just doesn't work. Gaming as a form of entertainment and expression has long since outgrown the misconceptions of enjoyment this game shapes its foundations from.  Some people, however, just can't let go. And they should.

In closing, KQVGA is like wallpapering Chernobyl: it looks better, but its still Chernobyl.

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I'm not *entirely* sure where this post should be going since it covers quite a wide range of topics. So, since it "generalises" I think it might go in General Discussion.. Anyhow, correct me if I'm wrong (known to happen). Anyway..

Hey guys! It's that bloke who was here for a bit then disappeared completely!

Yeah, sorry about that.. I've been working on a snes-style RPG project for the last few months ("Agh!" "Blasphemy!" etc.), a kind of pet project of mine I've been working on for a while using an engine called VERGE 2, if anyone's heard of it. Oh, and I've been fairly internetless (new word there) for the past month.

It's a nice piece of kit but it's a little hard for newbies to get into, can be relentlessly confusing, has a staggering lack of useful documentation and a community so small I could hold an annual meeting in my garage and still have room for the car and a buffet lunch. Which makes things a little difficult if you have a technical question and there are only five people on hand to give even a vaguely useful answer, one of which isn't entirely sane.

Kind of an irony that commercially, adventure games are supposed to have died despite AGS having a huge community of adventure lovers and commercial RPGs are supposed to be booming (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege etc.) and yet the fanbase for such a program as VERGE is akin to a group of survivors huddling together for warmth in the wake of armageddon.

Anyhow, I digress. I'm back and not only do I bring a fledgling, plot-heavy RPG in tow but I also bring mention that I'm now working on two AGS projects (from time to time. One's large and the other not so large) and news that the Baldur's Gate template I was meddling with a month or so back will soon be worthy of an airing to the public.

On a side note, does anyone have any suggestions for somewhere I could get some free webspace to host a site on games progress, publish my games, upload some screenshots of my lovely work, have a place to upload an avatar to and other stuff? I don't have 'net access from my own computer so I have to use the University's internet access and ship stuff across on a USB keyring so something I could use from just about anywhere (mount Etna, for example) would be ideal. Oh, and something without pop-ups. Banners are fine, I just can't stand pop-up advertisments.

On a side note, well done in once again getting a mention, nay a double-page spread, on AGS in a Future Publishing magazine (last time, PC Gamer plugged Pleurghburg). GamesMaker is on my list of recent purchases, although I'm not entirely sure I can recommend it (even if it did have AGS on the coverdisc). The whole affair just seems a little.. half-arsed. No, quarter-arsed.

The coverdisc is littered with instances of random copy-pasting that doesn't make any sense, many tutorials enclosed will confuse and befuddle those new to the "black art" of games making, the videos from 3DBuzz on the cover disc are ment to be a series of tutorials and there's less than half of them there and certain bits and pieces (reviews, the clown modelling piece etc.) have been blatantly ripped out of PC Format and 3D World and stuck haphazardly into GM in the hope that no-one will notice. This is recycled journalism of the lowest order and most certainly not worth six quid.

"Oh well, at least it *looks* nice!"

Oh, and I can't stress enough: I REALLY need some webspace.

Ciao,

Fred "Interference" Burbidge

Does anyone know an easy way to store to a string what's written on a label? I need this for a message log window.

This window is sent a message which is then placed at the bottom of the window while all other previous messages scroll up one line, the last falling off the list. I can't seem to find a function that lets me read from one label and copy its text to another. I know I could use list boxes but visually speaking, they're not what I'm after and it's a lot less convenient to make them run from bottom to top rather than top to bottom.

In case anyone's wondering, I'm coding a Baldur's Gate GUI set as a little side project and this is needed for it to look fairly authentic.

Hi. I'm new here but I've been dabbling with AGS for a few months now so I thought I'd just give myself a formal intruduction. I'm 19, from Oxfordshire in England, male, a computer-aided design student and have a variety of interests ranging from science fiction, writing, drawing, computer gaming, coding and other hobbies which regularly confuse and astound. No, not that sort.

In the short time I've spent with AGS I've actually settled in quite comfortably. The c-like scripting language is frighteningly easy for me to use and I'm already scribbling away in preparation for an adventure game I've had in mind for a few years now. I'm kitted out with Photoshop, Illustraitor and a selection of other software for making my life easier.

I'm also willing to lend my talents (if you can call them that...)
to anyone who wants them, although I imagine there's a seperate board for that sort of thing.. I do voice acting, coding, art, dialogue writing and interface design but I'm sadly completely useless at composing music.

Well, um.. I'll be going now. I've, er.. Left the iron on.. Or something.