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I have a room for a cutscene, In a game that I use multiple camera angles in one room. There's a scene on this cutscene where the background changes, by SetBackgroundframe, I thought, that since this isn't the only scene where I would put a different camera angle, Instead of calling for all the code needed for the change on the room after fade in (where the cutscene happens) I would put the extra code needed for the camera angle on repeatedly execute. This isn't needed for the scene, I just did it to figure out how I would do later when this would help outside of cutscenes, in other rooms.

So, on the cutscene script I call for the other background, and in the repeatedly execute I put a If statement: If (GetBackgroundFrame == 1) { SetWalkkbehindBaseline (2, 300);} (I don't actually remember if that's the function for setting a walk behind baseline, but in the real script I wrote it properly )


What happened is that the If statement didn't work. When I called for Frame 1 on the cutscene script the frame would change, but the set baseline wouldn't work. I'm sure I didn't make any mistake while writing the code because later I cut and pasted it on the after fade in and it worked (although I took the if statement out). Does setting walk behind baselines on rep_execute doesn't work? I'm sure I didn't do anything wrong. (I tried it several ways, putting else statements, checking the initial state of the baseline...)

This is a quick mock up I made just to see how the game elements and style go together. It's a Western/Sci-Fi/Dark Comedy game. Well, it's about cowboys on mars. It IS supposed to be a dark, lonesome game, but in my opinion the mock up ended up being TOO DARK in terms of atmosphere... My main concern is with the color scheme, most of the thing will be made of wood, therefore brown, on mars, brown/red. I don't know what to do to add more color.

Does it looks that bad?

There's quite a few artists in here, so I thought that I should ask.

Like anyone who draws stuff I've been *developing* my style since I was a kid, and at some point of my life I decided that one of the things I want to be is a Graphic Novel artist, and when I decided that it was near my 16 birthday, so I asked my mother to get me India Ink and a Winsor & Newton's Series 7 Kolinsky Sable Brushes.  The first drawing I made with that brush, OH GOD, it was love at first sight. It was absolutely beautiful.
Sometime later I started doing some digital art, mostly because my sisters DESTROYED my incredibly expensive brush in cold blood. I had a tablet once, but it was also slain, and shit, I've worked to pay for that, so I became pretty proficient in drawing with a mouse (eeew).

Anyway, after years of searching for a software that could reproduce the look of the love of my life, that series 7 brush, when drawing with a mouse (No pressure sensitivity). I found Flash. OKay, it's not QUITE the same. It's not even close, but it looks good. It actually looks like a brush, with the width variation and all. But Flash Isn't actually made for digital art.

So what I'm asking is: Do you guys know of any software that has a brush similar to flash? I mean, I just want something that is more art focused. It can be vetorial. I don't mind. And yeah, just remembered, one of the things that makes the flash brush so good is the 'Smoothing' function. I mean, it's great if you have to draw with the mouse.

And here's a quick drawing I've made with flash so you have a better Idea of what I'm looking for:

A week ago I was just finishing my OROW game (which is also the first game I've made in years of messing around with AGS that had a little playability)  and it got me thinking about how static and 'dead' my character looked most of the time, except maybe in some animated sequences, for obvious reasons. This is common in most games, character that don't move a pixel unless they're doing something (like walking, talking...). And that's okay and you'll understand why if you watch this video. Of course this isn't the best source of explanation of the uncanny valley in video games theory, but it was the first that came to mind.

If you watched it or just know what I'm talking about you'll know that a character that looks like this
won't look off if he doesn't move at all because he's a cartoon. But this:

(sorry AJA)
looks off most of the time.

Now that you understand what the hell I'm talking about, let's go to my question.

I'm making a horror game that uses live action video for the cut scenes but for the in game characters, in order to avoid what I just explained, the game uses cut out animation from photos of the game's actors. This Idea really improved the way the game looks and feels since the cut-outs fits perfectly the theme and tone of the game EXCEPT the scenes where the character isn't animating or is going from static to, let's say a pick up animation. I know I could use Idle views for making animations while the character doesn't move, but most of the time what would someone do while standing around in a scary place? Tap his foot? No, I don't think I like the idea.

Then a couple days ago I had a idea to avoid the character being static most of the time without using just Idle Views. I'm not sure if I can explain it, but I'll try:

>The character moves depending of the mouse X, Y coordinates. If the mouse is over the character, then he doesn't move. Depending of how far the mouse is from the character the faster he walks in that direction.
(And yes,  I know that this makes interacting with anything besides the player character impossible. I could set some key on the keyboard as a 'Interact Key' or make the same system I described above, but instead of just moving the mouse to walk the player would have to click  and drag the mouse on the screen, but this would be the same thing as the default walking/not walking system)
                  This 'solves' my problem because it reduces a lot of the time the character stops moving, and it could possibly make the character seems a lot less calm and peaceful, since he's supposed to be scared or something. BUT this can be VERY VERY annoying if not done right.

>IF  the system I choose is the one I described inside the brackets above, where you have to click for the character to move, his eyes, head, body and, I don't know, flash light if his holding one turn to face the mouse position.

How do I go about implementing it? Is it possible?
And a unrelated question: I've read in several places that too many objects on screen causes slow downs on the engine. Can someone say about how many objects with an alpha layer it would take for this to happen in a average system?

(Christ, every post I make is HUGE)

(Before I go and say anything, I'll recommend a book for all of you: "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud, It's about comics but anyone who tells any kind of story in any medium should read this).
(And beware, this is going to be a long long post).


Last week I finaly finished Half Life 2. Yes, I know, I'm kinda late. But see, I just got, for the first time in my life a video card (and it's a really old one to, a NVidia Mx 4000, if you want to know, I'm a poor gamer. ). All of this time having a pc with a 32mb onboard card was somehow good for me. I have the impression that I've playd every single one good game from 1990 to 2002/2003. Ask me, really, King Quest series? Played them all. Wing Commander? All of them. I played so many games that and I'm not even that big of a geek. But I digress. Half Life two.

All thing considered, it's not so good. Really. It's isn't a very consistent game. You can see as you play it that the game was made just to show off the source engine. But It has a great merit: It grabs your attention and the narrative is incredible and It has a genius pacing. It does. Do I have a point? I'm getting there.

There are, at least I think, two ways to grab the audience attention in the beginning of a movie or game or music or anything:
Slowly building it or suddenly,  with intensity.

The first one is the most 'safe' one. Like in the movies, you have to wait for everyone to get comfortable, open their sodas and SHUT THE @$%# up before the feature really starts, and most of the time just the trailers aren't really enough, so  the movie begins with a panoramic shot of the setting, showing some of the main credits, take The Shining for instance, and then after one or two minutes the camera finally stops on the main action. In the Shining this work also as a way to show how isolated the Hotel is. (should I say that I'm not a big fan of Kubrik?) Silent Hill 2 does the same with the long walk in the forest before you arrive in the city, it's so long you don't feel like going back. Anyway, when you finally start telling your history for real you can thrust whoever is playing/watching that they are at least a little bit engaged.

HL2 uses the second method. You start the game and after a few menus and a loading screen (that gives you the necessary time to get comfortable in your chair Gman's big scary face shows up in the screen telling Gordon to "Rise and shine", and on the background some  loud noise, as if the game was saying LOOK AT ME AND DON'T BLOODY BLINK ONCE, then you are throw in some train heading for a distopic city and the words "Point Insertion" shows up on the screen as you gain the ability to control your character. Genius if you ask me. But I don't mean to suggest that this method is better, it's just that intensity works.

What does this have to do with AGS? It's just that in most ags games I play I don't see that. Some AGS games just start right away with some introductory dialog, or some text explaining something and then the game starts. I mean I just double clicked  in the game Icon and 30 seconds later I already have to solve some puzzle? Think CMI, you have a puzzle in the first scene, sure, but only after about ten minutes of introductory cutscenes credits and all of that caribean music. When the game itself starts too soon the player feel kind of lost, he isn't "inside" the game world already, most likely he doesn't even know what kind of game he's playing. Is it serious? Is it easy? Should I expect a hard puzzle already? Or even: WHAT THE HELL DID THAT CHARACTER JUST SAID I'M SUPPOSED TO DO? Kinda sad, because most of the time this kind of thing happens to me I close the game and say "I'll play it later" and probably never play it again. I'm sure this happened at least once to you.

What I'm trying to say is that you should always try to 'introduce' the player to the game before the game really starts, you know? It's hard, but I think it's essential.

I hope I didn't sound too pompous, and I really really hope that no one give me answers like "Why are you trying to teach us how to make games? You didn't even released a game! Noob."

Anyway, what do you think about the subject? Today I'm in the mood for some forum discussion action, what about you?

I was making a game with a friend, it was a horror game about dreams and all of that cliché stuff. Actually we're still making the game, but we decided to start it all again as we tough it was not as good as we wanted it to be.

One of the things in the game that was 'not-so-good' is the puzzle design. The game is meant to step a little bit away of the adventure game formula and the kind of puzzles we wanted to make were 'unconventional' so to speak. How? Well, first I'll have to explain the setting of the game:

We play as a man who is having really bad nightmares (how original), but the game takes place inside his dreams. In the dream there's this entity, something like his subconscious, that tells him this girl need his help in the real life. But first he needs to wake up, and the really evil entity will only let him wake up when he overcomes his weakness and bla-bla-bla.

So there are several things he'll need to do. The first puzzle we made was he overcoming some troubles with his self image, so the entity hinted him with some really evil and scary monologue and then the player had to pay attention to the dream world to understand what it wanted so he could "win" the nightmare. At the end the player had to break a large mirror in a certain room. Obvious, huh? But it was the first puzzle and it was meant to be easy.

But now I have a problem: How to go on with this concept? I don't want to have fetch puzzles nor use-everything-with-everything kinds of puzzles. I wan't the player to think about the psychological aspects of each dream and interpret it so he can solve the puzzles, and I don't want the puzzles to be extremely hard, because I want to make the hard part of the game come from how scary it is. (Think silent hill, the monsters are quite easy to fight and kill, but you're so scared to face then that they look a lot harder).

Sorry about the looong post, but with my lack of english skills I have to write longer texts so I have the confidence I'm being clear.

[The development blog:]

The Awakened Body is an horror  adventure set in the mind of Charles Gilbert, a 45 years old doctor. He's having the most disturbing nightmares he ever had in his whole life. And it's your mission to discover what is causing them and who Charles REALLY IS.

Mere item hunting and combining won't help you go any further. To finish the game you'll have to understand what Charles subconscious is trying to tell him, and finally, escape his (and hopefully yours) worst nightmare.




The development blog:
http://awakenbody.files.wordpress.com

And a 'I-made-it-because-I-was-bored' trailar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmcKSOSfFGA

And if you're wondering: No there will not be monster-shooting in the game.

Story: 90%
Scripting: 40%
Cutscenes:5%
Graphics: 10%
Sound/Music: 50%

No expected release date, but I hope I can do it by the end of 2011/beginning of 2012, but I'll release a demo for the prologue in about two months.