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[EDIT:]

Presenting READY (3.78 MB download, 9.54 MB unzipped), a game designed entirely around the near-nonsensical instructional pictures of ready.gov. Can you help Eddie safely purchase duct tape during a Vermilion Alert?

I thought of this way back when ready.gov was the latest thing, and set it aside for a long time. Then I realized I had a pretty tight plot and the time of relevance for this game is (hopefully) soon running out. I hoped to have it done in September because Tom Ridge had declared it National Preparedness Month, but instead it's an October Surprise.

Let me know what you think, and if you find any problems. And I would very much appreciate any pointers to public places I might freely upload the file, so that when I let all my friends and readers of my comic strip know about the game, my website doesn't get hammered and put my hosting bill through the roof.

EDIT: Now there is an alternative download site, and I have written a complete hints page.

So, you've already got this nice thing that frames speech with a GUI, originally intended for "thoughts." I think it could be used for more than that. I would like to suggest a handy check box, "Use bubbles for all speech." I would use it in all of my games to set speech apart from complex backgrounds and make it easy to read; in my opinion, outline shadow text really doesn't achieve that quite so well at high resolution.

An idea for future versions that shouldn't be too hard: Each character could have its own speaking font, much as each character has its own speaking color now. Just another field on the character screen, pop in a number, and ta-da, AGS automatically changes the speech font before each person speaks, and returns it to the default afterward so that the other text functions can be used normally.

It's a style device that works well in comics, and could add a lot of personality to non-vox AGS games in the same way, easily giving each character his or her own "voice." A big angry guy yells in an extra bold font, a robot talks in a square techno font... you get the idea.

Okay, here we go. As in the last jam, your sprite should depict an existing adventure game character. What I want you to do is to take a human character and draw what he/she would look like as a furry animal character... Or, conversely, take one who is already an animal character and draw what that character would look like as a human.

There are no limits to size or medium, but you will score points by staying close to the style of the original; i.e. make your sprite look like it could be put back into the game the character came from without looking too out of place.

Have fun!