Messages

Thank you all for your input and sorry it’s been so long in between posts.  I have settled on a design I like for Neely But Would like your input on these Egore and  Dr. Spliner redesigns.
Yes there are some young Spliner designs for a possible flash back.

Neely final


Egore and  Dr. Spliner redesigns

All Input is welcome and appreciated!

[very stiff animation]

Hey every one thanks for your opinions they’ve been very helpful

So General consensus seems to be some combination of 1 and 3.
I thought 2 was going to be popular but I’m really glad I posted them all because he wasn’t anyone’s favorite ( Including mine)

I’ll redesign him again and post what I come up with here when I get a chance.

I like the current one, because it looks like your typical anti-hero.
However, what I'd criticise (and is not visible here) is the very stiff animation, that pretty much ruins the character design.
Also if you recall I was complaining about the lack of diagonal views for the isometric game sequence.

I totally agree with you on this one, the animation was totally sub pare compared to the quality of the game and the lack of diagonal views looked very odd in places.

I don’t want a repeat of the first game if I do this and I want the animation to be much better, It will be either drawn by hand or in flash (probably a combo of both) and use all 8 directions.

Hi everyone I would really like some input on these Professor Neely redesigns. I’d like the next game to look hand drawn and that calls for a style change.
Mainly I want to know which one you think is the strongest and if you’d like to see anything changed or if it’s just too different.
If you think one part would look better on another let me know. E.G.: Option 1’s glasses on option 2’s head ect.

Yes I do know that they are all fairly similar but I wanted a second opinion before I made a call on what I do with him as it effects the style of everything else.

Ok comments noted

1. Ok lets talk spelling again.
I don’t have the time to fix the glaringly bad  spelling errors and bad grammar right now.  I’ll make sure my next game Is spelling error free. If one of you wants to fix it enough pm me and I’ll dump the script or what ever and give you a editor credit.


2. Game locks up.
“The game locks up and the sounds repeat. It also causes a blocky-sounding click inside the tower of my computer. I'm forced to ctrl + alt + delete and cancel the program. This happened a second time when I tried it again.“ 

Dude I’m sorry about this problem, what’s happening is AGS is using this-

“eCDEject - ejects the drive tray if the drive has the ability. This is a feature you'll play with to start off because it's neat, and then realize that it has no real use in your game. Your script does not continue until the drive is fully ejected. “

I suspect that this is not getting along with your hardware The best I could do is remove this from the joke.

Thank you all again for the feedback criticism and informing me of bugs.

So here we go.

The game did kick me out at one time though, when I accidentally Talked to the "Jamed Door" and it gave me,

"An error has occured. Please contact the game author for support, as this
is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS.
(ACI version 2.72.920)

in Global script (line 717)

Error: RunDialog: Cannot run this command since there is already a NewRoom command already queued to run."

This little bug Is due to the fact that the talking to object joke makes Neely walk towards the objects x/y origin and in this case tigers a room change. Yes I know that that’s easily discernable from the error report but I’d be a fool not to recreate it myself so I could see precisely what was happening.

Anyways this is an easy fix.

The disk 2 thing really bugged me though, because the screen flips and most of the ending screen dialog is unreadable. It kinda killed the tension, which you don't want to happen during a climax!

Don't have a problem with the joke itself, just used it at the absolute worst time

This also is an easy fix and I  will seriously consider doing so.

As for the spelling-- no offense, but it's really poor.  But if you want to release an update, PM me and let's talk.  Being currently unemployed, I have far too much time on my hands.  But yeah, if you send me your script, I promise a typo-free edit in at least a few days, at most a week.

Thanks I appreciate the offer and may indeed do exactly that when and if I get around to releasing a updated version.

I always avoid playing a game once I find out it may be littered with typos or bad grammar and I wait for an update.
I'll play this once I hear of an update. Graphics do look fantastic!

If you are waiting for a new version you might be waiting a while. I’ll be the first to admit that the game itself was not made in a conventional manner has a few misspellings and the code is often messy and plagued by wandering tidbits of old now unused things ( like a pool of piranha and a giant library maze and some nonsense about Egore being a controllable character).

All things aside I’m currently have a lot on my plate and I honestly can’t say when I’ll have the time to pump more effort into Neely. Especially when I would be more interested on the Neely sequel and two other games I’ve been working on that I’d like to finish.

But I’ll tell you what If you can find the instance of Inexcusable misspellings and other parts of the game that don’t cut it please PM me and I’ll try to get a fixed up version out eventually.

Again Thank you for all your comments I appreciate the reception the game has had and your input lets me know that you earnestly enjoyed it because you wouldn’t bother giving me input if you didn’t.

[For your consideration: Professor Neely And The Death Ray Of Doom!]

For your consideration: Professor Neely And The Death Ray Of Doom!

With over 800 downloads!
http://www.filefront.com/user/sonicrumpets

well what can I say...WOW
It really got me...very well done for the first game
Enjoyed it a lot, to be honest I did not want to stop playing this game, but I had to
Very addictive
GRUNTS technology fits very well for me
Congratulations 

This game is really friggin good, especially for a first game! Besides some spelling errors, the game is pretty much flawless.

Even if I couldn't find the mini-game (till now ), I had a lot of fun with this game.
I like the style and the sound, when talking etc. was very funny, also the difficulty of the puzzles is right – well done!
I would really love to see more adventures of Prof Neely!

Game play Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNJvoKjakOo

Suggested categories:

Best Dialogue Writing
Wonderful Jokes and alternate lines of dialog.

Best Puzzles
I spent a long time fine tuning them to be just right.

Best Game Created with AGS
A guy can dream can’t he?

Best Game play
A lot of people enjoyed the game play.

Best Background Art
All painstaking drawn in MS paint and shaded in photo shop, In short retro and pretty.


Best Character Art
Fun, iconic characters that are easily recognizable.

Best Sound Effects
Ambient sound in most locations and  many sounds recorded or engineered (death ray, fire ect.).

Best Short Game
The game can technically be beaten in about 10 minutes because I didn’t artificially extend game time by making non skip-able cut scenes.

Best Player Character

Professor Neely

Best Non-Player Character

Egore

To conclude I'd be pleased as punch if you'd go nominate Professor Neely and the death ray of doom In any category you feel it deserves.

Thank you all,
Sonicrumpets aka
Nathan O.

Step by step guide to the "mini game" ( It's more of a LOZ tribute or a Easter egg than anything else)

Spoiler

Step one: Get the toaster from the powered up refrigerator make sure that you pick up the BLT in the tray or You won’t get the toaster when you use the panel a second time!

Step two: get into the lab

Step three: get rid of Dr. Spliner

Step four: use the toaster on “Insidious Machine part”

Step five: briefly enjoy playing Egore Quest as It will eventually crash due to Dr. Spliner’s choice of OS.

Professor Neely fun fact:
Originally the toaster was used to electrocute some piranha in a pool in the basement. The broken Jacobs ladder fell into the pool and you had to kill the fish to take it.
However the puzzle was plagued by a number of very unpredictable bugs so it was cut from the game.

[close]

“The right clicking on the day was NOT intuitive.”

Spoiler

Just to clear up any confusion clicking the page in question is not what enables the option to look at the diary date simply turning to that date in the planer will do this ( I checked the code)
The comment from right clicking the planer page was just something that was added to confirm that that was Indeed the date when the code was changed.
If your referring to the diary “read the 31st” well it’s a simple dialog so I can’t do to much about it .
I’ll definitely try using some other method for book reading in the future.

[close]

Sorry if this has caused to much confusion , If its any consolation this thread is giving me some good insight in to how I should design things in the future so thanks for the input.

Thanks for the feedback . About the disk 2 thing , that’s actually a ripped off joke from the original monkey island “the stump joke”

http://miwiki.net/The_Stump_Joke

Although After re reading this wiki page I’m not sure why I thought It would be a good reference, as the reaction to such a joke seems universal.


As for the bug with the toaster, well I might get around to it but as It won't actually prevent anyone from completing the game It’s not a top priority but I will test it and see if I can find a reasonable fix.

*edit*
Ok. I’ve tested the toaster bug and the blueprints are Unaffected by this so as It doesn’t break the game(only an Easter egg/mini game) my call is not to fix this with a new version However if more serious bugs show up I will make a update.

Thanks for the feed back!

Just out of curiosity have any of you found the bonus mini game?

Hint

Spoiler

It involves an unused Inventory item.

[close]

OK, Because I truly care about what you folks have to say I've Added labels to the cursors so the player can easily tell what mode they are using.
Also They now Go from Grey(inactive) To Color(Active).

Hopefully this helps.

Ah the cursors , well your right.
I have a much better system planed for my next game, simple left  click interact and Right click to examine/deselect inv. It’s working out better that the pared down Lucas arts thing I tried for this game.

There is Indeed more than one way too solve three puzzles…

Spoiler

Getting though the front door , Getting out of the pantry , and taking the face off the portraits all have two ways to solve them, The pantry has two because You might not have gotten the magnet from outside and getting the face needed two solutions because some of my play testers never thought to use the grappling hook.

[close]

However choosing one way over another should never prevent you from completing the game.
Just thought you might like to know

Wow it’s good to see that people seem to like the game!
If you downloaded it and have enjoyed it than thank you! Because letting others play this game and enjoy it is what makes it worth it.

Now it looks like I have some explanations to give,

1. Advanced GRUNTS technology
I may have played this up to much (as a joke). It also looks like I miss judged the grunts as gradualy becoming annoying (that’s why they are off by default). Anyhow I love banjo-kazooie and when I realized that voice acting was a bit out of my means I went for the banjo-kazooie style grunt noises.

As for how they are done well all I do is in repeatedly execute always see if a character is talking and play a random grunt.

Like this :
function repeatedly_execute_always(){

if (Grunts ==0){ 
 
// Make egore grunt
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
if (cEgore.Speaking) {
 
  int EGOREGUNTS=Random(5);
   
if (EGOREGUNTS==0){ if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(19,7);}

else if (EGOREGUNTS==1) {if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(20,7);}

else if (EGOREGUNTS==2) {if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(22,7);}

else if (EGOREGUNTS==3) {if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(23,7);}

else if (EGOREGUNTS==4) {if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(24,7);}

else if(EGOREGUNTS==5){if (IsChannelPlaying(7)==0)PlaySoundEx(21,7);}

}
.
If you assign a sound to the talking view frames it gets to repetitive Because they’ll always play in the same order.

2. Misspelled words
Damn! I thought I nipped this in the bud!
I seriously tried to get this taken care of and I’ll be the first to admit I’m a terrible speller.
Sadly the text was ran though a spell checker and a English major *sigh* I apologize for any offensively bad misspellings (I’m mildly dyslexic so I can’t always tell). In the future I’ll run my scripts though a tougher editing process.

3.  The music Is from this site
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
I used the following
Arcadia, Dream like, Frost Waltz, Laconic Granny, Machinations, Mysterioso March, Ominous and Scheming Weasel slower.

I think that’s all of them.

4. Animation not up to par.
Again I’ll apologize for this one but it was a case of me growing as a sprite animator and not wanting to go back and redo all my animation as It wasn’t to my current standard of work. ( I did all the animation In MS Paint)

This Is what I was going to do, I ‘m not sure it meshed well with the existing art.



In the end I decided that I just needed to release the darn thing as I sat on the project for a year or so and the animation never got a full second pass.

5. I’m glad everyone likes the backgrounds and art
I did the first pass in MS paint and then did all the shading and shadows / highlights in Jasc paint shop 8.

It’s good to get feedback and I can’t wait to see what others have to say!
Thank you  for playing my game!

WOOT! Over 2000 downloads!

Hey I’d like it announce that I’ve finished my first game!
I’m Sonicrumpets AKA Nathan O. and I’ve been lurking about sense 2004 but have been very quiet and didn’t want to go shooting my mouth off without something to show for it.

So with out further a due I give you,

Professor Neely And The Death Ray Of Doom!

In the game you'll take on the role of Professor Neely a retired college professor and famed inventor who is unwittingly lured to an odd house and held against his will by a mad doctor.
Your goal is to escape and stop the events that are about to take place.

Features Include:
Wide screen aspect ratio
Retro low res 320X200 resolution
Sounds and music for every location.
Play with no fear of dying as you can’t.
alternate solutions to certain puzzles.
Special hidden mini game!
Also GRUNTS !

Download the game

Downloaded file is a 17.86 MB zip

More info at my blog

Screen shots





Please message me if I failed to post this correctly or have goofed up the game in some manner

Thank you and I hope you all enjoy the game!

*edit*
You can now find it on the ags games page!

*Changes*
Added labels to the cursors so the player can easily tell what mode they are using.