Messages

Snap. Maybe it's on my end. I have a bunch of stuff running but I will do it all in Safe Mode and see what happens. Sorry for the false alarm!

This game looks awesome but when I downloaded the .rar from the link provided my Windows Defender software said the archive had a Trojan virus:

http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/threat/encyclopedia/entry.aspx?name=Trojan%3aWin32%2fSpursint.Ahreatid=2147705703&enterprise=0

Maybe you should check your system, Gurok :/

[ICBM]

Hey everybody!

ICBM has been updated to version 1.4, and that's now available on its GameJolt page!

http://gamejolt.com/games/icbm/57197

Almost nothing has changed with the main experience, so if you've played the game, there isn't really any reason to play it again.

In fact, only read this next hidden paragraph if you have already played the game:

Spoiler

The only real difference besides some code fixes and stuff is that I have added a new, bonus hidden ending for anyone who plays the game through on all five difficulties, but if you've already played the game once, you can just watch that hidden secret ending here if you're at all curious: https://vimeo.com/137639232

Since I'm the sort of weirdo who would actually play a game five times just to check for something like this, I wanted there to be a ridiculously huge payoff for the four or five people in the world who might actually play ICBM five times in a row looking for secrets

[close]

Anyways! The main reason I thought this game update might be interesting to anyone here is that I have updated the free and open Adventure Game Studio project files to this new version as well (also available from the same GameJolt page), and there were some good code changes there: namely, the game now saves its files to the proper, built-in AGS Save directory, instead of just to whatever folder the game .exe exists in. That allowed me to make an installer for it that puts it into C:\PROGRAM FILES, since that previous behaviour would not have been allowed. So using the engine's built in save folder is definitely a good practice to do, and if you had gone through my code at all before now, I apologize for setting a crappy example by doing it the "wrong" way. (And there are still plenty other examples of doing things the "wrong" way in my code, I'm sure )

Ha! Total coincidence, yesterday a YouTuber left a comment on my game's GameJolt page saying he had made a series of Let's Plays of it, so I started watching it today and you can see in his first episode, at around 07:15, the player "discover" the mouse acceleration bug:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LVDkTOsAQ

He's using the mouse to scroll along some words he's reading, and the mouse cursor suddenly takes off when he hits the mouse movement speed threshold that triggers the acceleration.

So if you didn't have concrete evidence of the behaviour yet there it is. I can certainly vouch that my Logitech mouse behaves lousy in the current 3.4.0.6 alpha, in this specific way, I mean, so I'm really excited to test your latest patch! Thanks for everything you do, CW <3

edit----
Also, it just occurred to me, that he would have been playing my game that was compiled with AGS 3.3.3, so this must not be a new issue?

So to try out this latest 3.4 test build we just overwrite the acwin.exe inside our existing AGS folder? Are there any settings we need to change along with it?

Ha! selmiak, you're a prince. I got the top 2% of my game ending back! Man, that's such a perfect example of an engineer-style hack... like, why NOT do it that way? If it's four pixels too high, why not try adding four empty rows of pixels to the top of the video? My brain just doesn't think that way, I would have never thought to try that in a million years

Mandle, nothing to be sorry about! Just learning if a problem is even solvable or not is often half the work bughunting sometimes, so just hearing a "hang in there, I had that same problem once but I did find a solution" would have been a big help if selmiak hadn't posted his answer. Y'all are the best, thanks so much

I've been running into a weird issue with the ogg theora player in AGS, when it plays back a full-screen video, it draws the image four pixels higher than center-screen, cutting off the top four pixels of the video and leaving a black bar at the bottom of the screen, as you can see here:



It's not the end of the world so when I shipped ICBM I just decided to live with it, but now I'm working on an updated version for AGS 3.4 for the Linux support, and I'd love to solve this, if it's solvable.

I'm also totally willing to assume it's something stupid I'm doing wrong when encoding, but I'm using a theora plugin for the Adobe Media Encoder, and when I open my final theora video files in Premiere they do not have the black stripe encoded into their bottom or anything, so I'm pretty sure it's AGS playing the video that has the issue.

Any ideas?

This is really, really a great game.

Holy cow. This looks amazing

[http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/12/8570561/nuclear-war-joke]

Polygon.com did a feature on ICBM!

http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/12/8570561/nuclear-war-joke

I'm so stoked!!!

[PC Gamer]

I know, haha! But the first one that was pretty spoiler heavy kind of 'ripped the Band-Aid off', so to speak Now I'm just flattered that they're speaking about it at all. PC Gamer just posted about it today!

http://www.pcgamer.com/icbm-is-a-free-game-about-nuclear-missiles/

Also, I've noticed, a ton of people are still surprised and ask:

Spoiler

"So, wait, is there nothing to do?"

[close]

So despite all the spoilers it's still working as intended I think

[ICBM]

Thank you so much!

So far ICBM has been written about on:

Vice MOTHERBOARD (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-most-realistic-cold-war-game-is-a-boredom-simulator),
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/13/icbm-simulator-free-game/),
IndieGames.com (http://indiegames.com/2015/04/icbm_lets_you_blow_up_the_worl.html),
and was recommended by Rami Ismail, one of the founders of Vlambeer (http://ramiismail.com/2015/04/icbm/).

This has just been the best month ever

I think you can find a middle-ground. I think a little written profanity "hits" a lot harder than spoken: for instance, this sentence (which is very profane, fair warning to anyone who doesn't like the f-word):

Spoiler

Fuck that fuckin' motherfucker.

[close]

I think, seeing it spelled out like that, looks, just, god awful, like, I'd be embarrassed for my mom to read that haha

But I think if I heard it said at a bar, I'm not saying I would love it but it would sound "normal".

So I say all that to say, a little swearing goes a long way on the written page.

KodiakBehr: Thanks so much! I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you have, and I have made all of my Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files, as well as the Adventure Game Studio project directory, available open and free at the GameJolt page:

http://gamejolt.com/games/strategy-sim/icbm/57197/

haha I am so, so stoked that you liked it. I also forgot to say, in response to your comments about state secrets: the United States were and are actually pretty open and transparent (I mean, relatively, of course) about our nuclear program, because there's no good in having these things if you're not going to show them off so everyone knows you have them. The missile launch procedure has been documented and shown to reporters, and the extreme safety precautions the program employs are bragged about openly.

Also, while everything in the instructions and "story" is based on reality (that is a real missile squadron actually stationed at that real Air Force Base, etc.) the workstation and its contents are a complete fabrication. I just made it all up Graphically I tried to base it on the real thing, especially the communications panel (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Minuteman_III_Launch_Control.JPG) but as for the names of all the components and the descriptions, it's all fictional.

Spoiler

It is meant to seem as if there was a real game to play, were you to ever receive orders. You would receive codes on the phone that you would then verify on the verification panel, then give the orders to your superior who would decide on the next course of action, you'd plot values on the targeting computer to use on the BIOS writer, then hand that disk over to your superior and then finally turn the key. So I didn't worry to much about what the real panel looked like or behaved like because I wanted to "gamify" the whole thing.

[close]

Also also, (I hope this isn't getting too pedantic but feel free to TL;DR right over this post whenever I start getting too boring) there is a rough plot, though I didn't want to spell it out too much, with, like, a screen of text at the end outlining it all or anything.

Spoiler

The opening movie is meant to be a war propaganda film that the main character, Derek Evans, saw as a little boy in school (in Eugene, Oregon), which made him want to grow up and join the Air Force to enroll in its nuclear program. And the ending video is, his mom makes him VHS tapes where she records a couple hours of live TV for him, like, the local news and stuff, the latest episode of Alf or whatever, for him to watch down in the bunker. And he sends them back when he's bored of rewatching them over and over and she reuses them, and that's why the tape is so worn out. What you're seeing on the tape at the end of the game is just a random slice of one of those videos she has sent him. And, also, it's meant to be a window into the contemporary world of 1983, of course, and be subversive and "deep" and "about things", etc. etc.

[close]

Mandle: Thank you so, so much for your kind words! It's crazy, because of the nature of the, err.. gameplay, I suppose we can call it, I couldn't really share it with a lot of people to get feedback until it was almost done, because I didn't want testers to get fatigued with the whole idea of it too early and then not be able to really nitpick for errors, so I was kind of working on it in a vacuum, much more than I would normally be comfortable (I normally prefer to share stuff early to let it get beat up on as soon as possible). It was always going to be short and free and it was always going to be a weird, niche product, so obviously I was never expecting an avalanche of praise, but I wasn't sure if, like, ANYONE was going to like it (outside of saying "Well, the art sure is nice"), and had sort of adjusted my expectations accordingly. All I could do was try to make it amusing to myself and then cross my fingers.

I say all that to say, basically, I had no idea if it would have an audience, much less be able to find it if it existed. So your post, and a few other responses like it that I have received in various places online, are such a welcome relief to read! Thank you so much for your time spent playing it as well as your awesome, awesome comments. I was absolutely floored reading your post, and I re-read it probably a dozen times haha

Selmiak: I really, really really love Don't Push The Button. Like, a whole lot

Spoiler

Just to be sure: the button IS unpushable, correct? That is, just, bravo/a, sir or ma'am. Bravo/a. Delightful. Inspired.

Also, there was a sound effects and music slider, but none of either, as well, right? Originally, ICBM was going to be strictly just the art of the background, sound fx, and the hand drumming its fingers with ZERO player interactivity, and I had a gag in the options menu to Enable or Disable Mouse Support (for a game that was keyboard-only, and even then only in the menus, there was to be literally no interactivity during "play"). When I had the idea to add the mouse to the gameplay, I lost that gag, which, just, broke my heart (though I gained the option to add the customizable mouse cursors, which I'm not sure if anyone has even noticed yet! haha).

Anyway, seeing how masterfully you have already executed the same joke, makes me feel like I can let that go.

[close]

AprilSkies: thank you!

Monsieur OUXX: Thank you so much for saying that! Especially coming from a French person, whose opinion on coolness is therefor automatically 1.6x more legitimate than mine!

The short answer is just "lots of practice" haha. I'm almost 33, and I've been making weird stuff and putting it on the Internet since I was in high school in the late '90s. And looking at the background you submitted to the Lost Cities Background Blitz, I don't think you need any pointers from me, pal. If anything it's the other way around

Soundtrack is now available here

http://gamejolt.com/games/icbm/soundtracks/download/57197/

My point was that most agsers would not think to check the audio for null (or to test the game with no sound), and so most games that use this feature would crash in that scenario.
So while what you said would indeed fix this, it will only be fixed after a player reported the crash, which is not desired, and could be avoided by changing the behaviour of the engine.

I know this is a super old topic but that's what just happened to me, haha, a player just tweeted at me that they're getting exactly the crash described. But at least there's a solution I understand listed here!

I can vouch that as a non-programmer, this never occurred to me to consider, and I never thought to test the game with the audio settings disabled because I assumed the engine would handle this scenario on its own gracefully (my fault for assuming, I know the old saying, so I'm not upset, I'm just adding my two cents)

Man, it feels so awesome to log into these forums and see my completed game listed in the Announcements section!!! It only took me 15 years hahaha

Mandle: Thanks! I'm realizing that I have quite a backlog of great games to play haha

StillInThe90s: Thanks so much!

Monsieur OUXX: lol