Messages

[What's it about?]

"Good morning, analyst

Today's assignment is waiting for you at your workstation

Another routine infestation I'm afraid"

What's it about?

In the game you play a low-ranking analyst at the Ministry of Paranormal Affairs, tasked with searching through old records to uncover how an alien infestation spread secretly through a small publishing company in the 1990s.

The game isn't a point and click adventure but is more of a logic puzzle. You're presented with a database of seemingly mundane information (e.g. sick records or security camera stills) and have to work out who has been infected based on knowledge about how the aliens behave.

The challenge for me was to try and make a game that was interesting to play, out of material that is inherently uninteresting (office life) Not sure if the game will achieve that but I've got this far....

Outside of cutscenes the game only uses two colours: blue and white

Screenshots



eliminating a suspect





office floor plan





security camera footage





sick records





briefing screen



Progress

The game has four separate puzzles in it, progressing through the stages of the infestation of the company; I think progress would be:
- Puzzle 1 - 100% complete
- Puzzle 2 - 80% complete
- Puzzle 3 - 50% complete
- Puzzle 4 - 0% complete
- Others (e.g. cutscenes) - 75% complete

My main problem so far is that I started out uploading the images as bmp file format, before I realised that's a terrible idea, so the file size is currently massive.

Release date
This is a hobby project for me; I'd like to release it as a free game, but it has been hard to find the time in between working to pay the bills. It's been fun though! I'm aiming to finish it before the end of 2022.

Thanks for reading!

I too played the demo today and thought it was excellent. I think one thing the game achieves really well is capturing the feel of the setting - I felt drawn in straight away and it gave me a strong urge to continue. Fantastic.

It struck me that the game is more 'task-oriented' than 'puzzle-oriented' (i.e. the player is given tasks to do which advance the story, rather than hard puzzles for the sake of being hard); this is great because it keeps the focus story-telling, which is what I enjoy most about adventure games. Oddly enough, yesterday I was reading a 1989 (!) article by Ron Gilbert, in which he makes this point:

If any type of game is going to bridge the gap between games and storytelling, it is most likely going to be adventure games. They will become less puzzle solving and more story telling, it is the blueprint the future will be made from.

https://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck

So the prophecy was true.

One minor semi-bug I spotted:

Spoiler

when I removed the plank that was blocking the toilet door I didn't open the door from the outside but instead went back into the pub and through the toilet again; when I tried to open the door from the inside Thomasina said something like "there must be something blocking it from the outside" but the plank had already been removed; I went back and opened it from outside and it worked fine.

[close]

I doubt it will come up much but just pointing it out in case helpful.

Looking forward to the full game.

The look and feel of this are absolutely fantastic! Have wishlisted and can't wait to play

Well, that was much easier than expected. Many thanks.

Hi All
I'm after some help with GUI buttons.

At several points in my game, I have a GUI button you can click which will fade the screen to black, turn on another GUI, then fade back in again (for example, the main screen has a journal button; when you click it the screen fades to black, then fades in again showing the journal; there's another button on the journal screen to go back to normal)

My problem is that during the fade the GUI buttons stay visible with a kind of ugly hash over them, which I don't want. I assume that this is because a blocking script is running (I am using FadeIn / FadeOut)

Is there a way round this? Or a way to achieve the same effect not using GUI buttons?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Took me quite a while to be able to test these but they both worked well!

Big thanks for help with this

Hey - thanks for replies, much appreciated - that makes sense, I will test out

Yes, to clarify, I meant also being able to use items in addition to verb buttons so it's all in one place (I checked this out and yes it's a similar idea to the one of the X Days games - the second one). Definitely take the point about not being able to combine items, but I like the 'clean' nature of it - everything being in one place

On the pointers point - I may be using the terminology wrong (definitely still a beginner!) - I meant that there would be a single cursor that was used for walk, but that the image of the cursor would change if it goes over something you can interact with (e.g. change to a different colour - I think this was the way it worked in Monkey Island 3)

I've made a fair amount of progress with my first game but have run into a wall scripting the inventory I'd like to make.

Rather than the standard 'walk', 'use', 'look' pointers, I'd like to have just two pointers: a standard one and one to show that you are selecting an object or hotspot. This much I've done already.

Then, clicking on an object or hotspot will bring up your inventory window which will have buttons for 'look' 'use' (and 'talk'). I can make the GUI fine, but am having trouble making the buttons run the interactions differently for each object / hotspot.

Can anyone help or direct me to a thread which explains this? (I haven't been able to find one)

Thanks!!!!!!!