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Very interesting concept

Thanks. it still isn't exactly how I envision it - I'm still getting the hang of it, making various changes. But the plan is that every time people visit there will be another story, something classic and substantial, but in a quick and fun way.

Latest game: Frankenstein, added last week. It's more immediate than recent games: the hero plays a central role, and it uses speech balloons to make the player feel more involved. It's been the most popular game yet. Apparently.

This weeks's free game: Macbeth

I'm not keeping up quite with one game per week, but that's because there is so much experimentation behind the scenes. E.g. Macbeth has more color, better art (mostly!) and various other tweaks. Any feedback or suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks for the words of support. I forgot to mention, in the land of the big blue coffee cup, my game includes rather a large coffee cup in the 'more books' menu. A nod to all my friends here.

This week's free game is Romeo and Juliet! Slightly delayed because I've added a lot of improvements, in response to feedback:

• You now get the complete game, not just a few chapters
  
• Now with color
  
• Now cleaner, and easier to follow (better start, better 'the story so far', now with chapter names so you never get lost)
  
• With a substantial quiz - brush up your Shakespeare!
  
• And a mini-game about Sam Everyman, the star of the games
  
• The backup pages (especially "about") are more professional
  
• I now have a business manager: the staff has doubled
  
• And the quill pen actually works. (The quill pen is optional, and needs a modern browser that allows mouseover and HTML5. The rest of it should work on anything.)
  

Plus you get the usual race through a classic novel, and plenty of chances to die. Enjoy.

Hi Guys!
I just thought I'd let you know about my new super-simple game engine.

After releasing five AGS games, people kept asking me if my games were available on the iPad. So I decided to code my own javascript based game engine that would work on anything. I am the world's slowest coder, so the games are simple and the engine is simple too.

Finished games:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Journey To The Center of the Earth
The First Men In The Moon
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
Frankenstein

How to make your own games


I plan to add one per week for the next 20 years (making 1000 new games). See what you think.

You won't have any! I stick to the Zak style of humor. Which was difficult like hell . (My tastes in humor were way more darker and politics than the game can afford without losing the taste).

It depends on the politics - I like the game precisely because of its political message. Small "p" - not party politics, but David Fox's views on how the world should be run infuse everything he does. Zak has the strongest message of any game I've played, strong because it doesn't hit you over the head with the message, but it's everywhere. But yes, it is the opposite of dark.

Chris : Please update your site and remove my old screenies from it. I can't stand watching them - it hurts.

Are you OK if I move them to a "not in the finished game" section? The whole point of the site is to be an archive of things that would otherwise be lost. Such as early abandoned versions of fan games. I like the early art BTW (the later stuff if cool too)

At last!  I run the Zak McKracken archive, and this is the only sequel that ever got me excited. The other sequels have been great and all, but this is the only one I have really looked forward to. It's the only one that seems to grasp the real beauty of Zak, the greatest game ever made.

I thought this project was dead, and this is the greatest Christmas present ever. Keep up the good work!!! Now I really need to update my site...

[freely]

I myself thought I cannot draw, was always breaking my head trying to select correct colours, shading etc, until I tried to draw as freely and careless as possible. The result was this  

That's a great look! Sure, it's rough, but that's no worse than being too smooth. I find that even perfectly rendered 3D figures are unreal, especially if they feature impossible characters to start with. Your grungy looking people in coats are at least as believable as anything in World of Warcraft.

[consistency]

Here's another idea. make a sci-fi game. Use Twisted Brush: I made this by just choosing weird brushes and swiping them across the screen.

It needs zero skill, and you can easily make a hundred weird images like this. There are also brushes for instant trees and flowers and pretty much anything. Twisted Brush Open Studio is free The full Twisted Brush Studio has tons more special brushes, and has a good "try before you buy" license.

There's onle one rule here: consistency
Once you have established a graphic style, stick to it. There's nothing more graphics ruining than inconsistencies , like putting a rendered model in next to your crudely drawn character.

Or if the rules are against you, change the rules. As mode7 says, it is easy to get hold of inconsistent art. then make a game where inconsistent art is part of the story:

*Edwin Abbott's classic Flatland. The main character can be a very flat stick man drawn on paper (very easy to animate - get a young child to do it for you!) who then walks around the real world.

* A game based on madness. Each group of images (photos, paintings, MSPaint images) represents a different mental state - serene, crazy, real, chaotic, etc.

* make an anarchic surreal game where different styles deliberately conflict in a montage. Make it look deliberate. Maybe you'll find you have a talent for montage.

* make a game about the Large Hadron Collider going horribly wrong. Reality breaks down, swirls and distorts. Get a copy of the GIMP (it's free) and experiment with weird filters. As the game progresses make the backgrounds more and more distorted as we al get sucked into a black hole and multiple universes collapse together. If you filter everything enough then photos and drawings look the same.

You have all the art you need! Just cut your coat according to your cloth.

All the art you need is here:
http://enterthestory.com/sludge.html


This is all you need for a complete game. Anyone with average art skills can add to it - the style is very easy to copy. If you need an extra page or two just post a request on the right forum.

I made all this art for my first game, then ended up changing the art style. So none of the art was ever used. I made it all public domain i the hope that somebody else could use it.

You get backgrounds, sprites, animations, the whole lot. The main character is based on a video and walks in all eight directions. You also have aliens, a trotting horse, rippling waves, more than enough to get a game started. Backgrounds include Paris, Johannesburg, a Scottish town, shops, landscapes, underwater, outer space, lots of different caves, and more.

The images are TGAs, but Irfanview will convert them. The animations are in the SLUDGE format, but the page includes instructions for extracting the individual frames.

Enjoy!

"The Count of Monte Cristo: reviewers wanted" is an awkward name.
You should have simply named it "The Count of Monte Cristo".

Nah, I prefer "Enter The Story, volume five, Alexandre Dumas' Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Being The Strange and Exciting Story of Edmund Dantes, How He Escaped From The Chateau d'If, of Buried Treasure, and How He Gained Revenge on His Enemies and The Scandals That Rocked Paris."

or "Monte" for short.

it seems to be a Complete Game, just not fully available just yet.

That has all changed, as of yesterday!

The Count of Monte Cristo is now on sale!

Here's a review, here is the demo, here's a new interview (if the page is not in English click on ‘vertalen’ at the toolbar under Gameflow), here's the main web site (including teaser video), and here are some screenshots and wallpapers from the various games.
That’s all the news for today. Thanks for reading!





.

That sounds like somehow your sprite file has become corrupted but yet remains in a semi-functional state.

That happens to me regularly. Well every couple of months at least. IIRC, the simplest way to deal with it is to remove every reference to that sprite anywhere, then delete both versions.

EDIT: on a related note, I've noticed it is possible to delete sprites that are used in views, I think by simply deleting their folder. The game won't complain until it comes time to remove the sprite from memory after use, and then... CRASH. I use 3.02 so possibly this has been fixed, or maybe I should just expect less hand holding when I delete folders.

Many thanks! I PMed the link to you.

The Count of Monte Cristo will be released at the end of this week, just as soon as I get the demo version made and do other housekeeping stuff. If you want a pre-release copy right now, for free, all you have to do is promise to review it on your blog, or write an official AGS review, or review it on on any site that reviews stuff - not just sites for games, as this is aimed at anyone who likes stories.

It won't take too long to play, as it's stuffed with hints and help if you want it. And it contains a lot of improvements over previous games, so who knows, you might even enjoy it.  Go on, you know you want to. Just PM me.

What's new compared with my earlier games:

* better early feedback from testers - I'm finally getting there.
* More polish: The Count of Monte Cristo has been tested and re-tested more than the other games, with more improvements added as a result of previous game reviews.
* More natural: The game now focuses on just on one character, meaning dialog is more natural and less generic.
* More detail: The full text of the original novel is now available in the game - visit the in-game library, or press B to read the book.
* Easier controls: just click. That's it! Simples.
* More natural movement: In early games, only one or two characters had full movement. With The Count of Monte Cristo, there are now fifty different fully mobile sprites. Also, walking code has been rewritten and improved.
* Lots of other improvements: no jumping around for clues, more favorite locations, more classical music, more access to that music, better space bar behavior, better books in the library, more relevant clues, the list goes on!
* A faster story. Early reviewers complained that the game felt too slow. Well not any more.

Don't worry, I don't expect a finished review by the end of the week. I know that reviews can take months. But the goal of this project is to adapt a new classic novel every few months, so I'm itching to release Mont Cristo and get working on The Picture of Dorian Gray.

PM me if you need a review copy.
Thanks for reading!

Too many adventure games start with endless dialogs that do nothing to hook player in.

As with all things, Zak McKracken is the perfect example of how it should be done IMO. The title sequence introduces all the main elements - the mysteries, villains, chases, puzzles, planets, characters, who they are, what they do... all tied into a simple idea (a guy has a dream). With an unforgettable soundtrack to boot. Then bam, you're in a familiar looking bedroom in the real world, and it's time to explore. Or just skip the intro at the start and you're right there. Superb.

It also depends on market expectations. I aim my games at book buyers, and most books are cheaper than most games. Then there's long term strategy. If you plan on doing just one or two big games you'll charge more than if you pile 'rm high and sell 'em cheap. Nobody makes much money at first anyway, so it's worth thinking what you want your offering to look like in five or ten years.

I don't know if I mentioned this before, or if it counts as a service, but I have a whole game's worth of art and animations free to anybody who wants them, here:
http://enterthestory.com/sludge.html

Want to make a game but can't draw or animate? In a hurry? problem solved. The link explains everything.

you'll need (4) more spare time than most people.

That's the killer. I absolutely love the freedom of the old games like Zak and Maniac Mansion. But to do it for anything beyond the simplest game (or without a reasonable sized team of people) is just not practical.

I found that with my first four games. I allowed any character to interact with any object in any game (the games linked together). This meant millions of possible interactions. The only way to do it was to have very generic dialog, spend very little time on it, and ignore times when cutting corners gave odd results. The games suffered as a result: they generally looked unpolished. I've learned my lesson with the latest game (Monte Cristo): it has ONE hero and ONE kind of click. As a result I can spend far more time on the story, and produce a much better game.

I'm getting some pleasing early reviews, and the game should be ready for release later this week... all going well.


http://www.enterthestory.com/blog/
and as a bonus, the blog contains early concept art for the next game,The picture of Dorian Gray!

there were other projects I never fully finished such as my very first project before I even knew of AGS, which was my Zak McKracken sequel with Maniac Mansion Crossovers.

As the guy who runs the Zak McKracken archive I say PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE finish this!