Messages

The reception bg:
- The wall the door on the east goes through seems to be only 1 pixel wide. As you said there will be a door there this might not be a problem. I don't know.
- The couch on the west wall seems to stick out a bit too much.
- Perspective is fine, but the room is very deep, forcing you to scale the character a lot. I would have dropped the foreground and "zoomed in" a bit so that the door on the east and the corridor on the west would be at the bottom of the screen.

Waiting room bg:
- Again the room is much bigger than it needs to be, forcing you to scale the character a lot.
- The picture(?) to the right on the back wall is squeezed up in the corner.
- The door on the east wall is too small. Usually in a house the top of the windows and the top of the doors are at the same height. Your window has about 1/4 of the wall above it and the door has nearly 1/2.
- The door opening on the south wall is a bit overdone. You can make it just 3-4 pixels tall and it will be obvious to the player.

Back alley bg:
- Nothing really wrong here. I recently had to draw a chain link fence myself and found the best way was just to do what looked good. If you try to draw it in scale it will be almost all fence, but in reality a chain link fence is mostly air.
- Dumpster might stick out too much from the wall.

Looking good so far! Best of luck!

It's not quite that bad yet, Steve.

Thank you very much! 

I hope, when the time comes, that you will find it worth investing $14.99 in our game as an early christmas present to yourself. Something to retreat to your computer with after a day of hard christmas preparations. Maybe even with a cup of hot chocolate in hand and with your faithful dog sleeping by the fireplace. *






*Yes, I DO feel dirty for that pitch! Welcome to the world of independent developers!

I can confirm that that's exactly the method I used for those backgrounds.

Thank you for the kind words and support, and to everyone who has purchased and enjoyed The Shivah so far.  You are paying for my Mountain Dew habit.  One can at a time.

What? You got paid? Dave!

Please don't change the voice!
There's something very sweet about a machine declaring his love.
I agree with Nikolas about how the break should be a bit...bigger. Maybe a harmonica solo?
Great work!

Sounds like you've mixed together Street Rod and Ghostbusters. Street Rod had the "tuning up the old car" thing and Ghostbusters had you sucking up ghosts with a vacuum cleaner attatched to your car.

Hmm... Second game reminds me of Contraption Zach to some degree, but not the entire description fits.

The background is indeed a good copy of the Simon style, and the pixeling is great both on the background and the character.
But praise won't get you anywhere, so here's the hard stuff:

- The colors seem a bit "flat".

- There is no "centerpiece" on the bg. It's all very general and nothing sticks out. If you look at screenshot 7 on the page you linked you will see a very similar screen. On that screen the mushroom provides some much needed color, and makes the room stand out in an otherwise labyrinthine forest.

- Last point is one I can say against the original Simon gfx too: Too much! This is a question of taste, but the texture on the ground and on the trees overloads my optic nerves! Less is more.

Some minor things would be that the anti aliasing of the tree against the grass and sky is a bit washed out.
Oh and I think Freud would have a word or two to say about the holes in the trees!

[against]

Dr. Scary, the "problem" you brought up about the universe being a computer computing its own future is, in a way, an argument against free will.  So... yeah...

You are correct, it is. It was in no way connected to the argument FOR free will, it was just a funny thought I decided to share with people in context.

On a side note: It is a nonsensical discussion. One can't HOPE to find an answer to the question of free will, so this entire thread is just a practice ground for the noble arts of polemics and semantics. But what else is new...

[Let's start with Both:]

As I see it there are three possible answers to this question; yes, no and both.

Let's start with Both:
In this case the universe has an infinite number of parallel universes where every possible permutation of every option causes another universe to be born.
In other words: Anything can happen in all the universes together, but not in just one of them.
How to prove this model:
Maybe one would be able to detect one or more of the other universes, but it's a 50/50 chance that you live in one of the universes where the attempt to do so would result in failure.

Then there's Yes:
The mind can affect matter, and humans have control over their own actions. Maybe it happens within the known world, or maybe thought is a separate dimension yet undiscovered. Who knows, right?
How to prove this model:
If the rules guiding the motion of the particles is correct unless a mind interferes with them you can prove free will with using math to calculate the future and when the future is present point out that it is different than predicted. The calculation of the future would of course, since everything influences everything else, require a computer built out of the entire universe and thusly would have no point. One could even say that the universe right now IS a computer calculating it's own future. MOAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!

Lastly; No
Let's face it. This is by far the most boring option. *yawn* Proving it's validity causes you to run into a lot of the same problems as when attempting to prove Yes. (The all encompassing computer trying to predict the future, etc) *yawn*

Closing thoughts
This is a question that can only be answered when you know the true nature of the universe. But then again, how can you know you know? Even if what you know explains everything you observe, how can you know that's not just the way you percieve it? In other words: If you sit in a room with no door or windows, does that mean that there is no room next to it?
Maybe one should rather ask if the universe is made for us to comprehend?

However, I don't like having the ability to save over old files.  Everytime I save I have to create a brand new save file.  Since I'm somebody who likes to save frequently and try every conversation branch (I'm obsessive, I know), this can get a bit tiresome.

Yeah, the save menu was the last thing added to the game and suffered due to lack of time.

Farlander: Thank you for those great words of encouragement! It means especially much when coming from a skilled artist as yourself.

I'm humbled by the great reception this game has gotten. Thank you all!

Oh, and don't forget to vote!

With a quick edit in Photoshop I found out that with a slightly smaller screenshot it was easy to make your design fit withing the 800px limit.
Nice improvement!

And A would chafe something awful.

Works fine with Firefox. Think the problem is the special characters you have in the filename. Try renaming the picture to a name with only stardard english characters.

Hvordan går det i landskamper? Gjør dere det bra, eller?

Just some last minute food for thought...

Saturated colors, but with the unsaturated skin. Also did something with her eyes. I felt they were a bit "vacant".

Yes, and also the ability to enable and disable it from the script.
How does it sound to you? Would it be terribly complicated?

I would also like to add that this could be used to do start and end animations as long as you can change the status of frames while they are animating.

Looking much better. I for one support your idea of reworking the same background over and over again. As long as you can keep your motivation up it's a great way to gage improvement.
On to the critisism:
- My main point of critisism is the colors. They are flat and boring. When you chose a cartoony style you should back it up with the colors you select. Right now the only things that seem like they have the correct color are the boxes and the roof. (I really like the roof, btw)
- The boards on the shack wall are a bit too big for my taste, even if it is cartoony.
- Likewise the window frame and the frame around the hatch on the Coke machine are too thick.
- Very niggly, but... inside the Coke machine hatch you have used outlines instead of solid colors to define the shape. It's the only place in the background you have done this, so it kind of sticks out.
- The city in the background could use some kind of solind ground underneath it. I think it would be visible from that distance.
- Finally, you have some color bleeding around the edges of your objects that should be fixed in the final version, like some bright pixels between the shack and the concrete.

Would it be possible to add a flag to enable and disable single frames of a loop?

Right now I am generating sprites into a temporary view from two source views. As of now the function requires that the source and target views all have the same amount of frames.
The ability to enable and disable single frames would make it easy to allow animation of different lengths.
A possible workaround would be to allow to set the frame speed, I noticed this was aready on the tracker, but the enable/disable option would be preferrable.