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[Music]

Music

Greeting
Hello!

Who am I and what am I doing here?
My name is Peter Silk and I've been composing music in one form or another ever since I started messing around with ProTracker on the Amiga, nearly 20 years ago. Now I'm looking to put myself out there for adventure game projects because I've been a fan of the genre since the old, old days and I'd like some more experience of putting music to games.

I'm fairly flexible in my capabilities and can adapt them to quite a few different sorts of music but my main specialities are orchestral-style pieces and NES-style chiptunes.

My musical influences include Michael Land (Monkey Island) & Peter McConnell (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts), old games by Capcom and Konami, film composer Danny Elfman and classical composers JS Bach and Prokofiev. I thrive on strong, memorable melodies and recurring motifs.


You'll get a much better idea by watching and listening to the music reel I recently put together, and I can provide some more examples on request. Do listen all the way through, as I cover various styles.


Availability
I would love to be able to work on music all day, but I do have full-time job responsibilities which take up a chunk of it so I will be making music in my free time, alongside other projects that I keep myself busy with. Rest assured, I'm not about to waste anyone's time: if you come to me with a project that excites me, I will happily make the necessary room for it.

Contact
If you want to contact me feel free to send a private message or drop an email to peter _dot_ silk _at_ gmail _dot_ com and I'll be happy to discuss things with you.

I think a better question is 'should there be more serious adventure games?'

I think the answer to THAT one is yes. People should be moving adventure games in any direction which is currently lacking. That's how a genre grows and develops.

Take Interactive Fiction, for example - that's grown from the simple dungeon hacking of the early days to all sorts of different styles. Every time someone produces a text game that genuinely surprises or makes someone feel something they haven't felt with an IF game before, that gives the player more reasons to keep partaking in the artform.

Currently, the indie graphic adventure community is has a lot of spoofs, tribute-games and titles that try to recapture the humour of someone's favourite adventure of old. That's fine! We all like nostalgia, but relying on nostalgia alone is almost like admitting the genre is dead.

We should, and I think we DO encourage adventure games which try something different, and creating a deliberately and uniquely serious game is one way of doing that.

However, I don't think it is necessarily a goal that designers SHOULD be aspiring to. It's just one of many options. Nor should a designer entirely shun their influences. If Monkey Island is the adventure game you're most inspired by, then it's absolutely okay for the influence of that game to creep into your own, as long as that influence doesn't amount to plagiarism.

Just as someone is rarely funny if their attitude screams 'hey, look at me, aren't I funny?' the same is true about seriousness. If you try too hard, it just looks pretentious. The key is to find the style that fits your own personality best, a personality that may have a vast array of influences, but should also be able to bring something fresh and new. As good stage improvisers know, the best and 'cleverest' ideas never come from the person who is desperately trying to be the best or the cleverest.

Hi InsoFox,
nice art and choice of design.
The music is good as well.
Tim Burton influence?
Well I'd like to play a full game based on this one.
Nice work!

Thanks! However, I've got no plans to carry this one on. I'm already working on a new project, but unfortunately I might need to get a new artist for it.

Some of the comments have just reminded me of something that it might interest some people to know: I didn't have any particular puzzle/setting in mind when I created the game. I said to my artist: 'Could you just create for me a sprite that walks around, and a couple of backgrounds and some random objects?' and I improvised the whole game out of everything she sent me. The only graphics I added myself were an animation needed to solve the puzzle, and one of the inventory icons, also to do with a puzzle. I'm quite pleased with what I came up with, considering I had no idea what graphics I was going to get

Anyway...

Awesome game this awesome quest. Great style. Could play it for much longer.I like the way the dialogs are build up.
The puzzle is fairly straight forward and easy.

Spoiler

You might want the player to get the key out of the bird. I was already thinking ahead when the hint came that I had to bring it to the guy.

[close]

Nice relaxed music added. I like the simplicity of the cursors. No guessing what tiny image represents what... just read and use. Good first try! Some notes:

Since this is a very short game the save, load and quit options aren't needed but you might want to add these to some kind of menu.
Having said that, pressing F5 or F7 leaves the text on what to do (ie. "type a name to save as" with F5) very unreadable.
A thing I find strange:

Spoiler

With using the plank on the bag you say "I might fall into the bushes" and a bucket attched to it is allright?

[close]

It's just a thought...

by the way, you should add your game to the DB so you reach a wider public and.... people can vote!... and since this is a one and a half room game maybe consider entering the MAGS or the OROW contest?

Interesting notes, thanks. I'll talk about a few of them:

1) Save function was one of the things that I didn't even look at when making this. When I make a longer game, I'll learn how it works, but this game was purely to learn how to put stuff into rooms and make a puzzle out of it.

2) The puzzle is easy, yes, but I wasn't going for tricky, so that's about as expected. I wanted the puzzle to contain a few different features which would force me to learn how to do them

Spoiler

(like animating the bird and combining inventory items and so forth)

[close]

but it was purely a learning exercise, more than a puzzle-design exercise. Also

Spoiler

I didn't have the player get the key out of the bird because I thought it was more amusing just to give it to the guy to deal with

[close]

3) The other thing you found odd

Spoiler

Well, I know what you mean, but I suppose the idea was that he'd knock it into the bucket instead of it letting it land on the ground. Not the most foolproof method, I admit, but better than nothing - and easy enough for the player to figure out.

[close]

Anyway, thanks for the comments, I'm glad you liked it

I really dig it. Better than most users' first games. Well Done!

The only thing that I would change is when you select an item from the inventory window and then close the window, the cursor should be the inventory item, instead of defaulting back to "go".

Also,

Spoiler

I was very disappointed that I didn't get to see Bob tear the bird open. Or at least hear a grusome sound effect.

[close]

Thanks for the feedback. I just had a little look at the first thing you said, since I thought I had fixed it, and here's the deal: when you click out of the inventory window just by clicking anywhere on the main screen it does stay on the inventory item, but when you use the inventory button toggle to exit the window, it does revert to go as you say. I didn't realise it was a problem until now, because ever since I implemented the 'clicking anywhere closes inventory window' feature I never turned the inventory window off using the button again! I don't think I'll fix it for this game, but that's something to keep in mind for the future, thanks!

As for the other bit, well... I thought I'd just leave it to the ol' imagination

Hello.

This is a very tiny little game I created in AGS in around 5 leisurely evenings. It has the feel of a demo of a longer game, because I really only created it to get my feet wet in the ways of AGS. However, I don't have any plans to make it any longer, so it is complete and I thought I'd put it up for everyone to enjoy and make fun of.

I created everything myself, except for most of the graphics were drawn by my excellent artist friend, McT. Apart from that, all of the game, a few of the animations, both pieces of music, etc were by me, so I hope you like them.

Here are a couple of screenshots:





And here is a link to the download:

http://www.4shared.com/file/51228269/61d3966d/Awesome_Quest_1.html?dirPwdVerified=581bf23

Some things you might like to try on a second play through:

Look at the stump.
Try exiting the left side of the first screen several times.
Solve the puzzle before speaking to the guy.

...And lots more. I  tried to be fairly detailed within this tiny 1-puzzle space, because I wanted to pack as much learning as possible into 2 rooms, so please let me know what you thought!

Hello,

I started using AGS a couple of weeks ago, and about 5 days after I started I had a nice, 2-room test game worked out. It's tiny; there's only really 1 puzzle (but with a few stages to it) but nevertheless I'm quite pleased with my initial efforts and wouldn't mind posting it up, if only to sort of get me name out there, as someone who knows how to use AGS properly and can do a bit of music, too.

But.

I'm not sure whether to post it under completed game announcements or works in progress. Certainly, it plays more like a segment from the middle of a larger game. And it's very small. But then again, it is more or less complete; I'm not really interested in expanding it into a full game.

So which forum do you think would be the best one to stick it up on?

To be honest I wasn't sure where to ask this question either, but I thought it would be better here than clogging up one of the aforementioned boards.

Mm, though I suppose my point was that the lack of decent adventure games was less to do with people forgetting how to make good ones (Escape from Monkey Island was something of a blip, I think, considering it didn't come that long after GF, which a lot of people consider LucasArts' best) and more to do with the fact that the sample itself became a lot smaller, which was the result of dwindling sales - lack of innovation perhaps being a contributing factor.

Adventure games aren't the only genre to see this phenomenon. People tend to get much less excited about RTS games than in their heydey - because you didn't see a lot of innovation there after a time, either. I hear the latest Unreal game did very poorly too, and each successive Quake has been less well received, I think.

But of course in the indie community we don't need to worry about that because we can make what we like, and what we discover is of course that when not under pressure from publishers people actually really like brand new ideas - ones which work.

So, to sum up my point, I think there's definitely a big place for retro graphics and puzzles and gameplay. But I think the potential for positive innovation is as yet (relatively) untapped.

EDIT: It occurs to me that an obvious reply would be 'Well, go on then, do it!' Certainly, when I make a game I'll have this stuff in my mind, but it's very rare that a single game can completely open up a whole new world of undiscovered gameplay. Changes usually come in smaller steps and I don't pretend to believe that when I make a game it'll be unlike anything anyone has seen. I just mean that I want to approach it with a broader design manifesto than 'Monkey Island, but with <insert unique 'selling' point here>' even if that just means throwing in some unorthodox puzzles here and there, at first.

I'm fresh from making a 2-room 'learning' game in AGS which I used to teach myself the basic concepts in a few short but fun days (I'll stick this up for people to look at in the appropriate forum, later on). Now, of course, I'm inevitably wondering where to take my new found prowess. I started by looking at what other people are doing, and have some thoughts about what I've seen so far.

My initial thought was that there is an awful lot of retro-styled content created by AGS. I think this is all fine and good because I love a bit of that but it got me to thinking whether adventures (and adventure gamers) in general are stuck in that sort of mindset. Certainly in my little test game the main puzzle was extremely traditional lucasarts-esque fare, and I haven't seen a whole lot of variation from that or similar formulae (except where people have created something in a different genre, like Art of Theft).

I think that there's a place for games that are retro, visually, and also a place for ones with traditional style puzzles. But I think there's also a place for people who are trying to be aggressively modern with their designs, thinking of new ways of doing puzzles - and not just for the sake of being different, but because they hit upon something new that works.

I think one of the main reasons adventure games suffered as a genre around the turn of the century was that there were not really many successful attempts at doing something innovative (although Westwood's underrated Blade Runner springs to mind) and so there was a lot of lost interest. One of the reasons they're starting to sell again, aside from new business models like Telltale's, might be simply that people are nostalgic about the old days, rather than the games offering anything particularly new (except perhaps an episodic structure, for example - and that was initially greeted with suspicion).

I don't know what my first 'real' project will be but I do know that I am likely to have these thoughts in the back of my mind when I start it, and I wonder if other people have thought similar things.

Discuss...

Hello,

I'm practicing creating my own GUI from scratch, and I've followed the manual as far as I can but I'm now lost.

This is what I have done:

I have an inventory button in the bottom left corner of the game screen (a bit like sam and max 1) and it toggles on and off the actual inventory box itself.

My objects are appearing in the inventory box just fine, but I can't quite get my head around how to actually select the inventory item as my cursor, so that I can use it on objects/hotspots in the world. I think there is some code for this in the help file, but I don't quite understand how it works or where I use it from scratch, and so on.

Can someone help with that in a step by step way, please?

ALSO, when I'm hovering over the inventory box, right clicking to change the verb doesn't seem to work. I have to move the cursor away from the box to change it. Why is that?

Thanks

EDIT: Sorry, solved this now. Note to others: The BFAQ is your friend.

I guess it's the sort of thing that's difficult to understand unless you've been addicted, which I haven't.

I bite my nails sometimes, which is a habit rather than an addiction, but someone compared it earlier. But a big difference I suppose is that I have constant access to nails with no money/effort. To get more cigarrettes I might be able to ask someone, but most of the time I'd have to go to the shop and pay a not-insignificant sum of money for a pack.

The bit I find difficult to wrap my head around is how someone who is trying to quit is unable to think 'no, I'll not do that' at any point in the process of standing up, going to the shop, asking for cigarrettes and handing over the money.

That's not the sort of thing that it seems to me you can do without even realising you're doing it, like nail-biting. Maybe it is, though, and that's the part that I find difficult to wrap my head around.

I'd love for a description from someone who knows about what is going through your head when you buy cigarettes after having already decided not to.

Also, I'm genuinely curious, I'm not trying to put anyone down.

Thank you so much!

Hi,

this is extremely basic, which makes me think I've been missing something obvious in the help files and faqs for the past hour, in which case I apologise, but I promise I've looked!

I know how to use the conversation editor to write dialogue trees and such, but I can't figure out how I actually assign that dialogue tree to a particular character. I assume I have to put something under his Talk to character event, but I don't know what, and how to get it to initiate the dialogue tree I've created.

Call of Cthulu : The Dark Corners of the Earth is fantastically creepy, especially once you get to Innsmouth.

Hello folks,

I'm a 25 year old long time adventuring fan from the UK. My introduction to adventure games was The Secret of Monkey Island, which I was introduced to by someone who I remember nothing about except that he used to write a column in an Amiga magazine under the pseudonym 'The Boggit.' I was round his house for some reason and remembered really liking the music in the intro to both MI1 and 2 and never looked back!

I'm also a pretty good music composer myself, and although I do a lot less composing that I'd like nowadays (as well as having a less than ideal set up for it) For the longest time had aspirations as a game musician but nowadays I'm a little older and my ambitions have changed to designing games in general.

Lately I've made a firm decision to get on with it what I've been talking about for years, and do it. This involves not being afraid of scripting languages (an irrational fear, since they're something which, while not my forte, I am more than capable of learning) and actually getting started (which is the harder bit)

I'm happy to report that thanks to AGS3 I've already had some degree of success with the latter; I'm finding it very easy to use compared to the last time I looked at it some years ago.

Soon I hope to have a little 2 room practice adventure to show for it. Once I do, I'm sure I'll be poking around the forums once again, in search of help for a 'proper' game. Of course, I'd like to keep -that- reasonably small, too: I have been around the adventure community long enough to know not to run before I can walk. Somewhere, sitting on a computer is a pile of MIDI files for adventure games that people never made.

I'm sure I'll be posting about more, now that I've got started. See you soon!