Messages

Fantastic stuff.  I really appreciate the video.  That is so cool.  You packed a lot of work into those seven days!

Thanks! It's always (kind of) fun to take a break from other projects and work on one that you will most likely be done with in seven or so days. That's why OROW is just my kind of a competition, short and sweet. Well, at least short and sweaty.

Wow that was like super complex stuff. I thought you had just modeled these in 3d and then rendered them or something. I am now even more impressed with this game!

I don't even want to think how long it would've taken to animate all that in 3d.

What programs did you use for this?

Just Adobe After Effects 7, with a script I wrote that exports the tracking data to a text file, and the python script I wrote that converts that data to the face point data. For prototyping purposes the python script also drew the wireframe images so I had an idea of what the hell I was doing.

At first I though I'd do the data conversion in AGS but since I'd already done the prototype with the python script, I abandoned that idea. It would've been a pain to convert the object-oriented scripts to something that AGS can process. On the other hand, it would've been faster to read the files which, as it is now, creates a somewhat annoying pause before the longer lines. Then again, I also tried to make sure the game wouldn't be too much of a power hog and would run on my crappy 1.6 GHz Celeron laptop without the animation getting out of sync.

At least the face paint didn't fail us! We we're afraid it might just melt off our faces with sweat.

[By the Numbers]

By the Numbers
Very cool visual style.  I'm also really looking forward to seeing your workflow on this.  The facial expressions were so awesome that I wish the gameplay incorporated them.  Like interrogating a suspect and having a grimace or the eyes moving to the left to help you guess when they're lying.

That's actually what I was hoping to do but it quickly became apparent that there wouldn't be enough time to think anything out so thoroughly.

Congrats to the king of the OROW!  What is that, four wins now? 

Yeah, such a drag.

Also the detective was an idiot, I'm sorry but there were things even the kidnapper noticed and actually I found him to be more compassionate and realistic character - the detective was calling victims by numbers while the kidnapper tells him they have names, I think the situation would be almost reversed. Also the cop seems not to be trained in any interrogation skills whatsoever...really found it off putting. Detective reminded me of Stabler (C. Meloni) from Law n order SVU, but if he was acting like that in the series, I can assure you they wouldn't solve any cases.

Haha, yes. I'm way too slow a writer to do something like this in two days. A second draft would've probably benefited the game a lot. But dehumanizing the detective was actually something I was doing deliberately. It's just a shame the point of it all, if there ever was any, got lost in the hurry.


Anyway, the proper release version is finally finished: Check it out! (There's also a link to the making of video.)

[By the Numbers]

A short game made for the sixth One Room One Week competition:

By the Numbers

The investigation of a wave of kidnappings is going nowhere. One day someone claiming to be an eyewitness to one of the kidnappings approaches the local police department. It's time to find out what he knows...


Download from the Games Database page or directly or Mediafire.com


Features:
- Full voice acting with motion-captured performances drawn with beautiful vector graphics!
- That's pretty much it!


Screenshots:





Changes from entry version
- Modified Act 2 dialog options to make them clearer and
  also changed the occurrence points of the short exchanges,
  making the last one occur only when all the dialog options
  have been exhausted.
- Added blinking and slight eye movement
- New music, changed song placements slightly
- Credits sequence
- Option to turn off subtitles
- Option to skip act one


Download from the Games Database page or directly or Mediafire.com


Making of:
A short making of video for the game can be downloaded here (XviD encoded AVI, 16 min, 35 MB).
MIRROR: Mediafire.com



Any and all comments are much appreciated! Especially ones such as: "You suck!"


-- EDIT --
Due to my website exceeding the monthly transfer limit, I've changed all the links and added some mirrors!

[By the Numbers]

Thanks for the comments!

Great game for a couple of days work!

Around nine hours, to be exact.

Right, I think you mentioned that before. Well, my inability to remember things has never been in question.

By the Numbers
AMAZING! Incredible. I must know how you did the vector/face animation.

There's going to be a brief look at the workflow in the making of video that'll explain it a bit.

Some suggestions: I wish that crucial story moments would have been made by the player, such as the moment when you decide that the interogee is a faker. This would have placed more emphasis on the uncertainty of the interrogation, making the player more inquisitive if he or she is really correct about the killer's true identity or not. Maybe?

A very good point, yes. Writing the script was a bitch, especially trying to make it interactive somehow. Clearly I still have lots to learn.

Happy to hear that, RedTalon!

Bug report: It's possible to move a dialog option above or below the "Start" node, which results in an error. Avoid doing that. I'll get it fixed when I can... unless I forget.

[Spoiler warning?]

Congrats to AJA!! (Expected that this game would win, and the Finnish voice acting kind of made it obvious!)

Thanks! I'm glad everyone's still alive after listening through that.

This is actually my first OROW entry that I think wasn't quite finished. So, a proper release version will be out soon with some small additions. And it's also looking highly likely that there'll be a short making of video, too. Just a little something that shows how the game progressed through the week. Plus MadReizka's bloopers, yay!

Thanks to everyone for voting! I'm getting tired of winning this thing.

And thanks to Bulbapuck for hosting! I hope this is the last time I have to say this: I hope the next one's in less than two years.


Now, comments on the games, like I promised earlier. (I wish I'd written these back when I played them.) (Spoiler warning?)

A Woman For All Seasons
Excellent graphics and a brilliant concept! Nice sound effects and music also. I just wish there were more (and more complicated) spells to perform. A couple of them I got on the first go. The story was lovely and well written, and the rat was hilarious. The ending could have been a bit more dramatic and spectacular but you can't get everything in a game made in one week. Sorry, the better a game is the more I need to go on about its very minor shortcomings. This was definitely my favorite of the whole bunch! Well done!

Boiler Room Blues
Clearly by Ishmael. Loved the graphical style, and explosions are always fun, especially the one in this one. One bug I noticed was that you could turn off the valve without first getting to the other side of the water spray. Great game for a couple of days work!

By the Numbers
This one I had some serious trouble with. Note to self: never try writing something like this again in two days. I tried to hide the clues to the correct address in lots of unnecessary information, which clearly worked based on the comments in this thread. Maybe a bit too well since none of the proposed solutions posted here are correct.

The correct address can be any of the three, it's randomized. There's like four or five clues that SHOULD lead you to the correct answer, a couple of which depend on the randomization. The clues are not quite as clear as I'd hoped, they sort of point you in the right direction but... unfortunately that I can't fix in the proper release for obvious reasons. :-/ But at least there'll be an option to skip directly to the second part of the game if anybody wants to try and figure it out.

Oh, one more thing... This one won best graphics? Really? Yay for the computer doing all the hard work.

Delerium
Nice graphics and moody music! The objects were a bit easy to find since they didn't move in sync with the background. I'm not familiar with the panorama module so I can't really tell who to "blame". Nice little game, nevertheless.

Disquiet
Great graphics, sound and music create an excellently haunting and disturbing mood! Definitely one of my favorites. The story worked nicely. Very depressing stuff. Great work!

Don't Worry Baby
LOL. That was seriously the first and only thing on my mind while I played the game. Excellent choice for the title too since it came alphabetically right after the depressing Disquiet. It was a really fun game, trying out each of the ways to get the baby killed. Does that make me a bad person? Nah.

Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee
Well, there's not much to say about this one. The graphics looked really spiffy. I hope this one gets finished eventually!

One Room
My brain hurts. A really interesting idea for a game and well executed, too. The last part of the game was a bit confusing, maybe I missed something or it was because of the bug mentioned here. Very nice take on the one room concept in any case! The word puzzle took some time figuring out, even though in retrospective the solution is so obvious.

Well, Well, Well, What Have We Here?
Lovely graphics and interesting puzzles. I'm really looking forward to playing the finished/fixed version. The first time I played this I actually went straight to the well after the first clue and clicked on the white stone - game over. A bit unfortunate but on the next try I knew not to do that yet.


Thanks to the participants for making all these lovely and very varied games! I had a lot of fun playing all of them. That's the true reward for taking part in this thing.


Wow, that's a lot of smileys. Well, back to writing about 30 pages worth of screenplay formatted crap for our new web series project...

Mirrored: www.serpentpictures.net/OROW VI.rar

Played and voted. Some great games this time as well! Comments later once the voting ends, which is... when?

Just for the record, I really prefer the previous voting method of "rate every game 1-5 in each category." I wasted a whole sheet of paper rating them, argh!

Done and done. What a relief. Can't write more. Than three words. Per sentence today. Gotta get sleep. Looking forward to. Playing other entries. Shutting up now.

That's a shame.

Due to not having a life (or a job), I think I'll be able to make the deadline after all. Sleep deprivation is the way to go! I'm guessing there's still about 8-10 hours worth of nonstop work to be done before its finished. I may have to cut out some of the polish. The Polish have to go too.

Damn thunder... I guess it's time to stop for today.

Having serious doubts about getting this thing finished in time... Tomorrow's going to be a pain. If I can survive tomorrow's tasks, it should get a lot more straightforward. I still don't even know what exactly is going to happen in this game. But that's the way I like it. I may or may not be lying.

I wish I had someone who'd write this crap for me... Also helpful: someone who'd write the game for me.

Back to work, I guess. Or sleep. Or not sleep because I can't stop thinking about the story.

Ah, finally. As it turns out, the timing could be a lot better but that just means everything else has to come second.

Good luck everyone! Let's hope we'll get as many fantastic entries as usually!

I'd better go get some sleep before the hair pulling begins...

Rules from the third OROW:

Here are the rules:
-  You must make an AGS game within the next week.
-  You should work alone, but may find one person to help you if you need to.

(http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24676.msg307107#msg307107)

So getting someone to help with the graphics or music or whatever you yourself suck at has been allowed in the previous competitions. I can't remember if the rules were different last time since curiously no teams entered. It might also explain why I tried to compose music for my game. (Thankfully, no one has died from it thus far.)

How immersion-breaking would it be to have some kind of highlight for story-critical dialog options so players would know what they can skip?

I think the Mass Effect games did this quite nicely by having the important options on the "top level" of the dialog and any extra chatter under an option called "Investigate". If the player just wants to keep the story going, he doesn't have the temptation of seeing what the extra topics are about, so it's much easier to dismiss them. And it shouldn't get in the way of players who are interested in background information.

[Download v1.1.2!]

It's been almost exactly four months since the last update, and after a long hiatus I started working on a game project and discovered a bug, which is now fixed. I've been waiting for an excuse to bump this thread.

Here's the new version: Download v1.1.2!

Changes:
- Fixed crash when the same variable was used multiple times in a condition.

-Edit-

Another one! Download v1.1.3!

Changes:
- Fixed isOff being exported to "equals eOptionOff" instead of "not eOptionOn".

Late July sounds good to me too. What is it with this two year gap that seems to have become the standard? We should change the name to OROWETY (...Every Two Years) or how about BOROW (Biennial One Room One Week).

Hopefully the next OROW will be before 2010

[Module header:]

This should work...


Module header:

Code: ags

#define PHRASE_DIR "phrasefiles"
import void setPhraseFile( String filename );
import String getPhrase( String phrase );

Module:

Code: ags

// new module script
String phraseFile;

// Trims whitespace
String Trim( this String* )
{
  int start = 0;
  while ( start < this.Length &&
        ( this.Chars[start] == eKeySpace || this.Chars[start] == eKeyTab ) )
    start++;
  
  int end = this.Length - 1;
  while ( end > start &&
        ( this.Chars[end] == eKeySpace || this.Chars[end] == eKeyTab ) )
    end--;
  
  return this.Substring( start, end - start + 1 );
}

void setPhraseFile( String filename )
{
  phraseFile = filename;
}

String getPhrase( String phrase )
{ 
  String filename = String.Format( "%s/%s", PHRASE_DIR, phraseFile );
  File* f = File.Open( filename, eFileRead );
  if ( f == null )
    AbortGame( "Could not open phrase file: %s!", phraseFile );
  
  // Read all the lines until we find the correct phrase
  while ( !f.EOF )
  {
    String line = f.ReadRawLineBack();
    
    // Skip empty lines and comments
    if ( !(line.Length == 0 || line.StartsWith( "#" )) )
    {
      // Split line
      int splitPoint = line.IndexOf( ":" );
      if ( phrase.CompareTo( line.Substring( 0,  splitPoint ) ) == 0 )
      {
        // Found!
        f.Close();
        line = line.Substring( splitPoint + 1,  line.Length - splitPoint - 1 );
        return line.Trim();
      }
    }
  }
  
  // Not found!
  f.Close();
  Display( "Phrase \"%s\" not found in file %s!", phrase, phraseFile );
  return "";
}

room1.txt in subdirectory "phrasefiles"

Code: ags

# Comment.. object phrases go here:
object1: This is a cup of coffee.
object2: This is a cup of tea.

# Something else goes here

Usage:

Code: ags

// Enters room:
setPhraseFile( "room1.txt" );

// Interaction:
cEgo.Say( getPhrase( "object1" ) );

edit:
Bug fixed.

Our game project (see picture below) uses a system that works something like this:

Every room has a separate text file for speech text, a sort of a very limited custom scripting language, formatted in separate blocks like this

Code: ags

# ACTION-TITLE
  roger: Your hair looks fabulous!
  larry: Thanks, I grew it myself.
  wait: 40
  walk: roger, 160, 100
}

Then upon entering a room a module sets the current read-file to the room's file and after that you can call readLines("ACTION-TITLE") which reads through the file and finds the piece of script with that title and parses and runs it line by line. And since every room has its own file, the files are shorter and thus faster to read through. It's not exactly what you're asking for but it's quite useful. We took this feature out of our game's demo and converted the scripts into AGS scripts to hide the content but hopefully we can upgrade the system somehow before the final release of the game and keep the content separated from AGS.

Wersay, what will you do if you create a game. Panel rate it as 2 cups and give you some notes for fixing. You create second part (story connected with the first) - and Panel rate it as 3 cups and give you more notes for fixing. You create third game (story connected with the previous parts) and fixed notes. The raiting give 2 cups, when everyone is saying that 3rd part is the best of the all three.

How about you just be happy that "everyone" except the panel reviewer thinks the 3rd part is the best? Sure, it sucks when some people don't appreciate your hard work as much as you'd like but it's far more important to me that at least someone likes it.

Yay, I finally got to participate in one of the sequels of this fantastically entertaining discussion! I'm going to give this one only two cups out of five since it's getting a bit repetitive.