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This has bugged me couple of days now.
If I had bucket of room temperature water (10 liters), would it be possible to cool an object (like a rock) so cold that it would freeze all the water in the bucket. Let's say the bucket would be 20 liters so no water would escape even if the object would displace 10 liters. So how cold the object would have to be? How big would it have to be? What material would it have to be?

I usually think about situations at the "limit" to solve this kind of problems. So let's cool a bucket of water till about (just a bit more than) 0° C. Then it's quite obvious that putting an object with an adequately lower temperature will suffice to freeze the water. Exact temp and mass of the object I don't know, but it's surely possible, under certain conditions, as long as you don't put restrictions on the mass and temperature of the object. Real life restrictions could probably involve the lower temperature easily achievable. I believe you can use liquid nitrogen to reach really low temps.

P.S. Objects actually happen to freeze water even as we speak: never noticed how the ice is usually found over car's windows, even when puddles aren't frozen?

CAPAREZZA: the artist's name is like... curly-head... if you see a photo, you'll understand
TORNA CATALESSI: Catalepsy come back. But in Italian, "catalessi" becomes a joke, since "Torna a casa Lassie" (translating literally "Lassie come home") was the Italian title of the famous TV serial with the collie as the protagonist.

I don't find right the turmoil, but when I get a place I don't swallow, I taste,
I don't put her in bed with the bust and I don't whip her, I stare neither the abyss (which is the translation of Abisso, my nickname, LOL) like Cousteau does, nor the space like Houston, I don't do my best for the farm of luxury and immoderation, where low blows are allowed, stress and such are permitted, stop, come back catalepsy! Come back! Come back catalepsy, make fools of them all, come back catalepsy, back! back! back! Fill this barren life, untie the chain and come back! back! back!

I decided to translate "torna catalessi" with "catalepsy come back" but keep in mind the double meaning I explained earlier.

Since this post was quite old I decided not to do the whole the translation. But since I like this artist too, I thought it was worthy to be dug up. Maybe someone else will find it useful and ask me to go one.

But I'm ready for the whip, just in case.

The sky is fixed now, but I'd go with something like what cpage tried (adding mountains or hills, and the sun). I don't think the bg is too dark now, it looks ok to me.
Anyway, the things that I dislike most, ore the dark outlines. They're a bit messy, sometimes are there and sometimes not: the best example is the tree which has this trembling border along the trunk, and some evident outlines just near the start of the branch, and on the knot. In the trail the line is also trembling and sometimes not continuous.

Apart from that, a quite fine background.

I think the second one is the best, and I like it very much (I love that sketchy feeling, produced by the more evident outlines). But I also agree that your character fits better in the first one. So I suppose you should go with the first one.

And, since you drawn so much things in the background, I hope you considered which of those will be animated. It's usually better to insert modifiable things as objects for animation purposes, but you probably know that already.

Anyway, I once more have to congratulate for your art.

Yeah, I do agree with InCreator. The colors and shadings are better in Brad Newson's paint-over, but I like the personality of the original character more than the other one's. The first looks a good guy, the kind of big man that doesn't use his size to be overbearing, a great beer drinker, and a centaur maybe.

The other one loses the "good guy" appearance as he lacks his eyes.

They look a bit like LEGO characters, especially Robin. This is not bad though, the style is simple but effective, and since you use the same model template for every character, you can save a lot of time but also make all of them look very different.

I'd suggest a tiled floor, too, but a rocky ceiling also (of a colour similar to the bricks). Other than that it looks great, exactly the style I'd need for a project of mine.

I'm using Firefox 3.0.10 and everything seems fine...

By the way, cpage, your Nazi guard is ready to strike now (or, more likely, cry for his mommy). Hope to see him in a game.

It actually helps a lot... it could be better even if you'd straighten the part under his belt: did a quick paintover, just moved his left feet to the left, adjusted his belt and the uniform below the belt. You probably can do a lot better than this... sorry but I suck at drawing. I'm just trying to help.

Well, I didn't mean to say you used explicitly a mirror function on your painting program, but just that the legs are almost identical (but mirrored). Try to make one of them a little bit in the foreground and the other one a little bit in the background.

P.S. I want my free copy of the game for having guessed it was based upon Gabriel Knight! But I suppose the game will be freeware, so I just hope you can get it done sooner or later.

Well, if you've drawn it (or transformed it, on the way) anime-style on purpose, it's ok then. It fits that style pretty well without being too exaggerated, like characters of classic console RPGs.

Playing the game right now on my Kubuntu 9.04 OS (just happy for it's the first windows game I play on a Linux system). What I can say so far is that the puzzles seem quite logical for me, except the ones about clicking on yourself (but I always try interactions with the main char, so it's not been hard for me to solve those).
The dialogue system seemed a bit strange and unnatural at first, but in some minutes you get used to it.

Graphics are fair enough, and soundtrack is fabulous (I'm mad for jazz, as you can see on my signature, at the end of this post). It fits the atmosphere of the night and the woods, but doesn't fit the char personality, and so it's a bit out of place (sadly). Animations are pretty good too.

The humour is there, together with some fantasy clichés, but told in such a way that they look new and some are very funny too (the elves hatred, the smell underground feature, etc.).

But, as someone else noted before, you absolutely have to change the dialogue colour (the red one) for it's very, very difficult and painful to read. And maybe changing the font would help too. Maybe you're a bit colourblind? Don't take it as an offence, I just thought of it cause of this recent thread started by Abs:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=38155.0

Yeah, that, and the verbcoin which is too small. Just let the secondary mouse button pop it up immediately, if you take my advice. You could just then set the inventory to trigger by going on the border of the screen with the mouse cursor.

I'll tell you more as I go on with the game, but I can already say I'm definitely going to play it when you'll release it.

He looks to me, a little like Full Throttle's main char, and a little like Gabriel Knight. Not at all bad for a first go, though.

For the legs... you should avoid mirroring, as it makes the char look less realistic: try to make the two legs different (one from the other), and give him a different stance, more relaxed. Same thing can be done qith the arms, and the position of the head. Try to give a shape to the trousers too, and use some more shadowing to bring life to the man.

The jacket is quite cool though. 

Take a look at your avatar... doesn't the face look better there? I think so, and suppose that is due to the fact that he seems to have a plump face in the other frame (the one with the body too). I don't know, maybe he's meant to be child-like and a bit fat, but I'd try to work on the face, maybe thinning his face, using eyebrows, and trying to give him an expression.

Edit: Sorry, I re-read the first post, and since the char is meant to be you, don't get offended from what I told about it. It wasn't my intention to be impolite.

I don't understand if he's meant, like... to be resting his back on a wall: otherwise I couldn't understand the position of his feet.

Apart from that, I think it's light years from what I'll ever be able to draw. Excellent job.

I strongly recommend the use of a GUI with buttons. You know, you can also change the image of the button (so that you can leave it blank until the memory has been gained and then change it, or, using variables, you can make more complicate things). I like the idea of knowing how much memories can be gained in total, and for this purpose, having them appear on a squared GUI seems nice and fit. Obviously the easiest solution is the inventory, a little more difficult if you use another character's one, but it's not clean, if you know what I mean.
An inventory is for items, everything else (spells, powers, memories, feelings) should be elsewhere.

I think a great game needs a great main character. And it has to be designed in a way that you must slowly become more and more empathically connected to him/her/it. So the two of you grow together as the story goes on.

I personally hate when you have to do something (worse even if it's something that doesn't look important) to trigger an event. Like in Gabriel Knight, where you have to deal with time-blocks: a day passes only if you did everything the game requires, but sometimes you'd rather just wait, and you can't. For example, if you give some ancient text to a professor, who says will give you the translation tomorrow, I want to be able to choose if I'm gonna wait or if I'm gonna do something meanwhile.

Well, let's just say that I don't like time-blocks.

I liked how Dave Gilbert got around this problem with Emerald City Confidential. One could say those little gems at the bottom of the screen listing every goals you had to achieve were only there for casual players, but at least it told you up-front what you had to do before the next time block. I wish Gabriel Knight had such thing.

Mmmh, never played that game... but, yeah, it seems that knowing what to do could fix the problem, for sure.

Time-blocks are great (if they're properly announced by the game of course). I loved watching the game world change in Gabriel Knight and Discworld

The world can change without the need for time-blocks (and actually the real world changes THIS way): in The Colonel's Bequest, at least, the time passed by without the need to do something specific (changing by half an hour a time).... I know this can be frustrating, but at least you don't have to wander helplessly until "you find you actually didn't ask that person about that '1 on a thousand topics possible'!".

It seems that we're all going off-topic now... but I'm glad my little problem served to put the finger on something that can be made better...

Ok... if I'm not mistaken, there was an AGSer who had this idea and tried to put every game ever made on a server he had... well, he was brutally killed for doing so!  Ok, apart from the last sentence, this is true. I don't know if that archive is still out there and where, and I don't remember who this user was... but I remember I found a lot of games whose link was broken there. I'll make a quick search on the boards to see if I find something.

Anyway, not just due to the new graphic possibilities granted by AGS, but also to the increasing number of full-length games I suppose it would be a really huge archive! Don't know if someone is willing to keep it.

But I would be glad if this was the case.

[Shouting Inside]

It's my first time in this competition so I really don't know if some rules prevents me to do so, but I translated a poem I wrote (Italian->English). Obviously, I couldn't transpose everything properly, but since I don't use rhymes, I at least avoided that matter.

This is basically how I feel most of the time...


Shouting Inside

I leave my window ajar
making room for the Moon
that, demure, peeps
in the empty hall

Like a bat I move around
blind, between these four walls,
throwing silent screams
no-one else can hear.

And I grasp feebly
to the branches of my existence
of an overturned world
incomprehensible and obscure.

Every cry is deaf and vain
does not reach any of you
and the piercing roar serves,
merely,
               to tear me inside.