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[The Last of Sheila]

It has also been pointed out that Glass Onion owes a lot to Stephen Sondheim's (and Anthony Perkins') The Last of Sheila (1973), which explains his cameo. I haven't seen that, but now I want to.

The Last of Sheila is good, well worth tracking down, but very hard to find. It's playful, but quite a bit darker than Glass Onion - but I can't do content warnings without spoilers. Apparently, it was inspired by the Murder Mystery evenings Sondheim and Anthony Perkins used to throw in Hollywood.

I also don't think Glass Onion is a Dan Brown spoof. I suspect Dan Brown is just borrowing from the same sources. I think the Mona Lisa is there because it's a philistine's idea of a cool painting.

I'm sorry I didn't post about it here! I can only recommend joining the mailing list, because I'm not going to be as involved in future, and I think the other organisers are not so active on here. The #AdvX22 hashtag on twitter has quite a few nice pictures.

I love Wilkie Collins, and I think he's more satirical than he might look with modern eyes. He certainly scandalised people in his lifetime. Most of his plots would unravel if a female character just told someone trustworthy about the nightmarish scheme she was caught in. But that's the point, I think, that women in particular were trapped by Victorian sensibilities - that social codes could be weapons in the hands of (admittedly, sometimes foreign) villains.

I didn't think his kind of sensational story would work in the modern era, but the first series of The Sinner (a whydunnit) manages to come very close. Perhaps the real story of Britney Spears's conservatorship is the kind of thing Collins would have written about.

I watched Rebecca. It has a nice style - Hitchcock - but it's not a detective story. The protagonist is a bit too one-sided imo.

No, certainly not a fair play detective story. It's a Gothic mystery like My Cousin Rachel or Uncle Silas. The BBC has adapted The Moonstone about three times, and I've never seen any of them (though I've heard the one from the 70s is a classic). And that's a great story and an interesting case, because it's sort of a proto-detective novel. Apart from August Dupin, I think Sergeant Cuff is one of the first proper detectives in literature.

I enjoyed that version of An Inspector Calls, and somehow I didn't know the ending. It's the quintessential set text in the UK, so it's one of those classics that everyone is a bit sick of. I probably should have read it in school...

I'm a huge fan of murder mysteries, and there are never enough good ones. Somehow, I didn't realise that the TV series Foyle's War is a classic whodunnit written by Anthony Horowitz (who wrote Midsomer Murders when it was half decent). If you can forgive it being an ode to broadminded English small-c conservatism, it has some terrific episodes. (At least until they stop shooting on film and switch to digital and I start sulking.)

In terms of classic films, have Les Diaboliques and Rebecca come up yet? For Agatha Christie fans - Agatha and the Truth of Murder on Netflix is both a straightforward whodunnit and a witty parody of the conventions.

I'm afraid I don't have that info yet, but seemingly I misunderstood the problem. Everything including the audio seems to be slowing down. I didn't realise quite how out of date 3.41 is - sorry!

I've just managed to hear back from the player with the problem. Sadly, it's not the software renderer, they're using Direct 3D. I've never experienced a slow-down like this with AGS, so I just don't know what to advise.

Sorry for the slow reply - I had to check with the programmer who compiled it, and there were delays! It was built with AGS version 3.4.1.14.

Hello!

Sorry to drop in with such a broad question, but I've searched the forums and can't find any reports of a similar issue. Someone playing Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! is having a problem with the audio slowing down, but only when they play in full screen. I've never experienced anything like that with AGS and I was wondering if it rings a bell for anyone? Here's their report, for reference:

Audio bug?
I haven't seen this reported anywhere, but I'm experiencing an issue with the audio: after a couple minutes I play, it becomes distorted and slowed down. It makes it impossible to play the game (except muted). Is there a fix? I'm playing full screen with headphones btw.

EDIT: Apparently, the bug only happens in full screen. If I play windowed, the audio is fine. It's unfortunate, though, I was hoping I could play full screen, being a HD version and all.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts!

Thanks,

Al

Broken Sword 5 used dynamic rim-lighting that looked really good, I think. And they seem to be 'faking' it in a cool-looking way for The Drifter: https://twitter.com/DuzzOnDrums/status/1473532545190924288

I think Guybrush on the Special Edition of Secret of Monkey Island was a 3D model that was rendered in 2D. It certainly looks like it to me. I'm not sure about the other characters, but he looked like it to me. Either way, he looked horrible in that game. 

We agree on the last part, but I think it's all 2D.

For animation. Yes, traditional cel by cel animation would have been far too expensive. Digitally, a frame by frame animation would certainly have been possible.

Just to be clear, when I said cel animation, I didn't mean literally scanning painted cels. I doubt any adventure games did that. (Maybe Dragon's Lair did?) But really, I can't emphasise enough how big a difference there is between high-quality frame-by-frame animation and (much, much faster) skeletal / pixelart animation.

It's rare because it's difficult and expensive, not because game devs or animators are lazy.

To keep this on topic: I hope the recent disappearance of Ron Gilbert's website isn't a bad omen. While I'm not won over by the new art, I hardly think it warrants a backlash.

The reason i wrote "3D Graphics" is because the figures are clearly not done in a 2D based program like drawn frame by frame in Photoshop, or such. It's been rigged in a 3d program 100%.

I don't want to disrupt the thread with pedantry, but like Babar says, skeleton-based 2D animation is still 2D animation. Almost every modern 2D game is made up of 2D sprites in 3D space. Just not the ones made in AGS...

I do want to emphasise HOW expensive traditional cel animation is. Apart from Broken Sword, I can't think of a 90s adventure game with that quality of animation where the developers got to make a second game in the same style. Curse of Monkey Island, Discworld II, Toonstruck... I can't help but wonder if the mega-budget 2D adventure game was ever really financially viable.

The team behind Gibbous managed traditional 2D, and Daedelic seemed to have found a half way house between skeleton-based and cel animation. In the case of Gibbous, the fact that 2 of the devs are also the animators, and they're based in Romania is a significant factor.

Back to uninspired "3D graphics" done by an Evil Tron Machine 3000 AI, i guess  .

Am I confused? The new graphics aren't 3D? They're distinctly 2D, with their flattened perspective. As I said, they haven't won my heart, but I prefer them to the Special Edition backgrounds because they aren't fuzzy and rushed.

We can keep begging for Curse of Monkey Island style graphics, but surely we have to accept that (by and large) it's just too expensive for the indie-sphere.

Ah, fair enough. I see the point that the article is making about VNs, that the average VN has a better chance than the average game in a more top-heavy genre. I was thinking about this one:
https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Game-Genre-Median-Earnings-vs-Number-Released-since-2019-2.png

Doesn't this graph show that visual novels and games with sexual content are relatively unpopular with gamers? Inasmuch as they make as much as Soulslike games, but loads more of them are released? Are some of the comments above mistaking the blue bar for earnings?

Hey, does anyone knows what software people use to make these smooth animations like in this trailer? I am curious if there's something that is kinda engine agnostic... Just for research purposes at the moment.

There's a range of skeleton-based animation software. Spine and the open source Dragonbones both plug into Unity (or similar). For pre-rendered skeleton animation, there's Moho, Adobe Animator, probably Toonboom and (increasingly) Blender. You might well be able to export 2D animations from Blender to your game engine of choice, I just don't know.

I'm a little frustrated by the RMI screenshots, the scenes are full of nice details but the overall effect is very... unrelaxing. It does feel pretty faithful to MI1... but I never particularly cared for the Melee Island art. That said, having seen some of the art director's other work, they are obviously talented. So I'll wait to see how it works in-game. I don't want to be a doomsayer or a fanboy.

Adventure games are, mostly, not made up of structurally discrete rooms. Games like Machinarium might be an exception, where many rooms are standalone puzzles. It doesn't take nearly that long for an experienced artist to draw a 2D background, and setting up a room in AGS or Unity (using Adventure Creator or PowerQuest) is fairly straightforward. I'm assuming you're not creating your own engine from scratch! Along with planning the puzzles and story, this is the relatively fun part.

Actually making the game is the slow bit. It's also much less satisfying because small, incremental improvements that happen later in development seem to require loads more effort than the early stages do. Animation, whether 2D or 3D, is much, much slower than drawing static backgrounds. Writing takes a very long time. Scripting takes a long time, and re-writing and re-scripting based on playtesting takes a long time. Voice acting is expensive, and no matter how good the performances are, editing can be the most tedious part of the whole process.

If you want to get an idea of how long it takes, you could look at the time between a successfully funded Kickstarter and the release of the game. You should also make a judgement about the level of experience of the people involved, and whether the Kickstarter actually raised enough money to pay the team for the time it took them to finish the game, or whether we can infer that they had funding from elsewhere.

I think the golden age - in terms of variety and invention - is now! But there's no mistaking the fact that the we'll never see late 90s budgets again. For me, there was a real dearth of good adventures from 2000-2009, until companies like Amanita, Wadjet Eye and Telltale sparked a renaissance. To keep this on topic - how wonderful that AGS played a role in that and (ironically) helped adventure games get out of the nostalgia phase. (Something that I, having made 2 pirate adventure games, didn't contribute towards AT ALL!)

If only I'd discovered it when I was at school, I could have wasted even more years of my life!

I joined in 2003, assuming that AGS was a reaction to the decline of adventure games. How interesting that CJ actually started it in 1997 - probably the peak of the high-budget adventure game, and the beginning of the end (when publishers realised that spending five million dollars on adventure games wasn't going to pay).

I'd look at the backgrounds from Curse of Monkey Island. Guybrush does scale, but it looks a bit crummy, so they've carefully laid out the rooms so that he's at full sized as much as possible.