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Without wanting to criticise that video, adventure games are fine. Look at Firewatch, or Life is Strange.

That remake has nice graphics, and is a decent proof-of-concept. But it's misconceived in my view. Pointing and clicking is fast - walking very slowly from place to place to read big chunks of (unvoiced) text is not so much fun - and even less fun to watch. Where is the interactivity? The first thing the player does kills them. If you haven't played Space Quest, this would be incomprehensible. I'm sure you can find dozens of boring FPS shooter and minecraft clone tech demos on YouTube.

Making games and finding an audience is hard, and can be unfair. But I also think very few people succeed by trying to do what is popular.

It just shows how easily people are misinformed and will believe anything that supports their own preconceived notions.

It does also reflect on the absurdity of the man, that ludicrous satire is only a few degrees apart from reality.

[Loremen]

I hope you don't mind a bit of shameless self promotion?

I recently started a podcast with another comedian, which I thought might appeal to other AGSers. It's called Loremen, and it's a funny podcast about "forgotten folklore and local legends". Basically, looking at weird stories that are very famous in one small place, and totally unheard of elsewhere. If you're interested, please give it a listen. There's a short teaser trailer, and we just uploaded the 3rd episode. As always, feedback is very welcome!

• Loremen: Series 1 Trailer
• Loremen Ep1: Parcy Reed & Poppa Bayliss
• Loremen Ep2: Tom, Dick and Harry & Blue Cap
• Loremen Ep3: Pelton Brag & Long Compton

     

• www.loremenpodcast.com
• Loremen on the iTunes

All the best - Alasdair.

I bought Anime Studio 11 when it was 50% off (which I think was the version before they renamed it Moho) and was really disappointed by how badly designed it was. I used it to do the simple character animation for this Kickstarter, and I probably wouldn't use it again, unless the task were very specific: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adventurex/adventurex-2016-the-narrative-games-convention

Importing from svg or ai files was totally messed up. All the colours change, and because the software can't do weighted bezier curves, the actual nodes shift around to an approximation of what you drew. But not actually what you drew. This is particularly annoying when you've created nodes that are going to be a joint, and those nodes disappear. There is also no integrated lipsynch, and the freeware app they've created doesn't consider "Thh" to be a phoneme.

Most infuriatingly, when I raised these issues on forums, the responses were all in defence of the software. "Oh, you just have to do all your drawing in Anime Studio from scratch." No! Its drawing tools are terrible and it claims to have .ai import. It should work!

Perhaps they've fixed these quite basic issues for version 12.

OpenToonz has some serious stability issues for me, but I'm very impressed with other aspects of it. And I've found english docs for everything I've needed to look up. The lack of an English user-base is a bigger issue.

Soma and Amnesia are both very scary survival horrors, on the first-person adventure end of the spectrum. Amnesia is more classic horror, but Soma is has better writing and characterisation.

Perhaps I've misunderstood, but I think setting "AdjustSpeedWithScaling" to true would have the desired effect.
(Though agree that the character is probably moving too slowly at 100%)

The trick of making seemingly different options lead to the same outcome (which I suspect most adventure games use in dialogue at least) is the only one I can think of that really qualifies as a trick - something the player remains unaware of. As Snarky said, a lot of the suggestions in this thread are good design tips, but not exactly tricks.

I guess the difficulty of identifying these kind of tricks in adventure games is due to the fact that adventure games are comparatively un-interactive. They don't have enemies, health bars, stats, timing or physics based challenges. There's less room for the game to secretly cheat, because a lot of the 'game' of an adventure game happens in the player's imagination.

The Iraq war was a pretty big deal, and fewer than 5,000 American soldiers died. Fewer than 200 British soldiers died, and over here it is widely viewed as having been a disaster. So in a more advanced world in which (we hope) war is less common, 80,000 deaths is enough. Surely?

I do think that the Klingon prosthetic are a problem, although I like the design. They should have ADRed all the Klingon dialogue. They seem to have solved the Buffy vampire teeth lisp, but nasal sounds come out weird. I love the idea of the Klingons speaking Klingon, but L'Rell seems to be the only one who gets near to it sounding natural. Most deliver dialogue as a series of meaningless barks.

Wow, I completely missed it

Too bad, there was no reminder here. Were the talks recorded?

Sorry you missed the livestream! Technical problems (that weren't our fault) meant that Dave Gilbert's opening talk wasn't streamed. But it was recorded by Adventure-Treff and should appear on their YouTube channel. All the other talks were recorded, with (hopefully) improved audio equipment. They're available on twitch for a while, and we'll clean up the picture and sound and put them on the AdventureX YouTube channel over the next weeks.

For anyone who missed the drama on the Saturday morning: even though we had tested it minutes earlier, the lectern in the auditorium stopped working just before the first talk. So we had to move the entire conference from the 120 seater into the larger auditorium next door, running 30 minutes behind schedule. This is something we didn't want to do, because we'd rather have a 120 seater absolutely packed out (with lots of people left outside playing games) than a 250+ seater looking half-full (with fewer people left to play games). None of this was ideal, but we had no alternative. I hope it didn't impact too negatively upon the exhibitors' experience. The room change is also why the videos from Saturday have piles of tables and whiteboards everywhere -  we weren't expecting anyone to see them!

In spite of this, I felt that the talks were some of the most inspiring and thought provoking we've had. The feedback I've heard has been very positive.

I liked it, and I'm glad you enjoyed my performance as a small girl.

I did feel like the dramatic tension was sort of spent by the final episode, though. It sort of felt like a neat wrapping up of threads, rather than the resolution of a perilous situation.

I'm with Radiant that the rock needs to be a flint for the puzzle to be fair. For me, it would depend on how naturalistic the artwork and tone are. In a cartoonish adventure - definitely, no problem. In anything more realistic than Broken Sword, it would be a stretch.

I tried the Expanse. Does it get better after the pilot? It seemed overly Canadian to me, like there's this vein of cheap sci-fi shot in Canada -- Travelers, Continuum, etc. -- that are built on a budget (few effects shots, mostly bottle episodes). It seemed very reminiscent of that, so much so that I switched it off about three quarters of the way through the pilot. Also, regarding Discovery's dialogue, I haven't had a problem with that, but if you're saying the Expanse does it better, I can't agree. The dialogue I witnessed seemed laboured and packed with clichés.

If you found the pilot a little dry and meandering, then I'd suggest you press on. However, if you just didn't like it, you made the right call.

Apart from Miller's trilby hat, I didn't find it to be heavy with cliché. As a series it's full of obvious choices that almost no sci-fi shows actually deal with. Gravity only works when you're moving. Moving really fast hurts. Forcefields don't exist - missiles punch holes in space ships and all the air gets sucked out. Belters talk like Afrikaner South Londoners.

Also, the Expanse's characters are given interesting things to do while they deliver expositional dialogue. They're at work, or in conflict. By contrast, the first two episodes of Discovery are heavy with characters standing across desks or in front of screens explaining things that they already know to each other. It's not as bad as the first episodes of Babylon 5... but not many things are.

But over all, hooray for sci-fi on TV!

I'm moderately enjoying Discovery, though I'd prefer if it had fewer lens flares and more ethical quandaries. The Expanse, on the other hand, is so good. Almost every dialogue scene in Discovery could use Chrisjen Avasarala saying "Get to the f****** point."

I'm not assuming he's done the thing he'll be impeached for YET.

Pence may be more predictably grim, but he's lacking entirely in charisma and media savvy. Trump's election was one in which symbolism outweighed facts. In terms of symbolism, if Trump doesn't face a Nixonian comeuppance, it will be a real tragedy.

You can't simply pluck a democratically elected leader away because you don't like them.

Unless you're the CIA...

That worked! That was so quick, thank you!

Hello!

I'm not able to load an old project in AGS 3.4.0 P4. I made the game back in 2014 using the "Custom Resolution" version of the editor Crimson Wizard was working on. It was the basis for a live comedy show which I'm doing again on Thursday. I naively hoped to update it: but I get this message.

---------------------------

Input string was not in a correct format.

If you cannot resolve the error, please post on the AGS Technical Forum for assistance.

Error details: System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.

   at System.Number.StringToNumber(String str, NumberStyles options, NumberBuffer& number, NumberFormatInfo info, Boolean parseDecimal)

   at System.Number.ParseInt32(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info)

   at System.Version..ctor(String version)

   at AGS.Types.Game.SetScriptAPIForOldProject()

   at AGS.Editor.Tasks.SetDefaultValuesForNewFeatures(Game game)

   at AGS.Editor.Tasks.LoadGameFromDisk(String gameToLoad, Boolean interactive)

   at AGS.Editor.InteractiveTasks.LoadGameFromDisk(String gameToLoad)

This is the version info from Game.agf: <AGSEditorDocument Version="3.0.3.2" VersionIndex="7" EditorVersion="3.3.0 CR">

Is there anything I can do to manually edit the Game.agf file to make it palatable to 3.4?

I don't know why people get upset at protagonists talking aloud to themselves or the player - it was good enough for Shakespeare. For a naturalistic game, an internal monologue is a much better idea. But I can't see why you'd be irritated by a Guybrush Threepwood soliloquy.

For me in sci-fi/fantasy, it's the use of idioms, words and phrases that don't make sense in the story world. I've been complaining about an orc saying the word "menu" for years, then recently someone made a meme about it and went viral. And I sulked.