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Application Systems have a couple of games on Steam: GhostControl Inc. and Splee & Glob which was Greenlit in the last round of approvals.
(And yes, mainly thanks to your insistence, Rachel is voicing Nelly!)

Thanks for your support. And thanks to Nikolas for trying to vote!

We've just uploaded a behind the scenes video of some of the voice actors (with credits including Broken Sword, Star Wars: Episode 1, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy & Doctor Who). Please check it out:
[embed=640,360]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=druPxr0gE4U&feature=youtu.be[/embed]

Thanks for the support! I also lied and voted for it. I'm going to get it for free! Take that, Steam!

Retro Wolf, I will do everything I can to help you remember your password. Was it any of the following:

• Passw0rd?
• Pa55word?
• retr0w0lf?

Thanks for the support!

It wasn't a nice decision to leave AGS, but we needed an engine with robust multi-platform and high resolution support. Even though AGS is on the brink of having those features implemented, since the programmers I'm working with have Unity experience, Unity seemed like the better choice.

[Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!]

Ahoy!

If any of you still remember Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!, you might be interested to know that I've just launched a Greenlight campaign for Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet.

I would very much appreciate your votes, tweets and shares:

Vote for Nelly on Steam Greenlight!


      

      

[embed=640,360]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_hZIgVLmU[/embed]

Earlier this year I teamed up with a German company called Application Systems, who are co-developing and publishing the game. Working with them has made it possible to offer the game for Mac, Windows & Linux, in English, German & French. It's also made it possible for me to bring the game up from good old 800x600 to 1920x1080.

A sad consequence of the collaboration is that the game's development is being continued in Unity rather than AGS. Nevertheless, if you can find it in your heart to support the game, you will have my eternal gratitude.

- Ali

I can't tell if you still disagree! Tripods definitely have little to no parallax, otherwise 360 degree POV adventure games wouldn't work!

If memory serves the parallax is backwards in the cable car office and in the chapel in the rocks. In the first of those, it's remotely plausible as a track-and-pan, but I find it weird and distracting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc-HeyFPtTk&feature=share&list=PLorRjmej6CBmWACW0NqPG171Ak3AYFHyB&index=3

Enjoying the game, but a couple of issues to report:

Spoiler

After escaping the prison and talking to the guy in the nearby cottage, the game hangs if I press Escape. A missing Endcutscene?

If I run the game in DX9 with 3x nearest neighbour filter, the game window appears unscaled on a black screen, and I can see Ord's sprite standing outside of the viewport during the Screen 7 logo.

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There's virtually no parallax with a stationary camera, except for extremely close objects depending on how the camera is mounted. And even if there were, it'd still be moving in the wrong direction.

The effect you're describing is tracking one way and panning the other, like tracking in a circle around a focal point. Which is a very odd camera move to choose when a pan or a track would have sufficed. And it's never going to look believable in 2D without more planes.

I've built a side project from scratch using it, with only a few editor-based glitches (which I've mentioned earlier in the thread). There are some performance issues, but I've experienced no stability problems.

I'm sure the designers evaluated the aero-dynamism of figs vs sausage dynamite. They wouldn't throw something like that in without thinking about it...

I'm not sure what you mean by thinking "about the riddle behind a puzzle". Parts of the tablula were absolutely brilliant:

Spoiler

House + Young + Sun = House of the Rising Sun = East.

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That's a proper challenging riddle, which was very satisfying to work out. But it's so frustrating that one of the glyphs was such an incomprehensible example of 'adventure game logic'.

[the parallax was backwards in several locations!]

And another thing I forgot - the parallax was backwards in several locations!

How can no one have noticed that distant objects were moving faster than nearby ones? In my book, that's less forgiveable than flogging a dead goat / electric cockroach.

Yes, those two puzzles particularly annoyed me too, but at least they were possible to solve because there was basically nothing else you could do.

Perhaps the reason I got so stuck on the code was that I forgot there was an in-game hint system in the gap between part 1 and 2. But I was really enjoying it right up until it turned out to be virtually impossible!

I've just finished Broken Sword 5 part 2. It almost lived up to the promise of part 1, but things started to go wrong for me when solving the Tabula code. I'm not looking for hints here, I just want to know if you made better sense of the puzzle than me. Perhaps I'm a mad fool:

Spoiler

I had solved the code apart from the second glyph in the second line, at which point I cheated using this walkthrough: http://www.gameboomers.com/wtcheats/pcBb/BS5/BS5.htm


Of course, in real life I had actually worked out what the glyph meant (I thought something like "Look at the Young City Region") I had also worked out these were directions to the garden of Eden, but I couldn't communicate any of that to George.

Having cheated, I know that the glyph translates as "South". My question is, how the hell is that a reasonable translation? Is it because Young Cities is the southernmost marking on Gehnen's map? Or because following the first line of clues, and then looking at the Young Cities would result in you facing South? If so, the glyph still wouldn't mean south.

Am I a semantic pedant, or is there a reasonable explanation I can't see?

(There are other points which make this puzzle extra confusing: When George examines the symbols marked 'a 'and 'b', he seems to mix up the letters and says 'a' must represent 'b' on the map. And Gehen says daylight will make his words fade, but we use lamplight instead. Come on!)

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Any help?

Thanks for my birthday wishes, and happy birthday to markbilly!

What the hell is wrong with adverbs? Why not try to write with no prepositions?

I feel inclined to design a Mervyn Peake app for people whose writing is too macho and concise.

But in the UK a torch is a flashlight! See also bickering torch.

A practical option is some kind of failure or change in the every day running of normal life, which the player has to put right. Putting things back as they should be introduces the player step-by-step to how the world of the game operates. Like powering up the ship at the start of Primordia.

But isn't the latter very cumbersome? The player has to move their hand a lot more if they're selecting icons from the corner, rather than tapping and flicking in the direction of an action.

If it's a tablet or phone, you have your other hand to press the verbs in the corner, not if you're on a computer bound to one mouse.

Ah but what if it's Windows 8? So the user could be using a mouse or a touch screen, then it could become very annoying for mouse users.

But isn't the latter very cumbersome? The player has to move their hand a lot more if they're selecting icons from the corner, rather than tapping and flicking in the direction of an action.

I used to love verb coins, but I've been persuaded of their many drawbacks by people in these esteemed forums. I've also gone back and played Nelly Cootalot and got confused and annoyed at my own interface. That said, we accept the idea of a context menu, so why not a streamlined, semi-transparent verb coin along the same lines? Perhaps one which appeared immediately above the place tapped?

All right, I admit that the worst interface of all time is either Normality or Return to Zork.


Incidentally: how do verb-coin-haters feel about a verb-coin/context menu in a tablet or other single-click environment?