Messages

It's all looking good. The character designs look especially professional.

The background is a good start, however all the barrels actually bother me a bit. Unless this is a barrel manufacturer's house, you could probably do with perhaps only a couple, or at least vary their design a bit. It's never good to have the same shape/pattern recur all over the picture. Especially the pyramid on the left hand side is distracting - in fact, the very act of piling barrels like that seems rather risky.

The mat is not drawn properly - there's a second view point far out on the left side that you need to keep in mind.

I look forward to the coloured version!

It's not at all my cup of tea, but some parts are quite good, I think. I'm getting some Prodigy vibes, which I guess is intentional?

The video could use more cuts. It's a tedious job, but you should add more footage and cut between scenes with the beats of the music.

The verse of the song is quite decent, and the part building up to the chorus, but I'm not sure about the chorus itself (where you "shout"). I think you simply don't shout enough - you look like you're shouting, and the music leads you to believe there's a crescendo coming, but the vocals don't really convey the expected intensity.

I would also some variation to the drums while at it! The beat is a bit repetitious.

Congrats! Demo and trailer are promising. Hope it sells well!

We simply haven't had the time to accumulate much of a mess yet.
Bicilotti; I occasionally play, but the clock is sadly out of order. It's a pretty little piece, though.

The head? Was that the solution to a riddle, or a new riddle, disguised as a solution?

Nice idea for a thread! I enjoy when people get nit-pickety (even if it was my game they picked apart). It's a great way to improve.

I hope this will catch on.

We moved rather recently, so I'd happily show some pictures.

This is our guestroom/studio/office:


OT, but this is our bedroom:


More OT, but this is our livingroom:


Not shown here:
The kitchen.

I've seen it, but yeah, looking good! I especially like the handpainted parts. I hope you can crank up production a bit now.

Lincoln with a penny, declaring that he's "in-a-cent"

Good one, Snarky!
However, looking at this situation from a non-riddle perspective, wasn't that a strange moment to suddenly produce a coin and brag that it's got your face on it? Did he plead insanity?
"Mr Lincoln, you're accused of this heinous crime, and..."
"LOOK AT THIS COIN! THAT'S MY FACE!"
"I accept your plea."

Alan:

The president is a dead man, dunno who, and he's giving the coin, an obol, to Kharon, the judge, so he can sail across the Styx ?
Obviously that sounds too easy, so I'm probably wrong.

I really like this solution, although it ignores some of the premises; Kharon isn't a judge (merely a ferryman), and the whole scenario can't be described as a trial, really.

Thanks a lot, Ben, I'm super-grateful for your support

Here's a little screenie to make this post more than a one-liner of gratitude:

The game length in the database should be the time it takes for someone who knows how to beat the game, but doesn't skip every dialogue or take other short-cuts. Like the let's-play runs you'd find on youtube, or similar. Never truly stuck, but not stressing.

You can't measure it by the first attempt a player makes, since getting stuck just once may consume hours and hours.

I think I once read Yahtzee advising people not to release their first game, just to move on and do something better.

This is just dumb. You've spent countless hours on coding and drawing your game, and it's supposed to just sit and gather dust on your hard drive, because it happens to be your first?

If you're such a perfectionist that you can't stand seeing a game out there with your name on it even though it's not super-polished, then chances are you're never gonna finish a game ever.

Resonance clocks in at over 1GB uncompressed.  About 275MB of that is audio/video.  The rest is lots and lots of 320x240 graphics.

And to answer the original question, I also don't think there's any problem with large file sizes nowadays.

725MB of 320x240 graphics? This is quite astounding. I simply can't wrap my head around it. Does AGS inflate the file size instead of compressing it? Back in the day, adventure games with similar graphics came on a couple of floppies.
I reckon Monkey Island 2 weighed in on some 25MB... has Resonance got 30 times the amount of graphics? What am I missing?

Okay, colour depth plays a big part, and surely our backgrounds contain much more colours, but still...

1 gig of images? That sounds a bit odd... even in a raw state, a 800x600 image can't exceed 2 megs, so that's 500 images, before compression. Is there lots of FMV or something?

I think the male character is good, although I'd define his facial features a bit more - he looks a bit washed out right now.

Like 99% of all male artists, you've drawn the woman's breasts far too big. I don't think this is necessarily sexist, but I'd change it just to avoid this kind of stereotypical portrayal of the sexes. If you take a look at real women in uniforms (google woman in uniform, and try to filter out the porn/sexy stuff), you'll find that their breasts are barely visible, at least they don't bulge out like two basketballs.

Her back view has some other flaws; her shoulders have suddenly disappeared, and her feet point outward in a way they don't do in the other views.

I don't think memory concerns should stop you from using high-res graphics. The only thing that could make a real impact on today's downloading times would be a huge soundtrack (non-midi) or video clips.

Absolutely.
Release it and get feedback. Without constructive criticism, how are you going to improve?

I use that old DOS version, where all variable are defined using small flags. Boy do I love them flags.

The problem is that when walking diagonally only see the images (right left up down)

What does "the images" mean? Do you see an animation or just a frame? Do you have four loops in the character normal view, or eight? The only reason this wouldn't work is if you've placed the additional diagonal loops in the wrong place.

There's this myth - I believe it's a myth anyways - about how the name for some exotic animal, I think it was Kangaroo, was actually the natives way of saying "I don't understand you". So when the settlers/explorers pointed at the animal in question, the aborgines or whatever just said they couldn't understand.

Lead?