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Happy birthday, Hobbes! Still waiting for Buccaneer here.

ShiverMeBirthday and his alter-ego Dan_N! :O

Many happy returns!

You say this from experience? Have you done this?

Got some output you can show? I'm curious about how viable a production pipeline this is!


EDIT: I thought you were speaking of game backgrounds in general. Oh well.

Yeah, GarageGothic, you need to release your game this year!

Beyond Good & Evil

Definitely.

I got it fine.

Mine is to get a divorce. Or some sort of open-ended agreement. Perhaps some ice cream.

You have lines at the ice cream stand? :o

This discussion isn't really relevant to me, but I just wanted to point out something that keeps coming up...

Again, the most powerful argument against this: why single out marriage? what about hurt feelings in other relationships or circumstances?

It's not really a very powerful argument, because, as mentioned before, while other relationships and circumstances may not be recognised by the government, marriage is.

If you have a specific form of existence of two (or more ) people that the state officially recognises and (in some form or the other) subsidises or derives benefit from, it is not illogical to, in some form or the other, seek to reprove or reprimand those who after entering an understanding or contract, attempt to bypass or misuse or break it without formally terminating it.

Woah...I feel like a dirty lawyer now .

You could argue about the institution of marriage, and that would be a valid and perhaps interesting debate, but currently, most countries in the world, for whatever reason, recognise it in some form or the other.

Khris, if I recall correctly, you didn't need variables at all for that situation. in the area for that interaction, you'd just select the "First time player does this action..." and then choose whatever you wanted the game to do only the first time the player did that action. And then didn't the code get automatically generated and included in the script file?

As for the monsieur's idea, I'm not sure that'd be such a great alternative, because the whole point of the interaction editor for newbies is to not need to see all that weird scary code.

I use +3, but I still miss the interaction editor. While obviously I don't *need* it, it did simplify a lot of things for me, and was definitely the appeal for me when I started out using AGS- it was a lot easier to get into, as you didn't HAVE to learn a new scripting language to get most of your basic stuffs done. This wasn't true for any of the any other adventure game engines out at the time (except maybe klik & play, but that had it's own weird problems).

Seeing as how the editor has become opensource, it'd be nice to see the return of some sort of interaction editor.
Perhaps the whole thing could be streamlined now, so that when new commands are added to AGS, or commands are edited, a short description of the command is has to also be given, and then what this interaction editor would do would be to go through all the commands, list them in categories according to their superclass so that the AGS game maker can then chose them from a list, put in values for any required variables, and make games like that.

I think there was already a game made like this, but with commercial adventure game characters rather than AGS ones.

You'd obviously need Roger, gorilla arms and all.

I did not take dkh to be getting a bachelor's degree in English or Musicology. Judging from his work on the forums, I'd have thought it'd be something codery intense like microcontroller programming or something .
But anyhow, congratulations!

I don't have any significant thing that happened to me recently that I should be overjoyed about, but I'm happy that you're all happy. YAY!

Or they could use SCIStudio VGA.

But the calling of it as being "outdated" isn't because of improvements in technology (such as your examples using books and paintings). It's because of it being a style or genre that is just...outdated.
I suppose it may just be semantics here, I'd consider "stale" and "outdated" to mean mostly the same thing.

But I'm talking about creation of the thing here, not the actual thing itself. Monkey Island is still a great game (especially if you haven't played the 5 billion derivatives that came after). Much of Bach's music is still awesome. But if someone tried making a game exactly in the style of Monkey Island or making music like Bach, it'd just be weird, and a "good copy" at best, or (more likely) crap at worst.

I can't really answer you about RTSes, as I really don't find them very interesting . I played....Warcraft 1 and 2, and even 3 when it came out, and I believe I probably played one of the Command and Conquers at some point, but they really don't stick in mind other than "1) build up troops and support 2) Attack". My favourite strategy game (for some inexplicable reason) is Colonization (the original one). It's turn-based, though, but that doesn't stop me from coming back to it about every year, and spending a week of almost continuous play beating it.

FPSes were pretty stale genre too, but then (people tell me that) Half-Life changed all of that. Personally, I still find them all very samey, but at least with FPSes I'm able to have some mindless fun whenever I want, so it makes for a good time waster.

As an aside, I'm going through the video GarageGothic linked, and it makes a very interesting definition for "Adventure Games" (as I consider and love them), but without calling them that. One of his suggestions for good game design" is story progression, i.e., not just having an initial condition and requiring the player to "solve" that.

You'd think that an adventure game would automatically have story progression, and it should, but many people don't seem to have that. For example, "I am at an archaelogical dig site, and I must go deeper in" is the initial condition and "I've made it to the deepest inside level of the dig site, some grand mystery has been shown, and I win!" is the end condition of an AGS "adventure game" I recently played. It had no story progression, just a situation that had been lengthened and "interactified" by artificially inserting puzzles into it.

The main focus of an adventure game shouldn't be the puzzles, and when the puzzles basically become the story, it's all lost

I have to rescue the princess - Okay, I've gotten to the castle - Okay! I've gotten past the guard in the castle - Okay, I've gotten/manufactured the key to the dungeon door! - Okay, I've gotten the princess! - Okay, now I've escaped the castle with the princess - Yay! I've won!

Isn't an adventure game in any sense at all to me, and is probably simply total boredom. But by mode7's definition (and I'm not knocking mode7 here, just that he exemplified the general understand of adventure games here), it is an "adventure game".

EDIT: As a response to a point Ascovel brought up that I hadn't responded to, I also enjoy the exploration aspect of many adventure games, and it most certainly can be counted as a form of gameplay for me. And the feeling I get when I find something new in my explorations is almost as rewarding as solving a puzzle to advance the story.

This strict classification of genres seem a bit strange and exclusive. For example, I disagree with mode7s's definition of adventure. Heck, mode7's definition could apply to all those puzzle games if you played them in "story mode"- you're basically solving puzzles to progress. Except games like peggle and such aren't adventures.

Personally, I consider adventure games to be story-driven games- you have to advance the story by overcoming obstacles. These obstacles can be puzzles, but they can also be action sequences, strategic placement of troops, or a ledge on the other side of a large pit .

Feels a bit funny talking about this since I've never played Braid, have no knowledge of any of Blow's opinions, and hadn't heard any of this before. But reading through his article, I can't help but agree.

When was the last time something "fresh" was inserted in the genre? He mentions Loom, which I absolutely agree (although to be clear, I'm not saying that was the last time, just that he mentions it!), was an awesome and sadly underrated take on adventure games...it certainly didn't have "puzzles" in the traditional sense, and unlike many adventure games of the time (and even now), there really wasn't any way you could get stuck- you were always progressing or exploring, because you totally understood the mechanism of the gameplay (find music, use music on obstacle), and there was no problem of trying to understand what the designer wanted you to do.

A genre can certainly become outdated. Watercolours and books aren't genres of their respective fields. Baroque music, for example is outdated (I know it might be cheating to use a genre or style that is defined by the time it was made, but I'm sure you understand what I mean), but that doesn't mean people don't use it for inspiration to come up with new stuff.

I come off very often against puzzle design here in AGS (and am then usually misunderstood or misinterpreted as wanting some sort of "interactive movie" gameplay), but that is mostly because I personally think it is prohibitively difficult to make good puzzle-based adventure games, and not much in the last decade has shown me otherwise.

I'm not going to make any excuses about something being "art" or "entertainment" or such stuff, but I can conclusively say that there is a certain style of adventure game as made today, that I do not have fun playing, even if I enjoy the story. I can't really convince anyone else to make the sort of games I want to play, although in my mind, my reasoning seems sound, and I sometimes find it odd that other people like the stuff.

I mean, I enjoyed playing Monkey Island immensely. It was new and fresh and interesting when it came out, and had many very interesting uses of puzzles such as Insult swordfighting, and the voodoo recipes. But then when Curse of Monkey Island just copied the idea of Insult swordfighting (with 1 token difference), I groaned. When it was brought again in Escape from Monkey Island (in it's most basic and stupid form), I almost felt like smashing my head on the monitor because of their bland lack of originality.

When Monkey Island did the whole "replace the required ingredient for the voodoo doll with something similar but not the same to get interesting but still valid results", I found it funny and enjoyable. When 5 million games after used the same gimmick, I got tired of it.


Sorry about the puzzle rant. But yeah...innovation is important. It doesn't necessarily have to come from hybridisation, but that is certainly one way.


EDIT: I see I'm not the only one. What's happened to imageshack?! IS THERE NO SAFE CONSTANCE LEFT ON THE INTERNET?!

Your character's model is obviously not perfect (I think he has hair coming out of his hat! ), but it does have a certain charm. Even your backgrounds! While I agree with Khris that everything looks waxy, I wouldn't necessarily count that as a bad thing.
As long as everything looks consistent, even if it is not the most perfect art in the universe, it should still look fine. I agree with ddq, you don't need super-realistic art (and you probably can't get it just yet), but a get to one "stylised" style, and stick to it. For some reason, people seem to have higher expectations of 3D than 2D art.

One thing you should try fixing is the outline, or halo of pixels around your characters. I haven't used blender in a while, but is there a way to export the renders as a PNG with a transparent background? If not, you should edit it in photoshop or GIMP or something afterwards to aggressively remove that. It is better to cut into a pixel or two of your sprite rather than have a pixel or two of that grey outline halo.

As for your interface, it does sorta aesthetically clash with the other art. Maybe you can make a 3Dish boxy border around the GUIs (all of them, including the icon bar, and the status bar when you don't move the mouse up) to make them fit in better? Something like what you have with the character portrait and message box (although I'd suggest making it more frame-like and boxy, perhaps adding some depth). And you should probably reduce the size of the Stats and Spells menu. They don't really need to take up that much space.

PS: I also don't know what the 2nd Special action is. Somersault? And the 3rd one? Kick him headless?

Am I the only one who understands Calin's game as a metaphor for communism?

Belated Darthday!

And also, Happy Birthday Iqu/Spleen/Renal Shutdown, wherever you are! Come back soon.....

Well then, just release Shadowplay already! I'm sure it's more than playable by now!