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Messages - Babar

#801
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Wed 25/09/2013 20:17:04
Should be pretty easy:
#802
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Wed 25/09/2013 19:53:15
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP!
#803
Sure, StillInThe90s. Go ahead.
And as for your latest attempt, yeah, it is still just the outlines (although slightly brighter outlines) that I can see.

Let me show you something:

On the left is the light intensity histogram for your first image. On the right is the one for your latest image. In the first one, you can see you had absolutely no colours in your image with a light intensity of over 128 (i.e. half the range), and probably 90% of your colours had a light intensity of less than 32.
In the latest one, you have 5 colours with light intensity greater than 128, although there is probably less than 1% of your entire image anywhere on the screen of that intensity, and still have probably over 75% of your colours with a light intensity of 16 or less.

As a counter example, to show you don't need literal darkness to show darkness in the game, and that if you up the overall brightness, you won't have an issue of unimportantly bright portions stealing the attention away from the important bits, here are two screens from the Monkey Island games. They are among the darkest in-game screens in those games that I could find:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/secret-of-monkey-island/screenshots/gameShotId,501385/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/monkey-island-2-lechucks-revenge/screenshots/gameShotId,501407/
The first one is fairly similar in colour layout to your screen, although it doesn't offer as much important detail. The second one is a more traditional background. After I removed the mobygames logos, inventory, white text and guybrush sprite, this is their brightnesses:


Finally, just to give you an example of what it looks like, regardless of screen setups, if I take your first image and pull the light levels so that the brightest pixel in that image is now 255 (which I admit might be a bit extreme, but the frequencies of the different levels is exactly the same, they've just been spread out over the whole range), this is what it looks like:
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/G3vvVHF.gif[/imgzoom]
(allowing me once again the marvel at your incredible skill at pixelling :D)
#804
Wow...with those in-game screenshots, you really shouldn't have any trouble at all. I voted as well!
#805
Apologies for resurrecting a 5 year old thread, but who knows, new blood may yield new ideas!

I was faffing about on the AGS Wiki (something more people should do more often, I guess :D), when I came across this:
Bill of Adventure Gamers' Rights

I looked around for the source of that page, and found this thread. A similarly themed (with cool links!) thread I also found is this: Fundamental Adventure Laws?
Anyhow, these are the listed rights:
Quote
    1 The Right to Skip Dialog and Cutscenes
    2 The Right to Freedom from Pixel Hunting
    3 The Right to Freedom from Monotonous Responses
    4 The Right to Exit a Scene Quickly
    5 The Right to Know Where Exits Are
    6 The Right to Freedom from Walking Deads
    7 The Right to Freedom from Unconventional Solutions
    8 The Right to Satisfying Rewards for Puzzles
    9 The Right to Freedom from Convoluted Puzzles
    10 The Right to Know the Goal
    11 The Right to a Streamlined Interface
    12 The Right to Logical Cause and Effect
    13 The Right to Fairness in Puzzle Occurrences
    14 The Right to Get Hooked Into the Game
    15 The Right to Experience the Back Story Gradually
    16 The Right to Know Where the Cursor Should Go
    17 The Right to Freedom from Useless Mazes
    18 The Right to Fair (or Skippable) Arcade Sequences
    19 The Right to Freedom from Reading Enormous Amounts of Text
    20 The Right to Freedom from Convoluted and Cumbersome Interfaces
    21 The Right to Be Treated Like an Intelligent Human Being
    22 The Right to Solve Puzzles Using In-Game or Common Knowledge
    23 The Right to Undo Death
First off, kudos to (the somewhat recently more absent) TerranRich for setting all that up. I encourage you to click the link and read the detail on each right. Personally, I'm not too sure about 4, 17 or 23. You have some ideas about the others? Any ideas on additions? Maybe some of them could do being rephrased or combined, or maybe set up as a series of contrasting rights, e.g. "The Right to Freedom from Monotonous Responses", followed by something like "The Right to Know if an Interaction is Meaningful".

One that I thought of (probably not phrased optimally):
"The Right to know what to expect from your game".
This kinda applies in several ways. Several examples: If I'm playing a serious detective thriller game, I shouldn't suddenly come across something like the infamous monkey wrench puzzle from Monkey Island. Or if I have an inventory item that has only ever behaved one specific way, it shouldn't suddenly become part of a puzzle where it is used contrary to its nature. Or if I have an extra interaction mode ("Punch" or "Lick" or "Tickle") that seems to only be used for jokes throughout the game, it shouldn't suddenly midpoint in the game, be required to solve a puzzle. In these examples, unless some indication is given to the player to expect or attempt such behaviour, it shouldn't be done. If you're building expectations in a certain way throughout your game, at least gameplay-wise (obviously, I can't speak in terms of story), those expectations shouldn't suddenly flip over or change.

I'm utterly ignorant on how to edit and write wikis, so I wasn't sure how to add a reference link to this thread there.



As a side-topic, more people should add more things to the wiki! I started out faffing looking for a bit of code for keyboard movement, but all I found was a page about a module from 2005. I'd help, but as I said, I'm clueless on how to do most wiki things (create entries, add multiple titles, format them, etc).

This is something of a huge suggestion (and possibly should be split off from this thread and added in the suggestion thread), but you know how wikipedia has those discussion pages for each of their wiki entries? Since the community is mostly built around these forums instead of the AGSwiki (or any AGSwiki discussion pages), it'd be cool to have like a separate sub-forum or something where threads would be the discussion pages of AGSwiki entries, with links to them (and links from the entries to their corresponding threads, of course). It might cause some SLIGHT duplication of information (if, for example, like this thread, an AGS thread is the source of a AGSwiki entry, which then has a discussion page of its own as well), but would really revitalise the AGSwiki, have contributions be more active and sustained, and would set up the AGSwiki as a one-stop reference to help people with specific issues, instead of the current method where they'd have to do several searches of the forums while refining keywords to realise what they need to look for, investigate entire threads to figure out whether the information is totally out of date, and then collect the help from several different relevant threads to solve their problem.
#806
As you say, I can see the important things here, and for for just playing the game, that is all that matters, I guess, although then I'd miss all your nice background art.

While simply from an accessibility standpoint, games where it is trivial to design a brightness slider should have one, and if possible a high contrast and colour-blind mode (or at least having a look at your BGs using one of the colourblindness tools available to make sure that specific important parts don't get hidden away), but the issue here isn't really a problem with my eyesight.
If the majority of players either can't see all your art without straining, or can't see most of it at all, and the rest say "it is fine" (i.e. they wouldn't mind it being brighter either), it'd probably better for you to attempt to fix up something in the basic artwork itself.
Of course, in the end, you're making the game for YOU, and what you consider important is the only thing that matters.
#807
Sure. Here you go:


Sorry for the crappy phone camera quality, it doesn't really glow like that (in fact the entire image shows up brighter in the photograph than it does on my screen, for some reason :D), but the visibility of black on it is basically like that. It was after I loaded your original image in photoshop and upped the contrast that I realised you had a secondary blue shade between the lines. You've got some awesome pixelling skills, it is a shame I can't really see any of them :D.
#808
The fourth (and third?) image also have the problem of being in perspective, so it won't look good when the player walks down those halls.
#809
There was a pick of the month long before there was a ratings panel, so I don't think so. Handling of it seemed to pass around a lot even before.
#810
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Mon 09/09/2013 14:59:35
Yup! :D
#811
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Mon 09/09/2013 14:37:07
Hahah...sorry about that. Almost forgot I had a game here.

(GUI blacked out)

Despite my selective screenshots, the game is actually the usual third-person view typical of adventure games. I'd have attempted to post nicely staged more revealing screenshots, but the idiotic fight sequences left me bored and I quit.
#812
The Rumpus Room / Re: Icey games' thread
Sun 08/09/2013 21:44:37
It looks very empty without the other islands. Maybe you can have the map torn, so you can only explore the lower islands, then in a later game (or in DLC!) you get the second half of the map, and you can explore more!
#813
Okay, with all these restrictions created to keep in mind the touchscreen mobile user, I'm curious...aside from single button (with not even mouse-hover text possible, it seems?), what would be an appropriate mobile device interface? I've never had one, so I'm a bit in the dark here. Andail mentioned something about two-finger touch simulating right-click?
#814
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Sun 08/09/2013 15:43:07
Hahaha...I had a choose a slightly unusual screenshot from the game, because most of the time it is incredibly easy to figure out what it is. I'll post another shot in a bit if no one has guessed it by then.
#815
Those images seem a bit lowishly textured, even for 320x200. At full-screen (or even windowed 2x) they'd be incredibly blurry.
#816
I think Gemini Rue was recently released for the Android.
#817
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Sun 08/09/2013 01:30:35
I'm sure it's fine, not the first time that has happened.

Here is the screenshot for you to guess:
#818
The Rumpus Room / Re: Name the Game
Sun 08/09/2013 00:39:53
Beneath a Steel Sk....oh damn!

I believe Touché was in this thread once before, I either guessed it or posted it :D.
But we're going to run out of adventure games at the rate we're going, so...Touché!
..Unless that's another sneakery!
#819
Unless they're dying :shocked:.

But I meant more in terms of average age, rather than individual ages. Like when AGS first started, most people using it would've been in their mid to late teens (having played the "original" 2D p&c adventures in childhood), and then that same age-group/generation aged, occasionally people leaving, occasionally new people, sometimes younger ones, who learnt about adventure games after the fact, or from the modern resurgence, but not enough to bring the average age down, just slow it a bit.

Not that I've done any scientific study or anything, but I'd suspect the average AGSer age would be around the mi-20s now?
#820
If I remember right, we had an "Average age" in the board stats, but not anymore.

* Babar summons the AGA!
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