Messages

I have started on an idea, I really ought to get back in the game myself!

I like the hand-painted look of the artstyle; very original and memorable, and gives a nice medieval vibe to the game.

I have a question. What is it about dialogs that you find difficult?
Maybe it's because I've spent the past ten years making at least one new webcomic every week (at one point I was making three different webcomics each week), but I find dialog really easy to do. Whether it's a one-off line for something as simple as using an incorrect item on something, to something as involved as a dialog tree.

Making it sound like a natural dialog, feels kinda hard to me, but then i look at funny games and i realise that i'm probably overthinking it! Also for me it's how much info you want to give away for puzzles. So it's not obvious what the player should do, yet perhaps a little clue or a "spark of an idea" get's into the player's head. Ah, Webcomics yeah that must help, i can imagine! As a kid i actually used to do small comics, looking back at them they were quite embarassing   

Personally, writing dialogue is all about trying to find a character's "voice" for me, as in trying to get a feel for how they think and express themselves, as well as knowing when something feels out of character. For example, somebody saying:

"Ewww, that's stinky!"

or saying;

"What a foul stench!"

both express the same thing, but one sounds more direct and childish, and the other more older and formal, and I think many beginner storytellers miss out on using the language itself to paint a character rather than just relying on outright telling the audience what their personality is.

But then again, for me, just getting the energy to start a project is the biggest hurdle for me nowadays.

It grinds my gears that whenever it's international women's day, you always see a bunch of guys complaining that "But where's the international MEN's day?!",
but there actually IS an international men's day, this very day, November 19, but none of the dudes complaining actually looked it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Men%27s_Day

Always had a fondness for Nemi comics.

Ah, super cool, how is it using Dragonbones ? I have tried a few skeletal animation programs and noticed they are quite different, does it work with key frames and setting transitions?

Yeah, more or less. It's free, so you can try it yourself if you look for it, so far, I've had fun playing with it.

So I've been practicing the Dragonbones program lately, and made a few sprites/animations for some standard fantasy enemies;
a generic bandit, a slime creature and a ghost so far, and I figured I might as well share them with the community if anyone wants them for an AGS project.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/4mugpsxhc87x19j/fantasy_enemies.zip/file

Happy Halloween!

Oh yeah, I've heard about that. I still don't get it though. 
I thought Gaza was a city not a strip?
Like I said though, it's flying over my head. 

At least you're honest about not knowing about the situation in question (and I don't blame you, it's just horrific and depressing),
Unlike Elon Musk, who seems to have made the opposite his signum.

At this point, it feels like Twitter only totters on because it had a large user base to start with, but I doubt it's likely to reverse the losses.

I'm just glad you haven't worked in my kid's daycare...

If my kids were to play apes when walking on the street with me, I would not stop them because some passerby demands it. Of course, the situation would be different on a bus or train, but not just walking somewhere outside.

It was a tightly crowded subway station, not a playground park. And the kids weren't "playing ape" as some cute game, they were howling just for the heck of it.

Let's be clear, I'm not interrupting kids playing in their homes or on a playground, or any place where you could reasonably expect kids to be allowed to run around and play, it's a subway station, where nearly everyone is tired from work or school and just want to be able to go home in peace. Is it really that unreasonable to ask parents to teach their kids bare-bones consideration for the people around them? And why would it be wrong for a passerby to ask for it?

How would you go about teaching kids to respect other people around them and prepare them for the fact that while their parents may let things slide, so many people in their future lives, teachers, bosses, older kids around them, facility staff etc., will not?

I'm just glad you haven't worked in my kid's daycare...

Also, you sound rather judgemental yourself saying that, you don't know where or what my work routines looked like.
Sure, it got loud, but there I at least was able to mentally prepare myself for it, and even so, when the staff was able to put the most disruptive kids in timeout for ten minutes, and just be consistent with having multiple people tell them when their behavior was bad, the kids improved their behavior to others greatly, and the older kids were able to sit down quietly and learn things.

The biggest problem on that daycare wasn't the kids, it was the entitled parents.

[but I did, because I was taught]

I'm just enraged at parents letting their offspring act feral and then having the gall to judge people for calling them out on it.

When I was commuting today, a mom with two kids, old enough to talk and walk on their own mind you, was walking right in front of me and the kids were howling like freaking apes for no reason whatsoever. They were not in pain or anything, they just felt like playing howler monkeys, and when I asked "must you be so loud?", the lady just gave a half-hearted hush and the kids kept howling, so when I asked her to tell them to stop, she just snapped at me saying "She's a small child". I told her I've worked in daycare and kids can quiet down if you just clearly tell them, and she just snapped back "then You should understand they can't" and walked away.

Look, I've worked with toddlers, and I know from experience that if they are not in pain or some form of distress, and old enough to talk, they very much can stop what they are doing as long as their parents can tell them to with just a freaking ounce of authority or consistency, but that woman was deliberately undermining ANY attempt, including her own, at making her kids respect their surroundings and other people.

I despise the current idea that any attempt at boundaries or rules for kids is on par with straight-up abuse, parents shouldn't be parents, but some cool friend that's never saying no, and that kids just lack any sense of restraint or consideration.

Well, kid's aren't born with inherent respect for other people, but that's a reason to teach them, not let them run feral until you expect them to just magically be gifted with social skills. I have Asberger's syndrome, so I had an even harder path learning all that, but I did, because I was taught.

And then there's this toxic mentality that any stranger reprimanding a child for bad behavior, what used to be known as "it takes a village to raise a child", is bad and intrusive and that is just another recipe for intensifying any bad thing they do the older they get.

Seriously, people who don't want to do any actual parenting shouldn't be parents, if they want a creature that only exist to be pampered and who doesn't understand or care for human social cues, they should get cats instead.

We all wish he could
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/general-discussion/rip-slasher/

I missed the news, but he truly was a prolific creator, and had a drive few could live up to.

Now Slasher's got to make something for this one! 

It grinds my gears when people in public transport in rush hour(trams, trains, subways) slowly hobble their way forward and just stand around in the middle of the isle rather than just go forward, take a seat if there is one, or else try to stand to the side so the other people can.

Seriously, the rush hour tube is NOT the place to stand around lazing about and blocking the way for stressed-out people who just want to get away from the sweaty crowd and get on with their way. And no, the majority of these sloths are NOT frail elderly, pregnant, or handicapped, but perfectly able-bodied young people who inexplicably think that it's fun roleplaying as a zombie where it's the most inconvenient.

Maybe he simply is dumb enough to be unable to realize he is dumb.

Yes, he does have Asperger's and as i understood it, parts of that diagnosis is having a hard time socially, reading social cues. Sounding or saying dumb stuff without realising how dumb it sounds, etc. But being very clever in specific interest's. Not sure Twitter is one of those interests

As somebody diagnosed with Aspbergers myself I take strong issue with that statement, While I did spend most of my childhood having to manually learn social cues that come naturally to most neurotypical persons, Aspbergers make you more prone to overthinking things, not less. Any idea that Autism or Asperger syndrome makes you more deliberately unsociable, self-centered, and narcissistic is a garbage stereotype made up largely thanks to entitled dudes who want to excuse their shitty behavior and use their diagnosis as a shield against being called out on it. Seriously, that kind of claim is not a good look.

So far as from what I've seen, Musk's basking in big publicity stunts and being dead set on his beliefs based on no facts but his own subjective opinions is the stark opposite of what you typically see from people on the spectrum, and seems entirely caused by his upbringing (his family made their fortune from an Emerald mine in apartheid south Africa, need I say more?).

Same here. Two great games with different approaches and strong points.

@Blondbraid , if you don't mind me asking, how do you do the animations? Do you use Dragonbones?

Yes, you guessed right! Plus Firealpaca for art assets used in the animation.

Funnily enough, the reason I made a Renaissance vampire woman in a gown was so that I didn't have to do any tricky leg animations while testing out Dragonbones.

Blondbraid, if you have an idea I wouldn't mind. 
Ii still haven't come up with anything, but I'm itching to do something.

Wonderful, I'll list a few ideal I have in a PM soon!

I know I haven't been active in the community for a while, but I'm hoping to get back in the game and wondering if anyone would like to collaborate this MAGS.

David Wolfe and his pseudo nonsense grinds my gears. He's just posted a video on Twitter alleging a patient cured their cancerous tumour in minutes through positive thinking. 

Imagine a world where to be healthy you had to be happy.

As soon as you got a little upset, it'd be a downward spiral into an early grave. 

It all sounds similar to Belle Gibson; It's super easy to cure an illness through positive thinking when the illness itself was something you've made up to begin with.

And on a more serious note, these types of things just end up causing further harm to people being down because of their illness, because then they don't just have to deal with their illness itself, but also with being blamed for not being able to turn their pain into inspiration fodder and being positive enough.

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What grinds my gears...

When I leave work early so I can get to the bus shop and renew my bus pass before it closes for the day... get 2 buses to said bus shop instead of 1 bus straight home... only to find that the bus shop has closed early today with no indicarion why. 

On a related note, it grinds my gears when your bus just doesn't show up, with no indication as to why.
Did it show up ten minutes early and you simply missed it? Did it break down? Has the timetable been changed but nothing has been updated to show it?
Who knows. 
Whatever the case, you now have to wait a full hour for the next bus. 

I recently missed a bus because it arrived early, then departed right before my face as I was running to the stop, despite that I was there before it was supposed to leave, forcing me to wait 30 minutes. 

Anyways, the reason I haven't been able to keep up with the AGS community much lately is that some time ago, I finally landed a job, data a daycare, and it not only grinds my gears but I've come to actively despise parents who bring sick kids to schools and daycare.

The last few months have been a circus of either struggling with whatever viruses they're bringing us myself or having to be overstressed and overworked because someone else on the staff is home  sick, and just today, a child started puking all over the place and their parents took TWO HOURS before bothering to pick up and bring home their spawn.

Seriously, we've had a pandemic that was not just within my lifetime, but recent enough to be within the kindergartener's lifetimes, would it really be that weird to demand some kind of penalty for bringing clearly sick or coughing kids to daycare?

Also, we seriously should normalize putting these on coughing toddlers as a society:

Spoiler

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It grinds my gears that shops keep trying to shill Christmas decor even before Halloween has ended, in some cases even before it's started!