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Many people no longer have the grit, drive and the determination we had in this once great country (UK)..

It grinds my gears that the UK nation has turned some people into gutless wimps..

I hate to say this and I feel sad about it.... but where has their backbone gone and why has it turned yellow?

We were once a nation of solid rock but now it's more like soft jelly...

It grinds my gears 

I think it's the same thing that every old people say in every country...

That's what all old people have always done, just look at this quote by Socrates, born 469 BC:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.

This looks like a fantastic game, I just added it to my whishlist on Steam!

I'd love to, though unfortunatly I'm on vacation with limited Internet acess, but I'd be very happy to talk about the games I've made and my current project if you have time in two weeks.

I would say that the dithering is a cool idea, but unfortunatly it hurts my eyes, not because it's ugly in any way, but the effect is straining for my eyeballs, a similar feeling as to when you are looking directly at a bright lamp.

Thanks to everyone posting your tips, I'll totally try them out!

So there is a surprising amount of animated kid movies featuring the Titanic out there, and the one featuring a rapping dog is the most historically accurate of the bunch, but the by far most weird and inappropriate insertion of Titanic in a children's movie has got to be Samson and Sally, where the two titular whales who are the protagonists encounter two singing walruses who act as comedy relief, and during their song number they find the wreck of the Titanic and build a human centipede out of the skeletons of the dead crewmembers in order to use their remains as a xylophone! Also there are random references to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and a bunch of Nazi imagery and the entire song ends with both walruses poisoning a bunch of fish and making them die in agony while both of them sing and laugh.

Did I also mention the film was Danish, but not even Danish people can understand the lyrics?

[P.G. Wodehouse]

Conversely, I've long been a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, and have tried to take inspiration from his books. But I find that comedy is really difficult to replicate. Even direct adaptations, such as the Discworld games, usually don't really capture the humor of the original, and if you're taking inspiration more loosely, whether it's actually funny really comes down to the quality of the execution rather than a superficial imitation of the style. If you want your writing to be as funny as a Wodehouse book you can't just sprinkle "toodle pip!" and "what rot!" throughout the dialog, you have to come up with a use of language that is as offbeat and playful as his was in its time.

That's a great point, I've personally taken a lot of inspiration from the Blackadder TV-series, but what I think one should look for in comedy is the character dynamics and story structure rather than the jokes themselves,
and especially in Blackadder the humor comes from the contrast between the snarky and cynical Blackadder and his naive and ditzy friends/servants. But with comedy, I think it's just as important to look at failed comedy and
what doesn't work in order to understand it, and the most common pitfall of all is just making random pop-culture references that make no sense if you haven't seen the original thing being referenced, or is just a random name-drop
in case you have heard of the thing before, so in this case it's probably the only time I'd actually recommend someone to see a recent Adam Sandler comedy, but it's a great example of what to avoid when trying to write humor.

Haven't seen the movie, but this trailer looked interesting:

If there is one story I'd want to see adapted into an adventure game, it's definitively the story of prince Setna and the book of Toth.
It's an ancient Egyptian adventure story about a search for the lost book of Toth, but also a moral tale about responsibility and redemption, and what's so amazing about it is just how timeless it feels,
because despite being several millennia old it still feels like a fresh and intriguing take on the genre and the story bears clear parallels and similarities to various modern stories like A Christmas Carol,
Indiana Jones and the raiders of the Lost Ark, Tomb Raider: The last Revelation, and Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and I myself have been greatly inspired by it when writing the stories for my games.

As this story is centered around the protagonist exploring an ancient tomb, it also provides ample opportunity for any game adaption to integrate various puzzles organically, and there's even a scene
within the story where the protagonist is challenged to a game of senet. Plus there being multiple translations and interpretations, just as with KyriakosCH's Lovecraft example, this gives anyone
wanting to make an adaption a lot of leeway in making their own take on the characters.

It's not a very long story, and could be easily summarized in just one page, so I strongly urge anyone to read it and see for yourself:
http://www.touregypt.net/godsofegypt/thebookofthoth.htm
And here is a different version with more background explanations:
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1056/setna-i-a-detailed-summary--commentary/

So I've been drawing and writing a lot lately, but I'm starting to feel the strain on my right hand and wrist, so I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on how to alleviate it?

Apart from the Captain Obvious advice of just resting my hand.

Thanks to everyone who played, commented and voted!

@dactylopus
Wow, even more insane than the original!

Anyway, this is equal parts fun and sadly true (some nsfw language):

Spoiler

[close]

[Understanding Comics]

For me personally, The unwomanly face of War by nobel prize winner Svetlana Aleksijevitj has been a huge inspiration source, as it contains countless interviews with a wide number of women who participated in WW2 and many of their accounts were very fascinating and inspiring, but I'd strongly recommend looking up non-fiction and historical/science books in general, for while there are lots of inspiring fiction out there the risk is always that in trying to emulate what made the original work, you instead end up with a derivative lesser copy. Probably the worst offender in this regard is the works of Tolkien, for even though The Lord of the Rings are rightfully regarded as a timeless masterpiece, so much bad and cliched fantasy has been created by people trying to copy him, and in some cases taking things that were bad in the original, like racist stereotypes or long-winded exposition dumps, and doubled down on them instead of trying to improve it in their own version.

So for anyone looking for creative inspiration, I'd advice you not to take direct inspiration from fiction in the same genre for risk of making it cliched and derivative, but instead to browse places like wikipedia and look up things from the real world that could serve as the basis for a story and then add fantastic elements onto it if you're writing sci-fi or fantasy. While I'm at it, I'd recommend Rejected Princesses for some cool facts on real-life historical women.

I'd also recommend another non-fiction book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which is a graphic novel where the author's cartoon version of himself explains the nature of comics, but a lot of the things he brings up,
like stylization versus realism and the pacing of a story, which are just as applicable to Adventure games as comics, and the reason my teachers made my class read it when I studied game design at university. It's a fun delight
to read, and you can easily find a free pdf version if you Google it, so I can't recommend this book enough for anyone seeking inspiration for writing and how to present their visuals. Yes, it's really that good.

It's not technically a screenshot, but close enough.
The goat is still in a very rough stage, but at least it's no longer made up of barrels, a pinball machine, etc.
And the character sprite needs a little more tweaking...

You did a good job capturing the likeness of a Swedish police uniform!

[This]

This is a scene from Schindler's List, a holocaust movie that was rated from age 15 and upwards;

The film is only a PG in the UK. So almost all-ages / 10 and up.
Then again Star Wars is a U (actual all-ages) and that has both smouldering blood corpses and graphic, bloody, dismemberment of arms.

Our ratings board is really weird around 'historically significant' films.

That's messed up!
I've always been of the firm opinion that one should err on the side of caution when rating films, and if some kids really badly want to see something above their age-range, they can always buy a DVD once those end up in the bargain bin.
And it's not just out of concern for the children, but for the adults. No one wants to have their expensive cinema experience ruined by crying kids.

Anyway, While I'm at it, have anyone else seen The Magic Voyage? It's a "children's movie" about Columbus discovering America featuring such insanity as a literal bookworm teaching Columbus that the earth is round, Columbus pulling a spyglass out of his trousers in a way that it looks like he's pulling out something completely different, and native Americans thanking him for colonizing their homeland, and that's not even the half of it! But if I had to choose just one inappropriate moment from the movie, it'd have to be this scene, where the sailors start a mutiny and try to hang the protagonist, and the entire hanging is treated as harmless fun on par with giving someone a wedgie (Skip to 10:13 to see what I'm talking about):

I still remember the alarming reports that came out when they hanged Saddam Hussein and some children had pretended to hang other kids as part of their play after seeing it on the news,
so just imagine some even younger and more impressionable kids seeing this movie and seeing the protagonist being just fine after being hanged by the neck for several minutes... 

[Donald Trump]

I know I just had to post it here the second I saw this clip, but there is an animated movie called "The Queen's Corgi",
a movie about Queen Elizabeth's Corgies... ...And Donald Trump is in it!!! 

I also have it in mind to watch "The Wind" this week, I'll report back if it's worth a shot.

Looking at the trailer, it seems like an interesting premise, but the video sure has the worst thumbnail imaginable.
Seeing someone's constipated face paired with the title "the wind", well...

I suggest to let this topic open for anyone wil need a little help. Blocks happens.

_

I think it'd be more practical for the next person who gets writer's block starts a new thread, otherwise the risk is that people get different writer's stories mixed up if there's just one thread.