Messages

Cool!!! In some way, it makes me think of an old AGS game called "Dada: Stagnation in Blue".

Spoiler

And yep, I'm pretty much sure that the river is Styx or something like that.

[close]

Thought you could be interested:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/ItTakesTwoToTangle
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/AlGurbishInNickItAndRun
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/AdventureTheInsideJob
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/FateOfMonkeyIsland
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/NightOfTheHermit
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/MI2LeChucksRevenge
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Ignac
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheTreasureOfDrunkIsland
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/MonkeyIslandTheDevilsTriangle

Congratz on the release! It was a real pleasure to volunteer as a beta tester.

Wow, amazing concept; I played through the demo, and I'm really looking forward to this one! I thought you invented the Bunnyman, but then I googled it, and saw that it actually exists! In fact, there was also a guy who jumped off a bridge in an Easter Bunny suit in 1996; perhaps it could also be inspiration for the story.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Silly-Rabbit-Stunt-Lands-Skydiver-Into-Financial-2982574.php

https://i.ibb.co/C2thSn6/Bunny.png
-- moderator edit to remove non-game related image

I wonder if anyone on the forums is in touch with the relatives of Ghost (Björn Ludwig) who passed away in December 2019? If yes, I would like to ask whether any materials from his unfinished games (such as Collateral Jelly and Once Upon a Crime II: Gumshoe Odd Ventures) survived on his PC and could be made public?

Also, perhaps someone would happen to have the screenies from Once Upon a Crime II that Ghost posted on the AGS forums back in 2008 (the links are all dead now)?

Thank you in advance!!!

I've recently discovered that there's a new adventure game project in the works called Whateverland by Caligari Games, it has a really bizarre feel and atmosphere, and I especially dig that it's going to have a multipath walkthrough. I really hope they succeed with the Kickstarter campaign!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/caligari/whateverland-a-grotesque-burton-style-adventure


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLOMyvY0idg

[not]

Awesometastic, mental patient+aliens is a combo that just cannot fail, gives me a real Twilight Zone vibe!

It reminds me of one game idea of my own, inspired by the movie "Beautiful Mind", about paranoid schizophrenia, with the protagonist encountering a number of weird characters and Broken Sword/Gabriel Knight-style puzzles seemingly leading up to some big revelation, but the point would be to not solve the puzzles and instead cling to ordinary life (with the character returning to sanity in the good ending and going completely off his rocker in the bad ending).

[not]

I've recently been reading some stuff on the so-called apophenia, i. e. the tendency to see patterns in unrelated data, and about people who become absorbed in it and gradually lose touch with reality. In particular, I've read "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco and "A Beautiful Mind", the 1998 biography of the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash. In the former, the protagonist gradually becomes convinced that everything around him is part of a mystical conspiracy, and the latter says that Nash had "a growing sense of revelation regarding a secret world that others around him were not privy to", found some hidden messages from aliens on the covers of magazines, and felt boredom instead of relief during his remissions.

It occurred to me that this is very similar to a lot of adventure game premises, with an everyman protagonist uncovering some sort of underworld, doing some investigations, solving puzzles, etc. (for instance, it's the case in Broken Sword, with the Templar conspiracy, and Dark Seed, where the main character finds clues telling him about a parallel dark universe) So I thought that apophenia/paranoia/schizophrenia could make a perfect plot for an "anti-adventure game", where the point is not to indulge in puzzle-solving and hidden meanings, and instead cling to "normal" life (with one ending where the character regains his sanity, and another where he starts seeing hallucinations, etc., and eventually goes completely off his rocker). In a sense, this could be similar to the 2008 game "Akrasia", which is a metaphor for drug addiction, where in order to win, you have to not collect the pills.

What do you think?

[really]

Hi everyone, I've recently seen a great movie called Under the Silver Lake, which is like a postmodern Pynchon-style deconstruction of the 1990s geek culture with some noir elements (it is about a guy who's investigating a conspiracy and looking for hidden clues in pop music, video game magazines, and cereal box images). The feel of the movie really reminded me of oldschool 1990s adventures, especially DOTT and Sam & Max Hit the Road, and also the AGS game Al Gurbish in Nick It and Run. I absolutely recommend it for game project inspiration, and in my opinion, this movie is really asking for a retro SCUMM-style adaptation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwgUesU1pz4

If you're interested, you may PM me, and we can try to work out something together.

Well that might be a bit difficult. I'm planning on participating in the current MAGS. But if I remember next month, I might.

If you're still interested, I've recently seen an amazing movie "Under the Silver Lake" which is a deconstruction of the whole "detective story" narrative: the protagonist, an amateur sleuth, is investigating the urban legends of Hollywood and looking for clues in comic books, images on cereal boxes and pop music; he meets some really strange characters which may or may not be imaginary, crosses moral boundaries, and it is implied that he may be going off his rails. The plot is very adventure game-escue, and I believe it may be a great inspiration for "unreliable narrator" stories.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwgUesU1pz4

I absolutely adore the DOTT-ish graphic style and the magical realism vibe! So, it involves just aliens, or also some other kinds of weird creatures (gnomes, vampires, Spring-heeled Jack)?

Somehow this reminds me a bit of a new movie called Under the Silver Lake; it's about a guy who also has problems paying for his rent, and who gets into a "magical realist" detective investigation involving lots of strange characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwgUesU1pz4

Thank you, I love your idea as well!!! It could also be interesting to combine "classical" 1990s-style adventure and Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain-style interactive drama.

I had an idea somewhat similar to yours which involves an unreliable narrator, inspired by the movies "Mulholland Drive", "Lost Highway", "Secret Window", "Usual Suspects", etc., with the two parts of the game telling the same story from the perspectives of two different characters. The first part of the game would be something very cartoonish/comic in the vein of DOTT or CMI, with an "adorably geeky" protagonist like Guybrush or Bernard Bernoulli and his humorous adventures (maybe with some surreal stuff, i. e. aliens, magic, time travel, etc.) The second part of the game would be told from the perspective of another character, with a darker and more realistic style and maybe different gameplay mechanics (think Darkseed), the guy from the first part would be the villain, and it would be revealed that his story from Part 1 was either his delusion or he deliberately made it up. For instance, in the first part he could be telling his story at a police station, implying that he was just an innocent bystander, and the second part would be from the perspective of a police detective, and the "adorably geeky" guy would be the criminal the detective is after.

That would be awesome. It would be like getting hearing a story from Moriarty, then from Sherlock Holmes.

If you're interested, you may PM me, and we can try to work out something together.

One more idea of mine is a game about qualia. The concept of qualia implies that different people may actually be seeing the world in different ways; for instance, one person may see a color as "red" and another as "green", but since they both use the word "red" for it, we would never find out that they perceive it differently. I thought that in the game it could be taken to the extreme: you could play as several characters who see the same locations in a very different way (one sees them as photorealistic, another in cartoony CMI or DOTT style with bizarre colors, another in retro painting-esque fashion, etc.), and there could be some puzzles related to that.

That's an incredibly brilliant idea!
I would gladly pay money to play a game like that.

An idea that I have is slightly similar, but nowhere near as good.
The idea is an adventure game, but where each character has a different interface. One might have a simple left-click right-click interface, and another might have the 9-verb interface. But it would go further than that, because while one character would function like a proper point and click adventure game, another character would function more closely to a Telltale adventure game (with timed dialogs and all), and another character would function like a hidden-object game. Thus resulting in some crazy puzzles.
You'd have to become the hidden-object character to reveal an item for the point and click character to pick up and use on something, so the Telltale character can make a choice which makes the game go forwards. Overall, the game would probably be a parody of all three genres.

Thank you, I love your idea as well!!! It could also be interesting to combine "classical" 1990s-style adventure and Fahrenheit/Heavy Rain-style interactive drama.

I had an idea somewhat similar to yours which involves an unreliable narrator, inspired by the movies "Mulholland Drive", "Lost Highway", "Secret Window", "Usual Suspects", etc., with the two parts of the game telling the same story from the perspectives of two different characters. The first part of the game would be something very cartoonish/comic in the vein of DOTT or CMI, with an "adorably geeky" protagonist like Guybrush or Bernard Bernoulli and his humorous adventures (maybe with some surreal stuff, i. e. aliens, magic, time travel, etc.) The second part of the game would be told from the perspective of another character, with a darker and more realistic style and maybe different gameplay mechanics (think Darkseed), the guy from the first part would be the villain, and it would be revealed that his story from Part 1 was either his delusion or he deliberately made it up. For instance, in the first part he could be telling his story at a police station, implying that he was just an innocent bystander, and the second part would be from the perspective of a police detective, and the "adorably geeky" guy would be the criminal the detective is after.

Gibbous! I'm sure of that, though it's not released yet

I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure Series (Daredevil Park, Behind the Wheel, You are a Millionaire, etc.), the Fighting Fantasy ones, and the Give Yourself Goosebumps ones. I really wish more adventure games were like this, with multipath walkthroughs and multiple endings; sadly, there are quite few of them (my personal faves are the Humongous adventure games; the choice is not defined by the player, but it is cool too: every time you start the game, you don't know what would the computer choose for you).

I'm all for jokes, but I'm a fan of very specific horrors. I love comedy horrors when you take the horror tropes and make something fun and warm out of it (like A Vampyre Story and the Transylvanian Lovecraft adventure Gibbous), and I also love the opposite, when you take something sweet and cartoony and add really dark/psychological horror subtexts (think Psychonauts, Penny Arcade Adventures, the movie Escape from Tomorrow, and Roald Dahl's stories). For a "serious" horror, I think they wouldn't hurt too though.

One more idea of mine is a game about qualia. The concept of qualia implies that different people may actually be seeing the world in different ways; for instance, one person may see a color as "red" and another as "green", but since they both use the word "red" for it, we would never find out that they perceive it differently. I thought that in the game it could be taken to the extreme: you could play as several characters who see the same locations in a very different way (one sees them as photorealistic, another in cartoony CMI or DOTT style with bizarre colors, another in retro painting-esque fashion, etc.), and there could be some puzzles related to that.

[encountering]

Bunny, that would be a fun little background event for sure. Not something I'd have implemented though, but that's a matter of taste. I thought it more fun for the player to actively try out the weirdest things and then the world reacting to that. I never really got it fleshed out though and I think it would be quite a challenge to keep track of what the player did and how the office gets more and more interrupted by his imagined adventures.

Still, I'd absolutely download and play the hell out of ANY GAME that has fairies pop out of coffee makers.

Well, it doesn't have to be a fairy, it can be a gnome or a Cheshire cat I completely agree with you that it would be cooler if the protagonist had a choice between "normal" and "weird" course of action, and this impacted the game world and the outcome. What I meant that it could be not only about him doing weird stuff, but also about him encountering something weird; for instance, during the lunch break, he would go out to smoke and see a mysterious alley (or a tunnel inside a freezer, or a door that wasn't there before). If he ignores it and comes back, everything would be in order; if he follows it, he would find himself in a couple of weird places with misadventures, and the boss would be angry with him being late and his shabby appearance. It all could have escapist overtones, with the implication that he's bored with his life and wants to escape into a fantasy (or not-so-fantasy) world. I also thought that it could have three endings: if he chooses to focus on "normal" stuff and ignore the weirdness, he would get back to his ordinary life and probably even get a promotion; if he tries to do both this and that, he would eventually lose his grip on reality and end up in asylum; finally, if he ignores his job duties and does only the "weird" missions, he would mysteriously disappear with the implication that he's now in a different world.

Anyway, I would be happy to work on such a project, either your way or mine, but I wouldn't manage that entirely on my own, since I'm a terrible artist/animator (I'm a story/puzzle/dialogue writer, and also a bit of a coder).

@Ghost: I think this idea is very cool, but I thought it could also be modified in the following way: a character could have BOTH realistic and weird escapades. For instance, the protagonist could be going to work and see men in black following him, or trying to repair the coffee machine to buy a cup of coffee and spot a fairy creature popping out of it, or go to the cafeteria and find a passage to the other world in the freezer, and after all that he would return to his work as if nothing happened. With the implication that he's probably going crazy and the weird stuff happens only in his head, but the line between the two is very much blurred. Like in the movie "Beautiful Mind" in which the schizophrenic protagonist had both real-life events (his work in mathematics, his marriage, etc.) and imaginary spy adventures.

Maybe I can make a graphical outline to give a better idea.

That would be awesome!