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Here's a more specific puzzle idea:

Say you have to get across town but don't have anyone who can carry you (or want to do it without anyone knowing).  So you have to look at a map (possibly cross referencing a phonebook) to find a delivery service (say a pizza place) that is within a block or so of where you are trying to go.  Find a phone and make an order to the delivery service.  You now have a time limit to reach the street before they arrive.  This may be too short, if the distance is far enough, in which case perhaps you have to call them again and make another order (maybe with another phone?  Say a cell and a landline; having both in one house is hardly uncommon), this one to a random place that is out of their way enough to slow down the delivery guy.  Or maybe phone in an anonymous tip to the police about a bomb threat or something, that makes them close down a major street.  Then board the delivery vehicle (climbing puzzle; you may have to rig something in advance to get you to the right height, depending) and then ride it back to its source.  Then navigate the much shorter distance from the delivery place to your destination.

If you are a fan of convoluted, semi-realistic, multi-step puzzles, that might give you some ideas for the types of things a tiny adventure game character might have to do to accomplish her or his goals.  Or of course I offered it up, so if someone wants to use it word for word, that's fine, too.  It looks like a coding nightmare, but depending how you do it, it shouldn't be that much more complicated than anything else you would have to do to make the premise work.

EDIT: Scratch the cell phone thing unless you are too small to carry it, because with a cell you could just call from the street.
EDIT 2:  But then you risk dropping it to the floor and breaking it--A reasonable excuse not to drag it long distances, or a puzzle in itself.
EDIT 3: If it looks contrived, that's because it is.  Wouldn't fit the tone of every game.

Text parser sounds good in theory.  I intended to use one in one of my semi-abandoned projects and I thought it would serve as a good way to make sure people could get at backstory if they wanted to and otherwise leave it alone.  Then I played A Second Face, though.  It put the system to good use, but what I found myself doing was writing down a list of everything that looked remotely like a keyword and then compulsively running through that list with every character in the game, to make sure I didn't miss anything important.  So I'm not sure that one will solve the adventure gamer's compulsion problem.

What you really need to do is deter the player, so that they know that they will have to DIG for the information.  That's the advantage of hiding stuff in STM (I assume that people will still try every LTM on everyone, anyway), because it means navigating the world and looking for obscure objects to see what people say about them.  It is too much for anyone who isn't truly dedicated to the task.  The flip side to this, is that this can't be necessary information to get more or less full enjoyment from the story.  It's a great place for hiding obtuse physics talk or back story minutiae, but you need to make sure that players who skip that step are still getting a full story--not a bare bones or functionally coherent story.  Otherwise the adventure gamers are being perfectly reasonable in their compulsivity, because they ARE missing something important, even if it doesn't stop them from finishing.

So for the most part, make sure there is an inverse relationship between peripherality of information and proximity to the main plot.  If it is pivotal, make it non-optional, if it is basically part of the story, but non-pivotal, make it an optional part of the canon dialogue.  If it is particularly telling backstory, put it in LTM for people to pursue on their own time (but don't spell all of it out here, because it kills the mystery), and if it is just a detail that pads the world and provides only nominal insight, put it in STM or dump it.  Obviously don't use that as a hard and fast rule, but it seems like a workable guideline.

That is what I think at this second.

I think put as much of it as possible in STM and LTM.  Then sprinkle the occasional optional topic in with the normals, but don't provide reams of extra information in any given exchange, and when you do, try to make it feel natural for the character to ask, and also natural for the character to neglect to ask.

I would avoid the "More options..." type approach.  It pushes the interface into the player's face a bit, and unless you have a ton of optional topics most of the time (which you don't want), it will feel a little redundant.  Also in many cases, it won't deter people who feel compelled to read everything you set in front of them, so it doesn't really solve the problem.

If you do want to indicate extra topics, I would maybe use italics, rather than highlights or recolors.  I think italicizing is one of the least intrusive things you can do to text.  I guess you might also try parentheses?  They carry a connotation of extra-ness already.

In any case, I wouldn't do away with ALL extra dialogue.  If you do that, then you may as well go the King's Quest route and forego dialogue trees altogether.  Just make sure it belongs in the exchange you are putting it in, and I don't see anyone complaining too much, who wouldn't anyway.

If you need a little inspiration you might try out Nanobots (and I assume Puzzle Bots, as well, but I haven't played it yet).  They aren't about shrinking, but they do deal with solving physical puzzles from the perspective of being very small.

I'm assuming you are at least relatively familiar with the print and video media that deal with this theme.  But if you want to expand your sources, you might look into stories like Thumbalina, The Borrowers, Toy Story, Stuart Little, The Mouse and The Motorcycle (actually anything ever about mice, except Redwall.  Sorry Jaques.)  See how they treat the implications of being very small in a world full of very large people.

What challenges do very small things face?  These may suggest puzzles, action sequences, or other game mechanics.

For instance, the smaller you are, the closer you are to the bottom of the food chain, and you will soon realize the huge number of predators that still exist in an urban environment, from dogs and cats, to birds, and possibly even insects.  In a more rural environment, these will only multiply.  Now you have to learn to escape and avoid such creatures.  This means chase scenes, stealth puzzles, and perhaps trap setting.  You may also be able to play predators against each other or otherwise, manipulate these dangerous opponents into helping you overcome other obstacles.

You must also worry about creatures such as humans that are so big they do not always notice you.  Being stepped on is especially dangerous.

Transportation is another big problem.  You now have to traverse what is to you rather extreme terrain.  The man made objects your shrunken character is accustomed to using are almost always stored on shelves and countertops high above floor level, or in cupboards and drawers that must now be opened.  While useful things are high up, the continuous walkways are all down low.  Traversing steps may also become a nightmare.  What if you need to travel across the city?  You sure as hell ain't walking.

Being scaled down relative to all the items in your environment means that many devices will be more difficult to operate.  The flip side is that there may be unconventional uses for many of them.  

What about the social implications?  Are you stuck small indefinitely, or is your goal to become big again?  If you will be small for the rest of your life, how will this affect your relationships?  Will your friends and family treat you the same?  What about wives or lovers?  The dating pool is probably a lot smaller.  Do people take you as seriously when you are the size of a thumb?  Do they treat you as a child or a curiosity?  Even if the condition is temporary, you have to worry about things like who you should reveal yourself to.  If you have enemies in the human world, they may well take the opportunity to kick you while you are down (anything from nasty pranks to murder).  Some people will want to exploit or study you because of your unique condition.  On the other hand, finding a full-sized ally could be invaluable, as now you can do most of the things you could before, if only vicariously.  (If I was shrunk, the first thing I would do is get to a phone and call someone I trusted.  If you don't want the goal of your game to be "get to a telephone/person," then you had better either come up with a good reason why doing so is impossible or ill-advised, or a good reason why doing so will not solve all of your problems.)

On the other hand, small people do have certain advantages that may affect gameplay.  For one thing, your surface area to mass ratio means that you are much stronger relative to your size.  Ants don't lift huge leaves because they are superhuman, they do it because they are tiny.  If an ant was our size with those spindly legs, it wouldn't be able to walk.  Falling will also become much less of an issue and so will climbing (which is good, since you will probably be doing much more of both).  I don't really know the full implications here, so it would be worth looking into the physics.  Just bare in mind that the athletics will not scale at a 1:1 rate.

You can also survive off of much smaller quantities of food, if you are like this long enough to become hungry.  Transportation gets one boost in that you can now travel through small openings.  You can hide virtually anywhere, and even when you don't hide, people being less inclined to notice you means that you can explore many of the same themes employed in stories about invisibility, such as spying and voyeurism.

Pretty much all of this stuff can be milked for gameplay and story ideas, and this is just what came off the top of my head.

EDIT: Regarding the art: do you have a digital camera?  Try taking picture of stuff lying around, up close.  Then you can trace this stuff and/or use it for inspiration.  Art is a bitch if you aren't good at it, but finding artists around here who want to help you is hard.  The more you can do yourself, the better, even if it is a little sub par, but there are always tricks that can make things a little easier.

Coding just takes practice.  If you have specific problems, post in the tech forums, and otherwise, just read the manual a hundred times, mess around a bit, and keep hacking away at your main problems.  If you can finish everything else and your code is still a problem, then maybe look for someone to do all/some of the code for you.  From my observations, coders are a little more available than artists, but if all you have is part of a story, that probably isn't enough to motivate them to help.  They need to know that your project is as good as its premise and that you are going to follow through, at the minimum.

At any rate, I see a lot of potential for this thread as a thread about game mechanics involved with shrinking, but I'd stay off the help recruiting tact, since there's another thread for that already, and I'd hate to see this one locked.

I don't know if the game is abandonware yet. That's kind of a middle solution between Maniac Mansion and Rashomon mechanic. Wasn't there a game where you play twins in AGS, similar mehanics of cooperation (sorry, not played it myslef, don't get offended author that might be reading    )

Two of a Kind.  I think it was a team project between...

BerserkerTails    character/character animation/music
Dart    Background art/character art
DaveGilbert    design/dialog/coding
Scotch    Background art
Yoke    coding/character art/character animation

There are some other games like that as well, floating around.  The POV switching mechanic is fairly common in games, to varying degrees.  I first saw it really explored in The Lost Vikings (platformer).  A lot of games will have segments that involve swapping characters for some sort of even, and it's fairly common in JRPG's to switch your main character at different points in the story, anywhere from having parallel plot-lines (all I can think right now is Treasure of the Redra's, which is kind of obscure) for the whole game, to putting in someone else while your main character is out of commission (Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7 and a few others from that series, +90% of the rest of the genre).  Final Fantasy 6 had enough POV characters, that it was hard to identify the "true" protagonist.  

In adventure games, King's Quest 7 had two characters that you played in alternating chapters, and Dreamfall also split the story between three characters, based on where you were in the plot.  There was a game called Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit that involved multiple POVs, I believe, but I didn't actually play it, so I could be off the mark, and I don't know how they implemented it.

The vast majority of the time, this is used either as a pure gameplay mechanic for solving physical puzzles, or as a plot device to showcase events that the main character is not present for, or occasionally different sides of a conflict, etc.

It's rarely handled in a very nuanced way to show characters with vastly different perceptions, unless you count games where you get to play two sides of a war or something, and then at least you get to change who you think the "good guys" and "bad guys" are.  Even when it does take full advantage of character outlook/bias, I have never seen it used with distinctly unreliable narrators, though.  I mean, it probably has been, somewhere, but.  

I'm a big fan of first person narration and multiple points of view.  One of my current pseudo-back-burner, way too epic for its own good projects is planned to have utilize the multi-POV approach.  I hadn't thought much about explicitly making my narrators misrepresent reality, though I certainly wanted to include bias.  If it seems to fit, I might consider doing some overlapping scenes with obvious (or subtle) discrepancies, though my current thinking is it might not work too well with that particular story, and would make more work for me on an already overly ambitious project.  Any rate, I will see how things play out.  It's definitely an intriguing mechanic.

I don't think making them tell the same story would be too limiting at all, if you were doing a short game to begin with.  An upper-medium to full length game would probably get tiring if you had to trundle through 3+ variants of every scene, though.  I think in the end, the mechanic as a whole might be better suited to something short.  Explore the mechanic to its full potential, and then let it go.  On the other hand, there is this kind of conservative streak in game design (even amateur game design) that says that if you want to take risks, keep things short, but if you are going to make some sort of lengthy masterpiece, you'd better keep things fairly conventional.  I understand the reasoning behind that thought process, but I'd still love to see it challenged.

The only time I think where it would be problematic is if you want to include a chase scene or something, but then you can always just disable the feature.  It can be a bit jarring, and there will always be people who resent the jarringness, use it for the convenience anyway, and then hate you for it.  However, it never bothered me in Curse of Monkey Island.

One could probably make the argument that the sort of brooding, atmospheric tone that you had going in McCarthy 1 would benefit more from forcing the character to endure the walks.  The running thing might be a good compromise if you are worried about that. 

I don't think you'll have a game breaker whichever way you go, but you are more likely to get complaints from people who get tired of backtracking than people who don't like the skipping feature.  That's my prediction.

Well I guess when someone says the moon is smaller than an elephant then we're all doomed.

But...but the moon is so tiny, and elephants are so very, very large.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the extraction process.  I have a bottle of lemon extract and I added it to some icecream.  It tasted exactly like "fake" lemon flavor.  So really, I think the fake flavor is what you get when you concentrate the real flavor and then water it down again.  It's like lossy compression formats or something.

 it may seem like it but i did read the rules.

I think you have identified the problem right there.  The act of reading the rules is less important than appearing as though you have read the rules.  I've read through them a couple of times since I signed up, but I'll be the first to admit that I don't remember what every rule is  (probably could do with a reread, now that I think about it).  But I haven't gotten into much trouble here, because I'm familiar enough with the types of behavioral expectations that generally accompany message boards with moderate standards of conduct and rule enforcement.  So I generally behave appropriately to the setting without having to think about it.

You don't have the luxury of a "natural" tendency follow the rules right now, because you haven't internalized them yet.  It really is a learned thing.  Spend enough time on forums like this one, and you'll eventually catch on.  Until then, it might not hurt you to be a little extra careful.

One thing you might try doing is reading (or scanning) the rules again every time you start a new thread.  Both the main forum rules, and the rules for the subforum you are posting in.  This sounds really boring and time wasting, especially since you have already read them, but you shouldn't have to do it too many times before you catch on.  I would also do this when people start "piling on" as you say.  See if you can find the rule they say you are breaking, read it carefully, and do your best to follow it in the future.  If you can't find the rule in question, try asking in as polite terms as possible where the rule is that you are breaking.  Make sure they know that you looked.  Most likely someone will be happy to point it out for you (whether or not they do so politely).

Scarab pointed out a couple of specific rule violations.  What you need to learn to do is spot them on your own and prevent them from happening.  Try to improve, and most importantly try to make it "look" like you are trying to improve, because it is true that any number of things could be happening on your end, but unless they are obvious to people on the forum, not everyone is going to assume the best.

To put this another way: I have often seen you say that you do read the rules and listen to the advice people give you (personally, I am inclined to believe you, for what it's worth).  The problem is that some people are not seeing evidence that these are things you are doing.  So what you need to do is manipulate people into believing that you follow rules and listen to advice.  Get inside their heads as best you can and ask yourself "if I were this person, what would Icey have to do to make me think he was following rules and taking advice."

If you want to check distance in an ellipse instead of a rectangle, you can use this function.  It will register the y distance as 1.9 as many pixels as it actually is,  which should be the equivalent of your x <= 200 and y <= 120, if I did my math right.

Code: ags

function GetDistance(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2) { //Gets the length (in pixels) of a straight line between x1/y1 and x2/y2. Assumes bird's-eye view where y=1.9x
  int xdis = (x1 - x2);
  if (xdis < 0) { xdis = (-1 * xdis); }
  int ydis = FloatToInt(IntToFloat(y1 - y2)*1.9); //y to x equivalence
  if (ydis < 0) { ydis = (-1 * ydis); }

  if (ydis == 0) { return xdis; }
  else if (xdis == 0) { return ydis; }
  else { return FloatToInt(Maths.Sqrt(IntToFloat(((ydis)* (ydis))+(xdis)*(xdis))), eRoundNearest); }
}

EDIT: Oh.  Looks like you figured it out.  Nevermind, then.

Hello faggetsyou need to shut up & eat a fuking dick because yahll faggets talking about games suck butyou guys suck dick why don'tyou nerd ass fagets go somewhere and fuk yourself wirddo ass fagets you fageet go problemms keep talking shit & ima kill all ofyou

Ah.  Welcome to AGS, Cosmoschange.  Not sure you're helping your friend's case much, though, if that was your intention.  

Clearly there has been criticism of Icey's games and posting style here, and some of it has been much harsher than necessary.  Mean spirited, even.  It is noble of you to come to his defense, but all you have really accomplished here is to make yourself look like a homophobe.  It is unlikely that you are truly willing and able to follow through with your death threats, which makes it look as though you are posturing--that is, attempting to make people think of you as more dangerous than you probably are.  People do see this, and it will probably make it difficult for them to take you seriously.  Your insults were also a bit generic--they don't make you look superior by any metric I can think of, nor are they creative or personal enough to be either funny or offensive.

Icey has been slow to adapt to some of the rules and norms on this forum.  A lot of people have become frustrated with him for that reason.  It's an unfortunate situation.  I don't personally think it is necessarily beyond remedy, but a lot of people do, and there have already been calls to have him banned.  By showing up here and hurling about blanket insults on his behalf, you are further damaging his reputation and lending credibility to the calls of people who want him removed.  If such happens, Icey will lose access to one of the best resources there is on learning to use AGS, if indeed he still intends to continue using it.  So when I say you are not doing him a favor, I do not mean that as a personal insult--I mean that your choice of actions could quite literally be a contributing factor in real negative consequences for him.

I know there isn't but is there anything close to Room.CharacterCount/player.InventoryItemCount?

I've faced a similar problem in my on again off again RPG engine project.  The best workaround I was able to come up with is a custom function that checks all the characters in the game and and returns that number of characters in the room.  I was using it along with some funky array business, so I had to call the function every time a new room was loaded or the the Character.ChangeRoom function was called (ended up making a custom function for changing rooms, just so I wouldn't forget.  Not very eloquent.)  But you can probably just make something like

Code: ags

function RoomCharacterCount() {
  int c=0;
  int count=0;
  while (c<Game.CharacterCount) {
    if (character[c].Room == player.Room) {  count++;  }
    c++;
  }
  return count;
}

The only reason you might want to bother with arrays is if you want to make character numbers relative to the room that you can cycle through.

Only problem I can think of is the loops might start to add up and cause slowdown, especially if you have a lot of characters.  But probably not a huge issue.

Wow. Just wow. So I guess Straight OSD is a ninja, gay OSD is a pirate, and bisexual OSD is a vampire? The mind, it boggles.

Something like that.  Bisexual might be a little too clean a term, though.  Clearly this is an iteration of an entirely straight character whose sexuality is being hijacked by the malevolent forces of fan fiction.  The implications are probably sinister.

EDIT:  I meant for the Draco Malfoy + FFSUOSD world domination plot thread to go nowhere, but if anyone wants to run with it, go right ahead.  
Also I wholely realize and accept the implications of entering my Mary Sue into an opensource multiverse.  All fates are now open to him (including the horrendous and vaguely disturbing ones), and as long as it doesn't get too personal, I'm not gonna complain.
EDIT 2: Oughtn't someone start a wiki page with links to all the games/stories and also timelines and a character list?  Seems we're about there.

That is the damn stylingest pimp I've ever seen. Perfect! But Straight Universe Oceanspirit Dennis (SUOSD) is most definitely a ninja private eye.

I can't wait to read the wacky fan fiction.

You asked for it mate.

In the long tradition of crossover slash fiction depicting canonically straight characters in homosexual relationships, I give you...

Draco Malfoy and the Scourge of the Underworld!  (Rated M for explicit and erotic sensuality and graphic depictions of violence against the English language.  Read at your own risk.  Also drug use and some cusses.)

And here's the Source Code.

EDIT: My Immortal?  What's that?
EDIT 2:  Ah.  And no intent to hijack, but I wasn't sure where better to post it.  Game is brilliant.

Tha-that's possible?

I can see writing how you talk (with punctuation and all that, you know) but writing out an actual stutter is going annoyingly too far (much like your other thread).

I'm actually surprised no one else has commented on that.

To be fair, mate, that was hardly excessive as textual stutters go, and I'm pretty sure I've seen professional writers use it in dialogues.  And if not professionals, definitely amateur writers of reasonable quality.

You're probably not the only person who finds it annoying, but it's a bit of a subjective thing.  Some people will find it a little cutesy; some people won't bat an eye.  I suspect (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that if one of the regulars said the same line, you might have been less inclined to comment.

At any rate, I don't know how someone should be expected to know to avoid that or similar mannerisms ahead of time, so it seems a little more understanding would be in order, whether or not you feel that airing this particular preference is necessary.  I mean, I know that your post wasn't anywhere near as harshly worded as some of the stuff in the other thread, but it does have a sort of condescending (is that the word? Passive-Aggressive?) vibe to it.

(Serious question: Would it be stepping on toes to start a civil, reasoned discussion on newbie policy in a thread where such is actually on topic?  I know some forum administrations get a little [understandably] touchy about people debating that sort of stuff publicly.)

ON TOPIC:  Yeah, there are some pretty good non-Squares.  Suikoden has a good reputation.  I played the first one, and it was alright, bur not my favorite.  There's an RPG maker game called Exit Fate that is sort of a tribute to Suikoden, and it is a pretty enjoyable game in its own right.  Lots of characters to recruit, political intrigue, big battles thrown into the mix.

The Wild Arms series is sort of Final Fantasy with a Wild West motif and some sort of Zelda-esque puzzles thrown in for good measure.  I played number 5 recently and the writing and voice acting were pretty bad.  It had a colonial/class conflict thing goin' on, which was interesting, but mostly handled pretty clumsily.  I liked the first 2 games a lot when I played them. 

The thing with Square, is that they tended to avoid overly generic anime and/or medieval "Europe" sorts of settings.  Even when they did use those settings, they were usually well realized enough that they felt fresh.  There were a lot of games like Breath of Fire, Beyond the Beyond, Dragon Warrior, Golden Sun that were all decent enough (even well-loved) games in their own right, but that I was never able to get into as much because they just felt so generic.

I did play Tales of Phantasia, and the first two Star Oceans, but didn't manage to finish any of them.

Fascinating.  I don't think I've ever seen a bot on a forum be--no wait.  The spam bots.  I don't think I've ever seen a bot mod a forum before.

And yes, obviously too many repeat offenses should be expected to be dealt with, one way or another.

Gilbet:  Wait.  I assumed it was a joke.  Is there actually an auto-banning mechanism, here?

EDIT:  Ah.  I guess I do get a little long winded, sometimes.  (Often!)  It seems a little rude to just assume he isn't going to read it, though.

Tha-that's possible?

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible, from a coding standpoint.  Deleting and/or banning accounts is something pretty much any message board software can do, and it is already keeping track of the times of people's posts.  That said, I've never heard of any one rigging a forum to auto-ban/erase for double posting.  He's probably lying to you.  Probably.

Still, on this forum (and many others), there are rules against posting multiple times in a row (that is, posting once, and then posting again in the same thread without anyone else posting in between).  I think it is generally perceived as visual clutter.  There may also be a bandwidth issue involved, though I couldn't say how significant it is.  The accepted thing to do if you have more to add to a thread which you already have the last post in, is to modify the post that is already there, and just add what you wanted to say to the bottom.  It helps to say something like "EDIT:" before the added text, so that people looking over the thread who have already read your post will see that something has been added to it.

If what you are adding is really important, you can also copy the text of the first post, delete it, and then post a new post with the old text pasted in and the new text added.  This will look just like an edited post, but it has the additional feature of alerting people that new information has been added to the thread.  I wouldn't do this too often though, because you'll start to look like you are trying to artificially boost your post's priority.  Save it for adding game changing information to threads that are already a few days to weeks old.

By "game changing," I mean information that sheds new light on the discussion or takes it in a different (though still on-topic) direction.  As opposed to saying something like "Oh and by the way, I agree with Lyaer," which is always appreciated, but doesn't bring anything new to the table.

EDIT: You know what?  This forum might not let you delete posts.  I can't find a button that does it, anyway.  So last bit might be moot.

EDIT 2, for on-topicness: I love this genre.  Or I did.  My early teenage years benefitted greatly from the likes of Final Fantasy and Wild Arms, Chrono Trigger, Earth Bound, and a number of obscure fan translations of Japanese only SNES games like Treasure Hunter G and Live A Live.

Nowadays the only ones I feel really comfortable admitting that I like are Earthbound and its sequel, Mother 3.  Maybe Xenogears.  Maybe.  But the fact is, most of these games have absolutely atrocious writing, and as someone who has mostly been interested in stories in his games, I feel like the main draw has been kind of yanked out from under me by my education.  Earthbound and Mother 3 get a free pass, because while their writing isn't exactly "good," per se, they have managed to embrace the sort of clunky, heavy handed style that is endemic in the genre, up the quirkiness by a few orders of magnitude, and then plow on with such unnerving sincerity that it becomes almost a commentary on the genre as a whole, if not a profound experience in its own right.

The more serious games, though.  They need more traditionally "good" plots and dialogue.  Some of them might have.  I don't know.  But I'm afraid to go back and play most of my old favorites, because I'm afraid I will find out that actually, they were really bad.

If I do, Xenogears and the Chrono games will be first on my list.

That said, I would love to make my own contribution to the genre, someday.  I have ideas for both serious and more surreal, Earthbound-esque RPGs that I think could be rather fun, if implemented correctly.

Western RPGs never really hooked me.  They failed to involve me with the characters enough, and on the whole, they seem to have a little less variety in their worlds and plots, since 90% of them want to be Dungeons and Dragons.  But to be fair, I haven't explored that subgenre as thoroughly.  And the adventure game hybrid series Quest for Glory, which does fit somewhere in the western fantasy RPG tradition, is an old favorite of mine.

Great work.  Looks better already.  One thing: if you separate text with a comma (,), the text on both sides of the comma is still part of the same sentence.  Same goes for colons (:), semicolons (;), dashes (-), and parentheses ( () ), et cetera.  Therefore, you don't need to capitalize letters after any of these characters.  Characters that are used to separate sentences are periods (.), exclamation points (!), question marks (?), and sometimes ellipses (...).  So if you use one of those to end a thought, then your next thought should begin with a capital letter.

Sometimes ellipses are used in the middle of a sentence, for effect.  Like:
"I wouldn't say he is ugly; he's just...aesthetically challenged."
It's still one sentence, so you probably wouldn't capitalize "aesthetically."

But if you end the sentence with an ellipse, like:
"I am sad..."
If you write another thought after that, it will be a different sentence, and would begin with a capital letter.

And no problem, I can for sure PM you once school is out.  But if I forget, and you don't hear from me before the 15th or so, feel free to PM and tell me what a neglectful bastard I am.

EDIT:  Read back a couple pages.  I see you have been capitalizing on and off.  Missed that.  Sorry.  Keep up the good work.