Messages

Alright!  I haves the truth in my mouth.  Brilliant.

Don't thank me yet, though.  Reputation is still a big part of getting people to work with you, and the anime sort of style you use might not be what a lot of people are looking for (it seems like most people either love that style or hate it, but if you look at most of the games produced here, you'll see that they tend to shoot for either a more realistic style or one based more in the western cartoon tradition, so it may be safe to infer that that is what most people are looking for.)  But you can still draw, which is more than a lot of coder/writer types can say for themselves, and there may be some anime lovers lurking in the shadows.

The best advice you can take is to follow advice.  There's a good bit of it in this thread, and some of it isn't worded very nicely, but a lot it is still probably worth taking.  I see grammar come up a lot.  I think your grammar has improved even over the course of this thread.  That's a good thing.

I can sympathize with this one, because when I first started on the internet, I didn't know where to put a period.  One of the first places I posted was on a role playing forum.  After a couple of (really, really terrible) posts in my first game there, the guy running it got (understandably) frustrated with and said "you can keep playing with us, but for God's sake, use periods."  I wasn't very confident that I knew the right place for a period at the time, but I used them anyway, and tried to imitate the better writers as well as I could, and after a year of role playing there, one of my teachers told me I was one of the best writers in my high school.  (Mileage may very.  And it was a small school that only went up to grade ten, so the accomplishment isn't THAT huge, but the point is, keep at it and you'll get better.)

You seem to have periods down okay, but keep working on them.  I know spelling and punctuation are kind of stupid and pointless, once you've gotten to the point where people know what you are trying to say, but when people who use more or less proper punctuation, etc. read things written by people who don't, we tend to read them slightly differently in our heads.  There are a lot of tiny subtleties to pronunciation in English.  So for instance the letter "u" doesn't end up sounding the same as the word "you" and the letter "X" sounds slightly different than the combo "ks" so that "that sux" and "that sucks" sound just a little different.  It might even be more of an association thing than it is the actual sound, but regardless, when a lot of people read that stuff, it sounds a bit like funny, broken English in their heads, and it can have an unfortunate negative effect on their impressions of the writer.  I'm not going to attempt to defend this way of thinking, because it is kind of unfair, not to mention anal, but it still stands that the better your writing is, the more intelligent people will tend to think you are--and the more likely they will be to take you seriously and treat you politely.

I'd say probably the best thing you could do right now is to try to get into the habit of capitalization.  I don't know if this is very easy on your phone or not, but it should be possible, and you shouldn't need to do it more than a couple of times per sentence.  Just capitalize the first letter of every sentence, any names, and "I" when you use it to refer to yourself.  I bet you anything, just that and keeping on with the periods will make people take you a little more seriously.  Because it happens at the beginning of a sentence, it is also the first thing people will see when they read your posts, so in a way you could say that even iffy capitalization will literally give you a good first impression.  So seriously, just pay attention to this paragraph and ignore everything else that I say.

Apologies if you have learned more grammar than your posts show and it seems like I am talking down to you.  That is not my intent.  I figure sometimes it just helps to hear the same stuff a few times until it clicks.

Regarding RPGs:  I've been working on an RPG battle system for a while now, with the up to date versions of AGS.  It isn't very cleanly coded, and if I ever get around to using it, I would rather keep it unique, so I won't share it with you. However, I would be happy to help you work through some of the concepts involved if you drop me a PM.  Explaining what I have done would help me wrap my mind around what I am doing better, anyway, so it could be a mutually beneficial transaction, and it wouldn't clutter the board so much.

I won't be able to discuss it a lot for the next couple of weeks, since I've got some projects due and Finals coming up.  After that I will be relatively free, however.

What's wrong with teaming up with someone?
Seriously, good games are rarely made by one man. Having a team project allows each member to focus on what's he/she is best at (writing story/drawing/coding etc).
Since you have pretty nice drawing skills, but have problems scripting rpg engine in AGS, you can seek for someone with better scripting skills to help you out.
Maybe you could even find another FF fan ))

To Icey
Yeah seriously, mate.  If you have what it takes to work with another person, stick with a project, and compromise when your teammate(s) have their own ideas for the story/design elements (and really from what I have seen in this thread, you look like you are relatively open to that particular kind of input) you are actually in a pretty good position.  Granted, your reputation in these parts seems to have taken a bit of a hit, but there are a lot of competent scripters around who are not very good artists and would kill for a chance to work someone who has an easier time in that area.

If you can find someone who is willing to work with you, it might be worth a shot.  Though I'll be frank--you might have a slightly better chance if you offer your services, rather than asking people to join your project, at least for your first game.  People don't seem to like you very much right now, unfortunately, but you definitely have something to offer a project.  If you do good work with/for someone else's game, you'll get some great experience and maybe win some respect back.  Though at this point I wouldn't really blame you if you thought it wasn't worth it.  A lot of these guys have been absolute jerks to you (no offense, guys).

I'm inclined to agree with you if we are talking about a game of any real length or quality.  The idea though, as I see it, is to learn work for a deadline, structure projects around whatever limitations are present, set realistic goals, and get a feel for the overall shape of game design from beginning to end.  The idea then is that the next time you make a game you will have a better idea of what you are doing, and thus even with a longer project, you will have a better probability of completion and a higher quality product.  If you start small and work up, the theory is that a) you will get progressively better at making games, more comfortable with the process, and more disciplined when it comes to trudging through the rough patches until you are finally ready to tackle the kinds of ambitious projects you initially hoped to make or b) you will get progressively better at making games, more comfortable with the process, and more disciplined when it comes to trudging through the rough patches and eventually come to the conclusion that your original ideas were unrealistically huge and start working on high quality projects that are actually within your means.  Either way, you benefit yourself and the community as a whole by releasing some great games that before were not forthcoming.

But if you can work a year on a game and make a substantial dent in the process with no significant signs of getting too burned out to continue, then you're right.  Nothing wrong continuing for another year, or however long it takes you to finish.  Lots of great games remain in development for a huge length of time.

I think the problem of most of the people who have posted in this thread is not so much that "I had this great idea for a game and I've been working on it steadily but it is taking longer than I thought it would" as "for whatever reason, the extent of my output before I get burned out by a project is far too small, especially when considered in the context of the scope of my ideas for the finished product."  Though of course that may be projection on my part.

The current talk of projects on the days to a week scale has more to do with trusting eachother and ourselves on a group project than on the actual upper limit of time to be put into a first game.

Regarding the difficulty of long deadlines versus short ones: Short games shouldn't necessarily be harder, because the actual size of the games is being scaled to meet the deadline, and because the deadline is so short, it is somewhat easier to predict the actual amount of work that can be done in the available amount of time.  Also with shorter deadlines, the probability of getting burned out midway through the process is much lower, because the end is always in sight.  If you are trying to make a masterpiece, an epic, an otherwise  ambitious project, or the same project you are already spending months on, though, then your right; that will be a lot harder with a shorter deadline.

Regarding the group projects:  I think we  should keep this mostly limited to people with some degree of experience who have none the less not completed the games that the hoped to.  However my current gut feeling is that what we will end up with is a lot of passable coders and writers, but that many if not all teams will lack members with competence or speed with art and music.  What do people think of the possibility of opening the event to newbies and/or veterans who have some skill in one or both of these areas?  Should any feel inclined to join, that is.

This sounds very nice on paper, although I can't help but foresee it failing.

Literally everyone in a given team would have proven that they do not have the drive to see something through to the end (me included). This does not mean, of course that everyone will give up, but the chances are high that at least someone in every team will, which will wreak havoc with the rest of the team, causing delays and whatnot....

However, I think this has potential to work with smaller teams, shorter games, and shorter time-frames. Say 48-72 hours or so. This is a small enough length of time that aspects in one's real life can be accurately predicted, forces you to avoid 'epic' projects that bog us down, and puts you under enough time pressure to keep the ball rolling the whole way through the project. It is also small enough that we can have several rounds of this, one after the other.

A fast game-turnover also allows you to assess the abilities and drive of other members with less risk, and then you can have iteration with each round of the project, meaning the teams (and hopefully the games) get better and better.

Excellent points.  So rather than a month-to-a-season scope (again with the impulse to make little things bigger, eheh) maybe something on the couple-days-to-a-week time scale would be more appropriate.  With my own slowish work pace I would personally hesitate to join a project that lasted only two or three days (though I could probably be convinced to give it a try--it does help encourage the multiple rounds sort of thing), but I know the movie I made a few years back took me two weeks, so with a team, I don't think one week is unreasonably short at all.

It may help to outline contingencies during the planning stage to adjust for members who quit early or don't pull their weight, though we'd also want to make sure that people don't think "oh, I can quit whenever, it's cool."  So as always that closeness of realism to defeatism is an issue.

An experiment like this may take a couple trials, and maybe it won't work, but even if one just team finishes a game, I'd say worth trying.

My guess is Abandonia just didn't want to risk treading on LucasArts' toes by providing a download for an unofficial remake of one of their games.  Probably it's just the original Maniac Mansion that is ESA protected?

Same boat, here.  All I have to show for the almost decade I've been lurking here on and off is a short movie based on a chat room conversation and a proof of concept for a minecart mini-game.  Also some unfinished projects, and "valuable experience." 

I find that I am okay at scripting, but that I tend to want to challenge myself, and quickly get in over my head.  I also find myself getting worn out very quickly from spriting and especially animating.  I have a tendency to think of overly huge, epic projects, and even when I think of something smaller, it invariably spirals out of control the longer it sits around in my head.  The part of design that I am probably best at is writing, but even that gets difficult as I've tended to get more perfectionistic as time goes on (I took a creative writing course recently, which finally convinced me of the necessity of drafts and rewriting (overall, a very good thing), but it also made me care whether my stories have some sort of literary merit, so).

I'm convinced that I am perfectly capable of producing a game of at least passable quality in every area except music, which I have far too little experience with.  I just get repeatedly overwhelmed, if not by my own ambition, then by the lack of structure in my planning process and the sheer volume of artwork involved.  The end result is that I will get extremely motivated for a day or so--no more than a couple of weeks--and I'll get a few sprites done, or a chunk of code, and then I'll get burnt out and distracted, or more important things will come up, and I won't feel motivated to continue for some time.

Not that any of this is insurmountable, of course.  Just showing solidarity with my fellow non-productives.

For a long time I've found collaboration an intriguing concept.  I've tried collaborating before, on long term projects, and my experience is that people tend to get unreliable.  Myself included.  But while they were still going strong, those projects were a lot of fun, and easier to stay motivated on than solo projects.  Until I am convinced of my own long term reliability, I don't want to work with anyone on a long term project, or involve anyone else in one of my own.  With a short game, though, I think teaming with someone could be a really positive thing.

At the risk of treading a little close to recruit a team territory, I have a proposal:

What if a few of us people who haven't finished a real first game yet started from scratch on one this summer?  Say mid June, when most people are out of school (at least in the US, dunno how it is other places, but we can flex for that).  The goal would be to release a short to shorter-medium game of at least mostly decent quality before the end of the summer.  If there is a lot of interest we could split off into groups of two to maybe four or five tops.  Then we meet in a chat and brainstorm.  Maybe enter MAGS or another competition, or just set our own deadline, depending on the scope of what we are trying for.  Doesn't have to be a whole summer long, but that would be the absolute upper limit. 

We come up with an idea that is small, but that everyone is happy with.  Then we tally our strengths, weaknesses, and interests and divvy out the work (team management, coding, writing, art and animation, music, puzzle design) accordingly.  If there is something nobody is good at, we find a way to work with it, or recruit someone else who can help us.  Then we keep in touch.  Weekly, twice weekly, bi-daily, or daily team meetings, depending on project length, and have individual team members collaborate with eachother in the interim, as needed.

Would anyone else be interested in something like this?

I haven't personally been able to find any setting like that.  I might look again later, but both the control panel and the set-up thing that comes with the tablet seem to focus pretty much on the more superficial behavior.  What constitutes a click, whether to map the tablet to the screen or use it relative to current position, et cetera.

It may be worth noting that when I use the mouse that comes with my tablet, I have no problems.  It's just the pen (or rather when one of them is mapped to the absolute screen position) that I get this behavior.

The main thing I remember is that conversations felt a lot more fulfilling in the original, because you had to pay attention and ask about things that made sense, instead of getting a generic dialogue tree that would let you pick a person's brain in a few seconds + reading time.

Oh man, if they buy the rights they could totally C&D all the other King's Quest fan projects.  Wouldn't that be a plot twist.

On a more serious note, could this be the beginning of a trend of fans buying up the rights to dead game franchises and then releasing them to the public domain?

This is potentially great news, though of course talking is still talking, so time will tell.

Hopefully whatever deal they come to allows them to finish their trilogy.  Looked like that wasn't going to happen even before the C&D.  It would kind of suck for them to go through all this just to release an unfinished product, though I guess even that is preferable to having to toss out ten years of work.

Great work on Blackwell, as I recall.

Anyway, since a fairly high proportion of this community's output is non-commercial in nature and since you didn't mention anything about this in the original post, it seems relevant to ask: Are you primarily interested in paid work or would you consider going pro bono on a freeware project if you found one particularly worthy of your time? 

No value judgment, here--obviously a guy's gotta eat.  Just curious.

If and when I consider making this a semi-regular activity, it will be more specific about what constitutes a valid project.

I've got a fair number of projects floating around in my head and a few that have enough work done on them to be considered properly abandoned.  I may try my hand at one of them this month, but realistically, I probably won't have time.  If you do decide to make a regular event out of this theme, I would definitely be interested.

I wouldn't worry too much.  Make a game you would want to play, and unless you are the world's more singularly unique person, you will probably be able to find an audience.  I would actually consider a sierra style game to be a pretty safe move, when it comes to getting an audience, because while it is true that a fair number of people dislike some aspects of the Sierra playstyle, it is also true that a huge subset of amateur adventure gamers grew up on King's Quest and other Sierra series, and still have a strong sense of nostalgia/loyalty for them.  I'd say the only aspect of Sierra games that would really risk alienating your player base are the dead ends.  It's still a design choice, but unless you market your game as an intentionally cruel and unforgiving game, people will probably get frustrated and complain.

Some adventure games are story games, and a handful of those manage to be genuinely compelling works of fiction, but having a fantastic and complex story is another thing that you don't really need to make an enjoyable game.  In fact, there are a lot of people who hate it when their games get bogged down in cut-scenes and dialogue and backstories, so if you do something straightforward and unobtrusive, there are people who will like you for that.

Guys I forgot to pick up the stamp and now I can't get back to the post office.  How do I send the letter?  Can I still finish?

Yeah, it really depends on how the game is done, but a game meeting that description could really fall anywhere from perfectly innocent to slightly uncomfortable.  Without actually including sex or nudity, it would probably have to try pretty hard before it became anything like straight up disturbing, but it could certainly be done.

But everyone knows that fifteen year olds think about sex and have sex and etc etc.  And while they may seem a little young, and are below the age of consent in most places, the idea of a fifteen year old seeking out sex with a peer is hardly some huge taboo secret.

There's a bit of weird out factor when two people of widely disparate ages hook up, and I get that there is always a chance that the necessary differences in amount of experience and societal role expectations could cause all sorts of problems.  But I say leave that to the couples to evaluate and deal with.

The only thing that really bothers me about these sorts of relationships is the possibility that it will lead to an imbalance of power.

But then, so can bread-winner/homemaker relationships, relationships between strong willed and submissive personality types, different levels of education, etc. etc.  Or so I would tend to think.  Honestly, I tend to suspect that every relationship involves some sort of power imbalance, so we need to be careful when it comes to regulating that sort of thing.

I have to say, I have never had a problem with games that are in actuality just movies you watch with your fingers on the controls, and I consider games like Dreamfall and Xenogears (well, XG was a legitimately challenging game, but it did have some monstrous cutscenes) among my all time favorites..  

Really, it kind of baffles me that some people are so adamantly opposed to these sorts of game-movie hybrids.  I mean, I can't think of anyone I know who enjoys games, but doesn't also enjoy movies, so what is it that's so poisonous about the mixture?  Is it just the associations people have with the word "game"?  I get it that "game" implies something you play, not something you watch, and so doing too much of the latter might disrupt some expectations, but game's just a label.  It isn't a crime to use it loosely.  Or if you prefer precision in language, say "interactive film" or something.  I've seen that term or similar tossed around a bit, but I still see people balk at it.  Like it's pretentious or something.  And maybe it is used pretentiously sometimes, like "haha my thing defies the current categorical system.  That makes it deep."  But it doesn't have to be that way.  I mean, really all it needs to mean is "its a story where you get to press buttons, but which doesn't meet the criteria to be considered a game, per se."

Anyway, I think there are a few ways in which a story can really benefit from a game-like format, whether or not it tries to be a game also.  For one thing, the game as a medium has all or most of the capacities of the other major storytelling media: it can easily utilize text, visuals (both still and animate), and sound.  This gives it a lot of versatility.  It can imitate a book, movie, comic, probably even a radio drama with relative ease, and in many cases can even switch between media-styles rather seamlessly.

Another advantage is length.  This is mostly an advantage over film and theater, which are media that expect their audience to sit still for their entirety, and so will tend to alienate an increasing number of people the longer they go past the two hour mark.  But most games of any length expect the player to leave and return at their leisure, so they can afford to go on for a few tens of hours, or more, so long as they can fill the time well.  In this way they are more like books, or TV series.  But unlike a TV series, a game can be released as a complete product the first time around, and isn't confined to a format of episodes of a regular duration.

Of course there is the obvious advantage that interactivity adds the possibility of non-linearity.  You can introduce the idea of branching plotlines, multiple outcomes, be they in the form of success and failure or tricky moral (or other kinds of) decisions.  Stories are always dealing with the consequences of actions, and sometimes an excellent way to do that is to allow people to see consequences for alternative courses of action.  Though of course, nonlinearity is a double edged sword, if you want to tell a certain specific story--especially if you want to tell a story where the protagonist doesn't always pick the obvious "right" choice.  When there isn't much at stake, it is very easy to be good all the time, or evil all the time, but no matter how much is at stake for the protagonist, there isn't going to be much at stake for the player.

On a similar line of thought, interactivity allows a story potentially to evoke a feeling of personal responsibility in its audience, whether they are making the decisions or simply facilitating the decisions made by the player characters.  If a character in a movie does something bad, we aren't going to feel personally guilty, or if we do, it's only as an empathetic response.

Games also put their audience inside the bodies of their protagonists, in a way that can't be done in movies or books.  Even in games like Dreamfall, where there is really very little you actually do, you still have the illusion that you are there, walking around.  A movie can engage sight and sound, but a game can in a way engage a sort of proprioception.

Yet another advantage, is that a story in other media needs to be concise and focused, to one degree or another.  That is, if  there is a point to your story, sometimes certain subplots and bits of background info are only going to be irrelevant and detract from the narrative.  This is true in games, too, but there is more leeway, because now you can flesh out your world with optional content that may or may not have a baring on the main plot, and instead of distracting, it can add to the overall experience.

There are of course challenges too.  Certain types of stories aren't as easy to tell in an interactive medium, especially when your audience considers themselves to be playing a game.  For instance, tragic endings may leave players feeling cheated (many people already feel cheated by them, even in conventional media, but in games they actually had to work to earn that happy ending you just stole from them).

Also games don't lend themselves to the same literalism that is possible in books and films.  The more control the player has, the more they will be able to poke around at the world and spot the ways that it differs from reality.  You end up with abstractions like healthbars and inventories that serve as approximate representatives for our real world abilities to take different degrees of physical injury, and own and carry material possessions.  We get NPCs that repeat themselves constantly, representing conversations, or the generalized knowledge we have of what people around us tend to think.  Even the ways we interact with the world are symbolic.  Pointing and clicking, or pressing an arrow to represent walking, for instance.  In this way, I think games (especially retro games) are a little more like plays than they are like films, because while plays and games are visual, they both still leave a lot to the imagination.  

The point is, I think all of these things make the "game" into a unique and viable storytelling medium, even without things like puzzles, fighting, sleuthing, or even nonlinearity.  This isn't to say I think we should do away with these mainstays of gaming, but just that I don't understand why people are so quick to decry their absence in "games" and yet are perfectly happy to sit back and and read books or watch movies and TV shows.  I mean, ignoring the fact that most games have pretty weak storylines, and so are hard to sit through without fun or interesting gameplay.

EDIT: Also really like what Ethan said.

My first adventure games were King's Quest V and VI, which I played when I was 9 or 10 and no one had yet taught me that those two iconic mazes weren't fun.  They weren't.  But only because I was a skittish kid and was convinced that something would jump out at me at any moment, and I was quite horrified of the prospect.  Usually my brother or father would play those parts, while I darted in and our of the room, praying that nothing hideous would pop out and kill them while I was there, but too fascinated, enthralled to just leave until they finished.

I miss that kind of involvement.

At any rate, I've never felt like mazes were bad puzzle design when I've encountered them since.  Then again, I also enjoy sliding block puzzles, so my tastes are suspect.

Aren't most bugs just features in that one case where they don't work very well?

You could also say that the player is merely a voyeur, like all audiences, and the player character is his/her own entity entirely, except that there is an intersection wherein the part of the mind that solves problems is largely the same for each.  Even their motivations are different, really, because the character has some objective in the interest of which these problems must be solved, but the voyeur just wants to see what happens if the character succeeds, and may or may not have any preference as to what happens in the end.