Messages

A really inspiring topic, I may have to take some time out to work on this.

Perhaps I should've made this a BB instead...well I guess Akatosh is the winner!  Feel free to start another (hopefully more successful ) thread!

Paolo:

Spoiler

Check the exits in the wide room before the library

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LittleQueen:

Spoiler

The map and key are in the guard room which is very near the start.  If I remember correctly, from the start of the chapter cross the spikes, walk around the edge of the room and take the first exit to the left, then take the exit to the top.

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Others:

Spoiler

I'm also stuck in the garden.  I manged to get to the end by running straight for the exit, but not otherwise.  I go to the statue with the key, eat the purple fruit, go through the door, into the shed, turn the handle and then go to the web as fast as I can and arrive at the web fully formed.  My processor is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.21GHz.

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I'll play on if I'm missing something or if this is a bug that can be fixed, but I really can't be bothered to slow my processor, having already become stuck several times and hit 2 walking deads a third into the game.  Which is a shame, because it is rather fantastic otherwise.

Awesome song, trackers look so fun.

I never mastered the whole sampling business with trackers and end up making a silly tune with just a sine wave sample or some random noises, I couldn't find any nice samples.  As an offtopic, if anyone knows somewhere to get good free samples (Amiga-esque is a bonus) or to generate/edit very basic waves it is much appreciated (without stealing from other songs).

If you have a DS and flash cart there's NitroTracker, although it's not very functional yet.

I prefer to pixel because it feels very methodical.  I still sketch things first though since it's much faster and it's easier to throw away your image and start again.  I work best by sketching my work by hand until I nail the composition, perspective and details, and then sketch some skeletons and construction lines with a mouse or tablet (I blu-tack the sketch to the wall by my monitor).  Make a new layer for each draft until you have a fairly refined sketch, then start pixelling.

As far as hand-drawn against pixel art, I don't think there is really any argument: they are just different styles.  Some pixel art is really incredible, but the imperfections of hand-drawn art are also unique.  One style is very precise and scientific, the other is less precise and feels more organic.  I suppose the style you choose depends on what you're good at and what type of game you want to make.  Just be very careful if you decide to pixel a whole game above 320x240.

I've just skimmed over the 2nd page of this thread, but I have some opinions on the difficulty.  Version 1.0 was easy with experience and lives were too plentiful.  However replaying the game through exactly the same levels to increase score is to put it plainly boring after a while.  Getting much further than finishing all the rooms a first time should be very rare.  I'd suggest giving no lives at all for finishing and leave some lives in the rooms in mostly risky places.  What would be nice is if on subsequent playthroughs the lives decreased and moved to more dangerous locations.  Have you considered lives per score landmark (with increasing intervals possibly)?

Regarding the bridges, I thought the difficulty was a rocky road.  In v1.0 they started off easily enough, but were quite repetitive, and then the long stretches were very difficult until you notice that it's not random, where it then becomes very easy.  Version 1.1 seemed to use the complicated pattern earlier, and having gargoyles too was very difficult.  Something more like v1.0 for the bridges is better, but the gargoyles in later levels make some nice very hard parts.  I haven't reached the end outdoor levels, but on v1.0 these were a breeze.

The rest of the game was great fun, nice graphics and movement.  The soundtrack fits the game well too by the way.

[Imagine the player has an extremely interesting, difficult or plain wacky job. Draw a location they're likely to visit.]

In case you've been stuck in a time warp the past few months:

"Your objective is to create an adventure game mockup. This means that you must create a scene exactly as it would look as if you were playing a game. You must design the interface, the main character (if 3rd person view) or any other characters, and the background."

This 2-week we shall say NO to bland jobless characters.  Your task is:

Imagine the player has an extremely interesting, difficult or plain wacky job.  Draw a location they're likely to visit.

Some examples:

• A black-market dealer collecting and selling goods, set in a dark alley or a subway or an obsolete part of the sewers.
• A SCUBA diver searching for treasure, wrecks or fossils.
• Some supernatural being overlooking Earth or abusing their power for their own amusement.

Use this opportunity to draw locations you wouldn't usually think of drawing, and be innovative!  Don't forget to draw characters and a GUI!

No limit on resolution and colours.  Entries by 27 February at midnight (GMT).

Have fun!

Suicided once I got to 100k with 8 lives.  Damn your patience, nihilyst!

Haha, I was thinking of Teletubbies too!  That programme will be the death of us all.

I studied chemistry up to about the same level you're looking for, and really textbooks are going to be the fastest and most thorough way of studying.  If you can't stand your textbook look around the library, bookshop or online and get a better one, it'll certainly be worth your while.  My personal preference is that nice size between A4 and A5, paperback (so you can hold it easily), nice white pages and fairly large print without pages of continuous text.  I have some core textbooks that are pretty much doorstops they're so boring to read.

Try and dig out some other chemistry sources like online quizzes even if they aren't amazingly helpful (preferably made for your syllabus, but things like this should share some common ground: http://www.mp-docker.demon.co.uk/as_a2/index_salters.html), the odd wiki pages about things you find interesting in the text, and anything else.  Learning from lots of sources should help keep your attention longer.  Just be careful about revision games, they're very often boring and the learning content is piss poor.

Find out how long you have left and how long your textbook is.  Ideally you'll want to read it cover to cover, or read most of it and more boring topics from better sources.  How many pages per day or week do you have to average?  If you read constantly you'll get bored very quickly; find something that interests you that you can stop and start easily.  My strategy tends to be study from between 10 minutes to when you get really bored and you're daydreaming, then do something fun, but before you take a break plan when to stop (ie when your track or song you're playing stops, when the counterstrike map changes).  Then study again.  This may not work for you, finding something that does is important.

Try some easy and ideally all the hard questions in the textbook (or another textbook if it doesn't have any) depending on the grade you're after to break up the reading too.  The odd switch between book and pen and paper can be refreshing.  If you can, dig out past papers for your syllabus.  Once you finish a topic or chapter in the textbook pick out the questions you can do in the papers while they're still fresh in your mind.  Picking out trends in questions you're confident in can be quite relieving.  If you have an abundance of papers save a few for revision just before the exam.

[Super Mario Adventure]

Super Mario Adventure

Typical of the adventure genre, Mario now needs to solve long convoluted puzzles to achieve simple tasks such as jumping on Koopas or headbutting blocks.




x2, 55 colours, but 86 with the tint (couldn't find any nice lower colour alternative )

"Cheapest car in town, won't find anything less than 1,499.  How's about it, 1,499?  Tell you what love, since it's you I'll do you a deal - 1,450 and I'll throw in the steering wheel free of charge.  You don't get deals like that every day."


80x150, 20 colours


x2

DS looks very promising for adventure games, but the screens are 256x192 and I'm not sure how good scaling down will look.  Perhaps Nergal meant actually drawing and writing your games for DS?  I don't know how powerful the DS is, are AGS games capable of running?

The cheapness of making and running homebrew on DS is exciting though.  I might give it a try in the summer, when I've actually learnt C++ :

Ok, I'm fairly stuck now

Spoiler

Probably fixed in this new version, but I noticed that in the nutshell puzzle if you select an inventory item, then click 'use' and select a nutshell, the cursor returns to the inventory item instead of a blank cursor.  Also, if you then proceed to 'get' a nutshell the game will crash, same error except from 'on_event' from Global script line 211.

If you use the oven door while standing on it then the character walks down, then jumps up, which looks odd
You can refill your jar with molasses, is this intentional or can it lead to a walking dead?
If you're meant to fill the jar up again, you can stand on the oven door with an empty jar and when you try and fill it from the lake Red tries to take it from the oven door, which looks like she's pulling it out of the beehive.

You can talk to the ghost with your back to him, perhaps Red should be made to turn around.

Personally I found the cherry puzzle quite hard, and solved it by brute force.  The fuse seems to stick to the surface, so perhaps a litte depression or hole (where the stalk was?) would help.  Purely opinion.

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Please don't take my comments too seriously, I'm being picky because the game is worth it.  Still having a lot of fun, it's very immersive.  By the way, is Flim a reference to Howl's Moving Castle?  Nice one if so

Spoiler

Crash happens every time I try, both before and after beating the pirate.  Crashes instantly if you press the RMB somewhere on the scene (regardless of if the mouse is over a nutshell) and if you RMB on an inventory item you'll get the 'look' description, then the game crashes.  Can RMB on the rest of the GUI without crashing.

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Playing great so far, thought I'd post my comments so far while I work out what to do next

A crashing bug:

Spoiler

In the nutshell game, if I have an inventory item cursor and press right mouse button the game crashes:

Error: run_text_script1: error -6 running function 'repeatedly_execute':
Error: Null pointer referenced in Global script (line 169) from Global script (line 242)

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Other comments (some terrible nitpicking):

Spoiler

Extra "); after 'inches!' when talking to witch
King Neptune says "What king of crime?"
Tin Soldier says 'revieved'.  Should probably be c instead of v AND swap i and e.

The owl noises at klutzencastle are a little too loud
Perhaps the inventory cursors should be all in the top-left, or somewhere nearby.  It's odd sometimes having the icon move to the other side of the cursor (especially the comb)

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Really good game so far, I like the references (including your other project ) and the GUI has had particularly good attention, the system menu especially.

Been looking forward to this since the (quite recent) WIP thread, playing now...

I have a similar image as a poster, it's a popular design.

I've missed this thread until now, but I'm glad it's the OP that bumped it.  This game looks awesome and you seem very committed to it.  Best of luck getting it finished.

Finished 1-7 so far and only got T's on 1 and 2.  But I will finish it eventually.  I'm getting a little hung up on where RP are awarded and whether it's possible to permamently miss out any.  I've noticed that picking a door from both sides seems to earn twice the RP.

For people having lag try just restarting your computer.  I have a fairly decent machine but I find that once I run a resource-intensive program then even after quitting some other programs will lag a bit.  And as for the key mashing, alternate between the index fingers of both hands - it should improve your tapping speed quite a lot.