Messages

Pom Poko?

, what he forgot. But

Here's an idea, what if we promote making MAGS games open source, so that future MAGS games can use assets from previous MAGS games?
Or is that a terrible idea?

I mostly cater for Stella. Can you really balance it? Puzzles and story seem to be at the expense of each other: the story flows and the puzzles are the roadblocks. The more you accommodate general puzzles, the more your story becomes like a premise (Myst, The Witness). On the other end, the tighter your puzzles are woven into the story, the less obtuse they have to become. e.g. You can't excuse solving towers of Hanoi to open the hero's front door if you want the world to be taken seriously.

I disagree. While most adventure games do indeed treat puzzles like that, I find that the best puzzles don't act as roadblocks to the story, but instead compliment the story.
Through the use of puzzles, you can learn things about the characters, their likes and dislikes, and the world around them. Because you're having to observe and interact with everything to figure out the solution.
If the puzzle is simply about being given a task, and then solving that task so you can move on. Then yeah, the puzzles are at the expense of the story. But if the task for the puzzle is also a puzzle, you're participating in the story while solving the puzzle.
The only problem is, this is difficult to do, so everyone just chooses one or the other. Even the best and most popular adventure games do this. But surely you can think of a few puzzles here and there, that embody what I mean.

One example I can think of is on Chaos on Deponia, where Goal's personality is split into three. You have to make each personality fall in love with you, that's the task. But the way you do it, perfectly exemplifies what I mean. Thanks to this rather lengthy puzzle, you learn about each personality, and how they are all aspects of the same person, while at the same time learning about the world around you, and the people inside that world, and the history and relationships of those people. If you were to somehow turn that game into a movie, that puzzle would have to remain, since it's so integral to the plot. It's not a roadblock to the story, it is the story.

[More teams]

The reason why I've only participated in one MAGS so far, is because it's a month long commitment.
You need to mentally prepare yourself ahead of time, that you will be working on this game almost every day for a month. And then you either wait for a theme that you like, or just choose a month and try your best to work within whatever theme gets chosen for that month.

Not only that, but a lot of people can take a month coming up with the design of a game, but with a MAGS, you've got one day to design the majority of the game, with changes needing to be made as you make the game.

It's fun participating in MAGS, but it can be stressful.

Unfortunately, everything I just wrote is just about my experiences, and has nothing to do with improving MAGS participation. I honestly don't know how to improve participation, other than trying to enforce it as a teaching tool for newbies, and trying to get people from outside the AGS community to participate. Neither of which I think is possible.

More teams - If you have an idea but think you'll be busy, make a team. Team games are always welcome and the games borne from teams and parnerships are always really good. The thread itself is a great place to offer and ask for help. Also try IRC, Discord, Twitter. Some folks who don't often check the thread might be willing to partner up if you approach them outside the forum.

Maybe I should try participating in a MAGS again, but try and form a team. How easy is it to do that?

Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed?

I realise that the title of this thread means people should be careful when entering, but still, there isn't a need to make the spoilers SO obvious!

Alright, I've put my whole comment in spoiler tags. But the game is six years old. If you haven't played it yet, intend to play it, and haven't heard about that ending, then you need to stop living under a rock and learn some time management. (No offence Stupot.)

I remember having that ending spoiled by Telltale Games themselves, when they stated why they didn't include Lee in Poker Night at the Inventory 2. And that was only a year after the game was made.

Also, I read somewhere that getting spoilers, can actually make you enjoy something more. I don't know if that's true, but I've certainly never had an experienced ruined by knowing an ending. Not even the twist ending of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was spoiled for me years before I even knew it was a book.

It feels like everything has been done already, and that everyone is extremely experienced and talented...

Don't worry if you feel like everything has been done already. Because everything was done decades ago. There are no original ideas, only ideas that combine little bits from a bunch of other things.

And also, not everyone here is extremely experienced and talented. Just look at me.

Welcome to the forums and good luck.

Spoiler

The first and second Walking Dead by TellTale, I cried when little Clem had to kill Lee.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot about that one. Yeah, that made me cry too. Although I don't think that I made Clem kill Lee. I think I got her to just abandon him, because I didn't want her to have to live with having killed Lee.
It was so long ago though that I played that game, that I might be mis-remembering that. Was that an option?

[close]

[9]

Ah yeah, try updating DirectX9 also.
As DirectX version 10 onwards are not a replacement of DirectX9, recent versions of Windows (starting from WIN Vista I think) actually contain both the newest version of DX and DX9, and will fall back to using DX9 if an app needs it.
However, M$ always ships a really old version of DX9 with their Windows installation and it's never updated automatically anymore(probably intentional, considering it's M$). By hunting down an updated version of DX9.0c and install it manually in your system some of these problems may be solved.

Yeah, I think they did that to get more people to use Windows Vista, since they made sure DirextX10 didn't work on Windows XP.
I think they might have done it again with another DirectX on Windows 8 and/or Windows 10.
If I'm wrong though, please correct me. I'm going based on vague memories here.

- now you're almost done but you need with two final (optional) steps : noise reduction (to keep it crisp but make it less busy by reducing rogue pixels) and color reduction (to give it an old-timey look while not making it look like a crappy gif)
- you can achieve noise reduction by using "XiMagic denoiser" (free demo plugin for Photoshop)
- you can achieve color reduction by using the "posterize" filter (not very pretty) or the free demo of the "XiMagic quantizer" Photoshop plugin.

I find the best way to handle colour reduction, is by using GIMP. That does an absolutely brilliant job at creating dithering effects, and allows you to choose the exact number of colours you want as well. Brilliant if you want to create something along the line of MI2's backgrounds.

Plus it's free, and looks incredible.

How often do people actually visit the front page?

Well, it is the first thing a new person sees.

And it's often the page that people will bookmark, if they haven't joined the forum yet.
It really does need updating.

Except that he forgot.

Any more for any more?

I would've gladly participated this month, since I absolutely love the theme (it really gets the creative juices flowing).
But I knew I wouldn't have time to finish it.

I really hope some other people manage to join though.

"Damn, I forgot!" he

1. I could definitely see this working as an adventure game. Since all of the adventure game mechanics and the kid talking to himself, will all be a part of his insanity, and probably creep everyone else out. I'm not so sure about the "regaining his sanity before hurting his mother" bit. It sounds like it would be much easier and more entertaining for the whole game to be about him slowly losing his sanity, until you accidentally hurt your mother and then snap out of it. You could slowly increase the game mechanics you have access to, to show the loss of sanity. And if you could get the player to kill the mother without realising it until it's too late, then you'll have a great game on your hands.

2. It would probably be annoying having the character constantly not want to do obvious things because of his germaphobia. Also, I wouldn't want to imagine the amount of detail you'd have to put into the backgrounds to make them all look filthy.

3. How exactly would the kitten "power up"? Point and Click adventure games don't tend to have that feature. Instead they'll just give you more inventory items to work with. I guess you could give more commands to use. But overall this sounds like it would be a very long and linear adventure. Which could be just what you're looking for.

4. Sounds like a perfect plot for an episode of The Twilight Zone. It just needs a twist ending.

5. I like the sound of this one, but does it have to be about the boy stopping his grandparents from losing the farm? I think I'd rather much more enjoy a "Coming of age" story, where it's about the boy learning to live unplugged, getting new friends, something bad happens, and he then leaves more mature. You know, rather than the kid movie tropes which usually involve a couple of bumbling bad guys that would gladly murder a child (have you ever noticed that in those types of films?).

remembered the obvious secret.

NCIS?

Sam and Max?

monkeys was well known