Messages

Space Cop?

You got it, your turn. 

I don't hunt or eat meat, but if I ever happen to come to South Africa, I'll drop by for some broccoli 

I would love to take part in a broccoli hunting safari! Any excuse to wear a pith helmet, really. 

You are more than welcome. And I'm serious. Bring your AK47.

7.62mm for wild broccoli? A light round like that may be suitable for feral Brussels sprouts or wild celery, but I wouldn't use anything less than an express rifle to take down a stalk of untamed broccoli stampeding towards our Land Rover. 

What about a USAS-12?
I mean, shooting 10 to 20 shotgun shells in super sudden succession should surely suffice. 

Citizen Kane?

You got it!
...
Just kidding. 

The Gun Ninja and the Jedi Cowboy Part II: The Reckoning

With how many strange movies exist in the world, I have to ask, is that a real movie?




Another screenshot for you.

That's awesome Crimson Wizard. 
Even I can think of a couple of scenarios from the top of my head where I could use that functionality, so I can't imagine how useful that would be to others.

GI Joe?

(Just a random guess.)

Nope.

Got it Davnzare! The colors of the clothes was an hint! Your turn!

As someone who used to be a fan of the show, but have never watched the movie. The colours of the clothes were the hint that gave it away. 

Let's see how long it takes for someone to guess this one.

I love the Pokemon aesthetic you've got going on. 

Power Rangers?

Dora the Explorer?

[Rowen Goes To Work (2009)]

Honestly, I don't see why you're complaining. It's just a subjective review that's highly dependent on the reviewer.

I mean look at my games.
Rowen Goes To Work (2009): "The game is short, uses borrowed graphics and music, and most unfortunately, the puzzles tend to be completely illogical, like using soap in a microwave to make a key. "
2 cups
Crepe Fields: A Scare Among Crows (2021): "While the graphical presentation and voice acting is average, the mystery writing and investigative puzzles are strong points in this adventure."
2 cups

The first game is terrible (I mean it was my first) and the blurb showcases that. The second game is quite good and the blurb showcases that as well. But they have the same rating. Why? Who cares! Someone played my games and cared enough to review them, that's all that matters. The fact that they both got 2 cups is meaningless to me, since I didn't make the game to appease them specifically. Especially since something like a rating is so subjective that even two people who share the exact same opinion on a game can give it different ratings wholly dependent on what they consider each rating to mean.
I mean just look at normal game reviews, where anything under a 7.0 is typically considered to be equal to a 0.0. 

Your self-worth should not determined by the opinions of others. 

People who post "inspirational" memes on social media that all directly contradict each other.

What about those "inspirational" memes that tout the poster as being "different", despite them clearly doing the same thing as everyone else.

I mean, there's only so many times you can see something along the lines of:
"Some people don't like me because I'm unique. I say screw those people."
before you roll your eyes so much that they've done a full 360 movement.

You're not special. You're just an asshole.

By old school SCI style without the colour limitations, I assume you mean SCI 1.0 (the EGA version), which felt more like the old AGI games but at 320x200 instead of 160x200. Because to get the SCI 2.0 style, I'd highly recommend using watercolours (or an equivalent brush in Photoshop) to paint your backgrounds.

But assuming you mean the EGA SCI games but with an unbound colour palette, I think brushfe has given some good advice.

My advice would be to try and draw with the EGA palette, and then convert it to full colour. You'll probably find that with the initial limitations, you'll be forced to rely more on certain colours for shading and separating details. For example, your character is wearing a dress of varying shades of red. This would be impossible to illustrate in EGA, so they would've probably made the sleeves white. These choices born from limitation, in turn helped create the style that you're thinking of.

Another thing to remember about the early SCI games, is that much like the AGI games, the backgrounds were more or less stored in a way not unlike vector art. So try and keep that in mind when drawing your backgrounds. That means nice smooth blobs with few to no 90 degree angles. The left side of the dithered wave juts out a bit, and the left side of the top dithered grass patch, also juts out a bit. Those parts should probably be smoother. Unless the jutting out is an important detail that was included.

Overall though, I think what you've got is already pretty good. Like brushfe said, you should stay away from smooth gradients, so dither that sky. But I also think you might've gone a little overboard with the dithering on the grass. Then again, early SCI games did have a lot of checkerboard dithering.

How did those penguins end up on North Pole? 

Obviously they're on holiday. 

John Wick 3? 

Once again a belated happy holidays everyone, and have a happy a new year. 

(One of these days, I'm going to have to actually come online ON Christmas.  )

Could you elaborate please.
Do you mean stuff like concept art and/or screenshots? Or just random pieces of art that we've drawn?

E.T.?

What about adding a border to the top and bottom of the image. Maybe something like a row of cups.

But with that definition in my mind, I can safely say that The Witness seems similar on the surface, but is quite clearly distinct from "adventure games". Fulfilling only a small part of the definition. Having discovery and even some exploration, but missing the involvement of the player.

I'm usually a bit of a lurker in these conversations but I'd love to hear more detail about "missing the involvement of the player." As an amateur game designer I'm always looking to strengthen my understanding of what makes games fun or not fun (or whatever it is that makes "the witness" different), particularly when it comes to story and to puzzle solving.

By that, I meant that the player doesn't drive the plot or the gameplay in The Witness. You go from one puzzle to the next, not unlike Picross or perhaps even Tetris. Sure there's a bit of window dressing, not to the same extent as say Professor Layton. But the point I'm trying to make is that you could remove all of that window dressing and still have almost the exact same game. Now if you attempted to do that with for example, Day of the Tentacle, it'd be impossible. The characters, locations, and events, make the game what it is (and I don't mean in terms of story, I mean in terms of needing those things to solve the puzzles you're given). And the player exploring the world is what ends up making up the vast majority of that gameplay loop.

The best I can describe it, is that adventure games are like exploring a wiki. It's all there, easy to find, and nothing is hidden away. You simply have to pay attention. The fun comes from learning.
Meanwhile games like The Witness are closer to one of those puzzle books such as the Gravity Falls journals or that FNAF book The Freddy Files. Where the information is hidden away and has to be discovered. The fun comes from figuring things out.


A way I personally like to look at is (so now I'm firmly going into my own opinions here), is that the adventure game genre is built from three pillars. In order of importance these are: exploration, puzzles, and story. You remove one, and the whole thing collapses. You can emphasize one or two, and de-emphasize one or two, but do so too much and once again, it collapses. But it collapsing isn't a bad thing, as doing so allows you to craft it into a different genre. Perhaps something new.

I always like to think of an origin of a genre to get a better idea of its definition. Of course, such definitions change over time as the genre evolves, so you shouldn't let the origins dictate your thinking. But it's always a decent reference point. And the first Adventure game is the aptly named Adventure (funny how people complain about MetroidVanias being named as Metroid and Castlevania, but no one complains about Adventure games being named after Adventure). In Adventure you literally just explored a cave, solving an occasional puzzle in order to reach an endpoint. The entire game was about exploration with story being completely absent. So we can tell from that, that story not only became important to Adventure games after the fact, but that it's also the least important pillar.

Now let's compare Adventure to The Witness. At first glance, they might seem similar. You wander around a desolate environment solving puzzle until reaching an end goal. But look a little deeper and you'll see a fundamental difference. While The Witness is all about the puzzles, Adventure is all about the cave, namely the exploration of it. And how you go about exploring that cave, and the actions you take to explore it, is all down to you. Meanwhile with The Witness, how you solve those puzzles and the actions you take to solve those puzzles, are things you have to figure out or to put in other words, discover. It's the difference between solving one big puzzle (Adventure) vs a bunch of little small ones (The Witness).
...
Although I feel like I'm getting into meaningless semantics at this point. 
Perhaps I'm completely wrong, and the two are basically the same. Or perhaps I'm simply not smart enough to articulate the differences. I don't know. I can simply try my best to explain.



But yeah, I'm like you in the game design department. I love hearing about what makes a game fun or not fun for someone as well.
It's part of the reason why I love watching reviews of old games, and why I always gravitate to buying weird crappy games no one has ever heard of.
And for the record, The Witness is a really good game.    And although it's not what I would personally call an Adventure game, I can't argue that it's at least adjacent to to the genre (in much the same way as visual novels are).

I hope my rambling helped clear things up a bit.

There are two kinds of people. Those who backup religiously, and those who have never suffered a hard drive failure.