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Einoo- if you're going to enter a competition like this, I'd advise joining the forum. That way you don't have to do a triple repost! Yikes!

Okay, escaping a room.

Start with: Swiss army knife

Rooms: Bedroom, kitchen, living room, front hall, attic

Attempts to open front door gets message "It's locked. That's the problem."

Attempts to open window gets message "I can't open it. I never should have gotten those indistructable, unopenable windows!"

Start in front hall.

EGO: "Oh no! I've locked myself in my own house! This is a new and startling experience! If only someone knew where I was, they could come and save me! I can't even phone someone because my service has been cut off! Woe is me!"

Go to living room.
Get HISTORY OF RADIO book from coffee table.
Ego: "Ah, a hundred years of history condensed into an oversized full colour book."
In inventory, USE book
Ego: "Apparently, to create a working radio transmitter, all you really need is an antenna, a voice reciever, some variety of chanel chooser, wires to connect it together and a sufficiently high enough place to transmit from. Who knew?"
Get REDICULOUSLY OVERSIZED REMOTE CONTROL from couch.
Ego: "The clicker box, the magic wand, the control centre, that deally with the buttons... my very own UNIVERSAL REMOTE!"

Go to bedroom.
Use SWISS ARMY KNIFE on clock radio.
Ego: "At long last, an excuse to destroy my clock radio! DIE ALARM CLOCK DIE!"
Get antennae and wires from broken radio.
Ego: "Well, these aren't doing any good here!"

Go to kitchen
Use SWISS ARMY KNIFE on phone
Ego: "If you say so." Phone is dismantled.
Get TELEPHONE HANDSET from broken phone.

In inventory, combine all items together except for the book and the swiss army knife. You now have a MAKESHIFT RADIO TRANSMITTER.
Ego: "Well, I'll never be a DJ but it's good enough for my purposes."

Go to attic.
Use MAKESHIFT RADIO TRANSMITTER.
Ego: Help help! I'm locked in this house and I'm in the attic and I can't get out! HEEEEEEELP!!!!

Cut to front hall, where a KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOUR LISTENING TO A WALKMAN breaks down the door. He kneels in front of you.

KISALTAW: "Oh fair one, I heard your distress ca- oh, I'm dreadfully sorry."
Ego: "You've come to rescue me!" (to player) "Ever feel like you're in a Monty Python movie?"
KISALTAW: "I thought you were a damsel in distress!"
Ego: "Nope. Just locked myself in. Just one of those days. Thanks anyway!" Automatically leave through front door.
KISALTAW: "That's the last time I listen to CDID: Damsel in Distress radio!" Throws walkman to the ground, leaves through front door.

THE END!

Ashen, I have to disagree with you on the "Too restrictive= no interest" idea. The most popular ones have given an detailed location and scenario, such as http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=13864.0 and  http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=14367.0

Those were some of the most fun ones, in my opinion, becauase they have very detailed discriptions of where you are. You could do just about anything to get out of them, but you still had to think within certain specifications.

You won't buy it unless you can download it    

I would give the tentacle lots of love, in the hope that that would counteract the pernicious effects from drinking polluted water.  Then he would never want to take over the world and "DOTT" would never have been made and "Willow" would now be thought of as Lucas' greatest achievement.

You should be banned from this community! How can you wish of DOTT never being made. I'm thinking of reporting to the moderator for your behavior. ^^

Bombadil, that's really uncalled for. I know you're probably joking, but not everyone has the same tastes in games.  I could never play MM for more than a few minutes (it bored me to tears), and I've never played DOTT.  Some people on this board are Sierra fans and don't like LucasArts games all that much. It's just a LITTLE mean to say we should be banned.

Rui: "Willow" is this.  It is a movie of awesomeness.

Oh, I'll try that later, but what's "tentacle mating song"?

I might have the name wrong, and it might just be something from LucasFan's deluxe edition, but there's a record that plays a high pitched squeal that is used to break glass.  It's the tentacle mating song or call or something.

I would get in the edsel, travel to Mars and get the chainsaw gas.

hmmm... maybe I'd take up Edna on that "chain you to the bed thing"....

Two words. Tenticle rape!

Did you ever play the tentacle mating song on Green's stereo? I don't know what happens but Green hops towards you, it fades to black and you end up dead. So I'm not going to think about that anymore.

My method has been basically this:

Concept, basic outline art music and programming all at the same time, cursing, starting over, basic outline, art, swearing, starting over, story, saying bad words, starting over, story, art... that's as far as I've gotten.

From this method, I've learned that game making would be a lot easier if I cut out the swearing and starting over, but it seems to flow naturally from the design process.

Ooo... I quite like the new version of the alien. The bony ribs (or are they gills? Cause that would be REALLY cool) look quite creepy.

As for the background- first of all, I'd advise not saving things for the critics lounge in as J-pegs.  It adds extra pixels. Use something like PNG's, which will show us exactly what you drew.

Onto the background!


I did a paintover, because I like paintovers. I only did it at half size because I didn't do any changes that matter on the pixel level.

First, the panel in the background has REALLY messed up lines.  I matched most of the lines to the top, making everything nice and square.  The only thing I didn't fiddle with was the gradient on the blue window things and the control panel. I made the control panel inselt, because the idea of trying to draw all those buttons in perspective made me sad.  I also made the lever red, because you said it was supposed to be.

I agree with stuh on the teleport thingy.  The perspective is really strange. If the white pedestal thing goes all the way around, you should be able to see it all the way around. I made the whole thing more rounded as well- the sharp corners at the edges made no sense.

There is a lot of empty space in the room, so I moved the panel down and the transport thingy up.   This just balanced the room a bit better.

I really like Princess Trinidad.  I personally wouldn't change the lips at all, except to make them match her skin tone a bit more- maybe a darker shade of red.  The feet and legs are the best of the three- she isn't bowlegged like the other two are. I also like her jewelry. She does seem a bit cross eyed, though.

However, I just handed in my last essay for this semester, so I've got time to do paintovers. Which I have.



1. Got rid of the lower black line around the eye. At the scale you're using, even 1 pixel ends up looking really thick.

2. Raised the mouth a bit, took off the top pixels .  According to my artists anatomy book, smiles that really turn up and aren't just an illusion created by the curve of the head are the rarest kind.

3. Brought the legs closer together. When someone is standing normally, the thighs usually touch.  Unless they're a skeleton.

4. Added a flare on the pants legs. Unless they're supposed to be tucked in her boots. Then ignore that.

Well, I was having so much fun on her that I took a shot at Leslie.


1.I did the same sort of treatment to the eyes on her as I did no the guard- got rid of the bottom black (and the eyelashes, in this case) and changed the shape a bit.

1.5. Don't know why I didn't number this, as this is what you were asking for help with. I think the problem with the mouth was where you started the curve of the smile. Instead of having the extra pixel at the ends of the red lips, I just started the curve from there. I also shrunk her cupids bow (the curvy bits on the upper lip) to one pixel instead of two.

2. Lowered the collar on the shirt by about a pixel, and made it more rounded.  If it was that high, it would be cutting off her windpipe.

3. Lowered and rounded the hem of her shirt to create a greater sense of her being 3D. Realized I should have done that to the guard's belt, too.

4. Brought her legs closer together, the same way I did on the guard. Got a bit carried away and also added a bit of a flare to the shorts.  I like baggy clothing, so sue me!

5. Thickened her legs by 1 pixel so they were more in proportion to her arms.

You have a bunch of really solid sprites here.  Just keep the legs closer together and they'll be awesome. Everything else I did was finiky bits.

I took a stab at a small area of it- it's hard to try and do a paint over with the red words written across most of the picture. Please note this is INCREDIBLY rough because I did it in about 5 minutes.



With all the lovely hatching you've done, shading isn't really an issue. What I did for this:

1. made the image monochrome, so that all the black lines were really black- no random gray pixels
2. switched it back to RGB
3. selected all the black (done in gimp by using shift+O and clicking on the colour you wanted to select)
4. copied it to a new layer
5. coloured on the background with a plain old pencil tool- the new layer over top keeps eveything fairly nice and crisp.
6. Added some highlights to the sand, because  there's a lot of empty space that needed to be broken up a bit more. I just used a lighter shade of the same hue I used for the sand.

Just my take on it.

Yikes. Snarky posted while I was working on mine.  Some of my stuff might be redundant now... I haven't read his! But these were my first impressions.

Placement puzzles
The ability to drop inventory items does make for some interesting cases. In classic IF, there is a restriction on how much you can carry, forcing you to drop things in convenient places (but this could easily lead to dead ends if used carelessly, and people seem a bit spoiled these days with the limitless-pockets effect). But I've seen some good puzzles with item placement in Kyrandia, and the bait-the-dog puzzle in S301.
Of course droppable invitems is tricky to pull off in AGS, so that may stop some people from allowing each item to be dropped everywhere. If you want to save space, the 'get' icon could be changed to 'get/drop', depending on whether you click on the room or on your inventory.

In QFG1 VGA there was a similar idea.  In the inventory there were several options- look, select, use, drop and pick up. Whenever you dropped something in a room, the game recorded it.  If you returned to that room later and clicked "pick up," the item would be returned to your inventory.  However, there was no graphic to show that the item had been dropped. If you did something stupid like dropping your sword and forgetting where you left it... well, then you were screwed.

This worked very well, as the amount you could carry in the QFG games was determined by strength.  If you were carrying too much you could always drop something and go back for it later. In games without such stats, you might have to put an item limit or a size limit on items.  (Hmmm... that size limit idea is interesting- I might have to work on that a bit more).

Which brings me to another idea.  Different interactions with inventory items.  In SCUMM interface games you can use most of your interactions with your inventory. Some, such as "walk to" don't work, but it works as a generality.  In Sierra games, however, the inventory is in a completly different window, and has it's own interface.  Should a different set of interactions be applied to your inventory than to the rest of the game world? Having a full compliment of interactions, as was available in KQVI opens up some interesting ideas (talking to the Dangling Participle and the Rotten Tomato spring most readily to mind). However, it can also create the same problems as having too many interactions in the main world of the game. I don't recall there being any puzzle that actually needed to use the talk icon.

Funky responses
Of course one disadvantage of adding more verbs is the fact that the game should have a decent response to many of them. LucasArts games seem to get a way with a lot of 'I cannot move it' and 'Nice tree', whereas Sierra games are almost expected to have a snappy answer to any look/touch/talk click. Clearly this is a tradeoff, but having too many generic responses does lower the game immersion.

So if I were to extend a Sierra verblist, or change a Lucas one, my first recommendation would be along the lines of
walk look
touch move use-inv
talk attack get/drop
(and Laura's notepad and Larry's zipper added in those games that could use it)
Interestingly enough an 'attack' verb can be extended to inventory items (to break them), and a move icon could shake inventory items.
A very good final addition would be the 'do something appropriate' verb from the Garfield game, which has such nice uses as 'kick odie' and 'save jon'. Also it could feasibly open doors, since I omitted the open/close verbs from my sample above.

Putting on the devil's advocate hat for this one.

This is a definite problem with not having a generic "use" verb.   If there is some action that will only be necessary once, such as untying a knot, for example, none of your verbs listed will do it, except the "Do something appropriate" (shortening that to DSA because it's a pain to type.)  The problem with DSA is that it wouldn't work in a serious game. Also, it becomes the same as either a generic use/interact or those annoying "smart cursors" from games like Kings Quest 7 and Torrin's Passage.  I honestly don't see how DSA is any different from use.  There is, of couse, the option of just adding an "untie" verb, but it will most likely just end up as a mostly useless extra verb.

Well, if you want to be all logical and stuff...

Cluey: Ouch. I feel your pain on that one.  I went to get two inches cut off once, and the stylist chopped off half a foot. Not exagerating in the slightest.

What was really weird is that no one noticed I'd even had a hair cut. :

My advice to keep that from happening again: keep your hair neat, or at least easily possible to make it neat.  If it's long enough, tie it back when your parents start getting fussy.  Point out how the musicians they listened to when they were teenagers (as long as they were teenagers after the 60's) all had long hair: The Beatles, Meatloaf, Ozzy Osbourne, Kiss, Neil Diamond, lots of folk bands, Flock of Seagulls... okay, don't use Flock of Seagulls as an example.

How are you going to get better at programming if you don't do it yourself?

Besides, the code is right there. Copy and paste.

Well, if you're going to be like that...

Bring me some whisky mother, I'm feeling frisky mother
Send me my sheep for I am lonely tonight
God knows I'm very randy
Good thing I'm very handy
England is prim and proper Scotland's depraved

Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baaaaa baaa ba ba ba ba ba baaaa ba ba baaaaaa
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
England is prim and proper, Scotland's depraved

Send me a lover mother, no not my brother mother
Send me my sheep for I am lonely tonight
No, not my sister Mary. Her legs are very hairy
England is prim and proper, Scotland's depraved

I'm as horny as a klaxon
I'll even do a Saxon
Bring me my sheep for I am lonely tonight
Scotsmen wear their kilts all day
Zippers scare the sheep away
England is prim and proper, Scotland's depraved

Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baaaaa baaa ba ba ba ba ba baaaa ba ba baaaaaa (bedabadaba)
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
Baa baa ba baa ba ba ba
England is prim and proper, Scotland's depraved

I notice, however, that they don't host Empty House Entertainment. Care to comment on that, Erwin?

Tis a conspiracy, I say!

(Please note that the above post may contain 100% teasing. And by "may" I mean "it does")

And up next is...?

There's "The Fantastic Book of Logic Puzzles" that shipped with The Castle of Doctor Brain oh so many years ago.  It took a bunch of the old standards of logic puzzles and put them into science fiction and fantasy settings. I enjoyed that book very much, but I know all the answers now so it's not so much fun.

However, I would strongly advise against using puzzles you found in a book in an adventure game, which seems to be what you're proposing. If it isn't, please ignore this. There's nothing here but pretty flowers.

First- if someone has read the same puzzle book as you, they're going to be pretty ticked off to see the same puzzle in the game. Solving a puzzle you'e solved before is boring. How many times have you had to slide a newspaper under the door to knock the key in the lock onto it?  And how many times have you enjoyed it?

Second- copying a puzzle will seem really artificial.  Has it ever made sense to meet two people, where one always tells the truth and the other one always lies? No, but it's often thrown in to a game or story, and it does nothing but destroy the flow of the narrative. Puzzles will grow naturally out of the story.

First- you're copying someone else's idea.  If you aren't going to use your own ideas, you might as well do a fan-remake.

Argh! No! I know what ridelcher means, and I wish I didn't! Baaaaaad....

Wow, she's alert for being so new!  Cute cute cute!

* DragonRose makes a fool of herself saying "aww" in a very girly manner

I don't believe you! You and your so called "baby."

I DEMAND photographic evidence! (that I will then proceed to make silly "aww she's so cute" noises at)

Congrats to you and your family and a big welcome to Sara!