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No, no, no...I'm pretty sure it's "Telephone ol' Wogan." This game is set at the BBC:

One thing that I picked up from somewhere (it might be one of my advisors, Lee Sheldon, who does the Agatha Christie games), is that in the conclusion of an adventure game, you should limit the space that the players can/need to travel in, limit the puzzles so they're working toward one or two things at most, and make the puzzles much easier. If you've told a solid story, players are, at this point, getting swept up in the momentum leading to the finale, and you can streamline their excitement by paring down their experience to a handful of essentials.

don't try and read it, I fattened all the text.)

That's what you think! "Petter Wogan --> Telephone ol' Wogan." I know all of your secrets!

Stu, did you see the recent NY Times article on real-life Escape the Room experiences? Apparently, they're popping up in a few of the bigger cities in the United States. You get locked in with a team to get yourself out of the room, and if you don't get yourself out, they unlock you in an hour. Sounded fun!

It's like you guys have never played a Resident Evil game. Tank controls make perfect sense, forward moves your character forward. It's pretty easy to ignore the camera angle and just know that when you press forward the character will move forward, right?

It honestly takes me a few times walking around Manny's office to get the hang of it, but after awhile, it's like riding a bicycle, and I don't notice the controls anymore. Grim Fandango is probably my favorite game ever, and I was worried this was only going to be for console.

I like him. Be aware if you're going to animate him that you've "shot" him from slightly lower than the waist, which means low horizon lines.

[Bejeweled: Apocalypse]

When your life is changed--irrevocably, unmistakably changed--sometimes it hits you hard and full on, like a stray fragment of meteorite flaming down from the night sky with your name on it. In other words, you know you've been hit because the damage is deep and instant. But other times it sneaks up on you, like the mosquito that gives you malaria and, later, when you're sweating out death, you have a hard time pinpointing where and when and which of the bastards it was that got you.

I find myself now, metaphorically sweating out death, and wondering when my moment of personal destruction, that true Rubicon moment where my old life ceased as I knew and loved it, and I began again as the hollow, discarded skin of a man I am today. Some might say it was when the transaction went through, the simple withdrawal of ninety-nine cents from my checking account to the app store. Others, the moment I first touched the icon and gave myself over to the shiny rotating baubles on the screen. But now, weeks later, I think I know when. God help me, I think I know exactly when.

In the reconstructed scene that plays out in my memory, I notice that her pace down the steps was slower, softer than usual. She walked like a mourner at a funeral, approaching the open coffin for the last time. I had my back to her, of course, my face illuminated by the soft blue glow of my chosen addiction. She did not touch me. She kept her distance.

"David," she said, or at least I think I remember her saying. "We need to talk."

By this time, I sensed her as a driver senses other cars on a busy highway. She was there, in my periphery, and I saw her only when I needed to change lanes, so to speak. My eyes were focused on the road before me, the one that saw me climbing to level 46 with only 6,500 points to go. I had driven far beyond tunnel vision; I was monomaniacal.

Rows of technicolored icons cascaded before me, and I steered them confidently, like a resolute captain at the helm of my digital ship. They met in pairs, in clusters, in groups of six or eight if I'd navigated their arrival successfully, pressing together for a brief, sweet instant, before flashing and fading into pixelated nothingness. The rows fell swiftly now, and my brow shone with a sweat of heavy concentration. I took a breath, as I saw and heard her again in my periphery, and here, dear reader, is my life changing moment in four simple words:

"Just one second, sweetheart."

The line had been crossed. She would give me all of the seconds I wanted, and then some. I barely perceived the door shutting, and it was only when I heard the clamor of the garage door and later, the sharp whine of the Honda descending to silence, that I realized she was gone. God help me, even in that moment of bitter clarity, I never moved my fingers from the controls.

I reached 46 that night, 47 and 48 as well. I won't tell you my current level; I don't want you to mistake for bragging what is truly a confession of defeat. I would give all of the points, all of the levels, all of the exclusive premium DLC, and all of the glittering rows of vector-polished gems in the world for...just a second.

One second, sweetheart.

Bejeweled: Apocalypse is available on multiple platforms including iOS, Android, XBox One, Playstation 4, and PC.

Can you also do a Tabata mouse saying, "Got any cheese?" to complete the pair?

Nope! No dead ends! Spoiler:

Spoiler

That symbol signifies the loss of knowledge (as a result of being kicked in the head by a cow) that you have to recover.

[close]

I purposefully made the image tiny so you couldn't, hopefully, read it! Sorry to tease!

attempts to set up goals that are organic and character/storyline-driven has, so far, resulted in a rather linear vertical line.

One of the things I found useful about the flowchart is that it inspired me to change up the...flow?..of some puzzles so that they didn't follow the same line/order/type. The three orange circles are the major goals of the first act of the game -- you can do them in any order, and in fact, as you go along, many needed objects or information are collected simultaneously for multiple puzzles. The task on the left is a lateral thinking/object use series. The one in the middle is a harvesting inventory items series (this is the one that's incomplete -- that big empty space should be a list of places / objects to collect). The one on the right is largely based in discovering information through dialogue with NPCs and applying it in different situations.

Hey, thanks for the link to yED. I was using Gliffy to do this same thing for my own game before they required me to start paying them a monthly fee to keep my chart private and to give me room to expand.

I'm interested in seeing what your own flowcharts look like, Trapezoid (and anyone else!). It's interesting that, even without reading any of the text in the Monkey Island charts you've put together, you can still see the basic flow of the game.

Here's what my game looked like the last time I worked on it as a flowchart:

Thank you, Selmiak! That makes sense, and I am using the basic height/generic option for picking up (most) objects. The half animated option makes perfect sense for everything else. Thanks again!

I'm at the point in game making where many of my technical questions deal with how to best incorporate animation in the game. I'm not sure if that's a technical question that belongs here, as it's only partially coding related, or in the Critic's Lounge, which seems to be more art-related. Feel free to move it if I've chosen incorrectly, but there's nothing really to criticize in this thread.

So, say I have a character who sits in a chair, or turns the handle on a sink, or otherwise interacts with an object that is a fixture in the room...what's the best method of handling animation for this? Hide the room object as the animation begins and include its image in one animation with the character sprite? Two sets of animated sprites, one for character, one for object? Seems like that would be hard to time. Some third obvious option that I've overlooked?

Eric, go finish that game of yours!!
I love those puzzle ideas.

It goes so slowly because every time I make progress, I level up in drawing ability and start over! I haven't even started learning to program really yet, and I've been here for years. BUT! My plan is to start a GIP thread on my birthday a week-and-a-half from now.

Those door puzzle ideas are open source! I saved my favorite ones for myself!

14 year old me thought they were the absolute best.

I voted 2, 5, and 10, and I accidentally sent my story off into the void and not to Andail.

• Door decorated with a poem whose blank final word can only be finished / door unlocked by an object that supplies the end rhyme.
• Door made of glass can only be broken by a note resonating at the correct frequency.
• Door with a military-time clock lock only opens once a day / according to player's system time.
• Door with a mysterious hole in the middle. The hole leads to a puppet on the other side that the player must use to convince a small child to unlock the door (Child is, of course, heard through the door, but not seen when the door is opened. Spooky!).
  

Allusion doesn't make a story.

Rather than talk about the supposed 6-word Hemingway story, look at Hemingway's "Hills Have White Elephants" then.

I accidentally emailed mine because I don't understand icons. Does this mean I'm disqualified?

Irving.

At the very early stage of Broken Age production they released a video of Schafer and Ron Gilbert discussing the game and the impression I got from it was that Gilbert seemed like a conceited person. I was like, this is a guy who made my favourite game of all time? I may be wrong of course, after all, it was just a 15-minute video but he didn't seem like a likeable person, more like a baffoon really.

I think Ron Gilbert has sort of become the John K. of adventure games. He has a specific way of thinking about them to the exclusion of other points of view, is a little bitter at how little influence he has on the modern state of things, but is still widely revered as a creator and teacher in the genre.

I think there IS a version that also has screenshots but I can't find it off the bat.

Not actually screenshots, but concept and pre-production art.