Messages

So beautiful. Thanks, Ilyich and Peder!

Ponch, since you've pulled it off well, this might be a good opportunity for you to share best practices with us on how you set up your games. Each background is a different room, with a GUI for options? Buttons take you to different rooms? Invisible player?

Happy birthday, Tabata!

I don't know that grammar enters into the conversation. I find this sentence structure used most often in a narrative where the narrator wants to imply something to the audience without directly stating it, a sort of half dramatic irony. The tension between the two clauses creates suspense as the audience waits for the narrator to confirm what they've hinted. Such as:

"With the bomb finally disarmed, the room was safe to enter...or was it?"

The implication is that for the people of the story, the room seems safe to enter, but the narrator knows something they don't -- it might not be -- and is imparting that knowledge to the audience.

In the case of your example, you might hear the following in a news report on a serial killer:

"He was president of the PTA, a church deacon, a former high school football stand-out with a bright clean smile and an Ivy League degree. He was, for all intents and purposes, a model citizen...or was he?"

Ilyich -- a PSD would be fantastic!

Nope! It's yours. I didn't guess the movie title, only the movie!

I can verify, since I'm here first, that that is the title that AnasAbdin passed along today, indeed.

Also, if you've found a way to capture the harmony

Spoiler

I believe you need to play the music from the cellphone before she'll use the rainstick.

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[Patchwork]

According to an email receipt, I was the first person to buy the Summerbatch. I seriously doubt that's true, but in my heart, I will be proud of this regardless.

Found some spare time over the past two days to play Patchwork, which I've been looking forward to playing for awhile, since seeing the preview art in the WiP thread. What a lovely little game with an interesting premise! The art has to be among my favorite I've ever seen in an adventure game -- the characters, the portraits, the backgrounds, everything. Gameplay was excellent too, for the most part. If there's any tweaking in the future, the only suggestions I'd make would be to provide a few more clues about the order of certain things in the end:

Spoiler

I got hung up not realizing I had to play the harmony first before using the rainstick. I was walking all over the place trying to do something with the rainstick. I also kept trying to give the phone to Lin because I thought she'd need to do everything -- perhaps some sort of gentle nudge there ("I wouldn't know what to do with that; you can play it when the time comes during the spell process.")

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...And to make the top GUI harder to trigger (its trigger point is awfully close to

Spoiler

the pixie

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).

Here were some seriously spoiler-ridden stand-out things for me:

Spoiler

I loved the bloksmith. Though he wasn't really animated, his portrait evinced such an amazing amount of character, ESPECIALLY with his spectacles on.

Brilliant effect when I took my glasses off to offer them to him too. It was pretty much like me taking my glasses off in real life.

The transition between Lin and Daniel's viewpoints in regards to the Dryad was also a brilliant effect. Also, the "patchwork" nature of the two worlds put together.

Speaking of which: the reveal of the Volkswagen in the cave. I laughed out loud.

My favorite part of the game though, for whatever reason, had to be the rainstorm, as brief as it was. I wish there was a loop of that which I could watch. How was this effect achieved? Hand-drawn? I was captivated watching the drops colliding with multiple surfaces on the screen, and then, with a flash of lightning it was over.

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Will there be a sequel?

Hey, weird question if the answer isn't yes, but does this movie end with a son eviscerating himself and cutting off his head and arm in order to make himself into art? I can't remember / figure out the title. If I'm right, the obese man is a former competitive eater whose mother may have been a pig. Like I said, weird question if the answer is no, but I think I saw this awhile back and Googling "movie 'competitive eater' man cuts off arm and head makes himself into statue" isn't giving me any answers.

If I'm on the wrong track, and anyone happens to know the name of this movie, shoot me a private message. As weird and depressing as it sounds, the film I'm talking about was wonderfully visual and imaginative and I'd like to track it down again.

Ponch's latest game, Barn Runner: The Mayor's New Dress, might fit what you're looking for. I've only played it for the first time this morning, and it's part of a series in which I've not played the other games, but it was still fun. Kind of a graphic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Could you give some more details about Snatcher? Is it a game with still images and mostly dialogue / choice of a few actions options? I'm thinking of trying to enter a MAGS competition one of these months, and this format might be doable for me.

Two things that might be throwing people off about the forehead:

1. The headband. I know the look you're going for, like a Cate Archer from the first NOLF sort of thing. But I think most here are reading the pixie's hairline as starting at the back of the headband, and not the front, giving them the idea that the forehead is elongated (or Neandertalish). Maybe if you slid the headband back and gave just a hint of bangs or something, it would negate that effect.

2. The concave curve where the nose meets the forehead, which I believe is called a sellion, usually goes in a bit more than your tracings of the models do, and this usually corresponds with where the eye goes. Look at the photos you've provided, and see how the brow makes a little shelf over the eyes. Yours slope back a bit too much.

The two together make for the baffling paradox you cited earlier -- too much forehead, and not enough forehead!

I am complete and utter garbage at pixel art, but you can see I've just shifted a few pixels around here to show what I'm getting at:



As for the fashion, I say go all-out secret agent, and have her wear a catsuit. But then again, I have a special place in my heart for Emma Peel, so you should take my opinion on catsuits with a grain of salt.

[The Exorcist]

Looks kind of like a grown-up Linda Blair:



The scariest thing in The Exorcist, by the way, was finding out what MRI machines used to look like.

[The Neverending Story]

When I was a kid, I was terrified of Gmork from The Neverending Story:



...and Large Marge:



As an adult, I'm more bothered by supernatural creatures that instill despair instead of fear. Like most things in Guillermo Del Toro movies. Especially the ghost boy from Devil's Backbone. The sight of him makes me feel as though I have a black hole in my soul:

Interesting idea, though it would be more useful if two people plays two games interactively on two systems through networking

Someone recently suggested a pair of games where one featured the player as a criminal, and the other saw the player as a detective who had to identify the other player's in-crime actions. That sounded interesting to me, and this system implemented over a network could facilitate that sort of game.

I was well behind in playing this game (I'll get to Resonance next year sometime, probably), but sat down with it over the past few days and enjoyed myself immensely. I know no one probably cares at this point, but....

Here are some things I liked about the game:

Spoiler

- I loved the dual play aspect to the game, especially because the two settings were so different in visuals, tone, and character, that it widened the experience.

- I was expecting a twist or two, but the moment where Sayuri's name is given in the Delta-Six storyline was incredibly effective.

- I continue to be impressed with the quality of Wadjet's voiceover work. I hadn't noticed in the Blackwell games, but the chap who does the voice of Joey and Kane in Gemini Rue has an Owen Wilson-ish quality to his voice. Are these all New York-based actors?

- I only turned to a walkthrough once, and for a foolish reason. I didn't think to talk to the door on the maintenance level to see Giselle. Otherwise, the puzzles felt like they were just right in difficulty for the most part, aside from one red herring (see below). There was a nice build-up of easy puzzles at first to more difficult in the middle, and then a fairly simple final act, which is, I think, the best way to do it (saving the hardest stuff to the end results in anti-climax, like Broken Sword 2).

- The danger with sci-fi is to go overboard and make a world that seems wholly unfamiliar, which doesn't let the audience identify in any sort of human way with the characters/world/situation. I thought Gemini Rue did a fantastic job of giving a little bit of back story, but letting us see the conflicts of the world mostly by showing us the effect it had on the people at the bottom.

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And here are a handful of things that bugged me:

Spoiler

- I only really figured out the hold-your-breath thing during my last gunfight. I was lousy at all of the gunfights, especially the one in the weather tower, and wish that had auto-saved as the bullets started flying, so I didn't have to skip past the lengthy dialogue with Sayuri every time I died (which was often). I think playing with a crappy old wireless keyboard from across the room hurt my accuracy.

- I'm not familiar with Cowboy Bebop, so I spent an incredible amount of time trying to re-find the weird girl Easter Egg character to try to get her to go through the hole in the tech building for me. It took me forever to talk to Sayuri, because I thought I'd learned from the other two characters on the back alley screen that they weren't interested in talking to me.

- There were a couple of times I was trying to save, but couldn't, in areas where it seemed as though I should be able to do so. I've got a baby, so much of my adventure game time is spent chasing him around the house and preventing him from eating/climbing/destroying things he shouldn't. I try to save every time I have to get up, just in case. I did have a few times where the game locked up, or threatened to.

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All in all, a grand experience, and a positive watermark and ambassador for the AGS engine.

The Long Goodbye?

Indeed it is. One of my favorite movies in general, much less the detective genre.

Back to you, Snarky!

[Dark Knight Rises]

Fantastic! You've inspired me to re-watch that one tonight. Been thinking a lot of that film lately, working on a P.I. project and having recently seen Dark Knight Rises.

Let some of that previous sentence provide a hint for this screenie:

Brick?

If your what im losing then by all means.

Boy, you ARE new here. You should go to the beginner's technical question forum and see who devotes a lot of time answering most of the questions there for newbies like yourself. Then you should maybe rethink your response to what was a well-meaning post from Khris. That foot you're using is not the right one to get off on.