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Maybe raise and level the shoulders a bit? I think the problem you see with the arms is that she's slouching a bit, and it makes her arms go in front of her torso a bit more than they should.

I like the colors!

There are some who say that, figuratively, you might be right. Some say the Hindenburg's structure was damaged by turning too tight, perhaps as a result of a battle of wills between acting captain Max Pruss and the Hindenburg's usual master, Ernst Lehmann.

I think some of us aren't British enough to properly understand the distinction?

I don't feel the magic of his last four albums.

I don't want to sidetrack this topic too much, but that's disappointing. I haven't listened to this one yet, but his last album was stellar, and I was looking forward to more in that vein.

Thanks for the input, Cat! Your ideas align with what I was thinking, which is reassuring, except I was looking at doing the first region in a one-point shot from the back. I think your two-point suggestion works better, and I might move the staircase to the other side of the gondola so it can be in the foreground to provide depth.

Since you've guessed, I will verify that this is indeed a ship, but an airship, not a...sea ship?

Room one, as you've labeled it here, will be the charts desk where the radio operator sits, as in this one from the Hindenburg:



And room two is the control car, like this one from the USS Macon (but wider):



Part of me wants to do a third area, if you walk all the way into the nose of the gondola (so all the way to the left of the schematic I drew), you would switch to a view from outside the ship -- from the same angle as the image below, but zoomed well in on the control car:



In my mind, this would (1) provide another view of one of the neater parts of the ship, (2), give some additional depth to the environment and (3) allow the captain to converse with the PC without turning away from the controls.

Would that work? Would it be strange to, when they have dialogue, see the words appear outside of the ship?

Thanks so much for the help. I'm trying to get functionality sorted before I commit (digital) paint to (digital) paper.

So this is a necessary room for the game I'm planning, and I'm trying to figure out how to best arrange / break down / design / draw it for AGS.

The blue circle is a spiral staircase that serves as the entrance/exit to the room. The purple dots are NPCs, and the arrows represent the way the characters are facing by default (though they can certainly turn to speak to /interact with the player character). The rectangle in the middle is a semi-transparent wall.

There are what are essentially floor to ceiling windows on each side of the room except the straight wall on the right.

I have some ideas about how to break this down into regions, and what POV to use, but am not sure if I'm thinking about it the right way. I thought I might pose the basics to you all and see what suggestions you have.

I can get more specific about what the room is if you need me to, but I wondered if some vagueness might help in this case. I've been thinking that my ideas have been too influenced by photographs.

(Also, not sure which is the best forum in which to ask this. Feel free to move it somewhere else!)

I went to a used book store and dropped $100 this week, mostly on trying to fill out my PG Wodehouse collection (Wodehouse is the literary equivalent to comfort food for me), and some kids books for my son.

I also picked up At Swim-Two-Birds by Brian O'Nolan, which I've been dying to read since reading a synopsis of it last year, a nicer copy of Jerome K. Jerome's classic Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), and a new lending copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which is my favorite book.

Unfortunately for me, reading for pleasure is something I don't do much currently. I also bought some books by Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault, Bakhtin and Raymond Williams that might figure into my dissertation, which takes up most of my time (which explains why I haven't made any progress on game making lately, but also why I've been posting so much as a method of procrastination).

Alex Cox's 10,000 Ways to Die, a retrospective of the Spaghetti Western.

I'm dying to read this one myself. I have a collection of hundreds of spaghettis, and often disagree with Cox on his overall opinions of film, but appreciate his analysis of the finer details.

I agree with Peder! I was surprised to find how useful some of the simpler exercises are to me. Like knowing all of the notes on the fretboard. Probably shameful that I don't instantly know them after over 15 years of playing without doing some quick mental calculation, i.e. by recognizing them through octaves, especially after the 12th fret.

The triadic arpeggios exercise is useful for me too, as I'm starting to get into gypsy jazz, where scales aren't as helpful.

I think what he means is that generally, browser enabled electronics will have to be running an operating system in order to function...yes?

Also, did everyone in this thread change their usernames, or am I having a brain damage kind of day?

The three very bad people from Superman 2

Hooray! I'm not completely horrible!

This is damned good! Have you heard A+E yet?

The Thing?

I use pidgin, (http://www.pidgin.im/) and I've also used Digsby before, (http://www.digsby.com). Both are very good and allow you to sign in with MSN credentials.

I use Pidgin as well, and I find it's worked better for me than Digsby.

Some people just skip the committee and go straight into the asteroid field.

At least they have chicken....

Whever we do end this story, I will probably draw a sort of a time line where you can see how the different characters moved and acted when you weren't observing them, how the map of the game works out and what key items, clues and events you could have seen but didn't.

Good good good!

I suppose part of my issue is that, when I first donated to the DFA Kickstarter and was excited to join those discussions, I didn't know about AGS or this forum, and was just eager to see some discussion about ludic v. narrative structures that seem to be unique to the adventure game genre.

A random comment on their Kickstarter page brought me here, and if that's the only positive I got from the DFA campaign, it was well worth it.

[The Good, the Bad and the Ugly]

The man seen above is film composer Ennio Morricone, one of my all-time favorites. You've undoubtedly heard his work before, if only from the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. His work with Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and other directors named Sergio, helped define what we think of as the sound of the western film. In Once Upon a Time in the West, he and Leone brought sound and music to a level of narrative importance seldom seen in other films.

But Morricone is so much more than his western themes. From the lush exotic pop of the theme to Ad Ogni Costo, to the nervous horror themes of Italian giallos like The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, to the sweeping and beautiful orchestration of the scores for The Mission and Cinema Paradiso, Morricone was and is constantly stretching his talents in new directions.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a piece of music that's inspired by Morricone. This can be an homage to a specific piece of music, an exploration of the sorts of sounds he composed, or a piece in your own style intended as a tribute. I'm going to be fairly lenient with what qualifies this round.

If you're drawing on specific pieces, feel free to link to them, or feel free to make us guess!

Competition will end on May 3, and I'll choose a winner. Good luck and happy composing, everyone!

[budgerigar]

Well, as we have a three-way tie, it looks as though the deciding vote has come down to me.

Captain - You chose one of my all-time favorite works for your piece, and I liked how the Vogon was sort of like Brian in the Life of Brian, always one step behind or beside the action of the story.

Budger - You did a great job of flipping the power structure of the Mario series on its head, representing the plumbers as bloodthirsty invaders, the Goombas as uneasy cogs in a war they didn't choose.

Sane - Far from being something I'm not familiar with, I actually re-read "The Hunting of the Snark" a few weeks back (because I've been reading Roger Langridge's comic Snarked -- if you haven't read it yourself, you should seek it out). You tackled the task at hand, and not only that, but you did it in rhyme, you crazy person!

It's tough, tough, tough to decide. In doing so, I've looked back at the original prompt, and taken special note of the section where I say:

Bonus points if your own tale contributes new meaning to the stories those characters come from.

From this, I have decided to award this fortnight's prize to budgerigar, for their story up-ends the traditional video game scenario and inscribes a new, highly political reading to the text that is Super Mario Bros.

Well done, everyone. I'm quite pleased with how this month turned out.

A: Keep the same character, mystery and seamless continuity?

My vote is for this one, if you can manage a Chapter 6 scenario where we still have some agency in our condition. We will just have to be much more cautious in the future.

In any case, I absolutely vote against C. To start a mystery story, tell it over the course of 3/4s of a year, and then never finish it? That would be cruel.

Also, I still would like to see a director's cut edition, where we find out all of the things we didn't discover, the paths we didn't choose, the answers we didn't solve, etc.

Hey, we ain't dead yet!

(Or have we been dead the entire time?!)

The phrase I'm thinking is somewhere along the lines of, "I bold you go," but that's not quite it. 

Ali, those threads are exactly what I was talking about when I wrote...

There were some quality posts once upon a time that I think were intended to be a multi-author discussion series on game design -- I'm having trouble finding them now

...Except now I can find them thanks to you (and Snarky)!

I think they're more likely to be people who played and liked a few LucasArts games when they were kids but haven't kept up with the genre lately than dedicated adventure gamers, much less theorists.

Yeah, I don't know why I expected otherwise.