Messages

Suikoden I and II.

Sorry for point and click lovers, but the two first Suikodens are the ones that changed my life and I still consider them the best narrative games ever made! They are deeper on many levels than any novel I ever read. And that influenced a lot of things for me.

That's refreshing to see a game so story-driven  I will follow that closely.

Very impressed at the idea that you are making an "open world" game! Coupled with the survivalist element, this is very innovative! Glad to see a game is coming that is actually different from the usual ones!

Thanks for your answer, it is interesting! I really admire those who can make an interesting game with a minimalist GUI, because I am a chicken who needs plenty of options to make it interesting  so it is really valuable advice for me to see what you can acheive with a single click.

Now that I think of it, I just compared you work to Cocktail Vision's, and in fact they also used single click interfaces in some of their games, so maybe I should play them again.

I played it. The art style is really lovely. It reminds me a bit of what Cocktail Vision was doing in the early to mid nineties (speaking of which, that's an underrated videogame studio).

The little interactions you can have with the environment such as bouncing on the hammock help connecting with the character. Also, it is actually a fantastic idea to explore, having an adventure game with no text but symbols to communicate instead. It helps immersion and communicates through gameplay.

I can't wait to see the fishing game. It seems you intend to have the story revolve around the river, plenty of themes to explore, that sounds very promising.

Are you not afraid the interface will limit you a bit? A single click makes it hard to build lots of puzzles, don't you fear it may become too easy game to complete or getting too similar? Unless you have other gameplay options coming up later? Or you have another plan to keep it exciting?

Well, yeah, if, as an indie game dev working on your own, you want to make a game in full 3D then go Unity or Unreal Engine, and be willing to compete with Triple-A studios and pour the next 5 years of your life into the game, only to then realize that the technology has already outpaced you.

This is actually an excellent reason to keep doing retro-looking games: they cannot get more out of fashion than they already are.

It's amazing... And there is a bit of context to its production in that there was a strike in Hollywood at the time that prevented them from filming any outside locations around their fictional town of "Denton" as they had planned... But I think that would have detracted from the movie actually and was a happy accident.

It gains so much from the claustrophobic feel of just being set inside a TV studio and the final scene really shows off the final mesaage of the movie all the better because of that limitation.

Funny actually when I saw trailers and photographs from Schock Treamtent I always thought it had a Maniac Mansion vibe!

[Shock Treatment]

Shock Treatment

Promoted as the "sequel" or at least the follow-up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and what the hell were they gonna do? Were they going to have the aliens come back and check back in on how Brad and Janet were faring? Were Brad and Janet going to follow the aliens to their home world by doing the time warp again?

NOPE! They just made a completely different movie!

And.... it is AMAZING!!!

And, everyone hated it because it wasn't anything like Rocky Horror.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is my most watched movie of all time. I have literally seen it hundreds of times. There is a reason why, but I won't go into that here.

And I can still watch it over and over and enjoy it.

And tonight, for the first time ever, I watched "Shock Treatment". I have always avoided it as I thought it would just be inferior.

But I loved it! It was truly a movie ahead of its time with its predictions of where mental health care was headed and the craze of celebrity-addiction via reality television.

The songs are awesome. Much more American-rock style than Rocky Horror was, but very enjoyable. It was awesome to see the Rocky Horror gang (in part) back together in different roles, with the amazingly talented additions of Rik Mayall and Barry Humphries.

The long tracking shots are incredible and really give the movie a theater-production feel, and the use of bold color and stark settings reminded me of Giallo films like "Suspiria" at times.

I felt like many movies and artists may have been inspired by this movie: David Byrne's "True Stories" comes to mind, as well as "Rubber", "Brain Candy", and even "Little Shop Of Horrors".

The campiness of Rocky Horror is fully intact, and there were moments when I laughed a LOT from the over-the-top performances and lines of dialog.

The titular song and the finale song are both incredible. I'm gonna go watch both of those again now.

(Also, the song about battling with your inner voice "twin" that is trying to bring you down and make you feel worthless is very affecting.)

Really? It is actually good?

I spent two years as a foreign student in Paris. I became a regular at the Studio Galande, a small theatre that played Rocky Horror Picture Show every friday night with amateur performers in the room. It was incredible, one of the craziest things I did in my younger years. 20 years ago already, I wonder if they still do it.

Now I definitely have to see Shock Treatment!

Thanks, in this game I will try to generate a new game with the template, clean up the pre-existing game, and put my own elements. Thanks!

Hello - after toying with different ideas I decided to give a go to the Lucasarts 9 verbs template. Now this may be a silly question but, what is the best way to "reset" it? I mean, when you create the template there is already two rooms, two character, and various items. I am concerned that if I start deleting them to put my own game elements it may screw up the GUI. Is there anything I should be aware of before I start messing with this?

Oh I'm so sorry guys, I was so busy I still had no time to contribute more... Anyway thanks for the feedback, it's not so bad for something I wrote quickly. I will make sure to contribute more seriously in the future Congratulations WHAM and Baron!

Sorry I only have enough free time to read and assess these stories on the weekend, so give me a couple days and I will vote too

I should have specified I am not a native speaker, maybe... I am sorry if I made grammatical mistakes, I wrote the story very fast as I only saw the topic one day before the deadline. Anyway, I will give votes before Monday.

And graphics can be anything from something that looks like a child did it to high definition semi-realistic. Just do the best you can and don't worry about quality at first. And if it's something just for practice, you can just use sprites from other games until you're comfortable making your own.
I wish you luck.

That is actually an excellent idea. I will use some existing sprites as material to test the engine and see what I can do with it, in the while I will keep on training to find a decent art style. I will also make sure to check the games you mentioned. I started looking into games that were made with AGS to see the extent of the capabilities and what people imagined before.
It was definitely a good idea to come here, your messages are very helpful, thanks again.

[Radio colours]

Radio colours

The radio went out for a few seconds. I wonder if death will feel the same. Maybe all they did was put the radio tower on a giant guillotine and cut the top. I am not so different from an antenna in the end - a concatenation of metal beams that you do not even need to dismantle, just chop off the electricity conducting part at the end, and there will be no more signal. I wonder if I will be back on air at some point.

I remember that day I started fidgeting with the wires in my car and found a way to connect the radio potentiometer with the source of inner light. Now, everytime I change radio station, my instrument board and the little fanal on the ceiling all change colours, bathing the inside of my car in a different atmosphere. This is the last time I will ever drive - the last time I will ever do anything in fact. I guess it is my last chance to drive through a rainbow. But I prefer stay on the green station, and the steering wheel takes a radioactive tincture under this light. My hands look part of the same haze, even though I prefer to rest one palm on the gear lever, where it looks impaled and already desecrating. She always talks on the red station â€" I only refer to stations through the colours I assigned them, and now I forgot the acronyms they use to identify themselves. Maybe my name was just an acronym too. It doesn't include any M's or K's so I am not sure I could pass as a radio station. In a minute I will be fed up with the muffled beats of the green station and I will switch to the blue one because I will be craving a few last breaths of reeds and woodwinds and brass instruments.

Here, the car is blue now and could almost disolve in the early night sky around me. She wants it to happen in the middle of a plain and there is nothing around but clouds. Each blow in the saxophone makes me self-conscious about my own breath. In the end maybe I should go back to green and try to reconnect with my own heartbeat. If I am brave enough I will switch to the red station and hear her talk, always quiet and always right, between the terrifying chords of some easy-listening pop song. She used to love me because I enjoyed so much music, a wide array of different genres, far from her monochromatic soundscape. Maybe in the end she hated me for this too.

I cannot stand it anymore - I am only a few minutes away from the scaffold and its guillotine. I am now fidgeting with the knob, passing from yellow to green to blue to pink to purple and back to yellow. I neglected the yellow station all my life. There is nothing bad about the giggles of an electronic keyboard the kind they broadcast on the yellow station. I think I overlooked it because its colour is nothing special, this is what my car would look like if I did not change the wires. This is what I would sound like if I had never tried anything, if I had never tried to reach her, love her, and build something with her. Now she has all it takes to ruin my life and I will accept to disguise my death as a suicide rather than taking others in my downfall. Last time I listened to the red station I remember her saying "it is for the best". I do not remember which of her lame and saccharine singers she was talking about and what kind of passive-aggressive tactic they used to get away with the royalties at the expense of their former bandmates. But this is the only time her radio voice sounded like her real, everyday voice. Suddenly the mask of the host fell down and this sentence betrayed her - suddenly, she was the woman I know.

I turn my car purple and enjoy a few sounds I do not understand - foreign sounds that I did not have the time to explore. The guillotine breaks the horizon on the left of my car. She said she would have loved to help me and comfort me as I let the blade fall on my neck, but she was afraid of inadvertendly leaving clues that would betray her presence and ruin the story of a suicide. "I am sure you understand" she said. I always understood, she used to love me for that.

Everytime I open the door of my car I am surprised by the difference in air presure. This is the only occurence in my life when I have the skills of a weather station. The music from the car will not fade away - I almost drove into the guillotine. Around me the light opens like a paper fan, cutting out my headless silhouette. I hear the bass and the vibration of some keyboard and this is what will accompany me as I interrupt the transmission and go off-air - and even if I rub my eyes while bending over the machine, and even if I my ears relish in their desperate craving for more music, I cannot tell anymore which colour the light is.

Don't worry if you feel like everything has been done already. Because everything was done decades ago. There are no original ideas, only ideas that combine little bits from a bunch of other things.

Eh, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution of ideas that makes something worthwhile or not. As long as you don't try to outright copy something, then your personal experiences and interests will guarantee that what you do is different from what anyone else would do.
With your background, you might even want to try something closer to a visual novel than typical point and click adventure game. That way you could focus on learning the basics before worrying about puzzles and inventory.

Thanks guys this is all very comforting! I will take the humble path learning little by little. I was a media producer by trade, I made my living producing radio programs and documentary movies. I wrote non fiction books and these were profitable but no fiction I ever published really brought money, so I do not expect any profit from my AGS ventures beyond the pleasure of finding a new way to tell a story.
I will try to start fidgeting with the engine using whatever resources I can find and once I feel comfortable enough with the tool I will try to convert a story idea I had into an interactive thing - a visual novel as you said or even a basic point and click. I am a poor artist but I may be able to do something visually interesting (I am also training on Gimp on the side).
Anyway I will make sure to show what I do so I can get plenty of good advises, and again if I can humbly give a hand with code building or whatever, I am more than happy to do the menial work so I can train in its use!

Hello everyone, I have been exploring the possibilities to create an adventure game, and this is very, very intimidating. It feels like everything has been done already, and that everyone is extremely experienced and talented... I never did anything like that. My background is publishing novels and short stories but I grew frustrated by the world of literature and I wanted to try another medium to tell stories. But wow, this is very humbling, a lot to learn indeed.
So I will go slow and learn to code and use AGS step by step. Please go easy on me. If anyone needs help with menial tasks in coding a game I am happy to help, it would be a good way for me to learn if I can join a team that could need an extra hand. Just let me know.