Messages

Please don't kill me, Eggie - here's another one:

The Monster Squad?

Priscilla Queen of the Desert?

Cactus Flower? $?

I think you're right! Totally forgot that one.

I kinda like the vector brushes in Inkscape - I've done a lot of sketches in that one. Also the smoothing function is pretty good if a bit finicky (on high settings it usually requires a few undo's before you get a curve quite right). And it's free.

Edit: Oh, and if you want to do graphic novels, I recommend checking out Manga Studio - very useful tools for setting up the page and a shit-ton of brush types to choose from.

Great work, Dave! Love listening to developer commentaries like these - your in-game commentaries as well as Grundislav's recent BJ playthroughs too. Man, those quest gems are fucking annoying, glad it didn't bleed over into the Blackwell games

What, in your opinion, Jay must to do?

1. Call the cops on his pervy voyeur neighbor.
2. Wear a tin-foil hat to block out the mind-reading devices
3. Get a job as a gay porn actor - there must be tons of money in being able to suck your own cock

Damn, I'm enjoying these commentaries so much that I really hated it when the BJ2 one ended prematurely, but I'm happy that you recorded as much as you did. Thanks Dualnames!

For whoever is gonna record the next one: Any chance that you could also capture the chat window like in the BJ1 recording?

Thanks for an awesome commentary, Grundislav! And thank you so much for recording it, nihilyst!

I was lucky to catch the last 45-or-so minutes live yesterday after coming home from a party, but watched the rest of it today. Don't think I have played the original BJ1 since back when it came out - amazing to see how far you've come as a game designer since then, Grundislav. Extremely inspiring and funny to listen to and watch. Great audience participating going on in the chat channel too - will make sure to creat a livestream login myself for next time.

Looking very much forward to future commentaries!  Here's hoping for a BJ every Saturday night!

Zoolander

I have a fondness for Vincent Price and Roger Corman movies in general, so I must admit I really enjoyed The Haunted Palace which, despite being marketed as a Poe movie, is actually based on Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I think if you have characters and a game world you need to flesh out before launching into the story proper, at least give the player a taste of what's to come - preferably in an interactive form. Indeed start off with a bang. Let me feel what the game will be like at it's best, then you've got my attention and can take all the time in the world to return to that level of excitement.
It's almost become a cliche in modern games to start you out with a bunch of equipment/weapons/abilities only to lose them early on (e.g. Assassin's Creed), but if you do it with style this can be a pretty efficient way of kicking off the game. Anian mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark (though it's true for all the Indy movies), which in turn borrowed the idea of a pre-credit teaser sequence from the James Bond movies. And I think this can easily be transferred to an interactive form. Fate of Atlantis does it pretty well, although Indy doesn't do much except fall through holes in the floor, and the simplified interface in the intro (single click interactions) means that you don't have to bother with a drawn out tutorial.

The intro can be a flashforward to a later point of the game, it can be the character's previous mission/case (imagine the intro to Sam & Max was interactive), it could be a dream sequence. I remember an old text adventure called Demon's Tomb where you start out playing an archeologist accidentally starting a fire inside the archeological dig. You know you're gonna die, but have to make sure that your research isn't consumed by the fire too. Then, when the archeologist succumbs to the flames, you take on the role of his son investigating his father's death and carrying on his work.

To me, this is good storytelling: Get the audience hooked, then go deep. Has nothing to do with "young people today" or whatever argument you can come up with. It's as simple as this - you have something invested in this, you care about the characters, the story, the location, because you've spent years developing the game, whereas the audience, for them it's just another game until you prove otherwise. So you'd better do that as soon as possible or you risk losing them.

I can think of a couple of different solutions, depending on the situation and object in question:

• Reduce the number of hotspots. If it's not relevant enough for the player to even comment on, should it be a hotspot in the first place? To me it seems that the classic silly responses of the Look-At command are remnants of an era (namely the early Sierra point-n-click games) before cursor highlighting became standard, and pretty much anything on the screen could be clicked on.
  
  
• If it's possible to interact with the object, it should be possible to examine it first - very few games have a high enough resolution, or descriptive enough hotspot names, to make it perfectly clear what you're interacting with and why. The Look-at text should at least provide the motivation for the player to want to interact with the item, and possible even hint at its use.
  
  
• Make Look-At a useful and necessary feature, expect that the player uses it. Some times it could lead to close-ups of items, but always offer useful information - e.g. add details to the story or a sub-plot, help establish the game world, offer some insight into the NPC who owns the item, or express the personality of the player character. I thought Gemini Rue was a brilliant example of how to build atmosphere and depth through Look-At comments.

Personally I find that thinking within the existing frameworks of what puzzles traditionally have been  like is very restrictive. As Hernald says, there are several lists of existing puzzle types out there (many linked to in this Adventure Gamers forum thread).

However, I think if you want to create something a bit more original you should forget everything you know about games and rather look into the psychology of learning and creativity. Because this is where we find explanations for why we as humans enjoy the mental challenge of puzzles, and also very good reasons for why we - as old-school adventure gamers - tend to become jaded with age, and no longer respond in the same way to solving puzzles. Because the "been there done that" feeling upon solving yet another item-combination puzzle is entirely linked to neurochemistry.

Learning new behavior, learning how to adapt to new environments and challenges, is a fundamental aspect of being human - it's a fundamental aspect of evolution too, to try out new ways of surviving and adapting to our current situation. To encourage this, nature has come up with the wonderful incitement of releasing dopamine into our bodies whenever we find a better, more efficient way of solving a problem. This is the function of the brain we as adventure game designers hijack, to give people pleasure by finding solutions to imaginary problems. We want them to have a eureka moment, we want them to feel the joy of insight, of learning, we want to flood their brains with dopamine when they figure out the "optimal" solution to a problem.

However, as we gain more experience in our lives, as we learn how to cope with specific situations (real or imaginary), our bodies stop rewarding us because we're no longer learning. We are just remembering how we solved similar problems before and applying the same logic to the "new" situation. This is why someone who's just discovered adventure games might find Gray Matter or Black Mirror 2 a pleasurable experience, whilst those of us who grew up with the genre will find them rather mediocre. Those games simply aren't different enough from what we played before to trigger that surge of neurotransmitters associated with learning.

So yeah, instead of looking into how it's been done before, I think we would be much better off investigating new areas that haven't yet been explored in games. Watch some TED talks about creativity, education, motivation, read books on psychology and neuroscience, oh, and talk to kids - they know a lot better what is fun than we do as adults, and they don't yet have the filter of culture to tell them what's the "right" approach to a problem. They'll try everything, and their solutions to problems may very well be better than yours, even when they seem like nonsense to an "educated" adult. Kids always think outside the box, because they haven't constructed the box to think within yet.

Edit: As for your categories, I think they're pretty spot-on. Anything we do in (good) adventure games is pretty much a mirror of real-world problems, and indeed, making tools/finding alternative usage for objects is very close to what we're doing all the time, as is communication and locating useful information/items. This type of goals are at the center of human existence, so learning them in a simulated environment is immensely useful. What we can change, however, is the "how" and the "why" of solving these problems, we can make them more intuitive, more meaningful, easier to relate to everyday experience, and this, to me, is the real challenge of game design - how to teach the player skills that they can use outside of the game.

If there are any sexual scenes in my games (if and when I get better with AGS), they will only be between a husband/wife pair, and ONLY under such circumstances (heterosexuality is a given).  But this too would be UTN.

OMG, what a shocking violation of the 1930's Hays code!!! :o :o :o
Married couples should only ever be shown in separate beds!

I especially like the white outlines around the characters. Why don't more games use white outlines??

Because pink looks better!

Has anyone come across some info on grass smoking and lucid dreaming? Dreams can get pretty wild when you can remember them, would like to know if it aids lucid dreams.

Depends how regularly you smoke and how it affects your dreamlife. Personally, I find I don't dream as much in periods where I smoke weed, whereas the moment I take a break, within a week or two I start having very strange and vivid dreams, often lucid or half-lucid ones (where you tell yourself things like "if this is a dream, this is the coolest dream ever" but aren't entirely sure) . If you are serious about lucid dreaming I'd recommend staying off drugs - go to the health food store and get some melatonin instead, I've heard that should increase lucidity. Weed is excellent for meditation and achieving waking-state closed-eye-hallucinations though.

Amen, thanks CJ for this awesome opportunity!

I was thinking, regarding the dynamic limits, I think we should really try avoid a solution where those limits are fixed upon compile. I agree that removing the editor limits would be first priority, but for a long-term solution I think it would be worth the effort to make the system stay dynamic at run-time. To be able to create say a character or GUI simply through script would be a godsend for module scripting.

Edit: I'll have to dust off my C++ skills this summer, but among the things I'm gonna try to implement on an experimental basis now that the source is released are two new classes: Scene (a "virtual room" class which allows stuff like split-screen, instant room transition, and allows you to manipulate scene properties without usin the other-room module), and Layer (which are dynamic objects similar to Overlay but can be displayed behind objects, characters and walkbehinds). If it seems viable to implement them in the engine I suppose Layer could serve the purpose that I imagined for dynamic characters/objects in the original post.

Found a really nice book about lucid dreaming on Google Books. Seems to be the whole thing, at least I didn't come across any limited access while flipping through it: The Lucid Dream Manifesto

One part in particular struck me. Unfortunately Google Books doesn't allow cut-n-paste so I can't quote, but it's the bit about the Senoi tribe of Malaysia on page 58. Now why weren't we brought up with this kind of encouragement to interact with our dreams? Seriously, why does western culture have such a boring approach to the powers of imagination?

"Precognition" in the sense that a dream becomes real is basic statistics. Using some arbitrarily chosen numbers like "people have 3 older relatives" and "people remember a dream every other day" you quickly get to a few thousand people worldwide dreaming every day of the death of a relative that's going to happen soon after.

I'm well aware of the confirmation bias involved in these things. And I'm not claiming there's such a thing as true precognition, but some of my dreams make a very compelling illusion that there is. If it was "just another dream" that turned out to come true, I'd agree it's a matter of statistic. But when you can tell those "special" dreams from your ordinary ones enough to think they'll be worth following up on, and they then turn out to be true, you do get slightly weirded out.