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different colour options when they have already been used, headers, Scrollable options etc.

Those are great ideas - especially the different color ones, I'd love to see implemented.  Perhaps along with some kind of "repeat click"-option that would scroll through different replies after the main info was given. I.e. if you don't want to remove the topic altogether because it contains hints (like "stop bugging me, I told you to go distribute those flyers.").

Of course you could just use an invisible sprite (1-pixel transparent) for the portrait, if it wasn't possible to turn it off. As for the rest, I'm not sure I understand what you mean redruM.

By the way, sorry for going off topic.

Mmm, no, I meant a Sierra text box (which, for my game, would be placed in the bottom black part of a letterboxed background) and the on-screen characters animating, no portrait. More or less like in the first Gabriel Knight.

So I hope whenever you do implement it, that we'll be able to turn off the portrait and keep just the animating character for Sierra speech.

Oooh, the hotspot editor changes sound awesome. Looking forward to get back home and test all the new features out. The final release of this version should probably be out by the time I leave Canada.

I know I shouldn't ask, but now that you're fiddlin' with the speak portrait positioning, how far away are we from Sierra style speech with LucasArts talk views and custom default (is that a contradiction in terms?) placement of text boxes?

Hey Vel, thanks for reminding me of my true calling while I toil for the Dark Gods(tm) of the gaming industry. Ok, so maybe the 19th floor of EA's Black Box studios in Vancouver isn't excactly the 7th circle of Hell, but I'm kicking myself for not buying a laptop computer, so I could sit and work on my own stuff back at the hotel. Especially after I found out that my room has free high speed internet access. Well... perhaps next time around.

I did bring a lot of paper though, and I plan on doing a lot of artwork, as well as working on the structure of the game. Things got a bit unbalanced after I introduced interactive flashbacks to the otherwise very linear 10-day structure of the game. Maybe it'll be good to work away from the computer, to get a birds-eye-view of the story rather than seeing it a screen at a time. The other day I went out and bought a pack of index cards (which to me has always been this mysterious American phenomenon as they are always mentioned in books on screenwriting, but aren't very common in Europe - or at least not in Denmark), and I've started filling them out with a scene or event each and spreading them all over the floor of my hotel room, moving them around, trying to visualize the flow of the game.
While I'm at it, I'm coming up with more puzzles (most of them optional) to add content without adding new locations. And to tie things together more organically. The original script had many events that just happened, or options that were unlocked on certain days (somewhat like the Laura Bow games), but now I'm letting one thing lead into another - for example, instead of a person suddenly responding to your previous phone calls, you will meet him at an event triggered by your previous actions (sorry for being vague, but its a big plot point, and I don't want to reveal too much).
And then there are, as I mentioned, the flashbacks, which have yet to be designed. Originally they were just dialog, then they became cutscenes, and now they'll be interactive - mostly just for the hell of it, but it also adds an ironic edge to the Rashomon/Citizen Kane-aspect of the story. How do you play the protagonist in a false memory?

I hope to return from this month-long trip with a complete script for the Shadowplay demo, and will start coding it as soon as I get home. Modgeulator has written the coolest theme music for the demo - nothing like his dark, dark theme for the game itself, but a very upbeat Pixies-style ditty and he even had a friend play the guitar and bass parts on real instruments. It captures the character of Lucas, the demo's player character, perfectly, and I really hope that the rest of the demo will live up to its audio. The demo isn't actually part of the game. It's a comedic spin-off featuring Lucas, the sidekick character of Shadowplay. It's a silly little story made to introduce the characters, show off the interface (which still isn't perfect as I'm waiting for a text box positioning feature to be added to AGS - if not for the demo, at least for the finished game) and give a small taste of the story to come.

With my current working schedule, a month abroad and a month at home, the release date could easily be postponed another year. Hopefully less if I get a laptop computer before my next assignment

Edit: See the first post in the thread for another short update.

Uh, I can't really promise a huge post, but I can offer my 2 cents at least

I think maybe we should distinguish between plot-important backstory and descriptive backstory. In a lot of games, especially in the detective genre, you spend a lot of time revealing the past, and often the backstory is more important than the current events.

In games like Colonel's Bequest, Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight the history of the characters is the turning-point of the plot. In Shadowplay, my own take on the mystery-genre, most of the story is told as recounted history (some in dialog, some in - partly playable - flashback). This is very important information, that makes a difference to the basic plot of the game. Although it's not really part of the game events themselves, the history change the player's perception of what's going on in the game (and are often needed to make sense of it). Another example is the ending of 7 Days A Skeptic. although it doesn't affect gameplay.

But what's more interesting are the subtle hints at a backstory, which the player might or might not pick up on. Usually, in games where you can read the player character's diary (The Longest Journey and The X-Files come to mind), the information doesn't deal with the plot of the game at all (the exception being the diary that comes with Dreamweb). In The X-Files, the player character's divorce, the short-story he wrote, his interest in the civil war (which is part of a puzzle though), or his collection of Ramones record covers has nothing to do with the disappearance of Mulder and Scully. But it does expand his character and let us see past his Special Agent facade.

If these things are really important for the character (it makes a difference whether he's divorced, and what the reasons for this is), they should be written in advance, as part of the character description in you design doc. But this is for your eyes only. The player need only hints at this, such as a message from his ex-wife on an answering machine (in X-Files they even put the papers from his divorce-proceedings on his couch - that's a bit on-the-nose in my opinion). Other things, like his colleagues obsession with old radios, can be made up on the fly, when doing the room art and adding som 30's adverts for radios in his office.
But these things should only be hinted at. I think reading dozens of letters and diary-pages of stuff that is not important for the plot detracts from the main story (remember the player doesn't know that it won't be important, and reads it all in case there might be a clue in the text). Personally, I'd hide these kind of things in object descriptions ("That's the only thing I took with me, when I left home") or in dialog ("Long time no see. How's Suzy?" "I don't know. We're not seeing eachother anymore. Last I heard, she'd moved up north." "Sorry to hear that").

The trick, and the challenge to us as designers, is to make these references to game world and character history as effective as possible - I know some of you love reading page up and page down of world history, but couldn't it be told better and more efficiently?

I've started looking for old adventure games at car boot sales. This weekend I got Larry 2 (nothing missing as far as I can tell, it even has the "Letter from the President" where Ken Williams tries to pimp Adlib sound cards ) for about $2.5 and the X-Files Game, which I've always wanted, for about $6 (a bit on the pricy side, but the box is REALLY nice, and with 7 cd-roms it's not something you could download).

Another great game - and a lot longer than the original! The graphics and sounds are fabulous. I still suck at these LucasArts kind of puzzles, and don't really enjoy them - same thing with No Action Jackson - but at least the bonus puzzle was much easier to find this time around.

Two thumbs up. Looking forward to The Find!

Is it just me, or did that sunset at the end look a lot like the ending of Full Throttle?

Awesome game, once again. When I first read that it took place on a spaceship, I was a bit turned off, but as soon as I got into the game, it felt very much like 5 Days A Stranger, despite the setting. I still have an issue with the graphics being so colorful (almost EGA-ish), because it works against the horror theme. But I'm amazed how much content Yahtzee managed to cram into that minimal download. I mean, most 4-room demos around here are larger than that. Respect, man! It was fun playing Enclosure and this game within just a few weeks of eachother - so similar yet so different.

I still can't work out how "6 Days A Sassin" fits into the series though

I think this might help you:

http://www.worldofmi.com/imageviewer.php?image=thegames/monkey4/monkey_kombat.jpg

EDIT: Ah fuck, sorry, didn't realize it wasn't filled out

Maybe this is better, although it's not visual:
http://www.cheat-xs.com/Cheatpage.php?page=E0012

I'd really appreciate it if somebody who got all the points would please upload a savegame from the end of the game (preferably after the sneaking part but before hitting the thing with the thing )?

I really want to see the full ending, but I don't feel like going through the whole game again (especially not the arcade sequences) only to still end up a point or two short.

Thanks!

EDIT: Never mind, I found something about changing the value of offset 39 in the savegame file to DD, apparently that should give you full points, but I haven't tried it yet.

Thank you very much scotch, I'll look into it when I get back home. Didn't even know there was a black and white plugin available. I don't have any animation on the screen while in b&w mode, only guis (only thing moving is the mouse cursor). Do you still think it will be too slow?

Here's what you do - start playing QFG1 very thoroughly - I suggest playing as a thief, because he's the only one who can get all skills and thus will be able to take all the challenges of the game (and always have multiple way of solving them). Then, when you finish the game a master of all skills and with tons of gold in your pockets, Tierra will be ready to release the QFG2 remake - which is, at least in one respect, an improvement over the old version. After finishing that, you skip over QFG3, which is pretty poor - especially for cross-class characters - and go straight to QFG4, importing your character as a Paladin.

See, problem solved

Enjoy playing!

Ah, thanks. Too bad I'm using 32-bit

Ok, thanks guys - I didn't think it was possible either, just wanted to make certain before I dropped it altogether.

I think you misunderstand my question (or I misunderstand your reply) - I didn't mean black OR white, but black AND white, as in black and white movies, monochrome, grayscale. I don't want to fade to black or white, just turn the background from color to grayscale. It's for a general effect (when pausing the game, or when reading documents in close-ups) so using a different background frame isn't really a solution either.

ThisÃ,  is probably a dumb question, but I have to ask - is there any way to "tint" the screen black and white (you know, like the Sam & Max film noir mode)? It seems that the TintScreen function only is additive when it comes to color. I suppose you would need to set it to (-100, -100, -100), if it was possible to use negative values. Or would that make the screen black? I'm confusing myself here.

Why don't you just use the same coloring technique as in the old background? The composition has improved immensely with the new version (especially the foreground objects did a lot for it), but I don't really think there's anything wrong with the old coloring style - except the very yellow light streaks coming through the blinds (I also wonder how the light streaks through the blinds manage to actually fall in the shadow of the file cabinet - isn't this the same lightsource?)

This game looks absolutely awesome!

BTW: You pencil drawing is so clean that you could easily include it to provide outlines, at a very low transparency setting (20 or 30%) It wouldn't look anywhere near as sketchy as the background in my tutorial.

Yeah, but not when the game itself is smaller than the save game 

This is a very High Fidelity-sort of question, and the kind of thing where you change your mind the moment you've replied. Let's see...

Lou Reed - Andy's Chest
The Clash - Janie Jones
The Ramones - 9 to 5 World
Nick Cave - People Ain't No Good
Velvet Underground - Inside of your Heart
Joan Jett - Crimson and Clover
Bauhaus - Ziggy Stardust (I actually prefer their version to Bowie's)
Stiff Little Fingers - Barb Wire Love
David Bowie - Life on Mars
Pink Floyd/Roger Waters - When the Tigers Broke Free

Looking back at the list, not a single of the songs are even the best ones by the artist in question. If I had written the list yesterday or tomorrow, I bet only one or two songs would be the same.

Oh yeah, big applause for the guys with Cyndi Lauper on their lists. Gotta respect that.