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Hmm, either the walkthroughs are wrong, or you've misread them. It's not the dirt ramp above ground, but rather the ramp below ground, which leads to the "reactor chamber". Check out that you haven't missed an exit in the below-ground area. Possibly at the bottom of the screen.

Edit: By the way, this should have been posted in the hints forum.

Farlander, I'm glad you could use the reference pic. I think the sweater is perfect for the university setting. I don't know about the t-shirt underneath though. Until the early 50s, t-shirts were pretty much consider underwear. I think a casual shirt, possibly short sleeved, although you wouldn't see that anyway, would be more fitting. But it depends on what you're going for of course.

As for the female character, I agree with Darth Mandarb that the one to the right is much better (the one on the left has a very 1980s look to her with those pastels). But you might even want to desaturate her clothes even more. I actually prefer the tan shirt in the earlier version.

What about movies based on people playing games?  (e.g. The Wizard)

One of my favourite movies when I was a kid was "Cloak & Dagger" I have never played the game, but I would have watched the movie at least 20 times. It had that kid from ET in it (Henry Thomas).

That was a really neat movie. But is it actually based on a real game? I thought it was just a fake game, like the one he plays in Big (you know, "melt ice wizard with thermonuclear wand" and all that). In fact, I really like movies about people who play games, which then become real - that's sort-of what happens in Shadowplay as well, but with movies instead of games. Wargames absolutely rocks, The Last Starfighter is cool, and Gotcha! (although not about computer games) is still among my favorite 80s movies.

Goldmund: Good idea, except it might clash with my passages on Baudrillard and Foucault

Don't worry. I'll try to scare away all the immature (pre-)teens by rambling on about ancient games with horrible graphics before even mentioning AGS.

Well, the Tex Murphy games weren't exactly original, were they? Apart from the futuristic setting, this could be any Chandleresque detective story. Besides, need I mention Blade Runner?

This description doesn't mention humor though, which, in my opinion was the only thing that set Tex Murphy apart from all the other pseudo-noir sci-fi stories out there.

Edit: Just Adventure seemed to like it: "this game will be an instant CLASSIC adventure game. I have not been so absorbed by a FMV (Full Motion Video) adventure game since Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive [...] It is almost included in the elite 'A+' games such as Gabriel Knight, The Longest Journey or Monkey Island"

http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/Conspiracies/Conspiracies.shtm

Wow, these sprites are awesome. A few ideas though:

I was thinking, maybe you could give him a letterman sweater (possibly worn underneath the jacket) to make him look more like a student/jock)?



Also, I think his hair is too long for the time. For a great resource on 1940s hair styles (though post-war), watch The Man Who Wasn't There by the Coen bros. The Converse shoes did exist at the time, but I doubt anyone would have wore them when not participating in sports. Have you actually looked at the Indy movies to see what his students dress like? Maybe that would be the very best reference source.

I think this is problematic, people without ideas "wanting to make a game". It seems there's a new one every week.

Of course creativity works in many ways, but honestly, in my opinion this isn't one of them. Authors, filmmakers, musicians, they don't set out "to write a novel", "to make a movie", "to compose a tune". If they do, it's probably because they're hacks, paid to deliver on time.

To think of "game ideas" limits you immensely. Forget that you want to make a game. Instead, open your mind to new ideas, you can always adapt them to the media later on.
Inspiration is all around you. News. Fiction. History. If you're even the least bit creative, you should see dozens of ideas flying past you every day. You just need to catch them. Some of them will be good, some of them bad. Maybe they're not game ideas, maybe they are novels, plays, movies, operas. Write them down, all of them. Maybe some day you'll feel like writing an opera.

Just look at every idea and ask yourself: "Would this be fun to play? Would I want to be part of this world?" Eventually you'll find something that could be a game. Maybe it doesn't look like anything else you've ever played. But that's a good thing.

I just got green light to write a series of three articles for a Danish gaming magazine about 1) Creating your own adventure game 2) The online comminity and the available tools (pimping AGS, yeah!) and 3) the future of adventure games, contrasting the commercial games to the independent scene, possibly interviewing Jane Jensen about her new game. Woohoo!

Ok, so apparently people are interested in the making-of stuff but not the annotations I had in mind. At least that saves me a lot of time, not having to keep track of where I found all the info. And I was going to do the behind-the-scenes thing anyway, with commentary and production art.

I think the current idea (the Pepper's Adventures in Time rip-off) will work very well for this, because it allows me to comment on characters, hidden references in the background and such on a per-hotspot basis rather than commenting the whole room.

Congrats on the nominations everyone!

As for ratracer's comment, I think people just tend to nominate their favorite game in all categories. It seems that it's not enough to be good at one thing, but the game has to be all-round popular for people to remember it. I agree that Keptosh and Purity of the Surf had deserved nominations. Hell, I voted for them myself. But I suppose it's the way things work. Same thing with the Oscars. I doubt we'll see a totally crappy game with amazing music nominated anytime soon.

I hope next year will see some more interesting nominations in the smaller categories. I for one can't wait to vote Byzantine for best sound. But I'm sure that will be one of the major titles in other categories as well.

Very interesting topic. I've been missing the game theory discussions.

I think the issue of perspective has much to do with technical limitations. Unless you're using 3D characters, you'll have to redraw them every time you want to change the vertical camera angle more than 30 or so degrees. And even depth planes are difficult unless your sprites are VERY big. The only non-3D game that did extreme depth really well was Cruise for a Corpse, which used vector graphics for the player character.

Also, I believe that most scenes where camera angles do change in games, it's done for maximum visibility (or in the case of LSL3 for the opposite ). The top-down view of Guybrush and the oars in MI isn't very cinematic, but it allows the artist to show the oars at the bottom of the canyon in the same screen as Guybrush. But it doesn't evoke any emotion or even suggest the danger of going down there. Imagine a different view, from the bottom of the canyon, looking up at guybrush at the top of the cliff, the vultures circling above him in the sky, the oars in the very foreground. This, in my opinion, would be a MUCH more interesting scene. But technically more difficult. It's so rare that you are even allowed to interact with the foreground objects because they are too close to the camera.
Imagine the scene from Citizen Kane where Susan Alexander attempts suicide. The jar of pills are in the foreground, her body in the middle ground and in the distance the door to the room where Kane is trying to get in. There's just no way that you'd ever be able to pick up those pills. How would you get the character close enough to the camera? Unless you were using vectors you'd have to let the character walk off-screen and then a huge hand coming into the foreground, picking up the pills. It's possible, but much too difficult in a 2D environment.

For those reasons, I think foregrounds are best used for symbolic pieces of scenery. Players are not so aware about objects silhouetted in the foreground, so you can do a lot of on-the-nose stuff, that would probably be too much if it was more visible. An example: In my game Shadowplay you visit an aging movie star - think Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. - in her crumbling mansion. The house is in itself a symbol of her and her career, but I've added a number of other symbols in the foregrounds. A vase of withered flowers, symbols of her faded beauty. A decaying velvet curtain representing her acting career. Dozens of framed photos (more of them in the background as well) of the actress in her youth, showing her self-image and her denial of age.

* What about certain motifs (reoccuring patterns or symbols)? i.e. the closets in Pleurghburg (as a symbol of Jake's fear)

Oh yes, the gay subtext of Pleurghburg Seriously, I must say I never noticed while playing the game, but there does seem to be a mutilated corpse in every closet Jake opens. I wonder if Chrille intended this, if so, he's even more brilliant than I thought.
I think motifs could be used much more than they currently are. Possibly because a lot of amateur designers make things up as they go along. Ratracer even admitted that he added a lot of the graffiti and other references to the class struggle in The Uncertainty Machine at a much later stage. But even if you don't plan everything out in advance, motifs is a great way of tying things together in the end.

And I think color could be used as a very strong motif. If you tie different colors to different emotions or situations, you could - potentially - trigger subconscious reactions in the player. Think of the way that the color red is used in Don't Look Now, or in The Sixth Sense for that matter.
For Shadowplay I've been playing a lot with the contrast of monochrome and colors. Dinah, the main character, wears mostly blacks and grays, while her sidekick, Lucas, wears these bright and rather tasteless Hawaiian shirts (a new one every day). The contrast not only ties in with Dinah's love of old black and white films and Lucas' love of comics and trashy monster movies, but also with their different life styles. Thinking about it, there's a bit of the same thing going on in Grim Fandango with Manny and Glottis, at least in the beginning.

I suppose it's just me then. I can't get enough of the behind-the-scenes stuff.

You are of course right that the information should come through playing. And obviously you'll learn a LOT just by playing the game. But for plot reasons there's a good blend of fact and fiction. I wanted the annotations to clear up any confusion about what's factual (I guess very  few people actually believe that King Ludwig was a werewolf, but there are gray areas where you just bend the truth a little to fit your story).

I agree that some kind of txt or html document would probably be the most simple solution, but I'd also like to award the player somehow for completing the game, so I might do it as text displayed within the game engine. Of course that would leave a problem with linking to external websites, but still, I feel that this information should be something you unlock by playing. Just like the production sketches in the CSI game.

Spoiler

The rightmost part of the printer. I think you can actually see a small square around the right spot. Have you tried printing the page first? Not sure if you can interact with it before getting the blank page.

[close]

You want to rip characters from LucasArts games, is that it? Go get Costume Ripper at http://scumm.mixnmojo.com/costrip15.zip it should do the trick for you.

I couldn't download

I downloaded The Adventures of Fatman at Underdogs and was overjoyed to discover that the audio commentary was actually in the game file rather than the audio pack (I suppose because the speech file only contains audio for dialog that is also written). Anyway, I listened to it all yesterday and really enjoyed it, even more than I enjoyed the game itself.

Anyway, for a long time I've been thinking of adding a similar feature to my game Shadowplay, as an option available after finishing the game (the game writes to a file in the game dir upon completion and then checks for it at startup to decide whether or not to show the "special features" option in the startup menu). I'm imagining something that is not just a "production commentary" like that on a dvd but more like "interactive footnotes". Theres a huge amount of fact in Shadowplay and just as much fiction, and I want to somehow educate the player in which is which - where the ideas came from, what's actually true and what is not, and what all the little references are hinting at. If you read Alan Moore's From Hell, you'll know how many pages of notes he had at the end, documenting his sources and revealing the liberties he took with historical events. This is more or less what I want to do - except it's in a game, not a book.

I've had a lot of ideas for how it could be done. The easiest option was to do a digital book available in the special features menu, where the story was broken down, either in acts or into topics. But I'd rather have something that ran parallel to playing the game. I feel that an "audio commentary" (more likely text-only) for each room lacks focus - especially in a game where all rooms are re-used throughout the entire story. But then I started thinking about this old educational game from Sierra - Pepper's Adventures in Time. It had this very cool "Truth" icon that you could click on all the objects, and the game would tell you if a character or a background element was based on fact, if it was fiction, or perhaps anachronistic.

This is the way I'm currently going. A special "footnote"-icon that unlocks during a second playthrough. Obviously not everything will be commented on, but this fits in with my "intelligent hotspot" feature (more on that another time) where the cursor only lights up if the task needs to be performed to proceed in the game. Obviously, when the footnote-cursor is selected, it lights up on all hotspots that have commentary attached to them.

I'm very happy with this concept. This leaves one problem though. How to comment on dialog and on cutscenes? Should I add comments in parentheses to each dialog line, which are displayed only if commentary is turned on? That IS a solution, but it's not very pretty. Any ideas?

I'd like to hear your thoughts on these things. Does anyone have a better solution to the whole commentary/footnote feature than those presented here? Would you even bother reading the commentary if YOU were playing the game? Tell me what you think.

Well, ScummVM is more than just a launcher program, it's actually a virtual machine ("VM") emulating the original SCUMM interpreter. It's a completely different program using the original game's resources (graphics, sounds, scripts). That's why you can run non-pc versions of the games in it.

I don't think there's a similar program available for Sierra games (there is at least one "new" AGI interpreter that allows the old games to use your soundcard instead of the PC speaker, though), although we could really use a SCIV emulator. I can't remember how long it's been since I heard a digital sound in a Sierra game (hasn't worked since I abandoned my SB16).  If you want "just" a launcher program, that will allow you easy access to old games, try Abandonloader (http://www.angelfire.com/realm/zeroone/)

I do agree that the GiP forum could be more restrictive than it is now - although it would be if people just followed (not to mention read) the rules. But I think a demo is the wrong criteria. It would only lead to less serious people cranking out totally worthless demos (a la the so-called "technology demo") to be able to start a GiP thread.

Usually the general tone of the post tells me if this is a real project or just bullshit. Obviously not all projects are going to be finished, for whatever reason, but at least you know when the developer truly believes in his project and won't lose interest next week.

When I started my Shadowplay thread, I didn't have a single thing programmed other than a few trial scripts. But I did have a heavily researched story, which took me years to develop, as well as a number of backgrounds and character designs.
I didn't post it to get attention or to attract team members, but rather to "claim the idea" first, in case anyone else, within or outside the community, should be working on a similar game. As well as letting community members know that this is what I'm working on.

Rather than the demo restriction, I think it would be enough to ask people for more info. On story, features, and possibly characters, as well as a number of screenshots. Obviously we should expect more details for remakes. By forcing people to think all these things through, as well as creating presentable art work, we'd at least get rid of those who just think up a neat but very sketchy idea and post it the very same day.

On second thought, possibly there could be a restriction that only people who'd already released an AGS game (either another game or a demo of the GiP) were allowed to start threads. I'd better get my demo finished soon

Check your graphics drivers and either update them or try using an older non-beta version.

My game kept starting up to a black screen and freezing the computer. I spent a whole day reinstalling the game, thinking it had something to do with corrupted files (the copy protection made my cd-rom drive sound weird, as if it had trouble reading the disc). It turned out that I had to uninstall my new geforce detonator drivers and return to an older driver version.

Edit: After installing the game, there should be links to the support website in your start menu.

But it'd be nice if her face had some accessories like earrings, lipstick that show the gender.

Not trying to offend you or anything, but I hope you can hear yourself how ignorant that statement sounded. Still, Dinah is a pretty gender-atypical person with short cropped hair and big chunky Doc Marten's boots, so earrings and lipstick would be totally wrong for the character. I hope though that when you see the animation, you'll be able to tell she's a female (and I think she looks at least SOMEWHAT feminine in the dialog closeup).