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Sounds interesting. Could you put up a link to the script?

Looks good. But a word of advice: When and if you redo the characters, don't just "draw on top of" the old ones with more detail. I think it's a problem that they are all based on the Indy character. His stance - the side view in particular - shows a very specific attitude. And although all these guys are probably just as tough as Indy, they lack individual personality. This is the main issue with using Poser as well - generic template poses and walk styles makes it easy to forget the importance of body language.

Congrats. Those seem to be in much better condition than my old Sierra boxes. I don't know how the hell I manage to get them so worn - at least I stopped lending the boxes to friends after certain people lost my Colonel's Bequest magnifying glass and my KQ collection manual (with all the copy protection, argh).

It's a good thing I don't have a credit card - buying old games off e-Bay would ruin me. I'll have to settle for garage sales. I recently found Heart of China in excellent condition for $2. Unfortunately there's no Sierra product catalog in the box, which used to be my favorite part of the games - I could spend hours just reading descriptions of games (the 10th anniversary catalog is particularly great! )

Reminds me a bit of the style I'm going for in Shadowplay, except I use colors as well as pencil lines.


As for looking filtered, I think the problem is mostly in the background, because the computer doesn't really understand the image - you wouldn't draw the window like that if you did it by hand. I think the sketch renderer does a good job with the character though. If you do hand drawn backgrounds with sketch rendered characters, like I do, you wouldn't have that problem.

I considered rendering characters normally, printing them out, and then tracing over them by hand to get more control of the lines and then scanning, but currently it seems like an impossible feat. If I should do that for every animation frame of every character in the game it would never be done.

Are you animating the background as well as the character? And are you using a flickering idle animation for the character, so the lines are always changing and flickering?

I really like the look, it reminds me of rotoscoped animation, like that old A-ha video (Take On Me, was it?) What game is this for?

I strongly feel that the discussion should take place in the adventure talk and chat forum. I see the concept as one way of making the AGS forums more serious, and moving the discussion to somewhere else would REALLY undermine these forums. Remember that the competitions used to be in the chat forums, and still managed to be "special" threads. As long as the rules are specified along with the topic introduction each week. i.e. no two sentence posts etc. it should work.

And as much as I like the suggestion of a game "book club", I think it's difficult to be much more than descriptive (see Goldmunds post), when discussing single games. I think discussing topics (game design as well as game content) is much more valuable to us as designers.

Check out  this tutorial:

http://screen7.adventuredevelopers.com/foy/tutorial1.htm

Good luck!

Being a Poser user myself, I can tell how much morph work you've done on this character, and it looks great. I'm not sure what kind of person he's supposed to be, but in my opinion the suit and cap look weird together, but maybe that was the point. Otherwise you might want to transfer the face to a nude male model and dress him properly.

One thing though: I think you should lighten the skin. The major flaw with most Poser characters is that they all have a mediterranean sort of skin color. Usually because people use a skin-colored texture on top of a skin-colored model, which darkens it considerably. So turn the surface color white and let the texture do the coloring (this is true for all surfaces - I always start out with plain white models and do all coloring with texstures). If the skin render color already IS white you might want to lighten the texture in a paint program.

Otherwise great work.

Of course there's always http://www.gamasutra.com (requires free registration). I also recommend looking at the footnotes of other articles, such as the ones in the http://www.gamestudies.org/archive.html often they refer to other online resources.

Some other links from my favorites:

http://brasslantern.org/writers/iftheory/
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/ (lots of off-site links)

As for forming an intelligent video game discussion, I think we're already doing a pretty good job in some of the posts in the adventure related talk and chat forum. But I'm all for a serious discussion of the possibilities of the medium of games. I'm not sure we need another forum, but it would be nice to see discussions at a higher theoretical level (without getting too academic, my head hurts whenever somebody mentions Baudrillard, Derrida or Bordieu) which doesn't run way off topic within ten posts.

Maybe we could have a "topic of the week" discussion, just like the Background Blitzes and other competitions. We could build list of suggestions for topics, and each week, someone would "host" a discussion by writing a short introduction to the subject at hand, outlining different approaches to it and maybe references to what has already been written. Maybe concluding with a provocative statement to get the discussion started. It would be the responsibility of the host to keep the thread on topic.

I think the debate competitions offer a good format for discussions like these, but of course in this case it would be our real opinions, and there would be no time limits to reply.

Thanks noed, apparently it's not just me

I ended up saving the game and restoring when Oscar says they're the wrong ones, instead of walking all the way back to the console. If I'd new about the different cutscene, it would have been a breeze saving and restoring if you see the short version of the cutscene.

Another puzzle that really had me stumped was making the drink at the end. I tried all kinds of combinations - I even looked up musical notes in the dictionary - until I realized that the ingredients were missing! For some reason I hadn't even noticed that anything but the keys were clickable, but I suppose the missing sounds should have given it away.

I'm not even sure I remember a song from 2003. My musical tastes always seem to be 10 or 15 years behind the rest of the world's. I'd say something from Lou Reed's "The Raven" - it's crap compared to most of his earlier stuff, but that and Nick Cave's "Nocturama" are the only albums I actually paid for this year.

Goldmund, yes, I was looking forward to meeting you as well. It's just that I'm working on my thesis, as you know, and the exact week of Mittens is the week where I'll finally have some peace and quiet to write. It's an unfortunate clash of dates, but at least knowing what I'm missing out on, should inspire me to spend the time really well.

I've decided not to attend Mittens this year. There's just too much going on, and I can't afford the spare time right now. Quite annoying really as it's probably the closest to Denmark it'll ever be.

Well, bon voyage to the rest of you. I hope you have fun.

a large library as in Indy3 and then do it topical like GK1

Yes, I think that's the solution. A larger library would make it much more tedious to solve the puzzle by clicking on everything, so hopefully it would inspire the player to think.

I agree completely with Goldmund's comment on the feeling of effort being put into something, although the player character. as opposed to the player. does all the work. Every time Guybrush digs a big hole I feel absolutely worn out My worry is that the player won't feel the importance of the information he finds, unless it's been difficult to find - somehow the ease of locating the books in GK1 made the text feel less interesting than the information I found on Sidney in GK3.
evil, yes, it's a lot easier if you burn most of the books and leave the interesting ones more or less unharmed (except the boring parts) But you have a point. I think I'll stay away from helpful librarians though - librarians in adventure games should always be an obstacle, not a help, except the cute one in Darkseed

I'm not sure how far we can go into this - but I certainly felt I've done some research when I clicked this german dictionary in GK1.

Spoiler

Ah, but that puzzle demanded logic - it wasn't about finding random words from the dictonary but of connecting this with the Drachen Drei poem (and later, to the clock). I'm not sure that the act of clicking the the dictionary in itself felt like research. It only made sense if you were actually TRYING to translate the poem.

[close]

Spoiler

Try breaking the window above the policeman

[close]

As for the save and load, I don't recall it as being difficult to find out (but I don't remember HOW you do it). Try F5 or run through all the F keys.

This is somewhat related to my earlier post about simulating internet searches, but whereas that was more about the tech side of things, this is directly related to gameplay.

The question is this: How do you turn library research into interesting gameplay?

There have been more than a few libraries in adventure games, employing different techniques:

1) The pixel hunt library, a Lucasarts classic. Run the cursor across the "books" on the bookshelf until you find that elusive, two-pixels wide "a book". Often these books have no obvious significance at the time you find them. The "How to fly an airplane" book in Indy 3 is an example, and most recently the mushroom book in Syberia, depending on when you found it.

2) The "topic shelf" library. Used in GK1, GK2 and The Uncertainty Machine. Each shelf has a topic of it's own, say "Geography" or "German history", much like a real library. Whenever you need to research a certain topic and click the hand icon on the right shelf, the player character picks out the right book. Often this turns into a longer puzzle where one book refers to another topic - the Schattenjäger library in GK1 worked like this.

3) The easy way out. Ask the librarian for interesting books and she selects one for you. KQ2VGA used this. Can't think of other games.

4) The MI2 version with a card catalog. I really liked that, but I don't see how it could be done with AGS. Besides, nobody use card catalogs anymore, so it's not very relevant. You could do a computerized version, but it had the same problems as the www search discussed earlier.

Those were the approaches to FINDING books. Now, how could this be used for interesting puzzles? An obvious one is the misplaced/misfiled book - it could be done a bit like the switched coffins in KQ2VGA, but that wouldn't be very logical. I mean, it's not as if books are just interchangeable. An index number mix-up would be more likely, but how could that be turned into a puzzle?

I have a few library puzzles in my game, that I for obvious reasons won't reveal here, but I'm pretty much stumped in coming up with any more. And I'm still not sure how I'll design the actual finding of the books on the shelves. A combination of catalog and topic shelf would be preferable, but I'm not sure quite how to do it yet.

Any ideas?

If you have downloaded the version from the ags site, you should be able to select language in the setup menu.

The beginning is quite hard, but if you remember to put everything back in order (tools back in the tool chest, no dummy under the sheet) before the father returns, you shouldn't be in trouble. One hint though: You need a shard of glass from the mirror. That took me ages to find.

Poser is very easy to learn to use but difficult to master. It has a bad reputation because it's very accesible, and lots of newbies turn out cookie-cutter artwork that looks all the same.

I've used versions 3 and 4 a lot and it took me years before I got beyond the classic Poser look (you'll learn to recognize and despise it VERY fast). Good texturing and lots of morphs (mesh modifications) are necessary to create unique characters.

I'm currently using it for a game, but I spend a lot of time getting rid of the rendered look. Here are some examples of what I did with it:

Early test of sketch-rendering style:


Animated:


And with retouched face:

We discussed something similar in a thread a while ago:

http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=6740;start=msg82878#msg82878

Although I'm still not familar enough with AGS script to understand Dorcan's code, apparantly retrieving the text shouldn't be a problem as such. I think the biggest issue would be to emulate html (clickable links and such) well enough to make it feel like the web.

Have you gotten the inspector out of his office and searched it yet?

miez, that's a great idea. I really like that. I'm probably going to use something like that. Thanks for the idea.

Esseb, or how about this: Irrelevant searches give a bunch of hits - all porn!

Edit: Which allows for a new mini-game - close the pop-up-windows