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MrMasse, first of all, don't worry about giving away the recipe. After all, if you can find the information, so can everyone else.

But on the other hand, I'm not sure that it's very important whether the chemicals used in the game could be used to make explosives in real life or not. I think it depends on the tone of your game really.
If it's a realistic game, it would make sense to use real recipes, but then just must remember that in real life, you wouldn't just mix the stuff together in your inventory (what do you mean you don't have an inventory in real life? ) but you'd heat stuff up, stir it slowly, chill it by lowering the beaker into ice water and whatnot (not sure if you'd do any of this when making dynamity, but you get the point). If, on the other hand, this is a humorous game, you might make up some bogus recipe with more interesting ingredients (or use a simpler recipe such as gunpowder rather than dynamity).
I mean, most of the ingredients you mention would be found in labeled bottles in a laboratoty. If you also gave the player a list of ingredients, there would be no real puzzle. It would be far more fun if you had to improvise, getting charcoal from the barbecue grill in the backyard and stuff like that.

Edit: You MUST give the player a recipe to work from, even if you use a real world recipe which the player would probably know (gunpowder for instance). One of the worst puzzles in an adventure game ever was probably the photo developing puzzle in Shadow of the Comet where you had to pick out three chemicals from a shelf without any sort of hint. It was pure trial and error.

I must say that I enjoyed the ending of MI2 as well. I haven't read any explanations for it (and I don't remember CMI very well, but wasn't it the same theme park?), but I thought little Chucky's glowing eyes indicated that this was just another of LeChuck's tricks. I can't really judge EMI since I only played it once, and probably won't finish it again because of the Monkey Kombat, that was just too stupid.  

As for disappointing games, I must say Phantasmagoria 2. Apart from the acting I really liked that game - it seemed like a game version of Jacob's Ladder - but what was with that ending? And the puzzles where you had do combine the strange creatures, was that supposed to make sense?

I think a lot of games have great potential, but ruin it with the ending. It's as if they make up the final part somewhere along the line, hoping that it'll fit together somehow. Even superb games such as GTA3 (what's up with that ending, paying a $500.000 ransom for some girl you've barely met?) and GTA: Vice City had rather disappointing endings. (I know these aren't adventure games, but they are heavy on story).

Other games are disappointing because they are part of an otherwise great series. I think QFG5 has already been mentioned. Although I don't think it's as good as some of the other QFG games, I think  it's a pretty good game. But QFG3 was a disappointment: It lacked atmosphere, the color scheme was boring, the plot had no scope. It was obviously designed for the fighter/paladin character class, and there was very little to do for the thief. And unlike the other games, you could only do the quests of the class you had chosen (no matter whether you had the skills of the other classes), so you were bound to miss out on something when you imported the character in QFG4. Also, I seem to remember that you couldn't get all points. I ended up importing my character directly from QFG2 to QFG4 to keep him as all-round as possible.

Personally, I never liked the "erotic" parts of the Larry games, in fact the only Larry game I really like is LSL3 and that's because of the puzzles (in parts LSL3 seemed more like Space Quest than Larry, exploring the jungle and all).

It's not that I find nudity or sex offensive, but it's so obviously only being used to sell the games. And any hint of eroticism is diluted by Al Lowe's questinable sense of humor (sure, innuendo might  be funny... for the first three minutes or so). I doubt that anyone above the age of 12 found the Larry games even vaguely erotic. It's like those teen titty flicks of the 80's, "Porky's" and whatnot, trying to be raunchy and failing in every other respect.
I think eroticism COULD be done well in games, but it would have to be treated matter-of-factly, without the  self-consciousness that you're doing anything controversial, without self-censorship (the Larry games have an Austin Powers-like approach to nudity) or without turning it into a joke for fear of offending people. And of course it would have to be justified by the story, not the other way around as seems to be Al Lowe's approach.

If you want to do it Larry-style, I doubt anyone will feel offended. If you want to do it properly, I think it'll be a difficult task, but if you succeed it'll be worth the trouble. Good luck.

I liked James Horner's score for Willow, but I must admit I haven't really noticed his music since. I just watch a movie, then see the credits: "Oh, so that was James Horner", without really being able to recall any of the actual score. I feel the same way about Jerry Goldsmith these days.

With cheesy synthisizer music

Living in Denmark, I've never really played any adventure games in my native language (except a few games by a Danish company, but they came pretty late, sometime in the mid-nineties). The market just isn't big enough for translations to be profitable. But growing up playing Sierra games, I learned more English from adventure games than I did at school. Sure, sometimes you had to use a dictionary, especially in the text-input games (to this day I think of PQ1 every time I hear the word "sobriety test" ), but it was a great way of learning the basics of a foreign language: verbs (action commands) and nouns (inventory items).

It's sad that Germans and the French never get a chance to learn English the way most other Europeans do, from american movies, television shows and other english-language media. I see your point, that a lot of non-English speakers would never play the game unless it was translated. But are we doing them a favor?
Much can get lost in the translation, anyone who's seen a subtitled movie or tv show knows that. As someone else mentioned, many jokes don't translate well, because they are word plays, or because they refer to things specific to american culture. And often, whole sentences would have to be completely rewritten to make any sense at all. Translating fiction is more of an adaptation of the work than it is a word-by-word translation. Which is why some of the best translations are made by people who are authors themselves.

I wouldn't let anyone translate a game I'd written into a language I didn't read myself (I WOULD however have someone else proof-read anything I wrote in English ). After encountering all the weird English translations of French games (Coktel Vision and Delphine had some rather memorable translation errors in their games), I can only imagine what would happen the other way around. Unless you're making kids' games, I think you should expect your audience to understand English, maybe they'd even learn something. Otherwise nothing will change.

Now, if you could only teach yourself Japanese by playing Hentai games :^)

This one is easy to miss (nearly pixel hunt). You don't have to give anything to him as such, but he won't leave until he finds something at the dig.

Spoiler

Maybe some dinosaur bones would interest him?

[close]

Need more help?

Spoiler

Check the foot of the skeleton in the Berlin museum

[close]

Let's see now. This should be easy, but most of my favorite directors have disappointed me lately:

David Lynch - used to be my favorite director. Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me is still on my all-time top ten, and the first 40 minutes of Lost Highway were awesome. But Mulholland Drive didn't really work - I was bored out of my mind during the first hour and a half, but then the tacked on ending really made it all come together nicely.

Tim Burton - another previous favorite. Everything up to and at least in part including Sleepy Hollow is great. Planet of the Apes, utter crap. I don't really care what he's doing next. I'd much rather see Henry Selick's (director of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) adaptation of "Coraline".

Robert Rodriguez - I have admired him since I saw El Mariachi for the first time and afterwards read his very funny behind-the-scenes diary "Rebel without a Crew". His philosophy about no-budget filmmaking has influenced every creative project I've been involved in. I can't say that I absolutely love his later films (From Dusk Till Dawn and the Spy Kids series), but they still have the energetic Rodriguez trademark pace.

Kevin Smith - This cat is the best dialogue writer in the business, no question. I'm not sure about his directing skills, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was horrible, but I can't help loving him. Mallrats and Chasing Amy are on my top 5 movie-list, and I own all his stuff on DVD - even the commentary tracks are funnier than most other comedies.

David Fincher - The best visual storyteller of his generation. Se7en was more stylish than any other neo-noir and as a renewer of the cinematic language Fight Club is the modern equivalent of Citizen Kane. Panic Room was a pretty average thriller with overblown visual effects, disappointing as hell.

Some other guys who I respect immensely:

- Roger Corman (The king of exploitation flicks. I love all his Vincent Price films, the Poe movies in particular).
- Brian De Palma (Blow Out is my all time favorite movie).
- John Carpenter (I can't help loving his movies, even the bad ones, except Vampires)
- Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Bringing out the Dead, what more can I say?)
- Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now, scariest movie of all time)
- Robert Wise (The Haunting, second scariest movie of all time, plus he did West Side Story )
- Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause)
- Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, People vs. Larry Flynt)
- Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion)
- James Whale (Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, Bride of Frankenstein)

Edit: Almost forgot Terry Gilliam, I feel a bit embarassed though, that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is my favorite among his movies.

Yes, that's what I meant Scorpiorus.

As I said, it IS a minor issue. Because the black areas probably compress pretty well when you zip the compiled game. But on the other hand, it's just one of many workarounds for getting AGS to behave in a SCUMM-like manner. I just mentioned it, because it seems like an odd thing, not being able to place the GUI outside the actual background, but I'm sure there is a technical explanation for it.

This is a minor issue, but how come the GUI needs to cover part of the background? I know it's the traditional Sierra style, to have the GUI pop op over the upper part of the background screen, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to need to draw the background letterboxed to be able to use the LucasArts interface without cutting off the lower part of the background.
I suppose the black areas on letterboxed screens compress very well, but still, it would be nice to just be able to either center the background image (for small rooms such as the back room in the church in GK1) or to align the upper left corner to a certain coordinate.

I'm doing a game with a PQ4 like interface (the GUI is in the lower black area of the letterboxed screen), and currently it means an additional 40 pixels of black at the bottom of all my background images.

Thanks. Sorry if this has been suggested before.

Let's see now, who do I admire? Tough question. Of course I admire people like Einstein, but not in any way that has really influenced my life. So I think I'll just limit this to the people who've inspired me to do the things I do, artistically as well as otherwise.

David Lynch - Film director and painter, among other things.
Kevin Smith - Writer/director
Neil Gaiman - Author of the Sandman comics as well as several novels
Lou Reed - Singer/songwriter/composer/poet - ex Velvet Underground
Joey Ramone - Singer/songwriter
David Bowie - As a phenomenon
Andy Warhol - Artist, but also, like Bowie, a phenomenon by himself.
Warren Spector - Game designer
Edgar Allan Poe - Writer/poet
Tim Burton - Director

I'll probably regret something the minute I post this. Expect lots of edits

Edit: Heh, remixor, I actually had Roger Waters on my list too. He WAS Pink Floyd to me. I even love The Final Cut, which everyone else hates, because it's so obviously Waters' album.

Edit 2: Ok, scrap Warhol and Bowie, replace with Orson Welles and Robert Rodriguez - two guys doing things their own way.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I've downloaded some of the programs mentioned, and I'm looking forward to checking them out.

Wow, that looks great Igor. Maybe a bit cartoony for my game (especially the neck), but I see what you mean. I'll probably end up doing the face as a pencil drawing and then adding it to the Poser body. I'm pretty good at working with morphs and magnets (tools for changing the character mesh in Poser) but the detail gets lost when using the sketch render. So maybe drawing it by hand would be easier. I also love the very simple shading in your pic. It's very effective.

I don't actually remember Build having this feature, but I'll take your word for it

CJ, it wasn't in the Build editor itself, it was a function of the editart.exe program which you used to add/change textures and sprites for the game.

I will try to explain how it worked: There was a cross in the middle of the screen. By default, the sprite was centered to this cross. However, by using the arrow keys, the sprite would move up and down and sideways, while the cross stayed put. So you could actually center the sprite at a coordinate which was actually far outside the sprite itself (great for stuff being thrown etc., MI2 uses it all the time). The Scumm costume ripper (don't remember the name) has a similar interface, but just for viewing I think, not for editing anything.

Edit: A good example, although not the best since the centering coordinate is still within the sprite area itself (but off-center in horizontal as well as vertical direction) would be a character swinging on a rope (or a whip if you're doing an Indy game )

but you can usually crop animations quite tightly and still make them centered,  and having a large area of one colour such as the tranparent colour means it will compress very well and probably not make a lerge difference to the file size.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't large areas cause slowdowns (at walkbehinds and such), even if they're transparent?

Although if character sprites did have this then I guess we'd be one step closer to being able to have a seperate head and body sprite like many classic adventure games had for talking and walking at the same time among other things.

That WOULD be sweet. Although this probably would mean a total recoding of the "follow" fuction (or a similar function for the head to stay on the body). It would probably make it much easier to do transparent ground shadows for the characters as well.

Thanks for all the feedback, it's very helpful.

I must admit that I hadn't even noticed her finger nails before you mentioned it (I think it might be the outline, not the nails as such that is dark), nor had I thought much about the elbows. I'll look into it when I get home. I can't really see it here since I'm at this really crappy computer at school, which can't show animated gifs properly (they just flash like crazy and almost freezes the computer).

As for the animation, I've actually watched women in the street, studying their walk. And I think this is pretty close. But I might go home and play some movies frame by frame to copy the actual motion. I was using Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs as inspiration for her movement scheme and body language, but you don't get too many shots of her walking towards the camera.

I agree that I should have stayed closer to the pale look of the earlier version. I will change the skin tone to a slightly bluish and less saturated color. Maybe a bit brighter, but not as white as in the previous version. It just wouldn't work with the talking close-ups.

Since most people apparently still think she looks male, I had a go at the face in Photoshop, just changing a few pixels really, but it made a lot of difference:



I think it made her look far more feminine, but I'm not really happy with this detailed face. It's too realistic for the stylized look that I'm going for. Maybe if I throw in some more dark pencil-like lines and change the skin tone. Also I should throw in some randomness for each frame, because I tried copying it into every frame, and it looked like the character was wearing a cardboard mask, because nothing changed.

Any thoughts on how to improve it?

I was wondering if anyone out there can recommend a good flowchart or storyboard program to aid game design.  

My design doc/script for the game is getting huge, and I'm having trouble organizing it. So I'm looking into some way to split up my linear design doc in a way that makes sense. To connect puzzles, characters, objects etc. with locations, but still retain the detailed descriptions (which you can't do with the good old pen and paper technique) and other notes.

Basically what I would like is a program that would allow me to build boxes for each room, link them together and then place characters, objects etc. within them. I considered building the game world in one of those text adventure creators like ADRIFT, but then realized that the compass directions made little sense in a point and click (especially as it uses a map as a central hub).

My current idea is to use Microsoft Frontpage, because it can display a diagram of how each html page is related to the others in the website layout. One page for each room, containing info on the location and any objects/characters there. But it's still not the best solution (you would have to remember which character was where, whenever you had to add anything about that person).

How do you organize your game designs when they get above a certain size?

Maybe this has been discussed before, but I didn't see it in the suggestions list:

Yesterday I was playing around with one of the Scumm game ripping tools, looking at all the MI2 and IFOA sprites, and I noticed how each animation frame was cropped closely around the actual sprite area. And each frame was relative to a set of coordinates instead of being centered or aligned to a corner. That seems SO much easier, not to mention more efficient, than having a huge blank area around each animation frame, in case another frame in the sequence should need that space. In other words, why center the character in the artwork instead of doing it when importing?

If you're familiar with the editart program for Duke3d and the other Build engine games, I think that's an example of a good interface for such a fuction. It also allows you to check animations within the editor, which of course would be necessary for correct positioning.

This is a walking animation test for the main character in my game. The pencil style drawing was rendered with Poser's sketch render tool and combined with flat color layer in Photoshop.


If you've seen my earlier character art post, you may notice that she isn't as pale in this version. I thought it was just too monochrome, and while it fit well with the other background, most locations in the game will have at least some color. It's lost some of the stylized look, but I think it will work better, when cutting to almost realistic dialog closeups, than it would with the old look. Tell me what you think. Did I screw it up?

I should add that I will of course correct the error with the boots breaking through the pants.

Also, if anyone has an idea about how to resize an animation without antialiasing the outer edges, please do tell. Even if it has to be done frame by frame. Preferably while still allowing for bilinear resampling of the actual image. I'm seriously considering installing my old win 3.1 version of Micrografx Painter, because incredibly that old program could do it, if you selected the actual picture area before resizing the whole image. But Photoshop always antialiases the edges unless I use nearest neighbour resampling, and Jasc Animation Studio can't even do pixel resize without messing up the edges!

If I find no other solution, I'll have to render the characters at the actual size they'll be in the game.

Edit: Relating to this, I have a few questions to those with experience in these matters. How many frames would you consider necessary for a walking animation (for each direction)? This is 12 frames. I thought of cutting it down to 8, like Indy FOA used. Also, what's a good (pixel height) size for a character in a 640x480 game? At first I wanted the player character to be larger than the other characters (so she could get closer to the camera for some scenes).  But then I realized it would cause problems with the walk area size settings if I ever wanted the npcs to move around. Final question: Does number of colors in a sprite matter if you import it into a hi-color game. Is there any file space to save by reducing the palette before importing?

SLaMgRInDeR, I'm sorry for the unfair comment. I wasn't aware of other meanings than the mythological name. It just reminded me too much of the horrible, horrible Mission: Impossible 2. Sorry.

Thank you to everyone contributing titles. It's very inspiring to see all these new approaches. Some of them I like a lot, and actually consider using, others just put a new perspective on things, opening up for new ideas.

"After Image" I really, really like. I might just go for that. Neole also had lots of really clever titles, but perhaps some of them are just too "funny" for this game: "The Reel World", "Tales from the Script" etc.
And somehow I doubt that "Lens Flare" would be a very popular title in these forums  
What inspires me however, is how many of the titles share the rythm of other, existing titles. "Mind if the Cameraman" -> "Mark of the Vampire", "A Game of Clicks" -> "A Game of You", "Back to the Forties" -> "Back to the Future", and so on. It's something Neil Gaiman often uses. Maybe that's the way to go. Especially if I let the game share the title of the fictional film.
I also like how some of the titles conjure up images of creepy old movie theatres. It reminds me of one of the titles I came up with for the game, "Pandemonium Shadowshow" (a nod to Ray Bradbury).

Andail, thanks. However, I DO think a title is as valid a subject for criticism as is plot, puzzles etc.