Messages

how is this fro my box art?

[/quote]

That's not a fro! This is a fro:

Yeah, I quite like the style of the characters too (though if this was the critics lounge, I'd suggest brightening the shadow under Marty's nose - I found it quite distracting). Doc's haunted look makes me wonder if they used a photo of Chris Lloyd as Uncle Fester for reference

I think it's a good mix of cartoony and realistic that will also work with their existing technology, and I must admit that I have a special fondness for Telltale's somehow angular, geometric take on stylization since it's similar to my own approach (not sure what to call the style, but Gerald Scarfe's character designs for Hercules shares some elements, as does the Clerks animated series).

For anyone critical of the designs, consider the alternatives:

(shudder)

New info and (possible) production artwork courtesy of USA Today.

Quotes of particular interest:

the Back to the Future game series will include the likenesses of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd

Lloyd will also provide his voice for the games

Woohoo!

Bob Gale, who wrote the screenplays for the three films, is working with the game developers on the plot for the planned five "episodes"

And, hoping that USA Today allows external image links, the character artwork:


Seems they're going for a Tales of Monkey Island with more muted colors approach.

The stages of grief model has also become a bit of a fiction trope. I remember first hearing about it in Bob Fosse's 'All That Jazz', but the last decade or so it's been popping up in TV shows time and time again. Sometimes for story structure within an episodes, or at times spread out over a season arch - I'm pretty sure 'House' used it at one point, 'Frasier' did for sure, Sopranos has an episode called 'Denial, Anger, Acceptance' etc.

Oh hey, look, a tvtropes.org entry for 'Five Stages of Grief, damn that was a pointless exercise in TV trivia then

The mini-games look very similar to the recent CSI games and the Women's Murder Club series (yes, I play hidden-object-games, but it's Jane Jensen goddammit!). The medical stuff could be good fun, in a slightly twisted way, a bit like the Life & Death games - I loved the whole doctor/surgeon concept but always ended up killing the patients because I couldn't pass the copy protection  .
As a game adaptation of House, though - If the single line of dialog was the best example of a House "zinger" (as they put it) they could come up with for the trailer... No, just no.

Actually, since a single char can store any number from 0-255, you would only need one String char for each value (even double-digit ones).

GUI stands for Graphical User Interface so presumably one should expect to be interfaced with by users in a graphic fashion.

Hence the pronunciation "gooey"...

I like the kind of GUIs with buttons that you can click on and make stuff happen. As for mini-games, I think you should have a Mario Kart clone with the characters from the RPG.

Bestowers schmestowers, Purity of the Surf 4evah!

Because you subtract five points from the score with the "GiveScore(-5);" call. Unless you want to punish the player for clicking the hotspotagain after picking up the pills that line shouldn't be there at all.

Also, the way its scripted now, the player will be able to go back and pick up more pills once he uses/loses them. I don't know if that's intentional.

Yeah the current downloadable demo is for the Deluxe version. As far as I know, Dave removed the links to the original MAGS version when he started selling the Deluxe edition. The main differences in the Deluxe versions are the voice acting, different music and one or two additional puzzles.

Of course it is, Calin, but there's no way Dave could find a background artist to match such style and talent.

Interesting, I was pretty sure EA owned the System Shock trademark, but it seems they abandoned it in 2007 (found here: http://tess2.uspto.gov/). Any takers?

Mark Image
Word Mark    SYSTEM SHOCK
Goods and Services    (ABANDONED) IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer game cartridges; computer game discs; interactive multimedia computer game programs; downloadable computer game software via a global computer network and wireless devices; computer application software for mobile phones; computer game software and entertainment software for use on mobile and cellular phones, handheld computers, computers, video game consoles, both handheld and free standing, and other wireless devices

(ABANDONED) IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Providing a computer game that may be accessed network-wide by network users; providing an online computer game accessed and played via mobile and cellular phones and other wireless devices
Standard Characters Claimed    
Mark Drawing Code    (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number    78773880
Filing Date    December 15, 2005
Current Filing Basis    1B
Original Filing Basis    1B
Published for Opposition    August 15, 2006
Owner    (APPLICANT) Electronic Arts Inc. CORPORATION DELAWARE 209 Redwood Shores Parkway Redwood City CALIFORNIA 94065
Type of Mark    TRADEMARK. SERVICE MARK
Register    PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator    DEAD
Abandonment Date    May 8, 2007

(hope the data doesn't look too crap after cutting/pasting)

Wait, weren't Square Enix going to publish this - shouldn't their logo also be on the cover? Or are they only involved with the net server/4 chapter deal?

Strictly speaking, Views aren't on-screen objects but just a way to structure animation frames that you then assign to an Object, Character, Button, Cursor etc. with its own coordinates. It would be lovely to have custom coordinate offsets for Views and individual Frames (like SCUMM did two decades ago ), but there's no such thing in AGS yet.

Are you using standard Sierra portraits, or the custom dialog module with portraits? If the latter, you could just create a new button in that GUI and use that to display the smaller sprites - though you'd have to move it around in script if it changes size/position.

and some actual JP people for voices from JP, things will be okay. No shitty sub-par voice actors please! Especially all those fake John Hammond's.

The only Jurassic Park game that matters DID have Sir Richard Attenborough.  Yeah, I'm talking Trespasser, bitches  8). Still standing by my fondness and respect for that game as a diamond-in-the-rough, way, way ahead of its time.

I hope they actually ask Alan Silvestri to write the music for the BBTF game, I'd love to hear his "fourth part" as it were.

As long as they use the musical themes from the original trilogy score, or variations of them, I'll be happy. Wouldn't be BttF without the Silvestri music, but I don't expect them to get the man himself. Also hope they get a few period tracks like the 50's music and Huey Lewis songs from the originals.

Spoiler

The 1986 outline sounds in part like a Breakfast Club pastiche, and I really hope they go with that vibe. Would be a brilliant occasion to get some mid-1980's songs in there.

[close]

Edit: Gotta love Telltale. I just received a press release about the S&M season 3 finale, and at the end of the mail, I noticed this little bit about their presence at the Penny Arcade Expo: "To welcome Back to the Future news we'll share at PAX, we're bringing along an actual DeLorean Time Machine! (for real!)"

Yeah, I'm also looking forward to this one - even more so after participating in the online survey they ran about what you would like to see in the game. They outlined four possible plots, and even if those turn out to be nothing like the released episodes, Telltale obviously know what they're doing. Very few elements clashed with the tone of the movies, and I was also relieved that none of them dealt with the distant past or far future.

From what I recall, the ideas took place in (should I spoiler tag this? Sure, why not):

Spoiler

1930-something, 1968 or '69, 1986, 2010

[close]

All of them set in Hill Valley - of course anything else would have been sacrilege, and some of them involving Marty and Docs from different eras. I didn't really like the overarching plot they suggested, that after the train destroys the time machine at the end of BttF3, the pieces were dispersed across the timeline, so it's your typical "collect the plot tokens" structure. But, hell, if they can use the plot device in some creative way like the paranormal toys in S&M season 3, maybe it'll work great - possibly adding new abilities to the DeLorean for each episode or something.

I really hope they get Christopher Lloyd to voice Doc, pretty sure Michael J. Fox doesn't do any kind acting anymore (sadly), but Thomas F. Wilson doesn't seem impossible. Both he and Lloyd acted in games before, and neither have much of a film career at the moment. If there's room in Telltale's budget, it would be pure awesome.

Edit: Adding some more spoileriffic details from the survey (from this site).

Spoiler

       * …November 5th, 2010. Working together, Teen Marty, Doc, and Present Day Marty finally corner the man who made off with Doc’s Time Train. While they argue about what to do with the well-intentioned time-hopper, a scary black vehicle appears out of nowhere. A familiar bulky presence steps out and confronts them. ‘Detective Tannen, Temporal Preservation Squadron.’ I’m afraid you’re all under arrest’…

       * …June 18th, 1938. Young Emmett Brown is about to announce his engagement to gold-digging young woman, turning his back on scientific pursuits forever. If Marty and Doc can’t bust into the party and get a singular Jules Verne novel into his hands, Emmett will never invent the time machine, a possibility too horrible to contemplate. Maybe they can sneak in with the swing band…

       * …May 12th, 1986. After stopping Biff Jr. from getting in a fight with his time-displaced son, Marty leaves the dance floor and sneaks into Strickland’s office, looking for the keys to the detention hall. He doesn’t know how three teenagers from 2010 got their hands on a time-travelling Delorean, but the most important thing now is getting them locked up in one place before they mess up everyone’s future…assuming they haven’t already…

       * …June 11th, 1968. Weaving their way through the peace protestors outside the courthouse, Marty and Doc surreptitiously use Doc’s temporal scanners to look for the mssing objects scattered through time by the wreck of the Time Train. After a number of dangerous encounters with riot police and hippies, there’s only one artifact left… the remnants of the train’s flux capacitor… repurposed as a peace necklace.. around the neck of a VERY pregnant Loraine McFly. Marty suddenly remembers that he’s going to be born tomorrow…

[also, while it's hinted at here, the other questions strongly suggested that there will be gameplay mechanics involving the hoverboard, Marty's arcade game taught gun-slinging talents, and probably some kind of guitar-playing minigame (nor sure which consoles it's coming on, but it'd be cool to see a Guitar Hero controller being used in a title that's not primarily in the rhythm game genre).]

[close]

Is the second-to-last one a vector drawing? I would love to see a game in that style if it's not too hard to animate, I love the ligne-claire drawing style and muted colors. If it's vectors, I suppose it could be animated quite quickly using cut-out style skeletal animation, though I don't know if there's any free programs for that (Anime Studio isn't too expensive tho').

(I know this isn't the critics lounge, but you mention having trouble deciding, so I'm taking the liberty to comment. I'd suggest if you go for the last one, at least anti-alias the outlines, or vectorize them for an even thickness. The roughness of the outlines makes me think they're based on a drawing scanned in black/white? If that's the case you should try scanning in gray-scale and overlaying it on top of the colors with a multiply blend mode - I think it would look really nice with that drawing style).

On topic, I'd like to know how early in the development process you guys start animating characters? Personally I'm saving it for last, since I know I would maybe have trouble matching the style later on, if additional animations are required, and I'm a stickler for consistency. But it does feel a bit odd to walk around a game world populated by placeholders or lifeless single-frame character views.

I don't think the File* functions are what you want. It'd require transferring the whole database to a temp file on the harddrive, and even with encryption that's a no-no in terms of security (as is transferring the password to the user's computer for comparison!).
To be honest I don't know much about servers, but what seems most logical would be to have the game call a sever-side script (submitting the login/password), and if the password is correct return a String from the server with the player's data, that you could then parse and apply to in-game variables.

Also, this thread is from 2003, but you knew that, right?

I'd really love to click that link, but I'm afraid of breaking it. 

Just kidding. Looks great, congrats on the release! The style reminds me a bit of an early CD-ROM game called Kingdom O' Magic (green guy there too ). Will check it out when I have time - got a long backlog of great-looking AGS games to play - including one I'm supposed to beta test   (sorry, Ben, I'll get right to it).