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Hello. The design and stance are all good. But the colours are very desaturated with little contrast, and that might hurt, depending on what the backgrounds will look like. As a rule of thumb, the characters should be more saturated than their backgrounds in adventure games. Just a bit really, to stand out. You're also wasting the middle fur shade, since it's so close to the other two, at 1x it doesn't show at all. Just up the contrast and saturation up altogether and try to reach a complementary level. A little more pronounced tint would also help this sprite, I think.

there were alternative solutions to puzzles for years before Indy 4. Mainly in interactive fiction games by magnetic scrolls and infocom etc.

I don't have a favourite company, but it seems I enjoy a few more sierra games more than the lec games. And plus, I never liked Monkey Island, Manic Mansion/DOTT or Sam and Max a lot.

They were following two of the best adventure games ever made (qfg1 and 2) with that. That's all. Very high expectations. The awesome thing was, besides the bugs, qfg4 delivered and then some. 3 isn't horrid, it's just dissapointing after the goodness of shapeir, and speilburg.

Besides the initial annoy when you are in such a situation, I don't really see the necessity of actual legaleze disclaimers in freeware adventure games. Sure, someone might stick it in a horrid paysite  as in this case, but I doubt they'd check the txt and go "oh, here's a liscence. I guess I better not put it up with my other 2 gigs of commerical warez games, then" if you did include a disclaimer. Assholes will be assholes, and I don't see the point of going after them, be you equipped with the legal highround or not. Sticking a notice somewhere that the game is free, and if you paid money for it someone played you for a fool is a good idea, since it's informing your potential audience. But actually trying to fortify against people who blatantly couldn't care less about your disclaimer is not, really. Even if you shut a site down, big deal. I know the feeling of getting exploited sucks, but I don't think we should waste effort on going after them. It's not like they're making millions out of someone's free game, anyway. Only a fool would pay for that site, for example. 

There IS no qfgV!

Vatican't City hearse Vatican't City hearse (all you need is death death is all you need)

yeah sorry, right over my head.

COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!

Ugly? umm... ok. I'm sure the extra 80 pixel rows in your versions made it to be stunningly beautiful.

This game does not need to be remade. In dosbox, with the patches applied, it runs perfectly.

that looks really bad. The car is totalled, right? Probably would cost more to fix it up than it would to buy another used one. Glad you're ok, sylph. But... burning building?

Probably Rob Blanc I? I think I tried ags then and was confused with the 256 colour-ness of it, and I e-mailed yahtzee for help. He directed me to the tech forum, and that was that. I wonder how many e-mails like mine yahtzee got those days. The first game I really really liked was probably Permanent Daylight. Hmm, it's been a few years. 

The early AGI games were a good example of good dead areas. Like space quest 1 and 2. The difference between them and more recent dead areas in games, is that in those old agi games, the art style was homogenized, so you couldn't rightly tell from walking in a room, if there was something you needed or not. You had to look around actively. And walk around, try things without resorting to randomly clicking on everything. The fact that these games were keyboard controlled ment navigating terrain was a gameplay device in itself. Of course dead areas seem a bit annoying in games with keyboard control, no environmental hazards and slow walking speeds like simon 1. But in space quest, I remember really liking walking through the jungle screens, trying to see what was important and what not, minding my step for danger, and generally, taking the atmosphere in. So I guess dead areas are good or bad, depending on the rest of the game design in each case. But I really do think the film analogy isn't really necessary. I'm used to hearing this about comics too. "Look at this panel! It's so... cinematic!" as if a comic has to be like a movie to be good. Comic books can be comic books, and operate on their own set of semiotic stuff, just like adventure games can be adventure games, and not movies. One should be more interested in making a good adventure game on it's own terms, than a cinematic adventure game on another set of terms, not directly related to the genre. The aesthetic of the computer game seems to be out of favour, in place of more and more elaborte attempts to mimic reality, or the next best thing, movies. I do not see why this is always good.

My main point is: "Don't waste my time". Over the last hundred years filmmaking has developed us a set of  tools to tell a story efficiently, and we'd be fools if we didn't take advantage of those techniques.

If your time is so vital and you feel it is wasted by some inbetween rooms, adventure games are not for you, I think. Adventure games aren't about instant gratification, they're about immersion, resonance and paced development. I feel you know all this, but I have to underline some things. Filmmaking has given us a set of tools to tell a story efficiently within the attention span of a viewer in one 2 hour average sitting. Games don't have to be like that. To make another analogy with another somewhat longlived art form, in literature some pieces have many  (more than 3) chapters, sometimes go on for lots of pages simply describing scenery, setting the tone, or in internal monologue that would be out of the question in a filmic format. So let's not be so fast to equate adventure games with movies.

dead areas are good when the player doesn't know they're dead. If the game is based around exploration and survival as well as puzzles and plot development, like early sierra games, rooms where you don't 'do things' but just navigate the environment, evade danger and get going are fine in my opinion. This serves another issue which is HORRIBLE in adventure game logic. The 'ok, what do I have to do in THIS room' thinking. Players who are accustomed to every room being vital to the continuation of the game, might solve puzzles prematurely, or collect objects they didn't know they needed, simply because the click on everything on everything in every room by habit. This is a design flaw. You need to take the player's mind away from solving puzzles sometimes, and remind him in others. On the other hand, you have the Simon 1 problem, where the main character walks so slow, and you have to traverse through pretty, but long rooms to go from point a to point b. I think balanced game design solves both issues. Garage, you are in my opinion wrong to borrow extensively ( in this issue ) from film editing. A film is over in two hours, and the audience knows that, and that's your space to do whatever. An adventure game doesn't. Adventure games are not movies. Adventure games can have a relaxed pace, "dead" rooms, optional stuff to do, and shouldn't always be action-packed and closely cut.

Yeah I was aiming at 15 august anyway so that doesn't clash, andail.

It seems we're going to have to go camping after all, seeing the estimates of how many people will be coming. I'll be looking for a good spot to reserve in Evia this weekend. More news soon.

Heimdall 2 is certainly a point and click affair, and it is very well made I agree.

I was not talking about a massively multiplayer adventure game, because I think that is a silly idea. To be completely clear, I have no interest in massively multiplayer games whatsoever, and personally I don't think the adventure game genre lends itself well to such nameless interaction between competitively minded people.

As I thought was perfectly clear, I was following up on the other thread of this conversation, started by Kinoko, where the discussion is about two or three (or anyway, a small group of) people collaborating on solving a compact game. I was attempting to adress scotch's comment about such games in AGS specifically, by explaining how difficult it would be to script something like that due to how AGS is fundamentally designed.

As to how players would collaborate in the stricter environment I was suggesting, yes, like Lost Vikings or the just mentioned Gobliiins. Select characters can do select things, timing, distraction puzzles, etc etc.  And the fact that it also can be done by one person, 'who has got a certain idea' (sic) , frantically clicking on other characters trying to get the timing right to solve a puzzle, doesn't negate the enjoyment of three different people synchronizing to get a task done. It is a concept not explored a lot in video games, sadly.

I guess the point would be for the players to collaborate instead of trying to work against each other in a multiplayer adventure game? Wouldn't that be a refreshing change, to be more interested in achieving the goals together, and enjoying the game instead of trying to be in the 'top position' for hoarding items?

Depends, Cpt. I think it's beautiful, not pretty.



EDIT: also, the topic does read 'point and click' adventure games, but OotW was in many essential ways quite a bit more of an adventure game than most others, so there. Less so for Flashback.