Messages

What shading look are you after? DOTT? Do you want it just less clean, or painterly? Would make it easier to give you advice if you could specify a bit more what style you're going for, since different ones use different techniques. Also, what mood are you going for in the room?

Sorry, I was being really unclear. I'd like it to have a more painted look, or something similar to that. Just as long it's not static cut-n-clean shadows or gradients. Something like this  or this.   

I did not express this at all in the original image with the "shadows", but I imagine the mood would be an abandoned living room during the day. Regularly being used, but currently not. Most lights are out but it's not completely dark, as the daylight is lighting up the room. I guess that gives it a slight impression of warmth and emptiness.

I don't know if that made much sense, or helped.

Do you have any experience in using photoshop?

Yes. I wouldn't call myself an expert but I've used my fair share and grown comfortable with it.

I think one of the program's main strengths are the very powerful non destructive layer types/effects, which allow you to experiment freely and quickly with colour and values, which is incredibly useful especially when learning, since finding the right combination right off the bat is nearly impossible, and might take a couple of hundred tweaks.

These techniques may be a bit difficult to grasp at first, but they're really simple and logical. If I knew what style you were after, I could combine an edit with an introduction to them.

Thanks. I wouldn't mind redrawing this whole background in photoshop, by the way, if it's better that way.

Now, your style is very different from mine and I have never used Open Canvas, but I'd suggest *never* to draw outlines and colour on one layer (if you did that) and then erase "spilled" colour. Rather put outlines and a sharp block of colour on sep. layers, and then never look back.

Yes, I'd imagine that would look terrible or just being a pain to work with. My biggest problem was removing the color that goes outside the outlines clean cut. So for example the red patch don't slightly blur into the green couch, or the brown frame blends itself with the wall.

I'd say adventure game's should move over to flash more mainly because it will allow vector based imagrey while avoiding problems with resolution size. No lost in detail the larger the screen is. Also all information is in Vector format, reducing the size.

But the quality reduces the performance considerably on slower computers, especially fullscreen. Besides, if you run the game in a window as it is now, it's pretty much as good as a .swf file could get.

So really, its more efficient to make it on flash. Then again, where do you start when making an adventure game in flash. Seriously, unless someone makes an adventure engine for flash and release a template, just like what AGS does, people won't bother. So your safe for now.

...And of course this too. Just thinking about programming the walking and inventory interactions makes my head spin. I haven't used actionscript since 2004, and I think they've moved up 2 versions since then.

If you just want to get rid of the clean outlines, you could simply load the pic into PS and then
a) do an overall blur (will probably result in a total mess, though)
b) draw with a soft brush tool of 1 or 2 px size around all edges, using the colour of the shape you're working on.

First option is out of the question, and the second one just seems like a slower version of it. Thanks for the suggestions, though.

But to be honest, I quite like the style you're using. The only problems I see with your pic is that the colours are a bit too bright for my taste, and that the shading isn't consistent.

I used the palette from Day of the Tentacle, and some darker versions of them. As I said the shading is awful and just an example on how I could do it. So in retrospect I really don't know why I even posted it. Sorry 'bout that.

Apart from that it's really nice IMO- though it's yet another "warped perspective" location, and I think it would look just the better with straight perspective.

I don't find it hideous, but I'd like to explore another type of style. I tried sketching out parts of it in OpenCanvas, but I had some serious issues coloring it. Erasing the color outside those thin, thin outlines and still making it look good seemed close to impossible. I'm guessing it's just a matter of practice, or are there any techniques out there making it easier? I used the airbrush, but maybe there's tools that work better?

I guess crooked/straight perspectives are a matter of taste, but I do find the window to be quite an overkill. Still though, it's more about the color than the composition.

Plus it would be a total bitch to program.

I haven't played v 1.1, but from what you describe it sounds great! I'm so happy that you keep supporting thegame after the initial release. Too often, it seems, do creators abandon their games once they're posted on the Completed Games forums, neglecting to make those little tweaks that would really help them come into their own. I'm glad you took my and others' feedback, and hope it has helped improve Earl Mansin.

I'm always open for things to improve, as long as it's on a small scale. Like certain responses for certain actions even if they don't work, but does make sense in a way. This is easy to add and hopefully decreases the frustration level of the player and improves value, so I'm all ears if someone got suggestions. I probably won't change major stuff like puzzles and such, though.

Replay value â€" none

And here I was hoping the super secret alternative puzzle would be good for at least something.

There are 4140 registered users here plus dozens to hundreds of anonymous lurkers, so I'd say the community is pretty big. Adventure games isn't a popular genre in the big flash sites anyway and yeah since what gives the game its weight is mostly music and sounds it wouldn't be much smaller in flash. For freeware adventure game playing crowds, most of the potential is here. And so making it in flash wouldn't give it that much more exposure.

Plus for some reason people seem to be picking up on AGS games pretty fast. I think I got on MobyGames after three days, and the Czech really seem to appreciate independent adventure game development.

And I don't think this is a game for your average Newgrounds or 123-free-flash-games.info crowd.

Anyway the total music and voice files after extraction for this game is 11,434kb + 11,179 so thats between 22 - 23 mb the rest of the files amount to 138 mb

So you can by more than half the games original size with flash ( Total being about 160mb ) 

Even if I managed to half the size in flash, I doubt anyone would care to wait for a 70MB .swf to load. Few places I could upload it too, and it would run slow as hell fullscreen. And since WinRar/InstallCreator works really well with AGS games, it cut the down the download about 100MB. I think that's pretty good.

I've been exploring different ways to shadow backgrounds, but I haven't found one I'm completely pleased with. Here's the result of a quick 2 hours, roughly showing one method I could use (it sucks but it's just an example):



If I spent a few extra hours doing these kind of shadows, it might have looked good, yeah. But what I'm looking for is a way to make the background look less clean and vector like. I'm guessing I'll have to do some work in photoshop, but I really don't know where to start. Any tips would be appreciated.

Here's a shadowless version of the background:

The thing that confuses me: Didn't anyone really donated them? I believe they could collect at least a few bucks...

Heh... This is internet.
By the way; the background image of the website is horrible, indeed. Are they real aborted babies?

Aborted fetuses usually look like bloody beans with limbs or roadkilled frogs, so my guess would be they're stillborn, or aborted way, way too late. These kind of pictures are popular among rallying pro-lifers.

I'm no expert, though.

Wow, this was a fantastic little game! Very polished - the graphics and voice acting were brilliant, and I liked the interface and the puzzles. My only nitpick would be to agree with Snarky about the lack of in-game feedback for progress on the puzzles, but really this was such an achievement, especially for a first game.

Really? I would think you'd get enough feedback in the 1.1 version. If you give me any examples, I might add some hints in the next patch.

Thanks for playing.

Just wanted to say thankyou for the game, it was really good, and the soundtrack as well, I'm listening to it now on iTunes. I cant wait for it to be continued.
Cheers
Cameron

Glad you liked it.

Downloaded it (again) and finished (again). First i started panicing, when i couldn't get that rag from botton of that box then after a while i got it.

installer was great! also it seemd to me that low-quality videos make a bit better mood for game, its not so "clean" etc.
but when i die, in that room where is the tombstone there is a flash"Main menu"(quickly dissapears) and when i click no matter where, game quits. so perhaps you make something like load and quit buttons to that place? then i dont have to start the game over and over again.

Thanks! I should really do something about the menu. I'll see if I can cover it in a little patch I'll be releasing on a later occasion. (There were some small issues with the German version)

If anyone still has nitpicks, I'd love to hear them, apart from the sudden quit at the death menu.

[Earl Mansin: The Breakout 1.1 is out!]

Earl Mansin: The Breakout 1.1 is out!

...And you can download it here! I've compressed the speech and movies a whole lot, so now it's at the humble size of 66,6MB. As always, if you find anything wrong, don't hesitate to tell me.

Right now I get one vote for each hundred download at average, so if you liked the game*, please give it a vote.
*If you didn't enjoy it, lie when voting, or avoid the voting page by all means necessary.

Some new key features:

- Now with German subtitles(by Ralf Knollmann)! And what language would suit a psychopathic serial killer better?
-Compressed speech and video files for size!
-The hammer bug and "quick escape" bug fixed!
-Adjusted and re-designed the sheet puzzles slightly. So all the previous walkthroughs of the game will have to be updated. 
-New and prettier menu screen
-A funky installer, instead of a boring .rar file!

You can also download the whole soundtrack!

The website will be updated later today.

Enjoy!

AppName: earl mansin.exe    AppVer: 2.62.772.0    ModName: earl mansin.exe
ModVer: 2.62.772.0    Offset: 000acf76

And actually it generated a windows error log report.
Don't know if this helps.

This seems to be beyond my control, sorry.

Pretty good game, but I think that with your graphic, animation, sound, etc., capabilities you guys are capable of making something really top notch. Perhaps your puzzle making, graphic scale, and story creation wasn't that great in this game, but you guys certainly have the ability to make something better. I hope to see something from you in the future that's a knock out.

Thanks for the game.

Since this was my first game ever, I of course expect some criticism to occur. Your comment was a bit vague for me to work with, though. Thanks for playing.

I had to register just to say what a wonderful game you've created!

Hillarious stuff indeed but my only complain is that it's way too short! However I'll give it ago later on again (as it seems like there is multiple ways to knock out the 2:nd guard?)

Glad to hear that. Yeah there are two ways to knock out the guard. I would wait for version 1.1 before playing it again though. It's all improved and bug-fixed (hopefully). Should be out any time now.

About it being too short, we'll see if I can't do something about that in the future. I have some ideas on how to extend it, and there'll be some additional locations if I go through with it. But let's all wait and see.

By golly man, tell me what it said. I'm working on the patch right now, and it would really help.

This was awesome 

This game will be a contender for many AGS awards this year. Great lucasarts style graphics, great animation and videos, great voice acting & dialogue, itesm description were amusing, puzzles were the right level - challenging but not overly difficult, though I agree with Snarky about the bed sheets puzzle process. I loved the death scenes but the game must really have poped up the option to load or restart instead of exiting on you. All in all a very enjoyable game in a great style, leaving a taste for more.

Thank you for the kind words! I've already explained why the game exits and don't go back to the menu a few times, so I won't bother being a broken record.

Two bugs though, the major one is that after doing the final puzzle the game crashes. That just can't happen!
The minor one is that in inventory screen (which is greatly designed btw) sometimes when you click the look on items, you get the description for another item in the inventory and not the one you intended and clicked on.

Did you get an AGS error when the crash occurred or just your standard "send error report" windows popup? I can't do anything with the latter, as that seems to be something with the AGS engine itself. The minor one I'll see if I can fix, but I won't promise anything. I downright suck at GUIs. 

I just finished playing it, that was well worth the wait!
Earl's voice is just simply...hilarious.
I love the writing, the humor, the dialogue, the puzzles.
My favorite bit though, was rummaging around the desk, and just taking things.
"I don't need it, but what the hell."
"Another inventory item never killed anyone."
"Sure, why not."
"Ah, something useful, lets put all this worthless crap back."

And I really loved "Well, looks like I'm up shit creek without a paddle."

Sonny did an magnificent job on Earl's dead pan and apathetic voice. I'm glad you liked it too!

i agree. cool game! superb voice acting and pretty entertaining violent cutscenes. 
thanks, hillbilly.

You're welcome!

- I'm one of those people who doesn't save and thinks the game will save me from death situations. So when I accidently died when walking into the first guard, and jumping out the window, I was kind of annoyed because I hadn't saved my game at all (but I learned after dying the first time). Also, it would've been nice if you could load your game after dying instead of the game exiting on you.

I would've loved an autosave option whenever you enter a new room, and be able to return to the main menu after you die, but I've lost all contact with the guy who fixed the GUI, and was left with an unpolished GUI. A shame, really.

- I thought the puzzles were pretty logical, and I only needed help for the final puzzle. I think I have to echo Snarky's points, but it didn't bother me that much. Also, I probably wouldn't have solved alot of the puzzles if I didn't mindlessly click on stuff

Spoiler

(such as double clicking on the broken glass to get my brick back, which was just a mindless click, but it made me advance in the game.)

[close]

I agree that was hideously unfair of me. I've already decided to add some kind of graphic of the brick in the patch.

The final puzzle was also hard and kind of "out-there" compared to the other puzzles. However, if I get the time(already have the motivation), I'll see if I can fix up an alternative way to work around it. I've already played around with the idea of more dynamic puzzle solving. (like the guard in the surveillance room)

- At the beginning, I thought it was kind of odd that the main character says he hid the hack-saw, then he expects me to find it, but he doesn't even tell me where it is.

He shows you though. If you watch the intro again, you'll notice the camera pans over the most important hotspots in the cell. I thought it was a pretty neat "visual" puzzle/hint, but it did stump more people than I expected.

I also found a bug:

Spoiler

At the end, I didn't know how to get past the spot light. I walked as close as I could to the spot light without entering it, and I was still safe. At that position I spotted the crack on the right side of the screen and I interacted with it, letting me win the game. It was kind of funny since I knew I skipped the oh so final and last puzzle.

[close]

Wow, I'm glad you told me this. That's pretty crucial.

Thanks for playing the game, and the nitpicking. I'll be home tonight sometime, and then I'll start working on the first patch. Hopefully it'll be out by friday.

This is some top notch stuff! Definitely reckons continuation! Although I think a couple of things couldve been done better, which has already been pointed out, I think this will deserve a special place on AGS!

Thanks. As mentioned those issues will be fixed in the patch.

Great game. I enjoyed it very much.
I had a lot of fun to try out the diffrent ways to die.

Great to hear the death scenes were more of an amusement than an annoyance.

I just finished it and I must admit, this game is super fun! I actually laughed at  a lot of things in this game, so funny. Even cursors and menu (especially the end menu) are very original.

I had a lot of fun with those cursors, so I'm glad you liked them. Also happy to hear you found the game funny. As long as you laughed at the right spots, that is. 

OMG it's finished !
I'll download it as soon as I can - can't wait to try it out mate.
I'll also mirror it on my site if you want.

Svartberg! I was wondering when you were gonna show up. I hope both you and your orchestra synthesizer are doing okay.

A mirror would be splendid. Just, uh, wait a few days 'till I get some annoyances sorted out.


In other news, does anyone know Czech? I'm really curious on what this says:

http://plnehry.idnes.cz/adventure/earl-mansin.html

It just isn't the same when he doesn't put on the sunglasses while saying the line.

This game rocks my ass! I just love the animations, the voices, the graphics, dialogue etc etc..

I can't wait to play it again when you've fixed the hammer glitch so I can finish the game. 

(Also agree with Snarky, although I wouldn't say it pissed me off)

Thanks! You can also work around the bug by solving it the alternative way.

[EDIT: I need a guinea pig to test my different solutions for the cutscene problems. If you only hear the music and the voice over(before the game goes black) after pressing new game and would like to help out, give me a pm. I will link you to a few test files(between 2 -10 MB) in a couple of days, and you tell me if they work or not. Don't be shy, stand right up!]

Weird. I can't get that to happen at all.

I'll look at the code when I get home and see if I find anything there. I think I can guess where the issue is, anyhow.

EDIT: I need a guinea pig to test my different solutions for the cutscene problems. If you only hear the music and the voice over(before the game goes black) after pressing new game and would like to help out, give me a pm. I will link you to a few test files(between 2 -10 MB) in a couple of days, and you tell me if they work or not. Don't be shy, stand right up!

Is it true that...

Spoiler

you can hit the guard over the head to kill him instead of using the chloroform?

[close]

Give it a shot. Or two.

If that is the case then you could have a different ending depending on which method was used.

I disagree.

Spoiler

It's simply there so you have a friendlier option. You even get an option to turn back when you've used the hammer once. Besides, it's such a minor part of the storyline that it should have no effect on the ending.

[close]

[IF ANYONE COULD TELL ME IN DETAIL WHAT THEY DID BEFORE THE HAMMER DISAPPEARED, PM OR REPLY HERE. PLEASE.]

Hey everyone. I've finally established an internet connection and I'll be able to comment on this thread again.

Tried the above right now but with no luck

I guess you're outta luck on that one. Only solution I can imagine is getting a hold of an older system and play it on another machine. Sorry.

Same goes for those with the WinXP problem. If you figure out a way, please tell.

Uninstalling CCCP.
Mind you that I didn't even tryed to fiddle with some of it's options. Installing it again isn't that troublesome anyway.

Thanks, this might be useful for someone in the future.

Glad too see you finally got the game released.  Nice work all around!

Thanks!

I've had that problem, too. Had to go back to an earlier savegame to finish the game...
Apart from that nice game.

I can't for the life of me seem to get that bug myself.

IF ANYONE COULD TELL ME IN DETAIL WHAT THEY DID BEFORE THE HAMMER DISAPPEARED, PM OR REPLY HERE. PLEASE.

I'll fix up a patch this weekend to resolve the problem, as soon as I figure out how it happens.

For the patch I'm thinking about PatchMaker. Anyone had positive experiences with this for AGS games? There will be changes in both the .exe and speech files.

Very nice game. The puzzles were great, the graphics charming and the voice acting superb. No bugs for me and really smooth gameplay. The only odd thing I encountered was that the game shut down after the dying sequences and after the outro. I guess this was intentional but I would prefer if you could go back to the start screen instead.

Thank you! I did not like the solution of having the game close down, but a strange issue of the save files disappearing happened when I used the "restart game" command from there. As my GUI programmer went missing, I had no one to consult about this and went with the second best solution.

Really nice  game.
Waiting for the next act.

Thanks!

I made a way around the problem instead of solving it.
I tried the game on my old computer with winxp and it worked fine,so i just made a gamesave and put it in Vista-pc and clicked load game and it worked fine there too.
There must be something with the intro the computer dont like,but now i gotta play,bye 


EDIT: Well,that didnt last long,came to the place where i opened the door and then.....a black screen again  :'(  Think i give up for now

Sorry about this. It looks like your computer crash at every cutscene.

Since there seems to be a problem with them only, I'll try to export them with a different codec as soon as I get home, and hope that'll work.

If it wasn't for the walkthrough I don't think I would have completed the game. It isn't fun to know how a puzzle should be solved but not be able to do it because the game insists on doing the actions a certain way or in a certain order. Hopefully you'll take this in the spirit it's intended: constructive criticism.

I actually had those exact issues on my fixlist, with an alternative version of the rag puzzle, doing just what you said. Unfortunately, I had been stalling this game far enough by my nitpicking, so I just went for a release after having it on my harddrive for over a year. Looks like I should've taken the extra time.

Since both the playerbase and myself agree this is bad design, I'll see if I can fix it by one of the next patches.

I have to agree with Snarky, the excact same things got me upset as well.

But other than that, it's a great game. Nice graphics, good music and superb voice acting.

Glad you liked it!

Heh, DoTT goes gory and violent, hey? Never thought it'd turn out to be such a great mixture, though.

Great graphics, great story, great puzzles, great music, great acting... damn, that was a short, über-sweet game. Congrats!

BTW, I second everything Snarky said in his spoiler. Also, shame about the hammer bug.

DoTT is not the worst game to be associated with.

Yeah, it's a bloody shame. It'll be history as soon as someone tells me how to archive it, though.

Nice game, i liked it, glad you finished it.

Thanks!

Funniest. AGS moment. EVER

*Spoiler Alert*

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f349/Captain_Stu/AGS/Hahaha.jpg

I'm glad it was taken the same way it was intended.

Can't download it. It says that the site is suspended. Can you fix it? Thx ... Lookin forward to play your game ... 

This is currently being looked into. Thanks for notifying me.

Does this game work with Vista? It doesnt for me,when i click new game the screen turns black and a guy talks in 10-15 seconds and thats it?
Please help,really wanna play your game.

If I remember correctly AGS does not officially support Vista, and I haven't tried it on that OS myself, but try running it with Windows 98/XP compatibility mode, alternatively with administrator privileges. That's all the information I found. Messing around with winsetup.exe may also solve some issues.

If you get the game to run, please tell me how and I'll add it to the FAQ.