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Here's the revision, as promised. As you can see, the hands are now different, he's taller and he has a belt.

I also like what Darth Manarb did with the shading, although I've only just seen it since it was my don't-bother-going-into-uni day yesterday and my house doesn't have net access.

I'll start messing around with that this evening.

Yes, he's called David Stone and no, I'm unlikely to change it.

Thought actually went into the name, you see, and the idea is that we have an extraordinary man with an ordinary name (rather than the other way round). He's a private investigator and the main character in my point-'n'-click in progress.

The idea behind my work is to take seemingly generic characters and open up the level of depth, doing things with them that's quite unexpected. I'm inspired a little by a book I once read called "Blue Angel, by Paul Magrs (can't remember if I spelt that right..). At first glance the story looks as if it's ripping off characters from the original Star Trek TV series but further into the book these two dimensional characters gain a greater sense of depth as the situation they're in gets more and more out of their control.

And Dr. Jekyll? ~ MR. HYDE!, thanks for the admiration. It's stuff like that which motivates people to work. I'm going to do some work now.

Dr Who would whip the Who's ass any day. Dr Who has a robot dog, all the Who have is Boris the Spider.

Lance, that's bloody marvelous. Thanks. I'll post an update as soon as I can, just so you can see the changes.

Cheers everyone.

One thing that bothers me, is that he has no belt  . Now this doesn't usually make me click, but he looks fat when the shirt hangs down on his tummy. Is he supposed to be so? Do you have a siide wiev to compare to?

Ah. No. He's not meant to be fat. I'll take that belt idea in mind. Gimme a day or two and I can come back with an updated version. I'll make the hands and legs a little longer too.

Ok, I'm working on an as-yet-unannounced 640x480 adventure game. It's in the early-art-creation stage and I was recently working on the sprite for the main character:

I'm reasonably happy with it but I'm having trouble drawing hands, as you might see. Any tips  / examples people can give me on how I can make these look any better?

Also, of course, you're general observations on the style and any other flaws you've noticed are welcome.

You're forgetting that bit at the end of GK1, where if you failed to do something it was possible to get into a completely unwinnable situation. But I digress.

Like I said, fantastic story teller, just a bit wooly in some areas relating to puzzle design. I don't dispute she's good, I just objected to the "Jane Jensen, the best developer to have ever graced our genre" bit.

[joking]

Jane Jensen, the best developer to have ever graced our genre.

*Spits coffee unceremoniously over keyboard*

WHAT?! You must be joking.

She could tell a very good story but that stupid cat/moustache/motorcycle puzzle is unforgivable, amongst other things.

Great magazine, by the way.

Remixor, that is a ridiculous number of quicklaunch buttons you have there. Can't wait for Armed and Dangerous to come out, mind you. Looks hilarious.

Wow, absolutely mental. The eyes are perhaps a little square, though. Do you think you could round them up a little to suit the general style?

Yay, Gamecube. I'm a PC owner at heart but I might well be buying a friend's Gamecube off him with a couple of games at a knock-down price.

The eyes: windows to the soul. Windows? Argh. Well, if I'm supposed to be able to tell something about someone from their eyes, what about their desktop?

This is mine at a random moment snapped last night and hastily converted to JPG this morning:



I actually have two desktops (I dual boot between Windows 98 and XP Pro. Which comes in handy occasionally) but XP's is always the better looker.

In the top left, we have Winamp 5 belting out Supergrass at an unnecessary volume. Possibly an indication of my musical tastes but definetly evidence that I really hated Winamp 3 but liked what you could do with it.

The background stands testament to the fact I'm waiting in muted anticipation for Thief 3 to come out and hence feel the need to stare blindly at concept art while I'm working away at something or other.

Startbar-wise I've opted for one of those windows skinning utility thingumabobs to make things look a little more exciting for me to look at. Yay.

Icon-wise, note my desperation to cut down the amount of crap on my desktop. This has obviously completely failed to generate any results since a good 6th of the screen is still covered in 'em.

We have a selection of 3D applications, ranging from 3DS Max 5 for my Uni work to Maya PLE and Gmax, which were downloaded because I was curious.

We also have a plethora of RPGS filling my precious disk space along with the odd FPS, utterly fantastic 3rd person action game and - surprise - some adventure gaming content by way of Broken Sword 3, AGS and ScummVM (which I'm currently using to play Day of the Tentacle and Beneath a Steel Sky). That icon hiding in the bottom left is for Thievery - the Thief multiplayer modification for Unreal Tournament - which is quite good.

Ok then, what does yours look like? Display 'em as a JPG and try and be sensible with the file sizes, ie. mess around with compression in PSP (or whatever you use) to stop things getting ridiculous. Mind you, saving as a jpeg in MSPaint on XP seems to produce a better compressed  file size for me that PSP does (116k compared to 121k). Hrm.

If you don't have any webspace to upload images to then try www.photobucket.com, which comes in fairly useful.

Extra points if you're running an OS that's older than the hills. Resist the temptation to photograph the top of your desk in an abstract display of literal humour.

Of course, if admin objects to obscenely large pictures (see above) then feel free to blast this post into the stratosphere.

Cheers. I'll give that a go.

Ok. I give up, I'm willing to resort to asking for hints.

I got this game a couple of days ago but still haven't gotten very far. Where on Earth is everyone on day 1? I met the guy in the room with the fireplace, found the woman upstairs but have no idea where everyone else is. Argh. I get the feeling I'm missing something painfully obvious.

Punk 'n' Pie, save yourself some time on Google, check out this useful little site for free image hosting. No invis funkiness required:

http://www.photobucket.com

I use HTML Help Workshop and Inno Setup Installer. I wasn't really happy with NSIS. The guys who made Winamp 3 made NSIS and Winamp 3 was/is rubbish. It crashed more times than contestants on "Britain's Worst Driver."

Html workshop can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/appndx/appa06.htm

Inno Setup can be found via the link below. Install ISTool too, it's a GUI for Inno, which is script-based itself.

http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

An interesting read, AGD2, that at the very least gives me some semblance of respect for KQ1.

King's Quest was undoubtably a launch platform for a plethora of games to develop ideas and control systems from and the father of the modern adventure game as we see it today.

My only grudge remains in the fact that no-one at Sierra saw fit to analyse their games, rooting out irritations, for quite some time. Even by "Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers" it was still possible to seriously mess up your game to the point of not being able to complete it, meaning all that work was for nothing. Nice to see enough people got the right idea to make adventure games a worthwhile genre to play.

And try not to poke too hard at my common sense, that serpent-infested moat was ridiculous. Like having a doormat fashioned out of nitroglycerine: one step wrong and you'll never tie your shoe laces again. It wasn't really that obvious.

An example of a well executed, you-know-you'll-die death would be the reactor in Beneath A Steel Sky: activate the door and you're fried. You know that's what'll happen though, so you can avoid it. The moat is a case of "Is that dangerous? Woops.."

Well... I downloaded the full game, because I couldn't wait for it to be getting released in Holland... and it disappoints me alot!

The interface is very bad... no mouse is just sooo worse. And please someone tell me why I see those white blinking stars on every object i can interact to. It's like people are to stupid in these times to solve puzzles of adventure games, because this game is so easy!

The graphics are nice, but although I'm a fan of 3D... it doesn't improve on the gameplay. It's just all to obvious in the game, and it seems like I'm just walking a straight way, without exploring.

The speech though, is very good and mooded. I liked the cutscenes also alot, and I haven't finished the game yet... so I'll just go on playing some more... but for as far as I know until now, my final score is :

Graphics : 8
Sound : 10
Gameplay : 6
Overall : 7

I hated having to search for useable items. The stars highlights are more of a step forward for me than a step back. Remeber those hallowed games before the status line? When what your mouse hovered over didn't even have a text name to tell you it was useable. Don't make me go back. They don't make the puzzles any easier, they just take the monotony out of the process.

If you want to replicate the experience you would get without them, I suggest you go and make a cup of tea and watch tv or something, simulating the wasted hours of searching for items that are right under your nose.

I actually like the control system. A mouse would have been a hindrance. The required action button is always right at your fingertips, rather than having to right-click until you find the right cursor. Argh!

Oh, and buy it legitimately, Revolution are a gaming company that deserve the cash.

Block-puzzle-wise, don't fear 'em. They might crop up here and there but I actually found myself enjoying them. Block puzzles they may be, but they're the finest block puzzles ever.

Ok, bought this a couple of days ago, just finished it. It's utterly brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even the bits that weren't so good.

Some painfully obvious block-pushing puzzles ("Oh no! Not again!") and some out of place arcade sequences but when we take a look at the bigger picture we see a veritable masterpiece.

Ok, its not the greatest adventure game in the world but I love it: the intro made me cry tears of joy act the fact the series was back and it was doing it with style. The graphics are fantastic, the humour spot on, the puzzles are rarely irritating and all have a logical answer without being frighteningly easy. Thoroughly enjoyable.

A few people had misgivings about the control system but its pretty good. Controls are always quickly on hand, although the directional keys are relative to the camera and not the player, which was a bit irritating since left can suddenly become forwards..

The credits music is worth waiting for too. Blinding.

Anyone else played / purchased / plans to play it?

I see it depends on what you see as "unexpected". The rock death was the only death where you could get killed by doing something that didn't seem fatal at first. (pushing a rock) All the other things are "watch your step"-cases. Depending on how you see it, "unexpected" may or may not be out of place here. If I fall into a serpent filled moat, I expect to get killed. The mentioning of the witch' cottage made me frown. I take it you're aware of the fact that you can get rid of the witch, right?

Yes, I know you can get rid of the witch. The fact is, you have to die first to realise that or get very lucky. As for the serpent-filled moat, sure I'd expect to die from falling in but I didn't expect to fall. Saying that sticking a deathtrap right in front of the player the moment they can move is not a design issue is missing the point. It's not the fault of the remake, of course, but its still wildly stupid to experience.

With a couple of exceptions, all Sierra games (most of them better designed than KQ1) allowed the player to die. This has nothing to do with poor or well-done design. It's done to either add a humoristic situation at certain points (Space Quest) or to make the danger more real. (if someone is pointing a gun at you, he won't have the patience to keep saying "don't move" until you're done with those 30 different attempts at escape. After one or two warnings, he'll probably shoot you.)

Certainly, pointing a gun at the player is something that should be time limited. Broken Sword did that and I can't complain (love that game). However, it wasn't a FEATURE of Broken Sword: it just happened as part of the story. It brought the danger home but the frequency of death (tm) wasn't to the extent that it became irritating and it was certainly possible to avoid it the first time round rather than repeat it again and again until you gathered enough knowledge to stop it.

And on one last note, death can be funny. Unless its your own. Then its irritating.

Woops, I'm actually surprised this thread's hit three pages. Looks like I inadvertently sparked off something.

To elaborate, KQVGA in a chronological sense is a "1984 classic," ie. back then it was.  But back then that was the best there was. Gamers knew no better.

To pick up on what a few of you said, its similar to black 'n' white movies. They're not so good today as they were in their prime, although that's not to say that some aren't - to some degree - timeless. Citizen Kane is supposed to be the finest film ever made and its black and white.

But film as a medium by then was quite developed. Gaming by the time KQ1 was released was only just into its infancy. Just like the first films, early games were looked upon with wonder but by now we have a greater understanding of what we're working with and those early games become nothing more than a curiosity.

Good games, timeless games, are more than the sum of their parts. Games like KQ1 were created in a time when people weren't even sure how to USE those parts correctly. I felt KQVGA didn't work for me because its update of the graphics and sound felt as if they were inviting you to treat the game as you would something of a similar graphical quality, without realising that its gameplay was what most needed an overhaul.

Monkey Island was originally EGA and got an update to VGA and CD music. The gameplay didn't need an update because it was developed enough to begin with. Lucasarts had enough of an understanding of the technology and of the genre as a whole to develop a game that covered new ground in an interesting and fun way (hence the Doom reference earlier, which did the same balancing act for FPSs, although I enjoyed MI more).

And Erpy, the rock isn't *quite* the only unexpected death. Falling into the moat is fairly easy to do ("They couldn't possibly have made a game that makes it easy to fall into that could they? ... Oh.") and of course, falling off stuff that initially appears fairly innocuous. Even worse though, is seeing death coming and being able to do nothing about it (*cough* witch's cottage *cough*).

Death as a feature is a cop out: an excuse for poor design. Look at Hitman: Codename 47 for an example of where this trait has slipped into a recent game. You had to go through the same level several times, dying frequently, before you gathered enough information to pull off a hit. IO Interactive chose this highly unrealistic and highly irritating approach rather than developing gameplay to the point where you could gather information discreetly rather than blindly rushing in and adapting your strategy to the consequences.

Obviously you haven't played a single Sierra game, it's not a flaw, it's a feature Actually, when I played all the old quests, I used to do obviously wrong things all the time, just to see the cool death animations and read the Restart/Restore/Quit messages.

I can almost understand that. What I don't understand is why something so clearly irritating that many still grumble about it to this day was ever made into a feature. How do you mistake a feature for a flaw?

"Intuitive stealth-based gameplay!", "Stunning graphics!" "Die pointlessly, many times over!". Which of those - if you were a game developer - would you rather stick on the back of your game box?

And on the subject of it's gaming importance, I agree that it was revolutionary but it went about it the wrong way: graphics and sound are nice but without gameplay they gained nothing. It took many skilled, intelligent people years of work to take those basic ingriedients and bake something tasty with them. Doom was revolutionary, but it was also fun to play.

Oh, and KQ2VGA might be worth a shot, and its certainly nice to see that the first is not an indication of the second's quality.