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Was this meant to go in the "Introduce yourself here" thread?

For me, all the best British history revolves around the Kings and Queens of yesteryear... but that was before all the power was given to the Prime Minister and the monarchy became little more than a figurehead.

People seem interested in the history of the Royals because they were, much of the time, complete bastards. I mean, look at Richard the Lionheart - among the most revered monarchs. He taxed the country to buggery and back, proudly claiming that he would "sell London to fund [his] wars, if only [he] could find a buyer!" and wasn't even in the country for all but 6 months of his 10 year reign. Plus was most likely gay and unlike other such rulers under this suspicion never even bothered giving the country an heir, some historians suggesting he never even shared his bed with his wife (whereas it IS documented he shared his bed with the King of France...)

Of course, sometimes there IS the magical lightning-in-a-bottle such as Elizabeth I and.... well Victoria... I'm trying to think of a King of England I know of that wasn't a git, really flailing... well, I'll go with Alfred the Great for the moment (and HE wasn't even a legitimate successor, he made up a story that the Pope annointed him heir that nobody would be able to disprove) with gives the monarch's history that thin shining veneer of glory but...wow. They come after strings of indolent wastrels and callow sadsacks.

I saw the devil you elect is much better, because we know what absolute power does.

With that said I also agree with the earlier point that Thailand does benefit from its Royalty - if countries need stability then Royalty is a good way to keep it because the lines of succession are generally fairly clear cut. Of course, sometimes they're not and you get a Battle of Culloden or two but I guess them's the breaks...

Australian, btw. So I'm stuck with the English Royals as well...

I agree with an earlier comment about the paranoia of adventure gamers - we tend to think that every piece of dialogue is a potential clue. I can't say much but I think the answer is to segregate vital- and non-vital-dialogue as much as possible in a way that will be clear to players. Obviously it's hard to keep the fourth wall intact in that case, but try and find the right balance.

For some reason this conversation reminds me of Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria, uber-obscure indy title of yester-decade, which got quite a few complaints for featuring too much dialogue. Although it did indeed have an ungodly amount in there, I found it fairly easy to work out which bits were plot-relevant and which were just window dressing and it served to keep me entertained when I got stuck with the puzzles. (Up to a point, where puzzles became ridiculous, as often happens)

I'd hate to post in a MAGS thread for the third month in a row saying that I *might* do something only to have nothing emerge again, but I *did* start a game, by coincidence, that featured no inventory items. This should be quite do-able...

Very, very cool looking indeed.

The insanity of the concept as described appeals to me greatly, as do the MSPaint graphics. Looking forward to this game..

I only ever measured my member to get a mental reference pint for when these discussions are brought up... always by females, inevitably. Wait... there were two alpha male guys in high school who did a bit. One of them was recently hospitalised after the boyfriend of a girl he slept with beat the crap out of him in front of the local shop.

...is there a moral to that story? Probably not.

I played Theme Park an awful lot as a kid, have some fairly fond memories of it. And I have to say that Theme Hospital was one of the most baffling sequel decisions ever... and not a very fun game.

Recently I enjoyed The Movies but I felt it got a bit overwhelming. There's quite a bit of micro-management and I was being constantly frustrated at my attempts to improve actor's 'star' ratings..

Write down a list of scenes, characters and puzzles that you can think up. Don't worry too much about consistency at this point. (Frasse actually started out as a collection of discarded ideas I had that didn't fit into the game I thought I was making.)

Once you have a bunch of things, you can start thinking about putting them together. It's easier to build from something than nothing. Or at least that's what I found. Now you can start making sense of things (and cut the things that don't make sense in the context of this game).

I think this is the best advice. Yes, I am aware while saying this that if you click on my profile you'll see the ever-condemning "I have not yet worked on any finished games" label that betrays us all, but my first game, if I really put my foot down could be done in a week.

When planning I brainstormed as Trumgottist suggested, weird elements I hadn't seen that I would like to use and explore. Then I thought about what exactly I wanted to do (which was a homage to insane object-oriented puzzles as I love them but they are going out of vogue) and introduced a restraint so it didn't go the way of my first 'full-length' project "Hell's Cafe and Accommodation" (to be made NEVER most likely) and that restraint was for the game to take place in just one room - largely for reasons of simplifying coding but also because drawing backgrounds is horribly difficult for me.

As it happens, I went on to break this restraint because as I wrote out my walkthrough of the puzzles (from which I nailed down what needed to be in each room, the characters and inventory items which I made an itemised list of) and ended up creating two more rooms, one for extra items and another for an all-dialogue 'show down' scene. To me this just demonstrates the strength of the restraint, however - other games I've made in my head have had 20 screens, multiple acts and cutscene close-ups and other unworkable things. Introducing two more rooms is such a small, manageable thing and with the restraint in mind I would only introduce them if I really, really felt I had to.

The reason it isn't finished yet? I've been distracted by coursework, I have been working on another project for a group online, and I want the finished game to have a ludicrous amount of dialogue. But as someone who's been tinkering with the engine since the days of Rob Blank and Drunk Island I feel I hit the jackpot with that formula, and if I wasn't a perfectionist with my small idea (like others in the thread I say this is no bad thing) I could probably release a version of the game this afternoon after a three hour's coding.

But, hey, I don't see any reason to rush things.

Discworld Noir, IMHO, did a great job of making you feel like a detective.

In the project I'm on there's a computer password sequence - the guy doing the graphics who dabbles in AGS gave me a keyboard sprite for the player to use on screen. When I went over what I'd done (which itself took a long while to set up) with the project leader he was unhappy and insisted that I set it up so it would all be done with the computer's actual keyboard. The state of the screen and various commands involved made it too impractical to do with a GUI so... a day of coding, hunting through the help file, guesswork and testing followed.

So QFGIV had a large penis rock in it?

When I read the post I assumed it had to be about re-jigging the game in design terms, as KQ5 is known for being pretty and annoying in fairly equal terms. It was the only way I could mentally frame the existence of this thread that would make sense.

I love the AGI SQ4 screenie, though.

Now... Secret Agent on Roller Skates may finally be released....

What if we happen to have multiple games fairly close to completion, are we allowed to be crazy enough to attempt to finish a few of them in the space of a month?

Luxon warrior! [/obscure]

...but nobody remember's Yahtzee's paranormal investigator's demo?

I get the feeling that I've asked this before but didn't find it in my posts and it's something that has been bugging me for ages... Yahtzee did a game that was called something like "Steve and Perry: Paranormal Investigators" that he only ever released a short demo of.

This may seem a weird thing to be bugging me for ages, but as the amount of writing about Yahtzee has increased over the years I've been amazed at seeing no reference to this game having ever existed, even on his own website. It's enough to make me question my sanity...

...okay, that's officially badass. With your blessing I'm using that Colin, too.

(After I posted I tried to do a Krysis-Colin to post here, but that effort shames mine..)

Yeah, I was going to say can the graphics be fairly collaborative? I'm not great at pixel art, and my backgrounds are even lamer. So... I can do my game totally on my own but it will look like "Doctor Who Visits RON". (The Krysis style graphics at least, but that's about my limit)