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Bearing in mind that My Immortal has become famous for being almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Harry Potter, and apparently written entirely on a mobile phone by a hormonally-unbalanced female with potatos for hands.

The first time I read the post I thought the OP was talking about puzzles that require the player to be aware of details that the character proper cannot possibly be aware of. An example would be the "How well do you know Hector LeMans" puzzle from Grim Fandango, where the player is aware of things that Manny cannot actually see at that point. Another one I've heard about is from one of the King's Quests where the location of a secret lever is revealed in a cutscene that the player character isn't in the room for.

I found this question quite interesting, even though I don't think it is probably the type of puzzle people are thinking about now that immersion is seen as the sovereign element of a game.  I think it's probably an idea that belongs in the time when developers saw it as the duty of gamers to play with a notepad and pencil, noting down any details that could be important.

This actually relates a bit to the "Don't pick up the crowbar yet" question, in an odd way. It's both about a clash of playing the character, or just playing the game. Naturally we want to pick up everything in sight because we know how handy that thoughtlessly-discarded pack of gum in the rubbish bin might be. But would actual people in those situations do that?

I also think that the answer is in no way simple - it depends on the design. The example given of the player refusing to cut a finger off the cadaver until it becomes clear he needs it is a very logical one, especially given how odd it would be for a character to gladly do so when there is no apparent need for it. The idea can be taken too far, though - Runaway took the idea of only doing what the character wanted to do VERY seriously and became one of the most irritating games I'd played (and not even finished!)

If we use Runaway as the yardstick, then it gets to the point where the character insists on doing something in a particular way when you told him to do it the exact opposite way, which THEN turns out to have actually screwed up the machine he was trying to fix leading to MORE puzzles... then you have definitely gone too far and I might uninstall your game and wait years before coming back to it.

I agree with the quoted "If it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. I only recently played RA3, and as soon as I started it I got a kind of warm, familiar feeling from knowing what I'm dealing with - build the base, get the army and kick some Soviet arse at a quick pace with lots of badass commandos thrown in.

I'm also the guy who likes WWII FPS for similar reasons, so I seem to public enemy #1 of all the net's elitist gamers.

Personally I think it's a combination of the really, really bad fanfic getting noticed a lot more because it develops notoriety, the slush-pile nature of fanfic sites and the reasons why people write fanfic. For myself, I've written a bit of Doctor Who fic, and only one of those has been a true self-contained story. The others were re-writes of stories that suffered from great-idea-terrible-execution syndrome and a short story that set out to deal with a bucketload of continuity errors and nothing else. I think some series lend themselves better to the format than others.

When I surfed LotR fic, for example, I learnt soon that there wasn't that much ground to be covered - material from the appendices concerned characters that authors didn't know enough about to write for, and the main characters have their lives mapped out to the point where it was difficult to shoe-horn extra episodes in realistically. So the community was almost all slash- or parody-fics, with the occassional stories about a single guy in the battle (most of which can safely be labeled as Mary-Sues)

I've pretty limited fic experience, but Doctor Who definitely has the highest proportion of writers who aspire to pro standards that I've seen. Which isn't to say there aren't stories where all the characters are Anime for some reason and Adric is cursed to turn into a woman every time his body touches water..

I'm on a project at the moment that uses broadly the method RickJ describes - the full scale view of the main character takes up over half the screen and is only used in a handful of scenes, but scales down quite neatly thanks to clear colours and neat outlining. We do have another set of sprites to use for roughly one/third scale and lower because at that point things do get a bit pixellated.

I have to say it's pretty effective.

Looks like he's contemplated the murder of the cameraman...

Hmm, having a quick look through now and I think maybe the sections should be re-arranged slightly -  a lot of work's gone in and it looks and reads well, but the order is a bit odd. Just hit the 'About the game we're going to make' heading and it seems very oddly placed.

I think some of the introducion and the 'About this book' piece should be in a separate section with Roman numerals as you usually see in professionally published works. History of the Adventure Game might even be a passage for an appendix.

It does seem very thorough, though, and I have to say I would have liked something like this when I first started tinkering around with AGS. Maybe this could be packed with the AGS download in the future?

I do everything on my computer now utterly solitary, but when all my games were on the 'family' computer I frequently asked my parents for any hints or tips. This got me through Discworld II without a walkthrough after Act I, and, IIRC, Broken Sword I and The Curse of Monkey Island.

Oh, and for a particular puzzle I've only ever completed the bloody annoying tumbler puzzle in year 3 of Grim Fandango the once without help from a family member. Dear god that was annoying.

My 'it's complicated' girlfriend is an adventure gamer, but so far I've only been around her when she was playing Monkey Island II which I played through years ago. I was trying to give her hints without spoiling the puzzles, because I get a lot of reward from working 'em out.

The dialog-request would have been my second guess, but I could have sworn that had a much lower limit. So are we fairly sure that it refers to one of the redundant features of AGS?

I'm really glad you can just embed the code in dialogs now. I don't know how people made decent games before you could... (Then I am late coming to the party..)

Was just double-checking the system limitations in AGS and I saw the '3000  dialog-script messages' - I was confused because I couldn't find the term elsewhere in the helpfile. Is this a redundant term from around AGS 2.0+ when you manually entered messages into the game and then called them from the script instead of just writing Strings?

To clarify I'm working on a game with a lot of dialogue and so was wondering if this could be a factor.

This is the type of game I love, and that makes me love AGS. I love the feeling that I have somehow uncovered an unheard-of gem from circa 1992 and playing through it for the first time and this game is giving me this in spades. I've only just got started I'm afraid, so no bug notices or anything like that. But this is right up there with your Doctor Who game and Cirque Du Zale in nowstalgia stakes.

Looking forward to the full version, natch.

I love that second photo - firstly for showing Yug attempting to control his hair style (which Matt Berger described as 'looking like the result of electroshock') and Yahtzee at the end in a pose looking like he's suffering from human contact overload.

For all the speculation about whether it's a good idea, I have to say that if a gaming bar is a good idea then Brisbane is the place for it - for whatever reason the place seems to be Australia's gaming capital. That and I think Queensland is the only state where alcohol consumption is compulsory.

(Lily-livered New South Welshman here, in case you were wondering..)

I am always the champion of Charlie Foxtrot and the Galaxy of Tomorrow, and believe it deserves a note here.

Au Naturel hasn't been mentioned yet, but that's best for those familiar with RON - still funny though.

If you're a fan of Simon the Sorcerer then Cique du Zale (from way back) is a must play, though that said I've got no idea where you can get a copy now because I'm certain that site is down.

I'll also vouch for Damsel, Nelly and Ben There, Dan That! as though my opinion is likely to sway anybody.

Big time contender for prettiest graphics I've ever seen on these forums. I'll be keeping an eye on this project..

As a Raptor: Call of the Shadows fanboy from way back I plan to play the hell out of this. Dl'ing now.

After playing Charlie Foxtrot I made it my mission to big it up at every oppurtunity. It's the perfect game for anyone with Space Quest nostalgia. (I've seen a few people give cautionary notes about the graphics and music - this puzzles me greatly as somebody who's been playing AGS games since Rob Blanc I and The Treasure of Drunk Island)

Nelly Cootalot and Nanobots are also terrific, in different ways, and if you can find Cirque Du Zale it's well worth it.

The best game Yahtzee has made is Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, though strangely the one nobody seems to mention. It's a good one to check out.

This game looks absolutely stunning - sadly I've been dragging my heels and haven't played Chapter 4 yet, but this will follow closely on that game's heels.

I don't suppose there's any chance of those gorgeous Guybrush sprites being made available for others' fan games? They're the best originals I've seen.

It's an interesting choice, given that I've never really seen any comments in favour of the SQ6 GUI. The parser adds a little to it, though, and I might use it - although I'd definitely use the text box as an inventory window instead. I didn't quite follow the logic behind that design choice, as there usually wasn't enough going on on the screen to justify not showing text on top of it. Done in that way it would look just like a variant of the SCUMM system.

The game I'm working on meant I needed to override the main characters baseline for a cutscene - for some reason I figured that this effect would be temporary and was bewildered by a number of walkbehind problems that followed, which now make perfect sense.

Is there anyway that I haven't been able to find in the help files to revert the character's baseline to its default behaviour, other than putting cEgo.Baseline = cEgo.y in the room_repeated execute method? (My current workaround)

Thanks, that's what I was dreading. I doubt he'd go through the trouble just for one person.

You'd get better results if you showed up at his doorstep on fire asking him for a urine sample, but even that would be touch and go.