Messages

["I'm sorry Marty, I'm afraid I can't do that..."]

Sounds awesome! I think time-travel counts as travel, and I'm sure nobody would mind you entering.

he finds him self trapped in the past with a machine that has a mind of it's own. He now has to find a way to return home.

I can just picture it now:

"I'm sorry Marty, I'm afraid I can't do that..."

  Noir construction, cool!  So PhilStrahl not only burst onto the writing comp scene with a great story, but he unselfishly pushed Baron ahead for the victory.  Kudos to him and Dadalus for injecting fresh writing blood into the competition (not sure if Mandle had competed before), and great turnout and stories overall really.


  Baron - 1st 

  PhilStrahl - 2nd

  Eric - 3rd


  This feels like deja vu, but over to Baron!

Congratulations to the winners! Sorry for not voting but I had no time this week to read through the pieces and give them the attention they deserve. I'm saving them for when the bar's red neon sign across from my fire-escape starts buzzing and flickering through the window blinds again (damn, that should've been in my story...just pretend that it was).

And yes, this was my first outing in this contest. I did enter the 55 words writing contest before.

Apart from playing the paper and dice RPG "Pulp Fiction" back in the day, I'm not much of a noir genre guy.

But give me a horror theme (next month is October...hint...hint) and I'm your guy!

Great little game!

I especially liked:

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The "lay an egg" fart joke payoff at the end...

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Have you tried running the game on a computer with faster performance? I'm just asking because I have had similar audio issues with AGS games on my crappy home computer, but when I ran them on the faster computer at work the audio performed perfectly.

Just a thought though. I'm sure no expert

I have following inventory:

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carpet

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It seems pixel hunting

Some hints then:

Mild Hint:

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Go everywhere you haven't gone yet...Go south young man!

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Prodding Hint:

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You can go south from the starting location...

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Give-away Hint:

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Use the carpet on the door south from the starting room

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I am so in on this one...

I'm so lazy to actually get a game out so I'm just going to do it fast and nasty this time (hopefully)...

Please don't expect a lot of animations and polished game-play but I hope the finished product can reflect a bit of what made the original source awesome:

Okay, I'm not a native english speaker, and I see more american english tv than british/australian. Don't think I ever heard that sentence before, and thus just sounds like a "very bad google translation" in my hears. There were other sentences that I thought sounded odd, but I figured that maybe they were "old english" to be historical correct.

I believe Slasher lives in Kent, and they have daylight saving there, which means when it's 2014 in the rest of the UK, it's 1850 in Kent

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There are a few bugs (did you got some game testers?) I mean, being drawn behind a closed door, walking on walls... and walking from one room to the other, can be a challenge in it's self. I spotted some english phrases that just sound wrong to me (like the "Good job I have this candle!" What? Don't you mean "Good thing I have this candle!"?

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I was a playtester, to answer one of your issues. And yeah, it looks like we didn't catch every issue yet, but we caught over 90% of issues before game release I'd say. Sometimes you need a lot more eyes on the game to find everything and first releases do that job well I'd say.

The term "Good job I have this..." is perfectly acceptable in British English...They say it all the time (as do we Australians as well)

Cheers!

I'm stuck! I feel as if I tried everything, although there is probably something I missed.

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I don't know how to get past the door in the dark room.

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Mild hint:

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You have missed something in the dark cellar.

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Prodding hint:

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Search something near the troublesome door.

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Giveaway hint:

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Get the brandy from the wine rack. Use it on the door

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I am very proud to have been a small cog in the wheel of this game's final release.

I'm sure the community will relish this game and spread word of it far and wide.

Long live our gracious Queen Victoria!

[CHAPTER 4]

 

CHAPTER 4

   I squinted into the gloom of her apartment. Dim light seeped in through the doorframe from the seedy corridor outside. I stood upon the front door, the impact of my shoeprint beneath my feet. I knew she had only just left. The smell of her perfume permiated the room.
   It was only ten days ago that this woman walked back into my life and I started hunting her down again. We travel so far over the course of our lives and yet we barely take a single step...
   I took my first tentative steps into the room, my .38 snub nose held at arm's length. Scanning left and right I saw no signs of movement. I took in the pathetic examples of her life in this place. After all this time it came down to this:
   There were scissors on the coffee table amongst some plastic shards and several cards. There was a cutter knife cast adfrit amid some pads of flesh that looked bloody and fresh.
   She was doing exactly what I had expected: Making fake IDs and erasing fingerprints.
   The rattle on the fire escape outside had me running towards the window. Her perfune was still hanging in the dead night air of the city as I ducked outside.
   Looking down through the grate floor of the fire escape, I saw her climbing down to the floor below me. I called out:
   
   "Patricia!"

   She glanced up and I took in her pathetic visage, when she could have been so much more...

(The story branches here so please open the options you wish to pursue)

OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU ARE THE BAD GUY

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OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU WANT A SUPERNATURAL ENDING

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   I used my unnatural agility to swing out over the railing and swing back in just in time to land right beside my wayward twin sister on the next level down of the fire escape.
   She never had a chance.
   I shot her in the leg first to cripple her.
   The broken neon light of the hotel across the alley flickered on and off as I bit into her neck and drained her of her blood.
   She pleaded with me. "Why?" she murmered, sinking deeper into oblivion, "Why would you do this to me?"
   I answered, whispering into her ear "We were the same at birth... Now we are the same in death."
   After some time she stood up beside me, truly thirsty for the first time.
   I led her off into the night...

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OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU WANT A REAL-WORLD ENDING

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   I plugged a few rounds from the .38 down through the grating of the fire escape. Sparks flew beneath my feet and one round peeled back enough to whiz close by my ear.
   But I nailed her in the right shoulder.
   Patricia fell in shock. The sound of her blood dripping down through the grating to the street below was audible as I climbed down the ladder to confront her.
   She was still able to meet my eyes with a stare of defiance as I stood over her.
   I aimed the revolver at her forehead.
   My twin sister asked "Why?"
   After all these years on the run from me was that was the only thing she could think to ask?
   I pulled the trigger. There was a wet noise.
   I said "Because there can be only one."

   I left before the sirens got any closer.

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OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU ARE THE GOOD GUY

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OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU WANT A SUPERNATURAL ENDING

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   My twin sister hissed up at me through the grate of the fire escape showing her fanged teeth. She had been hunting me for years, trying to make me what she was, but I had found her first!
   I knew the wooden bullets in my .38 would never be able to penetrate the steel grill of the floor beneath my feet so I called out to her:
   "Patricia! Now you can never have me!", and dove over the railing.
   Vampires are such suckers. She dove after me and, in mid-air, we locked in an embrace of teeth and gunshots.
   A few months in hospital in a back-brace are nothing compared to blowing down alleyways as ash for all eternity.

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OPEN THIS BRANCH IF YOU WANT A REAL-WORLD ENDING

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   After all these years of searching I had found Patricia! She dove for the next ladder on the fire escape and started climbing down.
   I called out to her again "PATRICIA...STOP...WAIT!"
   She looked up and we locked eyes in each others' identical twin faces for the last time in our lives.
   Her foot slipped on a rung. Her eyes, still locked on mine, grew huge as she plummeted.
   I gazed into her glazed eyes as the body-bag was zipped shut amid the flashing blue lights.
   Now I would never know why she had wanted me dead.

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The bit of her collar sticking out to our left: Any chance of adding a bit of an underside to it? It kind of looks a bit like something is sticking out of her neck to me.

Apart from that and what Darth said about the helmet flaps: Looks like a charming character for what is looking like a charming game!

Another one:

OMG...The banner message is sooooo fitting too!!! (Love that movie btw)

The 2-pixel gaps cut out of the backs of his legs look a bit weird to me. Maybe fill them in with the same shading as the rest of the backs of his legs?

Also: what were you going for with the up-down movement? Shrugging? Breathing? It's kind of hard to tell what he is doing (for me)...

My two cents (which no longer exist in Australia but...) :

I like the grey version that Darth mocked up for you. I think your grey version is a little too pale and makes her look a bit ghostly or sick. For me the colours in Darth's repaint are pretty much spot-on.

I think brown is a bit confusing: It makes her look more like a bear which makes the cringe-worthy term "koala-bear" reverberate in my head.

Why does no-one EVER READ THE MANUAL???

Because we're always too pumped to just play the game!;)

Looks great! One more slight thing I noticed is that, for me, her boots seem just a little too much "side-view" while the rest of her is turned on more of a diagonal between side and front, if that makes sense...

Not a huge issue if it means too much redrawing, but if it's a simple enough matter to angle them slightly more downwards like about 10-20 degrees it might be worth a try?

EDIT: I had a look at your other characters and realised that most of them have feet at a similar angle. I'm guessing there is actually a reason for this, probably to aid with side-view walk-cycle animations. If so, then ignore everything I just said

The character looks amazing!

Just one thing though: Usually with koala characters you can see a bit of the interior ear.

For example:



This is just one example, but if you google "cartoon koala" you will see what I mean.

At the moment they kind of look a bit "Mickey-ish", or like earmuffs, or turned around the wrong way by some koala-fixated sadist...

I don't know why, but I have a soft spot for kids investigating spooky locations.

Then this might be right up your alley:

The Adventures Of The Black Hand Gang

Also: playing The Mystery Of Haunted Hollow right now....It is very entertaining and nostalgic! Having a great time with it!

["The Quest To Recover The Hard-Drive"]

Quote from the manual (File.Open article):

IMPORTANT: If you open the file for writing, then you can ONLY work with files in the game directory. You CANNOT use a path, so any filename with "\" or "/" in it will automatically be rejected, for security reasons.

I think that might rather be a mistake. Perhaps the intention was only to deny accessing files outside of game directory.

Thus launching the popular and challenging adventure game: "The Quest To Recover The Hard-Drive"