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* Mandle staggers onto stage embarrassingly still dressed in his tutu...

"I would just like to thank all the...uuurgh..."

* Mandle embarrassingly vomits pints of vodka and other stomach contents over the first few rows of the audience in an awe-inspiring spray...

"Well (wiping lips and chin with handkerchief)...That's the real thing that came from the depths of Mandle I guess..."

* Mandle giggles, burps several times, falls bonelessly backwards, and the curtains close on his feet...

* We see Mandle's feet dragged out of view a few moments later...

Firstly: A big CONGRATULATIONS on getting the game out on time for MAGS!!!

And also: YAAAAAAAY!!! I've soooo been waiting for this one!!!

Awesome...kind of a bandaid fix rather than a real one I guess...But whatever works eh?

E for Effort, guys. :-  Now I've got to dodge the Bump Police to keep this thread alive.  If I get busted I hope you lot can at least cobble together some bail money for me.

Spoiler

I picked ABBA because they were Swedish and because they were musicians.

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Something like:

Spoiler

Kroenas?

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No idea what it means though but:

Spoiler

Swedish currency is called Krona with an s for the plural, and an e in the middle (swallowed)

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Just finished the game now and it was GREAT!!! Charming atmosphere and nice tragi-comedic feel throughout...

I did find a few glitches:

(SPOILER WARNING)

Spoiler

* If you use ROAR on iron bar in inventory the voice audio says: "Dat Rokk much big troll" by mistake

* If you drop the boulder right at Rokk's feet (when he is still in the cell) it goes above his baseline and disappears behind him: You can still recover it but it takes a bit of precision with the clicking...

* After you make the troll-tower with the x2 icon on the crystal: After the cutscene if you use the x2 on the crystal again it repeats the cutscene over from the start.

* I also noticed some baseline issues when the trolls are walking in a group, and sometimes you can get a bit trapped in a corner by the other trolls and it takes some wriggling to get free... These are probably AGS issues and not so easy to solve though I guess...

* Not a glitch but: I loved all the voice acting with one big exception: The narrator's voice-overs at the start and the finish: The tone of the voice and the echo effect make me think of the start of a sci-fi game (in particular the start of Unreal Tournament), or the voice of the self-destruct countdowns in Alien/Aliens movies...Could be just me but I really didn't feel that they fitted with the rest of the game...

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AWESOME WORK though and I can't wait for Verse 2...

You've got one fan hooked here for sure!

Cannibal the musical! I have that on vhs somewhere.

WELL DONE!!! A great movie and the best snowman-building song I've ever heard...Screw that one from Frozen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ1ZOFNBL68

I'm actually amused by my own reaction to this thread:

At first I was all like: Do we really need a game about prostitution when there are so many woman in the real world enslaved and trafficked because of the sex trade???

And then I actually read the thread properly and realized that the prostitutes are all men.

And then I was like: What?...Okay, hang on...So... I get to play a dude that women pay to have sex with??? DOWNLOADING....DUH!

[OH, THE SHEER HORROR OF IT ALL!!!]

OH, THE SHEER HORROR OF IT ALL!!!

One of those pesky KILLER TOMATOES FROM OUTER (DAGNABBIT) SPACE has just abducted one of the most valuable members of the AGS community and flown off towards its home planet with him:

[imgzoom]http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c201/Mandle/UFO04_zps64f93d4e.png[/imgzoom]

After strapping an Interstellar Transport Unit to the victim's back the despicable vegetable fled the planet Earth with its captive in tow, taking off into the otherwise calm and beautiful april skies...

WHO CAN SAVE THE EARTH FROM THIS GARDEN-VARIETY THREAT???

Anchorhead is such a good game. I've wanted to remake it in 3D for awhile.

I also had the thought in the back of my mind to remake it in AGS...But again: I doubt the really disturbing parts could be done better with graphics than they were done with text...

I tried playing Anchorhead years ago, and had to draw a map, and got lost over and over with the game telling me that I hit a dead end and would never find my way back out of the streets, as they became some sort of impossible maze.

I'd love to revisit it, though.

Oh, I'm also a huge fan of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, even if the combat elements SUCK. The portrayal of Lovecraft's universe visually is unmatched.

I know the part of the game of which you speak, and I thought the same thing at the time: "Oh God no, a maze!", but actually...

SPOILER WARNING:

Spoiler

...it's not a maze. You just go southwest to get back to the previous street. Most other directions lead you in a circle back to the same spot.

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I will be sure to try out Dark Corners soon...I've heard a lot about that one on various boards but had forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder!

[(1) Map drawing:]

Well, lately I've been on a binge of playing games based in or around the Cthulhu Mythos. I am considering my own game based on such, and thus decided I must check out what has come before both for inspiration and also to avoid unintentional duplication. And for fun as well of course...

So far I have played these graphics adventures:

"Shadow Of The Comet" and it's sequel "Prisoner Of Ice"
"Darkseed" and it's sequel "Darkseed II"

Which were all very good. "Shadow Of The Comet" was probably the best, despite a lack of anything resembling a decent interface and some impossibly counter-intuitive puzzles. Apart from its problems though it really captured the feel of Lovecraft and is a charming game to boot.

But the one main flaw that all these games had for me was the problem that all visual media hits when attempting Lovecraft, and probably why there have been few successful Lovecraftian movies:

Once you show the mythos entities visually they are just monsters. They are supposed to be sanity-sapping inconceivable-to-the-human-mind things, but the visual designs have been conceived by human minds and thus must always fall short of what the original stories implied.

So, I turned next to text-adventures:

I tried out Infocom's "The Lurking Horror" which was pretty good, but ultimately did not really satisfy me: It was so obviously Infocom-style above and beyond being Lovecraft...It felt a bit like playing Zork with a different setting. There is even a thief that steals your stuff and you get eaten as soon as your light source runs out.

So this brings me to:

BEST LOVECRAFT GAMES EVER

I downloaded two more text adventures which were made by indie-developers but seemed to have achieved tons of praise and awards. Both are public-domain so I will include the links now:

Anchorhead and The King Of Shreds And Patches

(The top link on the right-side of the screen is the game download link in both cases. You will also have to download the recomended emulators to play the games. Game files and emulator files are all very small in size due to the text-based nature. Once the emulator is installed just drag and drop the game file onto the emulator icon to start playing.)

And OH MY GOD these games are incredible! Nothing I have played, except for the Call Of Cthulhu dice and paper RPG, comes even close to these games in simulating the feel of being in a Lovecraft story.

Without going into spoilers I will just say that both of these games are masterfully written, both in plot and prose, and both have an epic scale, being about as long as a medium-to-longish novel. So yeah, if you're not into doing a LOT of reading then these games are not for you.

Also both games have fixed some big problems that people had with earlier text-adventures:

(1) Map drawing: If you ever played the Zork games then you know what I mean: Super-complex maps that you pretty much had to draw on paper or wander forever lost. Anchorhead solves this problem by keeping the layout pretty simple and the number of rooms to the minimum needed to tell the story. I never had to draw a map, except for one or two "maze" areas, and even those are fairly simple. King Of Shreds And Patches actually has a graphical auto-mapper which is always on-screen when needed, and also takes the time to tell you where new locations can be found (as your character is supposed to have lived in London (in the time of Shakespear) for years and is familiar with the geography).

(2) Impossible puzzles: Using the Zork games again as an example: They had those couple of puzzles which were just SO hard that you could get stuck literally for months or years or forever. With dozens of locations and dozens of inventory items and little to no telegraphing of what to use where, you could wear out entire keyboards trying every possible thing to make progress in some cases. The puzzles in Anchorhead and King Of Shreds and Patches are logical, well telegraphed, and just hard enough to require a bit of thought and planning, but I found I was never really stuck to the point of frustration. So the story is always moving forward and the immersion is rarely broken.

(3) Too long room descriptions: Remember when you would walk into some rooms in (again) Zork games and the entire screen was taken up by the description and even had the [MORE] at the bottom? In these two games the descriptions are concisely written to give you just enough atmosphere and information. Further detail is always provided by using "examine" on things and so in this way you still get the richness of detail but in snippets controllable by the player, not dumped in your face all in one slew.

The games do have what some may consider flaws:

(1) Dead ends: In both games it is possible to hit dead-end gameplay if you made too many mistakes earlier on. This usually involves something obvious like throwing an important item into the sea never to be seen again, and is in most cases avoidable. But still: save often!

(2) Time limits: Both games have a time limit, although it doesn't become so vital until later on. Anchorhead has the stricter time limit in the later parts of the game, but with a bit of strategic game-saving, and a stop-and-think-before-acting attitude (time is still frozen between moves as in most text adventures) players should have little real trouble.

The main thing that makes these two games the best Lovecraft I've ever played is, of course, in text it IS possible to throw the mythos entities at you without spoiling them by having to show exactly what they look like. It's done in pretty much the same way Lovecraft did it in the stories.

Another factor is that YOU are actually the main character in the story: Lovecraft usually had his characters already entwined in the mystery from way before the story began, although the characters themselves were usually unaware of this until later. In "Shadow Of The Comet" for example, you are an outside investigator trying to solve a mystery that you have no real connection with. But, oh my God, especially in Anchorhead you are bound to the story in ways that still haunt me even now, a week or so after finishing the game.

So...I hope this inspires some people to check out these two awesome games or, if you have already played them, please leave a comment below about your own experiences with the game(s).

Cheers!

Cassie: what an eye-grabbing sprite! Very nice textures/colours and great 3D look on the "claw"...

Also: LOL @ AprilSkies' not-so-evil twin

Hi Slasher.

The problem you are having is exactly what I have come across and I don't know why it does it.
I set a character to Walk to coords and then add a waypoint to make him come back.
He always walks faster going and slower coming back... Pixelated little pillock.   

Does upping the character's walk speed on the way back compensate for the problem or does it change nothing?

This makes one wonder what outside ppl would think of this topic, if they just randomly read this, not getting the meaning of the topic..

I took 'the middle of your ass ... So I spent about an hour last night trying to force a 'T' in ...

**SPITS DRINK** (again)

Guys, seriously....I'm getting more wine on the wall than in my mouth...

Oh wow....WOW!!!

Misj' that background is just....breath-taking!!!

Soooooo beautiful!!!

[THAT'S FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!]

HAHAHAHA!!!! Pindo you madman!!!

I was wondering what that post meant until I checked out the updated first post!

THAT'S FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!

I'm liking this game a lot so far: It has a real feel of innocence about it. I'd imagine some kids around 8-12 years old would go nuts for this!

And I love the sibling rivalry between the twins, and especially the not-the-sharpest-tool brother, but you give him his moments now and then as well.

The supporting cast of characters are also lovable and look awesome! I can tell a lot of time and love went into designing their looks: You can really tell at a glance what their personality is like.

I have a few classes at my school that just eat up this kind of detective stuff, so I'm sure going to be using your game in lessons. I will probably make some comprehension-style quiz sheets for them to work on after playing a case. I could share those with you if you are interested in having such support teaching materials also available on your site for download with the game: I can see this being very popular in classrooms!

Oh...and I have two students, brother and sister, that look almost exactly like your twins, so that's going to be great for some laughs! I'm totally going to start calling them by the character's names after we play the game

Without a word count it is impossible to be sure, but I think....

Spoiler

Putting a mirrored "draw" down the middle of "ass" (ie over the middle s) produces the word "awards", and "sag" suspiciously is an anagram of some sort of adventure game creating software....  I can't say exactly the significance of the date, or the clue that scrambles "sag" and puts it in the front, but I feel pretty confident in guessing "AGS Awards".

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100% correct! Well done!

And yeah:

Spoiler

I knew that once the fairly easy "awards" was figured out that the rest would be pretty obvious so that's why I didn't include a letter count and made the AGS part way too cryptical.

To answer your questions: The word "after" was supposed to indicate that "awards" should follow after "sag" rearranged in the order 231 (23rd of January). As I said: this bit way too cryptic without enough clear hints to indicate the code method, but I figured it was still solvable given the easy first bit.

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Double post and sorry...

The kids are pumped to get these games out and some very creative things are happening!!!

First game coming out soon...And it's a doozy!!!