Messages

Oh yeah... bloody wedgie.. that is TOTALLY what she's supposed to be doing. A bloody, Ninja wedgie, no less.

You always thought that was a potted plant in the background, huh?

Isn't

FollowCharacter(BIRD, -1);

A lot easier than all of that, Mama?


I think he wants to know what to do, and not what not to do.

I know you want to help, and that's good of you, but calm down...

And somebody shot JF Kennedy!!!!

Precisely, and I just thought of an example.

DOTT and Grim Fandango had a sum of all these things... graphics, design, characters, music, etc..

Braindead 13 had GORGEOUS graphics, and I mean they were so good they would make you weak at the knees just looking at them... and nothing else. That game sucked.

Sam n Max had great design, graphics, characters... but I found the music got annoying very very quickly. This didn't really spoil the game for me, but it still annoyed me.

The Dig had lovely music and graphics, but the characters and story sucked butthole. This totally spoiled the game for me, no matter how gorgeously designed it was, or how beautiful the music was.

See where I'm going with this?

Obviously the pressure on amateur games isn't as great. Once again, I stress that my idea of good graphics are in DESIGN, and not execution, or SOMETHING like that anyway.

Sam N Max was my least favourite Lucasarts adventure game... I loved it to pieces, but if I had to choose, it would come last. The music often got annoying. But DOTT was totally one of my favourites. Everything... the music, animation, graphics, story, characters... loved it.

Something I often find annoying is when people create horribly brightly coloured zany graphics/backgrounds, and call them DOTT inspired. DOTT was pretty insane in the graphical design, but where people got the idea that it was coloured like acid play-dough, I have no idea. bright purples and yellows and oranges and reds and greens... holy cow people, I thought the colour scheme in DOTT was NICE.

Er, anyway.

Nobody got my joke about the Chaffeur

[graphics]

Hang on, if you're so worried about wasting bandwidth, why reply with something completely off topic and unhelpful?

Anyway, for me the most important part of a game are the characters. I don't know if I got the grammar in that sentence right. Anyway, I also believe that it doesn't just lie down to one aspect of design, it's a combination of all elements, after being well thought out and planned, being put together. Things that I think are important are atmosphere, music, graphics*, characters, story, dialogue... pretty much everything.

*GRAPHICS!!! By graphics, I don't mean they have to be awesome 3D renderings made in Maya or something. Just so long as time and effort has been put into making them detailed and interesting, it doesn't matter whether they're particularly realistic or if they don't have that WOW factor. In Graphics, I find colour, shading and layout very important. I know you're gonna dig into me for saying graphics are important, but I don't mean graphics, I mean the design of the graphics. Hm. Does that even make sense?

Okay, example. Pleughburg had pretty flat graphics. A lot of people think the graphics suck. But I thought they were brilliant graphics. They were detailed, well coloured, had a lot of atmosphere, and always left you wondering with a little chill up your spine, what was going to be around the next corner. THAT is my idea of good graphics.


PS Toefur... I like your name

Oh geeze... this is a hard question... I can't choose. But I can choose my five favourite books!

1. Wuthering Heights or Trapped!!! ... no wait, the Mill on the Floss was good too. I can't choose.
2. Silas Marner, or no! No! Wait, Oliver Twist. I love Oliver Twist! No wait, Silas Marner. Oh I can't CHOOSE.
3. Anything by Enid Blyton or Patricia Leich or Roal Dahl
4. Anything about that girl Jinny Manders
5. Tintin. Wait, that's not a book exactly. Hum. Hard Times! nonnonon, hang on. I don't know. Wait. Can you give me like, five minutes? I need to think.

Preshishly.

Also, can anybody else think of ways to experiment in such ways? With RPGmaker, you really did have a lot of restrictions, and it was a nuisance but still.. I enjoyed finding ways to improvise. People had to come up with a lot of new ideas to work their way around the limitations. For instance using a mountainous background with an ordinary foreground, and layering tiled items over the mountainous background.

In one game made with RPGmaker, there was a scene that was made fully from in-game tile graphics, and it was neat. The guy had used, as well as the ordinary snow effect plugin, foreground and background scrolling screens, so it gave a lovely illusion of depth and the swirling of the wind. He'd used a hand-made tile set to build a first-person scene, and had an animated object that simulated the flapping fabric of the players hood as they stood looking out through the snow. It was really amazing, and completely stretched the engine to its limits.


With AGS there are fewer limitations, so people don't find the need to do as much improvising and therefore there are less new ideas/styles/etc coming out. For instance, if we wanted to simulate that snow effect in AGS, we would probably just paint a first-person background, use the snow plugin and voila. And set character transparency to 0.


So I guess I'm trying to encourage innovative use of AGS. Or something.

I was just thinking there recently.... like five minutes ago, perhaps... about how great experimentation is. Something I love experimenting with is graphics. Boyd likes experimenting on himself, but that is besides the point....

The point is, I used to use RPGmaker, and because of the graphical restrictions I found myself improvising a lot. I used a technique that was used a lot in Final Fantasy VIII; I tried to implement in game graphics with cutscene graphics. The end result was actually quite nice:



Yes, the picture is small, but anyway. See the eensy weensy little sprites down there? Yeah.

In Final Fantasy VIII, this was also very successful because it helped ease the transition between gameplay and cutscenes. Usually, you could tell when a cutscene was coming because of a pause in the gameplay and a black screen. Similarly you knew when it was over, and there was an unpleasant transition between soft, smooth CGI animation and the polygon characters.

Take for instance, the Ragnarok scene in FFVIII, where the ship crashes through Lunatic Pandora. The merging of graphics really brings the player into the action of the event. It starts off as you stand on the deck of the airship, and the camera zooms past our polygonal character into the FMV sequence. Then as the airship lands, we once again see our polygonal characters run onto the deck of the airship, merged seamlessly with the FMV animation. There was no definitive beginning or end of the cutscene. Similarly, this method is used in the beginning of Grim Fandango, where we are taken from the intro sequence by the camera zooming out on Manny and taking its place in the ordinary room position.

We don't have FMV sequences to merge the gameplay with. But such techniques could certainly be used. I'd love to see some experimenting like this. Look at the stylish graphics of Fear Effect... that game sucked, but I was addicted to it because of the graphics which were new for that time.


Anyway, the reason I thought about this way because I was using that very technique in BR, and I thought I'd show this screenshot:

I stumbling across this quite accidently. Indeed, it looks very much like it was used at some sort of lecture on game design.  I'll keep an eye out for more.

It puts across a good few relevant points in design that quite frankly, I hadn't even thought of until now. I think it's good that, should any of us young uns especially, want a career in games design... we should get into good habits now.

And I will be looking for those architecture books.

Just a suggestion for the next version... it's sort of petty but anyway...

When making a character face a direction, you use FaceLocation, right? (Or FaceCharacter, but you need another character present to do that); Well since most people only have Left, Right, Up and Down walking sprites, it seems a bit excessive for those people to have to use coordinates the whole time to make their characters face left or right.

Now I'm crap at explaining myself, because I really don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but perhaps it would be easier if there were a command that was simply:

FaceDir(EGO,left);

If you know what I mean. Rather than having to come up with X and Y coordinates when all you want EGO to do is turn left.


And maybe a button that automatically reads your background pictures and lays out the walkable areas, hotspots and walk-behinds...

I have a question for the new guy.

Do you like Psychonauts?

You do! Excellent! Oh man, I'm so happy right now!

We can be, like, friends! No wait... BEST friends!!!

Actually, George Washington couldn't chop down cherry trees in one swing; it took him at least three.

When I say I like this, I mean... this is cool.

It's stylized and neat. Very good. Dude! Like 0mg0mg0mg! I totally love it! The ONLY thing I would say, and I only thought of it after close scrutiny, is that the ceiling seems a bit blank or unshaded or something.

Nice idea.

Yeah well mine had a chauffeur.

[Come]

Day of the Tentacle. Come to papa.

We played it on a 486. It was like, the fastest thing since the 386.

Oh, I'm giving away spaces for free. But okay.

Dude... those graphics... I don't know, they just....
Awww man, I'm over my head in Dangerville!

Try without the DL manager, Hobbes Sometimes they do crazy stuff.