Messages

[LOSER!!!]

LOSER!!![/u]

No seriously, though. Don't worry. I once too spent a hellish time in an insane asylum... but now it's nearly over. Come on guys, let's go.

No, you are indeed a gentleman.

My god I love you so much I want to cry. Cry into my coffee. My tears are so bitter that they must counter the sugar. Perhaps the tears will enter my bloodstream and sober me! Ho ho ho!

Oh my god, I love life right now! I feel like the world is full of pink fluffy bunnies and sugar candy! Especially sugar candy!!!

[Grim Fucking Fandango]

For the following reasons:

Sam and Max Talkie
The Dig
Full Throttle
Grim Fucking Fandango

Go on, you bastards! Go on! Tell me I haven't played Grim Fandango again! Remind me again! Make fun of me some more! Because if you do, you will just be dumb and wrong!!!! What? You're always dumb and wrong? You think so too? Good, because you are totally right!

PS. Dude! I'm hallucinating! One of those characters on the start screen looks like... looks like Manny, with Tim Schafers Head cut out of a Photo and pasted on top. I should really stop drinking coffee.

EDIT: What is this little sticky mark on the Grim Fandango box, Marky?

I'm nearly 18, the same as last time I posted on this thread. But now I have Leprosy. The doctor says I should keep my arm in a sling, so that I don't lose it in the duvet if it falls off at night. Meanwhile, my mother has promised that the Arm Fairy, like the Tooth Fairy, does indeed exist. But very UNlike the Tooth Fairy, she's loaded. I think the under-pillow payment is measured in weight, so I'll be binge eating for a few days until my limb removes itself from the socket.

Yeah, see, it was so NOT annoying you can't even remember it

Play MI2.

See?

Actually, some of the best games IMO had non skippable text and you would barely notice. For example MI2, Sam N Max and I THINK Dott. The thing was you could adjust the speed to suit your reading speed, and also the converations were kept funny and short so you didn't get frustrated. In Discworld, the conversations rambled on and and and since you couldn't skip, it quickly became frustrating.

I think that if a game doesn't allow skipping of speech without annoying the player, this is a good design sign.

Oh my goodness, why did I not see this here before!??? Okay, firstly your humour is great and sticks with the old style! Second,  I loved the intro!!! Everything about it is great! If you want it translated properly/proofraed, I'd love to help! This is completely gonna kick ass!!!

Cool! My X-Boyfriend went to a college to do this nautical studies course and he had to go off on a ship for a year... of course, I know what sailors get up to....  so I dumped the bastard.... especially after he didn't visit me in hospital.... God I hate sailors.

But Tier, I love you! And I will miss you! Have fun and don't poke anybodies eye out with the insult swordfighting.

...Gameboy advance ports... .... Xbox... definately Xbox.... PS2..... Maybe even Nokia Ngage.... I don't know what that is, but still... maybe even a MOBILE PHONE PORT OF AGS.... If I steal source code... then sell ass...... Elite h4ckz0rz r0ckz0rz..... 0mg 0mg 0mg..... .... sewing kit...... assinated, and then port.... money.....bandwidth...

[Make the text unskippable]

I really can't believe you're actually serious about this whole lengthening thing but okay... here's my two cent....

Make the text unskippable
Loads of games actually use this option, because otherwise impatient players could just skip past all the relevant information. Also it helps the music time with cut scenes, where otherwise the player could merely skip the text through. I even use this. I don't do it to lengthen my game, I just prefer it unskippable... PROVIDED YOUR CONVERSATIONS DON'T GO ON AND ON AND ON LIKE DISCWORLDS DID....

Make the character move as a slug
This would make me quit a game in disgust and stamp on it, and then burn it and throw the ashes in the recycle bin, and then drag them out so I could burn them some more before deleting them again.

Make a crappy GUI with 1001 menus or commands
Completely retarded.

. Make a timed puzzle. But not your run-off-the-mill timed puzzle. The kind of timed puzzle that involves fooling around for 10-40 minutes until the thing the player needs appears
Supremely Retarded.

Make an illogical puzzle
Depends on how it is used... the Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle was great. Completely illogical puzzles can be annoying if used too much.

A really dirty one: make cool background music
Great.

Do not do a map of the region or something. Let the player travel through the beautiful lands of your game!
Depends on how big the beautiful lands are. Could be annoying, could be tactful.

More importantly, I would simply not be worried about making your game long.

Vel, only heathens actually like Pixel Hunting Puzzles. They're the worst, lowest, dirtiest form of a puzzle ever.  

Did a pixel hunt or a timed sequence ruin the fun of FoA? Or KQ2 VGA?

Yes. It did.

Good puzzles will keep you ages but stay constantly moving. Instead of a Pixel Hunt puzzle to find the Map Pieces in MI, they created sub-puzzles which didn't have to be completed in order. This way, even when you were stuck on one sub-puzzle, you could complete others, and possibly find the answer to the one you were stuck on on your way. This added days and days of gameplay for me, and yet constantly I was moving in the game, progressing slowly and surely. The game spanned for weeks with me, but I was never stuck for more than two days, and even when I was it didn't feel like it because I was still finding items or combinations etc.,. This is good design.

Under a Killing Moon added an entire Three Days of playing time for me, by putting a key that was approximately the size of a human head-hair, and the same colour as the background, on a mantlepiece. To top it off, you had to LOOK DOWN ON THE MANTLEPIECE in order to see the key. Even when you DID look at the Mantlepiece, you still couldn't see it. Besides that, you never had to look down at anything else in the game, and never had to do it again, so you wouldn't think of using that particular command. I did not find that very funny. It was horrificly designed.
You darted through the first three quarters of the game in an hour, got stuck looking for a key for three days, and then finished the rest in about twenty minutes. Bad game design.

Escape from Delirium. Leprosy.

[// script for room: First time player enters screenDisplaySpeech(EGO, "If I know Doctor Fred, he's got the Tentacles tied up in his secret lab...");FaceLocation(EGO,183,179);DisplaySpeech(EGO, "Question is... where is his secret lab?");GUIOn(2);]

When will I stop with the stupid problems already?!? First the Missing View, and now THIS!!???

Here we goes....

 // script for room: First time player enters screen
DisplaySpeech(EGO, "If I know Doctor Fred, he's got the Tentacles tied up in his secret lab...");
FaceLocation(EGO,183,179);
DisplaySpeech(EGO, "Question is... where is his secret lab?");
GUIOn(2);


It's just after a cut scene. It's in "First time player enters screen". There are no other script commands for that room.

The problem: After he says "...Secret Lab..." control is returned to the player. Without any commands from the player, the second control is returned Ian disappears, and a few moments later it boots out of the game with an error, "MoveCharacter: Player Character not in Room".

EDIT: Oh my GOD, never mind. Am I an idiot? It was a command from the previous room trying to take effect. Dumb me! Let all potential future idiots learn from the proffesional dunce. Do not be dumb, like me!

Graphics are important to me. More than impressive 3D wizardy and crap like that though, the design of the graphics. Maniac Mansion was pretty flat and straight, so I wouldn't consider them good. Monkey Island had a nice graphical design (Monkey Island 2 moreso than 1) and Day of the Tentacle was gorgeous to look at. Final Fantasy games have some gorgeous and detailed backgrounds, especially IX... I loved the graphics in IX.  Metal Gear Solid II has so much movement and fluidity, and Simon the Sorcerer had a few lovely backgrounds and animations (Even though I hated the actual game).

See, I would consider Final Fantasy IX and Day of the Tentacle on the same level graphically, in that the design is supurb. No matter whether you live in 1990 or 2000, no matter whether you're running 286s or Ataris or Pentium 4s or an Xbox... the platform won't stop the designers from being creative and artistic with the design. Unless you go back reallll far. But let's not do that.

Nu-uh. Why does a game need to be long? Wouldn't a short, action packed game be better than a long, dragged out game? Length doesn't make a game better, it'll just frustrate players. My priorities when making a game would be to (1)make it enjoyable, (2) give it a good story and characters and (3) give it some sort of purpose.

If you need to lengthen your game in any way, it only suggests to me that you couldn't think of content to fill it with, which suggests bad design.

Beyond Reality isn't gonna be as long as I planned for it to be. That was bad design. I hadn't planned for it, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna make it longer by using dirty tricks; I'm gonna hope that what content I do have is gonna be entertaining enough to pull it through without being 50 hours of gameplay.

That's not to say that those dirty tricks weren't funny to read. But I wouldn't use them.

Jannar I don't think you should tell him what to do like that... but Dan, he's right. The 2D and 3D don't go together, and the font doesn't seem to fit in either.

But that's not to say it won't be a good game, but changing these little things will make it better. I'll download the demo later and try it out.

If you make it good enough, the graphics won't really matter. I wish you luck completing it, especially as it's your first game

But, Jannar was only really making suggestions on how to improve it, so you shouldn't be defensive. You should always be prepared for good as well as bad reviews.  It wouldn't be much fun if everybody just said everything was great, to be kind. Just take his suggestions and consider them. Jannar has been around here a long time and made some good stuff (Check his website) so it's worth respecting his opinion, cuz it'll only help you make your game even better

Actually, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's people using dirty tricks to lengthen their games. It means they don't have any real content.

I know a guy who claims to be ten. But he is in fact like 30-something.

I guess my point is, if you're 10, you never know, you might actually be a 30-something year old, and if you are, I suppose that makes you smart and creepy. Well, I am 17, going on 18. I know that I'm niave. Fellows I meet may tell me I'm sweetly, and willingly I believe.

Oh sure, Beef is fine. At least, until I come across an injured Cow abandoned at the side of a road, and nurse it to good health, and grow attached to it, and condemn the eating of this animal too, as I have seen the kindess and intelligence it displays.

As I have done with every animal on the above list.

Yeah, he doesn't have many First Person Shooters or RPGs.