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I think if he isn't dead he'll probably announce that pretty soon.

But that makes me wonder about the US planning this so he'd do that so they could find him. That'd be masterful.

I didn't think of flowchat programs. I'll have to give that a shot. I'd shyed away from using digital plans previously because I'd only been thinking about a digital version of my paper-based approach, made in Photoshop or Word. Which would be even more inconvenient.

How do you plan out your dialogues?

In the game I'm making I'm writing some fairly convoluted dialogue puzzles with lots of options and sub-trees of options which loop back on themselves and can jump into what you might have thought was an entirely separate tree of options. I'm doing it like this so I can model fairly complicated conversations and have a stab at having them flow more naturally than standard adventure game dialogue.

I'm finding it hard to plan out though. I've bought some extremely large pieces of paper and I was thinking I could make a huge web or graph with lots of lines flowing between all the options. But that's already going to be hard to maintain and just thinking about it makes me ill.

Anyone have experience with this? How did you solve it in your own game?

Have you tried changing the resolution in the "winsetup.exe" file that came with the game, and then select the 2x graphics filter? Or select "run in a window" and see if that works.
The only problem with that is your saved game from before wouldn't load after changing those options (as far as I know?) so maybe someone else can offer a more robust solution.

What were you doing between now and when you were playing earlier? Are there any new programs running?

I'd be interested to see a slightly more robust demonstration of the online, and some details of how it works and will be involved in the gameplay.

This is one of those games I was too excited about to ever actually expect to see finished.

I played through the demo last night and I wasn't disappointed. I was primarily interested in the sci-fi setting and the amazing graphics, and I was wondering if the actual gameplay would quickly deteriorate into bog-standard puzzles and lame characters. It didn't. I'm particularly impressed by the voice acting. I can only presume professional voice actors were involved? The quality was impressive. I've never played an AGS game with voice acting that didn't have nasally, unexpressive voices.

Aaaaand it's looking like it's going to be the first AGS game I've ever paid money for, because damn it, I want to see more!

When I first came to AGS I needed it; I wanted to make games but I really lacked the knowledge necessary to build a game from scratch. My programming capability was probably above average of an AGS new recruit (though I still shudder to recall some of the things I considered good code back in the day) but still well below what I'd need to make it on my own. So I loved that AGS let me just get on with being creative, and held my hand a bit through the difficult parts.

Now I've been doing a programming degree for about 2 years, and I've already made some games from scratch. So I suppose you could say I've really grown up and I could write my own adventure games if I wanted to. But, I notice that I'm still making my (development hell-bound) game in AGS.

If I were to think about why that is, it's probably because AGS really is just that simple and fun to use. If I were to write my own game engine I'd end up with something that was heading towards acting just like AGS does, but without all the years of experience and fine tuning that have gone into AGS. I'm thinking, immediately, of the Views and animation stuff.

That said, if I were going to make a game that relied on a lot of stuff AGS doesn't support, I think I'd rather go from scratch than hack a lot of technical stuff in.

Large pixels mixed with small pixels are a big no-no. I'm guessing you got here by starting off at low-res, getting frustrated that you couldn't add enough detail, doubling the size, and continuing to draw with the same size of brush? I recall doing that when I first started out, it's a pretty bad habit to get into as you'll always end up with odd looking art. It won't work in a low-res game, and it'll look pathetically blocky in a high res game. Either stick with low-res (about 30 pixels width, 65 pixels height) or get the pencil and paper out and do high-res art that's actually in high resolution.

As I recall you can't change walking speed mid-walk. There's probably an incredibly complicated workaround. Infact there is, remember when people were bandying around ideas for making Broken Sword style walking where the character would take a smaller step if they were close to the destination, and come to an animated standstill instead of just switching frames? If you look that up you might find helpful things for making animations with strides of varying length.

I don't think that allowing American soldiers to be openly gay would result in all current gay soldiers coming out. I think they'd know themselves if it made sense to come out, given the people they spend time with.

I think it's a good idea to avoid some of the more worn police clichés unless you're doing a Noir style thing, in which case the more the merrier. Remember that you can subvert tropes to make them less clichéd.

I haven't read the whole thread but have you considered adding emulation support so DOS AGS games will work straight from Nexus? That'd be a pretty cool feature.

I am planning for something like this for agsarchives.com with help from Arj0n, and Calin will have full access to those files for Nexus.

Actually thats already been done.

Nexus runs a version of dosbox for the games.

I love you all 

I forgot to mention that I got an expensive non-Wacom and it was unusuable,  prior to getting my beautiful Intuos2. To be honest, I can't see a reason not to get a Wacom.

I was moreso thinking of just being able to give feedback on a game at any time, from the list of downloaded games in my imaginary picture of the Nexus browser. Like eBay feedback. I agree that a pop-up or prompt would be far too invasive.

When I was in 3rd year my art teacher said my portrait needed some green in it, which she liberally applied. After she left I sat back in shock because she'd really badly ruined it, and everyone agreed.

I have to use tablet PCs in uni, maybe we just have bad ones, but I find them totally unsuitable for drawing. The lag is noticable between input and response, and the sample rate is hideously low (ie. how smooth a quickly drawn curve will be). That might just be the cheap HP models we have though.

I use my tablet instead of a mouse at all times now and can't imagine going back.

How about this? Ask people to rate a game after playing it in Nexus. Then use that.

A system like that would also be useful for suggesting other games to play next.

I haven't read the whole thread but have you considered adding emulation support so DOS AGS games will work straight from Nexus? That'd be a pretty cool feature.

On the current topic, if you're just taking games that people are volunteering for the service, I doubt you really have to worry about people submitting games that are utterly unplayable. Maybe the simplest way to remedy this is to only accept games that have had over a certain number of downloads? I can see where you're coming from, wanting to present a cream of the crop type showcase where every game on the system was potentially worth a download, but I also feel like Nexus would be massively useful as a way just to download any old game at all.

Even one that looks so bad you wouldn't usually bother, but you now can, due to the simplicity.

I don't think anybody here has the right to tell someone their game isn't good enough to be made available. I'd be sad if we turned into that kind of community.

I have an A5 Intuos2.

You shouldn't really get anything smaller than A5, but you don't necessarily need to get an A4. I presumed I needed an A4, but the A5 works for me just fine. My screen res is 1680x1050, and the A5 works just fine.

I got mine on eBay for a steal at like £60, but you can't rely on an offer that good coming up all the time.

Let's see... what other advice can I offer... I went out of my way to get tilt sensitivity and I never use it. You're better off getting a smaller, newer tablet than an older but larger one. I really don't think you need a big one, I mean how often do you want to draw using your whole arm and couldn't accept being zoomed out a little?