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http://hem.ektv.nu/~ekt014611/MappomediaIndustries.htm

Ah Mappomedia...

Also, awkwardly enough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUrqpwSafMg&search=Mappomedia

My only problem with it is that one can't really just google up a sprite jam entry* or a MAGS entry or a background blitz entry but 5 minutes in google and I've answered all the questions perfectly and now I have an award.

Eric

* Yes I know about the people stealing sprites, but it's not rampant.

yodaman, why don't you read the rules of posting, specifically number 3. Also, why don't you be helpful and find the threads where this has been talked about many times before instead of just posting a meaningless post and calling for a lock.

sizzling_hotty, if that is indeed your real name!

Here are some threads from the past that might help:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=13376.0

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=10748.0

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=11569.0

These 2 are AGS only games:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=14440.20

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=19096.0

Welcome to the forums.

I think the best thing you could do for these drawings is make them all 3/4 view. The bodies are in a 3/4 view more or less but the heads are then in profile. The bearded man suffers the most from this.

Also on the bearded man, his arm is attached to his upper body by a tiny little shoulder joint. It's ok to get rid of the space between his arm and body and just let it all overlap.

Overlap is also the keyword for the tentacle alien. His body is contorted in a really weird way and his anatomy just falls apart. In my drawing I let his body overlap his farthest arm and his left arm overlap his body. Then I tried pushing his shapes more. Really giving him a neck fin that stands out and has a shape to it.

The blonde man needs to have his head turned towards us and the space between the arm and the body thins him out a lot.

It kind of destroys any butt he may have, try drawing the body and then adding the arm that overlaps.

The bird lizard man is your best, in my opinion. He's got a lot of nice shapes to him. Again with turning his head to a 3/4 view and he's good to go.

The other thing is the feet. The foot that is closest to us, turn it out to point at the viewer a little. It will ground the body more and add a little bit of perspective to the body and he will look like he's standing on the ground.

The other drawings were just me messing about. I made a really quick and dirty version of the bird lizard and when I was making it I came across my last bit of advice.

You're going to have to edit the sprite a lot more when it's shrunken down and almost ready to be put in the game.

Mostly the eyes. Get rid of a lot of the greys in the eyes and make them bigger and brighter. We need to be able to see those eyes. Especially on the bearded man, they're totally lost on him. They don't need big anime eyes but they do need bigger more expresive eyes.

In my opinion.

Is there a little Tom Waits in there?

As for the walk cycle, I don't think it suits him, he looks like he's truckin' down the street.

I'd think of him to have more of a swagger which his upperbody suggests.

Also, there is a bit of flashing on the white line to outline his jacket. If this is made in flash or a vector program I'd thicken the white line.

Oh but I love the tie and how much animation you did. The head's slight bob and the shoulders moving, with more practice you could be well on the way of being an animation star!

I don't think anyone would care. If you made a game about making fun of Bolivians I'm sure you'll get some angry PMs but I'm 99.9% sure no one will hate you for making a game making fun of a tv show/movie.

There is fan fiction out there involving all the characters of each universe having sex with each other, I doubt you'll do something more "offensive" than that!

So to answer the question: I don't care which, as long as you have fun. But I'd prefer Star Trek because Star Wars has been spoofed so much and is so boring anyway. Just don't make jokes about the one guy on an away team that gets killed.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=24331.0

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=21561.0

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=25970.0

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=11802.0

Here are a few threads from the past, the majority of forum goers posted in there so give that a read if you want to know what people like. Please don't post in them though unless you really feel you need too. If you like some music someone else likes, PM them maybe and let them know.

Maybe

Hello, this is Helm speaking.

For a quick at-work-eating-lunch answer I'm going to default to my long running bit of advice to people making adventure games.

Add a verb.

Current style adventure games have stripped down all the possible actions one can do in the game into "USE". Why do games even have TALK TO when USE would work just as well with characters. Use is such a generic do everything word that it ruins puzzle design. You don't need 20 verbs [turn on, turn off, push, pull, examine, look blah blah] but just try adding 1 new verb. In Spellbound I added the magic system which let me add as many new verbs as I wanted. In Automation I added KICK. In a way this agrees with Helm though I dislike the crowbar example because it's a lot to ask [as he says] and unless you build an engine around interacting with the world like that, it just ends up being a minigame.

You can keep the USE icon but limit it to just what can be done with the hands. If you create a GUI where there is HAND, EYE, FEET, MOUTH and let the player know that they don't just represent USE, LOOK, WALK TO, TALK TO.

MOUTH could be anything that can be done with the mouth. Talk, eat, blow on, suck [grow up!], bite... FEET, walk to, kick, jump... HAND has a ton of stuff it can do but try your hardest not to make it the generic verb, grab, open, pick up, press, pull...

This doesn't solve the problem of convoluted puzzles because you could still make a puzzle where you have to blow air up a drain pipe to unclog it and get a birds nest that was in there... But it opens the possibility of puzzles and frees you to think, in my opinion.

Crowbar in door: With the hand put it in the door, the crowbar sits in the door, use hand on crowbar, the character jiggles the crowbar back and forth, not enough strength to break the door down, use foot on crowbar in door, the character kicks the crowbar which breaks the door lock and the door swings open.

I don't know if that helps or is relevant to the discussion.

Or just do a simple websearch on Jimmy Kimmel Snake Bite and note that there are no news stories about it.

Also, from what I have learned, you are quite wrong on the idea that you can suck venom out of a bite. The venom enters the blood stream and the heart pumps the blood quite quickly and will remove an insignificant amount of venom, if any at all:

Suctioning out venom, either by mouth or with a pump. Suctioning by pump removes a clinically insignificant quantity of venom (Annals of Emergency Medicine, February 2004), and the resultant bruising speeds the venom's absorption. Suctioning by mouth presents a risk of further poisoning through the mouth's mucous tissues (Riggs, et al 1987). The well-meaning family member or friend may also release bacteria into the victim's wound, leading to infection.

Wiki

It's a car commercial. They edited out the last bit at the end.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/advertisements/meteor.asp

[real]

For me, when making puzzles, if there is no reason for a puzzle to exist I don't let it exist.

If you can't think of any real way to open a locked door other than a long convoluted process... Don't lock the door. That will "shorten" the game in a way but I'd rather spend time solving puzzles while chasing a murderer or disarming a bomb or freeing trapped alien slaves than unlocking a door. The door may just be blocking the way to all the good stuff inside the location, don't stop me from getting there.

Also, it seems people spend a lot of time trying to make puzzles where you go from easy to hard through the whole game. "The puzzles must get harder and more devious!" and they forget about a lot of simple actions that can feel like puzzles.

You have a knife in your inventory? Draw some overgrown weeds on the door [where applicable] and have the knife cut them down. Or just let the player USE HAND on WEEDS and tear them down. I didn't need to search for weed killer only to find an empty can of it but read the ingredients and find that all the ingredients are simple house hold objects I can get through other puzzles and then use the new weed killer on the weeds and they magically die in 1 second and the door is opened. Sure that adds a lot of puzzles to the game and a lot more time the player is playing the game but UGH! Quit, Uninstall, Nasty Email from Eric!

Who said anything about their music?

Pick of the month highlights a specific game for various reasons, not because it got a high score in voting.

All those answers are on the internet, check Wikipedia.

If you sort by rating, so says CJ, people will sort by rating and play the top rated games and not play the unrated or low-rated games when the only reason they are low-rater or unrated is because people sort by rating and play the top rated games.

Which simple tools did he use? TELL ME NOW LAS NARANJAS! I can't wait for the answer!

That's DG's old site, he ran the first few awards. Pay it no mind, it hasn't been updated in years, as you can see.

You can also use an old version of Hammer with Torque. You can't really do much with it though, it's mostly for building brush based geometry and texturing it, you can't place decals or overlays or anything like that. Just brushes and lights and camera paths.

Personally I find Hammer easier to use than QuArK

Yes AGA, and as I said, one shouldn't have to read a 10 page thread about people arguing/discussing how the awards will be run. One should put all the rules in the official AGS awards thread, which it wasn't.

It's not the fact that it was required, it's the fact that it wasn't officially announced.

But whatever, techincally anyone can vote on the awards as long as they register, they don't even need to post once.