Messages

Yea I didn't know there was a wizarding school in Canada...

What's your house name?

I do not know what game this is but I thank you for keeping the community in mind.

Eric

If you ever need someone to get you down in the basement! LGM is your man, he did the voice on my animation:  http://kafkaskoffee.com/junk/lj/comics/Zday.html

Granted he's very hard to hear and the line is 5 words long and slightly obscured by the moaning but... hey... he recreates cinema history in that scene!

Wow, you did all that with only 3 colours?!

That's basically the plot of Die Hard and look what they did with that. It's also the final plot device in 28 Days Later and it's quite different from Die Hard.

It's all in what you do with it, just about every plot will seem cliché when written out in one or two sentences.

It's the complete difference in styles really. The face is pixeled and the coat is a photo. The face has like 10 colours in it and the coat is photoreal.

I'd recommend either tracing over the coat or running some photoshoppery on it to make it look more in line with the head. Or update the head with a real head.

Also, can you put up a non-JPG version? I makes it really hard to crit an image covered in artifacts.

When this question pops up people usually write "go for a walk, listen to classical music [for some reason it's always classical], read a book, watch a movie, etc" So the answer is always "Do something else"

However let's examine why you've lost motivation and not exactly how to get it back. When I lost motivation on Time Out it wasn't because I hadn't taken enough walks while reading a book on classical music in the movies, it was because I was stuck in the story. I had come to a part that I never really wrote fully and hoped that by the time I got there I'd have figured it out. The time came, I hadn't figured it out, I stalled, out of ideas. Then I started doubting the entire project "This is basically a series of cutscenes with 6 puzzles scattered in between!" Then I started trying to think of a way to really cram some good puzzles into the ending of Time Out and stalled on trying to cram puzzles into it.

I lost motivation on Spellbound because 1.) the month was over and MAGS games are month long dev cycles. 2.) I didn't fully write out 2 puzzles and got stuck trying to come up with something.

I lost motivation on a comic I was drawing years ago because I decided to just come up with the story on the fly as I drew pages. I had a beginning and an end and I just made up the middle. The middle began to suck and I got stuck trying to think of a way to bring it all together and make it cool again. Also, I was bored drawing the beginning of the comic. All the exposition and getting to know characters, shit man I just wanted to draw the fight scene and the main character breaking the sound barrier in his modified experimental plane! I decided the only way to do that would be to start over and thus, I canceled the comic. 8 pages of comics tossed because, eh.

My newest game: I have gone through high and low productivity periods. Some weeks I crank out backgrounds and I'm so productive it's like I'm getting paid to do it. Some weeks I just can't look at it and work on my new comic instead. How I overcome this when I realize that it's gotten silly and I haven't worked on my game in a while is I work on a later part in the game. Usually that means paint a new background from a part of the game I'm not ready to implement yet. I stop thinking about the game in it's current state and start thinking about the exciting future possibilities of the game. I get excited [hopefully] and keep working. I also just THINK about the game. Think about the exciting parts that will hopefully wow people. I think about parts I haven't fully fleshed out yet and how to make them awesome.

So I guess my 2 take-a-ways from this post would be:

For me the biggest killer to a project is not having planned the whole thing out. "And then somehow he makes it to the little village" is a killer statement in a story outline for me. I need to know how he made it to the village so I'm not sitting there looking at the backgrounds I have and trying to shoe-horn in a puzzle into current art without having to draw more. That won't make anyone happy!

The second biggest is just growing bored with the project. It happens very easily for me because I can be sitting here working on my game when I get an idea for a new game and my brain won't let me stop thinking about it. Now I'm all excited about this new game and want to make that, not finish painting this stupid forest background with it's 300 trees and a flowing river, shit that's boring! So teleport production ahead a weeks and work on the final act of the game. It's a fresh new area you haven't thought of in a while because you've been stuck in the beginning for weeks just trying to get these trees to look good!

Gilbert's VERY BAD THING:  Spellbound did it, hooray!

Moodyblues, let me expand on your brief description of your opening.

Don't have the argument at all. Have the father and daughter in a tense scene in the foyer of the house, lamps are lit and things are clean but cozy. Maybe a housekeeper is there. The father speaks very little as if to signify that everything that can possibly be said has been said. The Housekeeper or whatever fiddles with the daughter's coat and explains little things to her "Don't go being a bother." "Speak when spoken too..." "...Stay out of trouble... Please..."The daughter is all packed and the room is dark, it is just about dawn. The daughter tries to apologize when a caller arrives at the door. The father, barely looking at her picks up her bags and brings them outside, the daughter follows him carrying her own smaller bag, the housekeeper bursts into tears...

Outside a huge dark carriage is waiting, lit torches in sconces are hanging, the sun is JUST about to break over the horizon, the horses are pawing at the ground and breathing into the chilly air. The father throws the bags on the back of the carriage, talks to or pays the Man In Charge, the Man In Charge gently pushes the daughter into the carriage, gets in, closes the door, reaches out the window and pats the side of the carriage and they leave.

6 days later we open on the daughter in her new room, starkly different from the house she just left.

The daughter obviously did something bad if her father won't even look at her let alone he's sending her away. After we gain control of her in the new room we can have her talk to other people or other people gossip about her and we'll learn why she was there. People's reactions to her will show us that what she did wasn't just break a window, people stop talking when she enters a room, etc...

Better yet have the entire opening be playable. The daughter is standing there, your father tells the housekeeper to tell you to pick up your bag, you do it. If you don't or trying to do something else the housekeeper will reprimand you. You have to get and wear your hat. Close up your bag. Say goodbye to your pet dog. Try to speak to your father. Get some dialog out of the housekeeper... Stuff like that. When you're father walks outside with your bags you have to GET BAG and then WALK outside. The player has to, not the cutscene. All with gentle prodding from the housekeeper to make sure you know what to do. "Better follow him out there love, it's best not to disobey him again, not after what happened..."

Just a quick thing that popped into my mind, I'm a much more visual thinker and when it comes to trying to explain something I default to pictures and mood and not words.

So that's a long post but I think it fits the topic of this thread.

I don't really know what makes the start of a game interesting for me. FoA's interactive opening was great but it wasn't really an intro to the story. DoTT was better as far as intro to the game and not just the mechanics. I loved Soviet Unterzoegersdorf but I had a hell of a time with the opening because it felt so slow, just picking up garbage... But then it picked up and grabbed me by the brain. The garbage bit was a part of the intro and got you into the world. Garbage on the lawn is treated as a terrible tragedy and picking up that garbage is seen as a valiant act of patriotism. But I guess I wasn't ready for understanding that at the beginning of the game.

The opening is so tricky because if you put me in the shoes of a character, show me his opening and I don't care about his plight, there's no reason for me to solve his puzzles.

I'm struggling with the info-dump problem right now and I think while writing this post I just decided that if I feel like I'm saying too much in the beginning... Just cut it. Tell the character the important stuff they need to know now and forget about the back story. The back story can be sprinkled throughout the game.

So I guess what I may have just taught myself is to wow the player in the beginning and not teach them.

sort folder by details and then sort by last accessed?

hey Ben, I've been following this thread and I just wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the works!

I did not know that the character was supposed to be immediately female. I thought she was an undead creature.



That's the face I see when I look at a majority of these faces. A skull face with long incisors poking down.

Maybe make the line under her mouth the lighter...darker green? or just remove the under the lip shadow and use the midtone green in there.

Yay, this may well mean further Rabbi Stone adventures!

Oh gosh... I hope not! Dude had a substantial adventure, any more and it's just wedging a character into stories just to keep brand recognition going. Urgh

Congrats, I hope all turns out the way you want it!

Also, same "virus" warning here too:

Detected As: Exploit-IFrame

That is the nicest thing I've seen in a long time, lo_res_man.

Now if you'll excuse me, my collossal girlfriend is terrorising a japanese city...

It's true... Ali and I are dating and it's wonderful. If only Japan would recognize our love!

Congrats to everyone who even made a game last year. I just need to find the time in life to finish these games now!

I call into question the truthiness of this account. I'd love to see a news report on this because usually every time one hears something like this it turns out to be an urban/internet legend.

A 20ish year old burglar being able to afford legal council and a long legal battle over a broken ankle raises a red flag.

I absolutely marvel how people get so heated at these kinds of debates.

I just want to say that I'm not heated. I just asked some questions. You may feel attacked by other people posting but I'm typing very un-emotionally. Just didn't want you to feel attacked by what I wrote.

Do you really think because things happened in the past, things should be allowed to happen in the future?

Lots of people have protested lots of things for more than 50 years. Just giving up because the thing you're protesting hasn't been shut down completely is a poor plan. You bring up bad things other people have done for their religious views, why not stamp out a growing religion now instead of wait for them to commit larger scale atrocities that will affect you?

If no one was bitching [which is a great word to diminish the arguments and efforts people are making against scientology] for 50 years, who knows how much more power and influence they'd have now.

Is going green in some situations better than not, is the main question for me.

Does it use more resources to reuse recycled material [building recycling centers, powering them with fossil fuels, powering the trucks to get the recyclable materials, exhaust/pollutants from all of these steps etc] than it does to chop down a new tree from a tree farm and use it?

actually, I can't remember a single game in which someone was married...

King Graham is married. So are Guybrush Threepwood and Sonny Bonds.

the deletion of a comma begins a descent into horribly awesome slash fiction...