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Babar, the suggestions you offered about the door are quite different from being able to use some sharp edged inventory items for the same puzzle.

So I'm curious, where does the love for nonlinearity come from? Or is it a love for the potential or the idea of nonlinearity?

"In fact, I like nonlinearity in the sense of "Hey, why don't I forget the door, and go find the lost Helmet of Evel Knieval instead?" as well."

This line confuses me too, can you be more specific? Also offer an example of where you can do this in previous games?

The reason for all these questions is because I am not sold on the idea of nonlinearity in traditional point and click adventure games and want to be persuaded!

Nonlinearity while solving puzzles is great. You can open the door by using the axe on it. Or the old newspaper under the door trick. Or knocking. Or calling in the GPS coordinates of the door and having a missile blow it open.

Can you name a game that allows for this? I can't think of one personally and I'm interested.

One technique is to think of something obvious your protagonist needs to do for the story to progress (dig a hole, unlock a door, eat a pear) then take away their means to do it (make the shovel factory be on strike, put the key on the other side, make the character have no mouth).

From Cyberdreams unsuccessful sequel "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Eat Pear".

I also forgot to mention, in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream there is a puzzle on eating a pear!

I have to disagree with Ryan Timothy's technique, I know his suggestions were random top of the head puzzle ideas but they all seem designed to annoy the player. Everything is broken or lost or out of reach.

Say there is a time machine in the basement, there is no "before I can use it", I want to use it now! It's a time machine in my basement! Let me use it! I'm running around putting a screw in a hole when there is a TIME MACHINE in my basement! I should be whipping through time and space solving puzzles in the old west and the future, not messing around with mice!

Anyway, the reason I feel the need to post that is because there is a time and place for puzzles and sometimes fewer puzzles is a good idea. If you've set up an obvious path for the player to take, let them take it with few roadblocks, if you keep breaking things or locking doors in front of them I fear they're going to get frustrated and not care that they finally fixed the time machine because they are worn out on tiny puzzles.

I consider this like RPG battles. Every few steps you are confronted with a puzzle. Just getting out of your house takes 30 minutes because of all the locked doors and fetch quests you have to do!

Let them walk the obvious path and struggle at the non-obvious path. Or make all paths easy enough because being stuck in an adventure game is not the same as being stuck in any other game. Being stuck in an adventure game means NO PROGRESS. NONE. The player will not advance a single bit until they've solved the puzzle before them. They will try everything on everything and then talk to everyone again and then give up and look for a hint. Say they are stuck for 2 days on the puzzle and then finally solve it on their own, they did not learn a skill by solving this. They did not learn something that can then be applied to the game in the future. They got past 1 puzzle out of X puzzles in the game. Being stuck in Mario means you can't do a series of jumps but through trial and error you should eventually build the skills needed to do those jumps. Or you go back a level and get a power up. When you're stuck in an adventure game you do not slowly build any skills of deduction as you sit there staring at a screen. Anyway this is a different rant for a different time.

The way I personally like to work is that if an obstacle doesn't present itself relatively quickly, no obstacle is created. I've set the player up in a situation and if it only takes 2 puzzles to get out of that situation then that is how many it takes. Hopefully the 2 obstacles are fun to overcome and that is what is important. The player just had fun overcoming 2 obstacles and they weren't worn down by me breaking those 2 obstacles into tiny fragments.

Jess and I just saw it tonight. It's interesting to read other people's feelings of the movie but I'm starting to feel like the only person who was completely bored of the movie.

I don't write this to try and shit on anyone's parade because I hate when people enter a conversation "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU LIKED THAT!! IT WAS HORRIBLE!" and I don't mean to sound like that. People are writing their feelings on the movie and these are mine.

It wasn't a bad movie. VanHelsing was a bad movie, the final 2 Matrix movies were bad in my opinion. This was just middle of the road. It was Ferngully only they were big instead of small! I kid I kid   If this movie changes Hollywood I guess people will just stop writing harder. I kid I kid... If this movie changes Hollywood I hope I get to watch a 3d pretend nature documentary set on a distant planet with a robot Attenborough telling about it. That I am serious about!

I see you... Put on some pants!

Just passing this on:

http://www.positech.co.uk/content/explosion/explosiongenerator.html

Explosion Generator, I've used it a few times and it makes some neat results for a quick explosion.

I recommend bringing the exported bitmap into photoshop, copying it into it's own alpha channel and playing with the levels to alias the edges. If you want I can make a small tutorial showing how to do this.

This is what I ended up with



One could even make a photoshop action to take lots of these bitmaps and do this all automatically so you'd have a series of explosions to choose from so it wasn't always the same explosion over and over again.

The general consensus seems to be that it was a Russian rocket that messed up and spiraled out of control but man, I'd love to see something like that in the sky [as long as it didn't hurt anyone! or I guess waste god knows how much money] just for the sheer awe of it.

I have no idea who Chris Knox and why we are tributing him but I quite love Neutral Milk Hotel!

Thanks for posting.

Mittens 2010: Space

Who's with me? We can all get in a hot tub and just... let the mood take us

edit: nevermind*

Anyway, something I love about the real world is that something will happen that is unlike the majority of popular science fiction. A space elevator? No one adds that to their science fiction movie because either it sounds unreal or isn't sexy like getting in a space craft and counting down. Man, it's fucking sexy as hell. Anything that gets me to space is so amazingly fuckable.

From an asteroid defense plan to fascism? And you think other people are scared over nothing?

I just saw Phil Plait [the bad astronomer] give a talk and he said the prevailing plan is to build a rocket that has a lot of mass and position it next to any incoming projectile, leave it there for a little while and they will attract each other, put some rocket boosters on it so it stays a fixed distance away and the asteroid will move out of a collision path and we're safe from that strike.

He didn't mention any thing about fascism being needed to enact this plan but maybe I just don't know the tech tree well enough.

I... I think you were pregnant

I personally wouldn't jump to conclusions about getting high off of second hand smoke from potential research into getting high from main stream smoke.

... Are you honestly denying the existence of second-hand smoking?

N... no?

I didn't write anything suggesting that.

Scarab, follow that through now, what is the reaction time reduction from being in a room while someone is smoking a joint? Any research on that? I personally wouldn't jump to conclusions about getting high off of second hand smoke from potential research into getting high from main stream smoke.

Snarky, if you're bored can you listen to things? There are plenty of entertaining podcasts to listen to. Radio Lab, Wiretap, This American Life. At least that's what I would do in your situation.

I drew out levels from Gobliiins by memory while at school and people would play them and I'd redraw that part of the image

I only did it twice because the first reason I did it was that I was stuck on a level and had to draw the level to ask someone at school for help, they helped me [give ball and cup game to skeleton!] so I drew another and then I was tired of drawing.

The End. Good story!

What's weird is that a friend asked me if I wanted an invite and then the next day I was in. Maybe he's magical?

So I'm in Google Wave now... And I can't for the life of me think of what to use it for... Me and some friends from work talked on it for a few minutes, went back to work and forgot about it

anyone actually using it?

That was adorable as all get out!

I loved it!

Also, I moved this thread!

That's cool, I didn't I guess!