Messages

I want to point out Anita did not disable comments to stifle debate, she disabled them because the comments become a breeding ground for death and rape threats against her. She has had a video game beat em up made of her just for daring to open the kickstarter for these videos.

She's not making these videos to say "I am the authority on this issue, that's it, no one talk about it anymore. *mic drop*" But in all seriousness when are youtube comments a place for serious debate? They aren't the best forum for a real discussion. If we want to debate the videos we can, just like we are right now in this forum. Reddit will have been debating the videos I'm sure.

I agree her delivery can be a little monotonous and patronizing, but she's clearly explaining concepts to people that may have never heard anything like this in their lives. Her videos are also designed to be used in a classroom setting or as a teaching aid for parents and kids. They aren't flashy, but they are rich in content and easy to pause and explain and so it makes more sense when you view them as a teaching aid.

I think it's important to remember that she's saying from the start she enjoys video games and that it's ok to critique something you love and say "This aspect is kind of lame, but I can't change that so I'm going to enjoy it as I have in the past, while still being aware that maybe this isnt the ideal."

I appreciate what you are saying about tropes, Calin. I hadn't thought about it that way before. I think the problem is that the damsel in distress trope is quite overused and does perpetuate the stereotype that women are less capable and valuable (as often the damsels have no identity aside from the damsel). But I understand why tropes are useful now.

There are great female characters out there that aren't tropes though so I just hope we see more April Ryans, Chells and Femsheps. And a lot of guys played femshep because of the fantastic voice actress too so it's not like guys won't play as a serious female character.

Speaking as a female gamer, and one who likes to play serious titles, the whole making games specifically for women thing isn't what is needed really as Calin suggests.

Ryan said he enjoyed the bonus of the female protagonist in Hunted, however as a woman who enjoys a huge variety of video games I would have been really disappointed to see yet another sexualised female protagonist. I want the immersion experience in video games too, and I'm telling you if I was going into battle I'm not going in wearing a chain mail bikini, bending over, groaning and giggling every time I perform an action. I'm going in practical armour, and I'm going in with my brain functioning.

Femshep from Mass Effect was a brilliant character. She could have scars, she wore practical armour, she had a realistic body, she was just an exceptional character, and I think it's largely because they didn't bring arbitrary gender stereotypes into it. I mean sure they had female characters who were a bit OTT when it came to sex,(I dont have a problem with sexy men or ladies in games as long as there is some equality) but femshep was a character that allowed me to have a total immersion  experience in a game.

I'm not some special snowflake standing alone here either. My friends game, and we want to get excited about the new games coming out too that all you guys are excited about. We aren't any different. We play the same blockbuster games as you, but we walk away with a lesser experience because we have to watch our gender fail at the most basic of tasks, or become sexual fantasies. I mean why couldn't one of the GTA V characters be a woman? Why do we only see npc tropes? I'm not saying men wouldn't benefit from a few less gender stereotypes either, but this is mainly focussing on women. I mean when you think about Guybrush, he anything but a male power fantasy and he's one of the most beloved characters.

This picture has been floating around on Tumblr recently and it does show the lack of diversity in female characters excluding hair and skin tone (although the race issue is something else rather prevalent too.)



I guess I have a lot of strong feelings on this subject because I strongly identify as a gamer and know many other women who do too, and so getting the argument of "Women aren't playing games, if they did maybe it would change" really irritates me. We do game, we have gamed, nothing changes. If we don't complain will things change? Probably not. And maybe more women would play if we were represented as actual people. It's a chicken and egg scenario because more women would game if games represented women properly, but they are saying they wont make them unless women play games? And these same people say they cant make games like that because men wont want to play a female character who isnt a naked contortionist but fail to understand why women don't want to play a roided up guy who saves a half naked blow up doll? It's a frustrating situation and I think its just pandering, easy money, and lazy writing that win 9/10.

Hopefully people can understand where I'm coming from and I'm sorry if this seems a bit ranty! Don't even get me started on impractical armour because I could go on for days lol.
 

I seems you are looking for a formula by which to make your game a commercial success, which I think it a bit of a fruitless endeavour. I don't think a formula exists for successful indie games outside of the developer bringing the player their own unique experience through story, game play or art. Comedy games are still popular too, Telltale had commercial successes with Tales of MI and the Sam and Max releases. Hector was another comedy game they produced. The Book of Unwritten Tales, Critters Chronicles and The Chaos on Deponia games are all recent comedy releases. The Walking Dead is of course amazing, but drama/horror is certainly not the only successful genre now.

The thing that will make your game a success is a passion for the story combined with good writing. As the lead writer of the game, if you are writing what you think a particular demographic will want, or writing in a genre you aren't familiar with or a fan of then it's probably not going to be a good game. If you have no sincere interest in the story it will show. If you write a story you want to tell, that you care about, then it will really come across and people will probably enjoy it. I like to lose myself in the worlds other people create, whether it is books, TV shows or video games. Write something you personally love. If you are a good writer I'm sure it will be a success.

I re-homed a five year old cat when the owner developed a chronic illness and began having allergic reactions to her fur. It's honestly the best decision I ever made. She's a bit old and fat now, but she's the loveliest girl. I hope they find a good home.

Wow! I think I can safely say Sox and I are blown away and chuffed to bits to have won. Thank you kind voters!

The other games were so good, I enjoyed playing them all and I really do think it was a crazy strong month and can see how we were close in votes! We feel very lucky getting 1st place by the skin of our teeth!

I am really looking forward to doing another MAGS in the future, but we really have to work on the game we started before this MAGS now lol! 

I have been spending waaaaaay too much on games recently. I just bought a 3DS XL which was very, very bad, but I really love it!

3DS XL shout-out! Bonus Virtue's Last Reward shout-out! Whoo!

Game prices...boo.

I bought a Vita about a fortnight ago, for some reason. Well, the actual reason was that GameStop had a good package deal on (Vita/Soul Sacrifice/8gb card/90 days PSN+ = â,¬229), and were also doing 2 for â,¬30/â,¬50 deals on Vita games.

Turns out the Vita is a damn fine machine, though it's unfortunate that the buttons and sticks seem to have been designed for use by some human/chimp hybrid with toothpick fingers.

That is actually one of the games I bought the 3DS for! I really liked the first game so definitely want to try the sequel. The game prices do suck though!

The vita looks really good, but compared to the 3DS its not got as many titles I would enjoy so it always had the edge. But it looks like a great piece of hardware. I had a psp and to be honest I didn't use it as much as I could've.

I have been spending waaaaaay too much on games recently. I just bought a 3DS XL which was very, very bad, but I really love it! I keep hoping "Night of the Rabbit" will go on sale more that 33%, but I realise it's unlikely to drop any more as a new release.

I found the steam group and joined! Yaaaaay for friends.

I agree with the others saying it would be a shame for a project to be heavily invested in only to never see the light of day, although I would love to another Discworld game. In fact this year his daughter Rihanna said they were considering another game.

There was actually a legal battle over the last Discworld game between Psygnosis/Sony and Perfect Entertainment and the cost of fighting them was what likely led to their demise as a dev company. Sony felt they owned the rights to Discworld I'm guessing, but I can't find much info on what actually happened. But if Sony think they still own the rights, or the Pratchett's offer the rights to another dev team there could be issues down the line.

Or maybe you should pitch your idea to Sir Pratchett and see what they say!

And a ghost chick that talks about sexual positions and locations!

Spoiler

[close]

This is now becoming the most exciting Blackwell yet!

That is exactly where my mind went when I saw that screen shot. I'm glad I'm not alone in assuming she was just kind of a kinky ghost.

But for reals I am so excited about this game regardless of sexy ghost sex!

Dropped Monocle Games (Myself and Soxbrooker) are looking for a musician to work with us on our latest project, "Goat Herd and the God's". Our first game, Witchy Woo was one of the entries in the June 2013 MAGS contest.

"Goat Herd and the Gods" is a short freeware game, set in an Aztec jungle period/locale. We are looking for a talented individual to create one or two tracks for us to really bring the game to life!  If you are interested in helping us out and would like a more in depth brief please reply to this thread or PM me and I will send you a detailed synopsis.

This is not a paid position, however we are looking to work on longer (hopefully commercial) games in the future and if we develop a good working relationship with someone we could definitely look to work with them in the future and pay them for their services.

Thank you so much for all the kind words. I think I can safely speak for both Sox and myself when I say we have certainly not finished with Woo. We both love her dearly! I'm certain she will appear again, possibly in a full length game of her own, but we will see 

I'm definitely far from an expert, and I didn't work alone, but myself and Soxbrooker have just finished our first MAGS entry so I thought I would share our process as a team in the hopes that it helps somewhat.

The stages we went through were similar to Ghost's, but there being two of us we can bounce ideas off each other and I think that cuts down some of our time debating projects. It took me a day to write several different concepts and then share them with Sox and develop them briefly together before picking the one we liked the most. Then I go away and develop the full script asap. I think Woo took me a day or two to get sorted.

Once we had our game outlined Sox started doing the basic place holder art so we could code the majority of the game. It was our first real experience with AGS so coding took a lot of time and we had to work out so much stuff because we chose to do a "simple" left to interact, right to look mouse click system. We regret nothing but we were definitely tearing our hair out over it. Once we had our mouse system and puzzles down though really it was just all polishing.

For us working as a team probably affords us a bit more polishing time because while Sox is creating assets, I'm coding or writing dialogue, and then when I am making a stupid mistake because I've been staring at code for too long, Sox comes in and spots the mistake instantly his fresh eyes. I think working as a team helps us a lot.

Aside from that, a good play tester is definitely essential too. We would have had a far worse game had it not been for our play tester Arj0n so we are eternally grateful to him for his advice.

Ok really this should just be TL;DR - What Ghost said! 

Thanks for the kind words and the downloads, guys!

If you have any feedback it is always appreciated. It's our first game and while of course we only had a month, its still good to have constructive feedback where necessary so we can keep making better games in the future 

Sox and I have posted Witchy Woo to the completed game forum as we have officially finished Witchy Woo! Check out the thread here.

DOWNLOAD!

Witchy Woo is an adventure game created for the June 2013 MAGS competition, with the theme of something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Woo is a witch in training and to be perfectly frank she's not very good! Because of her magical failings her teachers have banned her from having a familiar of her own. Tired of being the laughing stock of the witching community, and the only witch without a faithful companion, Woo decides to take matters into her own hands. Help Woo find a friend in this short debut adventure game from Dropped Monocle Games.

You can download it here.

We hope you have as much fun playing it as we have had making it!

Myinah and Soxbrooker

Ok firstly, sorry if I seem to have missed your code Khris! My coding partner and I actually intended to respond to Crimson and san.daniele before you posted. We have just been really busy trying to work on our game so its ready for the MAGS deadline we kept forgetting to respond. I didn't want to seem ungrateful and rude so I quickly posted the thank you for what had specifically helped us. The stuff they said helped us make the puzzle work in our own higgledy piggledy way.

That said, looking over your code it does seem much better (cutting out lots of our excess stuff) and my coding partner will take a closer look later to see how we can implement it. I am not as great at understanding code right off the bat as I am completely new to all this. Really we've taken on a huge task to make our first ever game in a month! I'm doing my best, but clearly I need to be more thoughtful in my responses. Sorry if I offended you!

sans.daniele, the question was kind of vague, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. Sorry! My coding partner will make a post later on and probably do a far better job! 

Thank you all so much for your input. I really appreciate the responses. It was fixable by simply adding the && to combine the two conditions. I had tried to do it with the additional ifs and such, but none of it worked. The rest of the code was actually okay. So thank you Crimson for helping out with that. I won't forget that in the future! (Touch wood...)

Also san.daniele you were right about the counter too. We took out that bit of code. Thanks for that!

There was one thing my coding partner soxbrooker wanted to ask, and that was is there a reason "else" doesn't work in the code. We were following one of the video tutorials regarding these variables and the command else worked for them, but it wouldn't accept it for us. We have just used "if" for every alternative. Is else a redundant term now?

edit: spelling

True! I couldn't back the Amikrog guy after learning all that stuff about him. I'm one of those people that struggles to separate the art from the artist. If Bill's franchise interested me more I would totally still back him.

Hi Guys

I have a problem when using active inventory items with a global variable counter. I apologise if there is a really simple answer for this, but searching the manual didn't help and I couldn't find an answer in the forums. I have tried various code combinations but nothing works. If there is a thread or page in the manual answering this please feel free to point me in the right direction. I have created a successful global variable before, but there was no inventory involved.

Basically we have a puzzle that requires us to use four ingredients to create a spell. The cauldron is an object in the room and we need to add 4 inventory items (in no specific order) to the cauldron. I thought using a counter would be the best way to do this, but it doesn't like the additional "ifs", "()", and "{}" for the code. I have tried removing one or all of them in various combinations but nothing works. Am I barking up the totally wrong tree here?

Code: AGS

function oCauldron1_UseInv()
{
  CauldronCounter = 0;


if (CauldronCounter < 4) {
      (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient1) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("In it goes! Black as night!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient1); }
      CauldronCounter++; 
}
   else {   
     cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("In it goes! Black as night!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIndredient1);
      cWoo.Say("That's it! That's all the ingredients!");
      cWoo.Say("Now to begin the spell!");}
   }

      
if (CauldronCounter < 4) { 
     (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient2) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("Fresh, new, into the stew!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient2); }
      CauldronCounter++1;
}

else {
  (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient2) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("Fresh, new, into the stew!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient2); 
      cWoo.Say("That's it! That's all the ingredients!");
      cWoo.Say("Now to begin the spell!");}
  }
  
 
if (CauldronCounter < 4) {
     (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient3) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("This perfectly aged item is going to make our spell awesome!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient3); }
      CauldronCounter++1;
}

else {
     (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient3) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("This perfectly aged item will make our spell awesome!");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient3);
      cWoo.Say("That's it! That's all the ingredients!");
      cWoo.Say("Now to begin the spell!");}
}

     
if (CauldronCounter < 4) {
     (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient4) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("Can't get enough of this stuff!");
      cWoo.Say("...");
      cWoo.Say("Oops.");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient4);
      cWoo.AddInventory(iBrokenThing); }
      CauldronCounter++1;
}
  
else {
     (cWoo.ActiveInventory == iIngredient4) {
      cWoo.Walk(787, 623, eBlock, eWalkableAreas);
      cWoo.Say("Can't get enough of this stuff!");
      cWoo.Say("...");
      cWoo.Say("Oops.");
      cWoo.LoseInventory(iIngredient4);
      cWoo.AddInventory(iBrokenThing); 
      cWoo.Say("That's it! That's all the ingredients!");
      cWoo.Say("Now to begin the spell!");}

I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong. I feel like I must have missed something really basic because multiple items in a recipe isn't exactly testing the boundaries of adventure puzzling!

If anyone can offer some advice I would be very grateful.

Thanks again.

I'm a huge fan of Bill Tiller as an artist. The art of CMI was iconic in my mind and I think really set a standard for beautiful video game art. That said his story telling on Vampyre is a bit bland in my opinion. Nothing heinous, but nothing special.

Also I read his blog that he infrequently updates and he kind of comes off a bit full of himself. A lot of his posts seem like his complaining people are influenced by his art style and hes not getting credit etc. He even suggests a POTC character was exactly the same as his Pirates of Voojou character. I find it a bit irritating because it seems a little tenuous and his style is so heavily influenced by Disney that really he's clearly influenced by a lot of people and yet not giving them credit in every picture he draws. I'm  sure if someone interviewed the artist they would say "Oh I loved the art of CMI and I think Bill Tiller is probably a big influence."

And  the stuff he's complaining about regarding Monkey Island IP is stuff they laid out in the first two games (a tree house in a swamp) before he was even drawing the backgrounds. I dunno, I just don't like it when people quite successful in their career with enough respect, ability, and position feel the need to point out every little thing they possibly influenced that smaller devs are trying to do. Although as far as I'm concerned he can whine about Disney till the cows come home, but again he's said before that they were a huge influence on him so it's a bit chicken and egg as far as I'm concerned.