Messages

Nope, sorry,you're on the wrong track there.

It's a DOS game.

Here's another screenshot:
[imgzoom]http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk/uploads/guessthegame2.png[/imgzoom]

Lucky guess

Is this obscure enough for you?
[imgzoom]http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk/uploads/guessthegame1.png[/imgzoom]

Hmm... I never played either of them. I'm gonna say... two?

Is that Manhunter?

I don't use a tablet, but on my Mac trackpad I can easily "right click" by using two fingers. Works like a charm. Do tablets not have similar tech?

Its a different mindset. On a track pad you're controlling a mouse pointer and instructing that to interact with things, and people understand that mice have a right button. On a tablet it's more direct - you're tapping on an object and there's nothing in the middle. Plus if you're tapping on something with two fingers, how does the tablet know which finger is on the object? Now if tablets could recognise different fingers...

On topic: The game was fun but a bit too easy - it often felt like they were telegraphing answers before I'd even begun to think about the puzzles. The art's great and the locations and characters are interesting. In fact I was disappointed when I ran out of dialog choices for most characters because I wanted to spend more time with them. Overall I preferred Vella's part, I was getting a Studio Ghibli vibe from parts of it.

So yeah, good game so far and I'm glad they made it. Though even if the game had been terrible the documentary is more than value for money.

[The Search For Oceanspirit Dennis]

Hey, I made a game last year! And it was pretty decent too*!

For your consideration...
The Search For Oceanspirit Dennis

Step aside Dennis - it's time for occasional pimp and full time adventurer Life Partner Ray to get some of that spotlight!

• A stand-alone story, suitable for Oceanspirit Dennis fans and newcomers alike!
• Classic point and click action of the adventurey kind!
• A whole bunch of custom art, animation and music!
• Meet a host of colourful Oceanspiritverse denizens (Dennisens?) old and new alike!
• Not one but two(!) minigames!
• Bonus features including** an unlockable director's commentary and optional achievement system!
• Like, it's actually fun and pretty funny too!

Cast a weather eye over this array of screenshots and remind yourself of how much fun you had! What's that? You missed out on this rare gem of a game? Well, you can soon right that wrong by clicking on the big red text below!

Play it here!

And don't forget little old Ray when it comes to nomination time!***


*You can only disagree if you've played it.
**And, indeed, limited to
***Is there an award for most exclamation points in a post?

Several years ago I wrote a series of blog entries about making Breakdown for one of the MAGS competitions. They start here if you're interested.

So far I've only made short games, and MAGS in particular forces you to work very quickly so you don't have much time to out different ideas. If I was making something longer I'd change my workflow quite a bit.

Just to report a small mistake : the page here says the game is 2.5MB but it's actually 20.5MB http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1684/

Oops, well spotted. Fixed now!

I think it depends on the purpose of that section of the game. Each of the examples you give has specific reasons for using that style:

Choice #1 (Monkey 2 tunnels) is laid out like that because you are being chased by Le Chuck. You enter each room blindly without knowing if he's in there, and if you hang around too long he might enter your current room. You never know where he is until it's too late, and it's supposed to feel scary and claustrophobic.

Choice #2 (Last Crusade castle) is similar to the above (by hiding your view and filling the castle with Nazis) but tipping the advantage towards the player by letting them see enough to avoid the Nazis if they're careful enough. However you are expected to run into several of the Nazis as you play and either puzzle or fight your way past them, so this style helps the careful player pick when those encounters happen while providing an element of danger.

Variation A (FoA Knossos) is one big puzzle made up of a string of smaller puzzles, and rewarding the player for each one by showing them progressing a bit further through the maze. For example by showing them on the other side of a room they were in before which had an impassible ravine in the middle, or by them finding an item that clearly goes with an object they passed earlier.

Variation B (FoA Atlantis) is a friendlier version of choice #2. The goal is to find the non-empty rooms while avoiding the guards. Unlike #2 you are supposed to avoid the guards (if I remember correctly beating a guard in a fight just stops them patrolling for a while, it doesn't remove them) and avoiding the guards is much, much easier than #2 both due to the maze layout and the lack of fog of war. Also the generic rooms are not just there to be red herrings or to make the place look bigger, but to give you a hiding place while you let the guards walk past.

I'd also add that the Monkey Island 1 forest and monkey head are an option #3 or Variation C. While they are mazes, you're not supposed to solve them as such. In both cases you cheat the system and are given or shown a route through them. Like variation A the location itself is a puzzle - for the forest it is used twice to get to two different locations and for the monkey head the sequence only goes on long enough for you to see the 'scenery' and to confirm that you understand what you're supposed to be doing.

So I think you need to ask what the purpose of the location is, and what the player is supposed to be doing and feeling when they're in it. As for personal taste I most enjoyed choice #1, but only for the specific reasons above. One of my pet hates in adventure games is having to wait while my character slowly walks across multiple screens just to try something that doesn't work, and that's made worse if the screens have no (gameplay) reason to be there. If I'm expected to visit locations several times I'd much rather have a floor plan I can click to warp to a room, or an overhead map that quickly takes me to a location.

Also, the MI2 remake lacks the cool opening credits of the original.

There's no equivalent in special edition mode, but I'm pretty sure if you switch to classic mode very quickly after starting the game the original credits will play.

I think the main reason the second one looked better, more care and time aside, was that the original backgrounds were scanned in paintings, so it was much easier to update and emulate the style in Photoshop. On the whole I prefer Monkey 2's special edition artwork to the original because it looks like the same picture at higher res with less colour banding. I don't know, but I'm guessing Monkey Island 1's backgrounds were originally pixeled on a computer, and trying to make them semi-photo realistic didn't fit. If they tried the same with DOTT I think it'd look a mess, though if they went for a style that matched the original and enough effort and talent was put into it, it might have looked good.

Anyway, guess the point I'm trying to make is it's doubtful the art would look better, and we already had voices, so if all we're losing is an iPad version, commentary and ease of buying the game again I don't think it's too big a loss.

What I want to know is if they HDified Maniac Mansion as well, or was that cut?

[RoN-The Outbreak review]

I rolled RoN-The Outbreak, rated 1 cup by the AGS panel.

RoN-The Outbreak review
RoN-The Outbreak is an strange game. Set in Reality on the Norm, and mainly using graphics from that series, The Outbreak is a short story about a plague killing townsfolk and your character's quest to find a cure. I have to admit I am not very familiar with the RoN series, but to my mind the story, combined with some unpleasant photos of people in horror make up, doesn't quite fit the colourful town setting. This lends the game something of a patchwork feel.

This mishmash of different styles and sources is continued in the game's graphics. The game runs in a 640x480 resolution which matches the main character, but almost all the backgrounds and others characters were designed for half that. These graphics are mostly shown upscaled, which makes them pixelated by comparison, though occasionally a background will be displayed in the correct resolution which means it only partially fills the screen and leaves the rest black.

Similar attention seems to have been paid to interaction with the world. There are next to no background objects to interact with, and the few objects you can click on usually only have one or two interactions that give a response. What the game lacks in objects however, it more than makes up for in locations. A large number of RoN locations are present, but most have no purpose and nothing to interact with. I guess the author is trying to be faithful to the established layout of the town, but it means that most of your play time will be spent walking. My biggest complaint about the game is that many times the exits to these screens are not obvious, which necessitates clicking up and down the pixels on the edge of the screen to see if your character can leave that way.

The story isn't bad, but there isn't a whole lot of it and you are mostly just told what is going on by other people, rather than discovering anything for yourself. Talking to characters also seems a bit broken â€" listing all the dialogue options at once instead of them becoming available as you progress further through the conversation. It's also worth mentioning that the game's text contains a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but it's never bad enough that you can't work out what's going on.

I wouldn't say the game feels rushed, but I suspect the author focused on the bits he was interested in and paid very little attention to almost everything else. While there were one or two glimmers of potential in the game, this is drowned out by poor or lazy execution. Unfortunately this isn't a game I can recommend to anyone, but then my feeling while playing was that this game wasn't really intended for a wider audience. Overall RoN-The Outbreak feels like an author creating a game for their friends or even just themselves, purely because they want to, and I suppose that's a large part of what Adventure Game Studio and the Reality on the Norm series is all about.

Word of warning - I started trying to make a generic battle system that would work in lots of different games, but then I got lazy and just made it work for that one battle. So there's code to get you started, but people are still going to need to do some work.

Sorry for the delay, but as promised the source code for The Search for Oceanspirit Dennis is now released! You can grab it from the following link:
Download source code

Alternatively if you're interested in using any of the artwork in your projects, but don't want the hassle of extracting it from the source code, you can grab the resource pack which contains all the art and sounds used in the game.
Download resource pack

Have fun!

If that were the case you'd either have to build your OROW to fit the MAGS theme, or bend the game to fit the theme if you overshot the deadline. I'm interested in an OROW, but I'm also pretty burned out from just having finished my last game, so we'll see.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

It was epic. I laughed. All I want is more Ben Egg, please (or whatever it was...). going to go rate it now.

Well I'm going to release the source code once people have had a chance to play the game and it's proven to be relatively bug free, so maybe the character will show up in another game. Perhaps you could make one! Thanks for rating!

It looked so cool, we featured it!
http://www.indieretronews.com/2013/05/the-search-for-oceanspirit-dennis-point.html

Thanks for the write up!

EDIT: Found that video I mentioned a few posts above!

Spoiler

[embed=425,349]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_AGsoDqxVA&feature=youtu.be[/embed]

[close]

Rock on, Lifepartner Ray. Rock on.

Yeah, that's the one. That's sped up to something like 32x, and it actually took me longer to render and upload the video than it did to do the animation.

Neat! It always makes me smile when one of Oceanspirit Dennis' tales escapes the forums and makes it out into the larger world. I can only wonder how baffling it must seem to people who know nothing of teh Dennis.

You'll have to start marketing http://www.barnrunner.com/OSD/ or the Oceanspirit Omnibus thread then! On a side note, while I've been playing Oceanspirit Dennis games recently I wondered if it would be a good idea to start an OSD wiki. That's probably a discussion for another thread, but I thought I'd put the idea out there.

That was great, Ponch! The ending was really funny

Sweet! I'll give it a go when I get home!

[The Search for Oceanspirit Dennis]

Three years ago today ddq introduced the world to Oceanspirit Dennis' life partner, Ray. Now see the story behind their first meeting in...

The Search for Oceanspirit Dennis

Story:
Ray's village is under threat and the only one who can help is the legendary Oceanspirit Dennis. Tasked with tracking him down Ray sets off for the next city, but quickly runs into problems...

Features:
* A brand new adventure game set in the Oceanspirit Dennis universe!
* Several exciting locations to explore!
* Minigames!
* Loads of original art and animation!
* New and returning characters!
* Original music!
* An unlockable director's commentary!
* An unlockable medal system - earn medals for performing specific actions!
* Exclamation mark!

About:
This is the first game I've completed that didn't have a MAGS time limit attached, so it's my biggest and most polished adventure game to date. It was originally started three years ago then put on hold for a long time, but over the last few months I've finally finished it. If you have any comments, feedback or bug reports I'd love to hear them!

Links:
AGS games database page: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1684/
Website: http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk/games/osdsearch.htm
Several of the music tracks in the game were written by Diane Webster. You can see more of her work here:  https://www.facebook.com/dianewebstercomposer

DOWNLOAD THE GAME!

Update:
The Search for Oceanspirit Dennis is now open source! If you want to poke around in the game's code you can grab the source code from the following link:
Download source code
Alternatively if you're interested in using any of the artwork in your projects, but don't want the hassle of extracting it from the source code, you can grab the resource pack which contains all the art and sounds used in the game.
Download resource pack

My game 'Alan Saves Christmas' is on the list, but the screenshot is showing up fine for me. I've not edited its entry recently. Any ideas?