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A+++ would watch again. Forget the haters.

I do like it a lot! My wife's not particularly sold on it, though, and since the game's 50% her work...

I think I might spend some time this weekend brainstorming ideas, to see what I can come up with. I've also had a lot of fun recently playing with sound effects; I never knew before how much richness they add to a game!

Actually, I can help with that! As of January 2013, Life in the Dorms had a conversion rate of around 30%, from people downloading the trial game to actually buying it. Not sure how that compares to other games on Xbox Live Indie Games, though. Taught me the importance of a strong demo (or, in the case of XBLIG, a strong first eight minutes); if I'd designed the opening to be more bombastic I think we could've gotten that number up further.

Thanks everyone; that's just what I was hoping to hear. I'm always hesitant to include voice acting because, like a few of you mentioned, if it's bad, it can really tank a game, and I don't really have it in the budget to hire professionals. (Plus the fact that--yeah, the game's length kind of got away from us, so adding voice acting would be a pretty big thing at this point.) Maybe if we do release the game commercially and it does well, we can release a talkie version later 

Quick update: I now have a fully playable, beginning-to-end build of the game! (I say "the game" because I'm still not entirely sold on our working title. I guess I'll have to finalize something at some point, though...) Post and percentages have been updated accordingly.

Random question, to give this post a little more meat: ...How important is voice acting to an indie adventure game in 2013? I feel like, to me, it's not a deal-breaker by any means, but I'm not sure what The People At Large think about it.

Thank you! I'll pay around with this and see if it can make life any easier for me.

Thanks for the quick response! Do you know if there's a function for turning on instant transitions for a particular part of the game, rather than setting it as the default?

Does anyone know if there's a way to keep a static image on-screen between rooms? (i.e., when you change rooms, everything fades out but this one image; the image stays visible during the fade out/in.)

I have a workaround in place right now--instead of changing rooms, I made one room with several different backgrounds, and I'm fading them in and out as needed to simulate changing rooms. That way, the image (an object, in this case, although it doesn't have to be) stays visible even during the fades. It works, but it's not very clean.

33%?! That's the best rate ever recorded for a proofreader! Let's go, I'm uploading the game to Desura now...

I should've said that it's the SECOND best payment I could've received. Money is the first best 

Hey, awesome! PM me with what you're thinking about and I'll see if I can help out!

Oh man, I've been dying to help out with an FMV game. ...Guess it's probably too late for this though, huh.

[ignore original response; it was meant for a different post]

Although I would like to mention that a storyline involving a place called "robot hell" sounds totally boss.

@Fitz: Thank you! Yes, the graphics are basically all Lizo's. So far my contributions in that respect have been: 1) an animation of Paul drinking soda. The rest is all hers (and that's what she's continuing to do, too, in addition to providing me with AGS support because I'm still a little fuzzy on this crazy thing called "coding.") As for the beard--yes, this game's development began in the pre-crisis, beardless Paul era! We try not to talk about those dark days.

Hey, if you can hold off release until around 2020 or so, I think we can make that work!

@CaptainD: Thank you, too! Gosh, I hope so. It's bugging me that it's been taking so long, but part of that is because I stayed so hands-off in its development before, just watching it slowly creep its way out of Lizo's life-goals. I couldn't just let that happen; the game deserves to come out some day.

@OG: That's my best estimate! I haven't tried to play it all the way through (in as much as I can, anyway) in a while, but with four reasonably long, distinct sections, I don't think I'm over-reaching too much.

[Steam page:]

Long-time AGSers might remember this post by my wife Lizo back in...holy crap, was it really 2006?? Here's where we are now.

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/
Release trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J3ov5TUfxY
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oharock
Twitter:: https://twitter.com/oharockstudios

Release date:: October 25, 2016

Conception

TestGame was (and is) a game Lizo and I have been working on since we were in undergrad (she's wrapping up her doctoral degree now); it was based on games we used to play over AOL Instant Messenger, wherein one of us would start off by saying something like "You wake up lost in a forest. To the north you see a sparkling stream surrounded by long vines; to the east is a foreboding cave. What do you do?", and the other would respond as though playing a text adventure game--although instead of playing against a bunch of static computer programming, you were playing against a real-life person who could tailor the experience to your exact reactions. The story for TestGame was born from this.

Story

It's about a college-aged boy not-so-coincidentally named Paul, opening his bedroom door one day to discover, instead of the hallway leading to his bathroom, an all-new world of magic, monsters and maidens. I like to think of the tone as a marriage between Sierra and LucasArts, as my wife was raised on the former and myself on the latter, and we take a great deal of inspiration from each. Ultimately the game is about Paul growing up and figuring out his place in the world, all the while solving fun inventory-based puzzles and making dumb jokes about everything. I think it's roughly in the range of 10 (update: more like 6-8) hours long, although it's hard to judge, seeing as I know the answers to all the puzzles.

Development

For years my wife (Lizo) was coding and writing everything herself, with me offering input when I could; but as time went on she had less and less time she could devote to the game, so I started taking over things like proofing text, and then writing text, and then designing puzzles and finally, now, actually programming the game. Our roles have essentially reversed. As part of this transition we decided to finally give the game a more proper title: The Beard in the Mirror.

Now seven years after she created her first screen, here's what we're looking like:

- Story: 100%
- Puzzles: 100%
- Backgrounds: 100%
- Character art: 100%
- Animation: 100%
- Coding: 100%
- Music/Sound: 100%

If ever there was a "blood, sweat and tears" kind of project, this has been it. But it's still moving forward, now more than ever, and I do harbor a small fantasy of going commercial with it on Desura, or another indie-friendly platform.

...Although that said we're still two very slow-paced developers, both having a full-time schedule in addition to our work in Mirror. Look for it to be released sometime (hopefully) in the next seven years.

-------------------------------------------

Update: 12/21/12

Lizo just drew the cook character in Mirror, and he's everything I aspire to be in my life:

Update: 3/19/13

Just hit a big milestone the other day--the game is now fully playable, from opening to epilogue! There's still a lot of placeholder art in there (and it's only now that I'm starting to contact musicians about working on the game's soundtrack), but still. Considering the length of our development process, I'm pretty proud we've made it this far.

5/29/13

Some quick updates to the numbers! Lizo's made a lot of progress in the game's art over the last month, spurred by our new arrangement whereby for every piece of art she completes, I will watch one (1) episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender with her. The first half of the game is now essentially complete, with the second still missing a whole bunch of art assets (and the coding to make them all work).

Meanwhile, I've been playing through the game as it is--which has been a real treat, since in eight years I've never been able to play through the entire game from beginning-to-end before. I'm testing and re-testing, tweaking dialogue, replacing emotes like "*hands over item*" with actual animations of handing items over, and--most noticeably--introducing sound effects and music, mostly from freesound.org and incompetech.com, respectively. (Until now, we only had a couple of original songs, plus some sound effects I recorded in 2006 with a cassette tape recorder. Now, it's not only looking like a videogame, but actually sounding like one, too. It's amazing how much fuller a few well-utilized sounds can make a game feel.

I'm tentatively hoping to release The Beard in the Mirror* by the end of the year, and if we can maintain this pace, there's a real chance that'll actually happen. (I have a lot more free time for game development now that I've left my post at GameCola.) Fingers crossed.

* Oh, and by the way: We did FINALLY settle on The Beard in the Mirror as the final name for the game, after brainstorming through several pages worth of alternative titles (actual examples: "A Grizzled Fate," "2 Mirrors, 1 Fate", and my personal favorite, "King's Quest," but that one was apparently already taken).

Update: 3/4/15

Hah-hah, did I really say we'd release in 2013? Good one, Paul! OP has been updated with updated completion-percentages, and below I announced that we just got Greenlit for Steam! Happy times!

Update: 10/10/16

THE GAME IS FINISHED AND WE HAVE A RELEASE DATE AND IT'S GOING ON STEAM AND I'M FREAKING OUT.

The best payment I could've ever received. THE BEST.

Yessss! I mentioned this to Fitz in an e-mail before, but to reiterate: that intro is a thing of beauty. I feel like I'm watching an IMAX movie. Amazing what you can do with such a limited palette.

[unpublished]

I think if it's a puzzle from an unpublished game, it's totally kosher, so long as the puzzle makes sense within the context of the game. As far as the wider public knows, it's a brand-new puzzle; the reason it'd be a problem is if people had already solved this puzzle in a previous game.

Second asking around in the Recruitment forum. If you show people the scene and the song, they'll know exactly what you're looking for, and they might be able to reproduce the feeling of the song without outright ripping it off.

Nice! How long before the demo hits the Internets?!