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I wasn't expecting this thread to become so blatantly erotic! 

Well, I've hit the inevitable part where I begin to question if my game will be worth finishing or not.

Exercising every day is how I have the phenomenally ripped and toned body common too all AGSers. 

I appreciate you have me playing proper sports and none of that unAmerican nonsense like soccer and (shock, gasp) cricket. 

But shouldn't Baron be playing Canadian Fight Club, aka hockey?

Attempted a walk cycle, which accounts for Dr. Moo's loss of body mass. Also reduced the size of his feet, er, hooves.

Spoiler

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I often wonder if I'll ever make a really good walk cycle.

That's exactly how I walk!    And for the record, Tom Baker is my favorite doctor. If I had a TARDIS, it would probably be a porta-potty, so good call on that.

I remember your old cow gifs. I think I still have several of them on an old hard drive. There was a hula cow and a cow dribbling a basketball, as I recall. Now the cow has graduated to being a time traveling pooper. Well done! 

I'm in the same boat as VW. Two rooms done, 1 NPC done. No working dialogs yet. Most everything else is placeholder The player character is still using Roger's walkcycle. Maybe 15% finished? It's not looking good... 

Very nice little stories this month and I enjoyed them all. The theme inspired me enough to contribute something to the FWC and I haven't done that in years. 

Anyhoo, my votes:

Spoiler

SNICK-SNICK 4
Her Father's Wish 3
Loopy & Doofy and the Case of the Stolen Cookies 3

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Already looking forward to reading the next batch of stories!

[The Color of Home]

The Color of Home

Spoiler

"Earth is boring," Jimmy insisted with all the certainty a fourth grader could muster.

"No, it's not," piped up a pair of voces, speaking in unison, from the front of the classroom. This pair of girls were inseparable to the point where they sometimes spoke in stereo.

"Yeah, it is," Jimmy insisted. "It's just blue and green. That's boring."

"The blue is from the oceans," said Mrs. Kittner, as she moved about the room, watching the children working. "And the green is from the land which is covered with life."

"One day we'll have oceans like that here," someone said, though in a tone that didn't sound entirely confident.

"We won't see them," Jimmy said, his blue Crayon sweeping back in forth in wild arcs, spilling ocean out into space.

"You might," said Mrs. Kittner, though she knew better. Oceans here were at best a wish for a future still centuries away at the earliest.

"My dad is from Earth." One of the two voices from the front of the room spoke again, high, clear, and confident.

"Everybody's dad is from Earth."

"My dad is from here," another kid offered rather smugly.

"Just because your granddad was one of the first guys to get here."

"A mechanic," the boy, Robbie, said. If he was not the smuggest boy on mars, he was unquestionably the smuggest boy in this school. "Granddad set all this stuff up so the rest of us could live here."

"Whether our families came in the first wave or the second, the important thing is that we're all here together," Mrs. Kittner said warmly, still making her rounds, threading carefully between the rows of small desks that had started out in neat columns but were becoming more and more disarrayed as the school day wore on. "And Jimmy, I'm seeing a lot of white space still on your drawing."

"That's the ice on the poles," he explained. "It's growing. All that ice's gonna eat the whole planet up one day. That's what my granddad says. And he lives there!"

"I hope not," a girl said from her spot under the air recycler vent, unconcealed worry in her voice. Sherry worried about everything, all the time, or so it seemed.

"The whole world's not gonna freeze," another boy said dismissively.

"Maybe they can bring the extra ice here," Arnie, the teacher's pet, offered hopefully. "We could use it. Can they do that, Mrs. Kittner?"

Mrs. Kittner had no idea, but children expected a measure of certainty from adults, so she replied appropriately. "There are two cyclers running now, and a third one will start making the trip back and forth in another year or two. They bring all kinds of stuff from Earth, so maybe they'll start bringing ice too."

"Told ya," the boy said to no one in particular, relishing the joy of being right or at least right enough.

"My mom's not from Earth," one of the girls at the front said, steering the classroom chatter back to something she wanted to talk about.

"Where is she from, Syrette?" Mrs. Kittner inquired pleasantly, already knowing the answer.

"Beacon."

"That's on Venus," Arnie said.

"Yep. It's way up in the clouds. And Seya's got a pen pal on Venus too," Syrette said, bringing her best friend along for the conversation.

"She's my mom's sister's daughter," Seya said.

"Your mom's sister is your aunt," Mrs. Kittner said. "So her daughter is your cousin."

"Yeah," Seya said, looking up from her drawing. "We're about the same age, Ellarae and me. We write each other all the time and the messages go back and forth from our cyclers to the Earth and then to the one that runs to Venus and then alllllllllllll the way back."

"I'm drawing Venus," Syrette said, holding up her picture, a world of tight, intricate yellow and white swirls. "For my mom."

"It's nice," said another girl. She was drawing Mars, like most of the children in the class. It was her home, after all. When Mrs. Kittner told them they would be drawing their favorite planet, Mars was the natural choice for many of them.

"And what are you drawing, Haseya?" the teacher asked as she glided past the young, dark-haired girl.

"Mars," Seya said. She indicated with one of the three crayons she was holding, each a different shade of red. "See? Here's Mariner Valley. And right here's the school. And that's my dad's plane. He's flying out to take cargo to the people out by the big mountain."

"Olympus Mons," the teacher said. "It looks very nice, Seya."

"I'm giving it to my dad when I get home," she said, her attention on the drawing again, trying to make it perfect for her father. He worked hard and he was raising her all by himself. He deserved a nice picture and she was trying her very best.

"I'm drawing Mars too," said Kyle, the boy closest to the door. "See?"

Mrs. Kittner looked at it from a distance of two rows away. "What are those yellow stars in the middle of the planet?"

"That's the SPP," Kyle explained. "And they're getting blowed up!"

Another boy made whooshing, rumbling explosion noises. Most of the boys laughed. Syrette and Seya and most of the other girls did not.

"We're not at war with anyone here, Kyle," Mrs. Kittner explained, not sharing young boy's eternal enthusiasm about war. "And there's never been a war on Mars. And there isn't going to be one either. The SAU and the SPP are friends... sort of."

"Which one are we?" Seya whispered to Syrette.

"SAU," Syrette replied, almost done with her masterpiece. "Oh, hey, can I still come over this weekend?"

Syrette loved spending the night at Seya's house. Seya didn't fully understand why Syrette liked sleeping over, but she loved having her best friend there. She and her dad lived at the far end of the habitats, near the hangars where his plane was kept. There weren't a lot of kids where she lived, at what her dad called 'the ass end of the habs' so Seya wanted Syrette to visit all the time and her dad didn't' seem to mind much, so Syrette visited often.

"Sure. Dad said it was okay. He's gonna let us order a pizza, I think. With real meat!"

"Nice!" Syrette was practically beaming. Life could not possibly get any better for an eight-and-a-half-year-old. She had a sleepover scheduled and she had just completed her greatest work of art ever. Her mother was sure to love it. She would have only words of praise for her daughter this time.

"What do you think, Sey?" she asked, holding it up between their faces, displaying it in the air on the wall of an invisible art gallery.

"Beautiful," Seya said and meant it. Syrette had a natural talent for art and Seya tried her hardest not to be jealous.

Syrette grinned, pushing a lock of curly auburn hair away from her eyes. "How do you say that in Navajo?"

"Nizhóní," Seya replied. She didn't make a habit of speaking her home language outside the apartment where she lived with her dad, and so it always felt a little weird to make those words around people who weren't family. But Syrette was mostly family, so it was only a little weird.

"Say something else," Arnie said, leaning in, including himself in the girl's conversation.

Seya rolled her eyes, not minding the spotlight but not really liking Arnie much either. She held up her drawing of Mars and tapped it with her finger.

"Chii," she said.

"Wuzzat mean?" he asked.

"Red."

Like me, she wanted to say. Like our home. Like Mars.

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Interesting theme... I may be able to put something together, but it won't be a very large game.

it's certainly not because I like having to choose between shutting down prints in the evening or go to sleep with grinding machine noises next to my head! 

I love the sound of machinery. I think that would be a good sleep aid.

It was all a clever scam? And I fell for it? 

Is this the catfishing I've read about in my morning newspaper? Do I need to cut up my credit cards? Can I wait until the nice Nigerian prince finishes processing the payment I made to help him out?

This is why old people like me shouldn't be allowed on the internet! 

A few months ago my sister found an old stack of pulp sci-fi books. I'm currently reading Galaxy vol. 26, no. 6 from 1968. Specifically, I'm halfway through Brian Aldiss' "Dreamer, Schemer." It's fascinating to me to read these visions of the future from the years just before I was born. Plus, short stories are a quick, fun read before bedtime. I never run into the "can't put it down so I don't get any sleep" with short stories.

Voted! 

[The Art of Noise]

The Art of Noise and Max Headroom; two names that will mean absolutely NOTHING to you if you weren't alive during the 1980s.

The tidal wave of nostalgia almost drowned me. 

I agree that it would be difficult (and probably a little boring after a while) to make a large game around found photographs, but I think it could be used to good (possibly comedic or intentionally jarring) effect for a small game like a MAGS or OROW kind of thing. Beyond that, painting over it or slapping a filter over it would probably be called for.

Interesting idea to play around with, I think.

I kind of like your screenshot, jwalt. It works for me in a "mixed media" kind of way. If I saw that as a screenshot for a MAGS game or something, I'd give it a play.

I've been on a big binge of The Police lately.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the music I didn't appreciate when I was young.

It's this economy. Votes just don't go as far as they used to. 

Voted! 

Spoiler

1 for Panzer Strider
2 for Stories of a Connected Continent

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Congrats, OneDollar. Very fun game. You got my vote. (And thanks to whoever voted for my silly entry.   )

what struck me about Quake was the much improved physics of the game compared to Doom. I remember distinctly the feeling of throwing a grenade and having it bounce predictably of the walls before exploding. Seems like a small thing today, but at the time it was definitely a fresh dynamic!

The physics were mind-blowing for the time. I remember the low gravity level making me feel a giddy sense of joy the first time I played it. What a wonderful, unexpected sense of joy that was in the middle of all that grim, gothic design. Id was really something once upon a time.