Messages

Yay, you've completed it! Congrats, Cassie! It's always great to see a game getting finished after watching its development for months or even years. Your game has come a long way, and I'm looking forward to playing the final version.

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Holy cow! I have just loaded an old saved game, and now I wonder why I didn't notice that portrait before. It's so obvious!

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I finished it a few days ago, and it's really awesome!
Despite the low price this a polished full length game with an epic story, lots of puzzles, RPG elements and some mini games. Everything about this game feels polished. The bold art style, the fine character animations that even show the main character carrying large objects around, the straightforward GUI, the excellent music and sound effects.
And the atmosphere - every island you visit has its own distinct character. While the story starts light-hearted and slow, with every new island you visit it gets more tense and serious, always with the right amount of humor that is never distracting from the darker tone in the late game.
In terms if atmosphere this is one of the best games I've played this year.
The puzzles were on the easy side, but had a lot of variation to them - I only got stuck twice because I overlooked an entrance. Most of the mini games were very nice, with very few exceptions where it wasn't clear what to.

So yeah, if you like adventure games with RPG elements, go buy and play this game! It's well worth the money and for its length and the amount of polish it might as well cost twice as much. Congratulations Shaun, John and your team! I once said that I like every single game you guys have made, and it looks like this streak is not going to end any time soon.

Bonus points for

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including Lord Buckethead

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And finally, a bug report:

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In the village of the snake people it is possible to click the hut entrance before picking up the blue flower. You can't walk past the flower, but the entrance is clickable regardless, and when you click it an important part of the game is skipped

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I can confirm this bug - I've updated to the latest version of the plugin, and people are reporting keyboard issues. I can't reproduce it myself though.

It always amazes me when people try to attribute the economic situation to the current government. The ecomony develops slowly, and political decisions mostly have long term effects on the economy. If the economic data looks good it's most likely because of decisions made during Obama's (or maybe even Bush's) presidency - long term effects. Believing that Donald Trump can have a notable impact on the US economy after less than a year, when he didn't even bring any large reforms on the way, is completely naive. And any economic data that people bring up to make his presidency appear good or bad is pretty much useless. Unless he starts a war or makes any revolutionary changes to the system, it will take many years before you can even try to measure the ecomonic effects of Trump's presidency.

It's also no good to limit your view to the economy and international relations like Gurok does - that may be convenient if you want to support Trump, but it leaves out the worst parts. The country appears to be more divided than in a long time, partly because of an election campaign full of hate and lies. The current US government seems to be unable to bring any real reforms on the way, despite having a large majority in the Congress - this results in a political stagnation that you wouldn't expect with such clear majorities, and that says a lot about Trump's negotiating abilities. (One could argue that it's better if they get nothing done though... but that's not the point) Trump also hasn't delivered on his promise to fight corruption - instead he repealed anti-corruption rules.
See, you don't even have to bring up racism or minorities or his ridiculous lies to see that Trump's presidency is failing. Are the USA better off with Trump? I doubt it. The conflicts, both domestic and international, have become much more intense, and he appears to be too incompetent to improve the situation in any way.

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Very creepy, but that was to be expected.
What really surprises me though... was it really the first cabinet meeting? How long has he been president now, 5 months?

[KodiakBehr]

Hi everybody,

I wanted to share a project with you that I have been working on over the last year with Little Red Dog Games. The game is designed by fellow AGSer KodiakBehr, and you may remember us from AGS games like "Rogue State" and "Conspirocracy". We are currently working on a new (non-AGS) game called Deep Sixed, and we have just launched a Kickstarter for it:

Deep Sixed on Kickstarter

So if you happen to like this kind of game, please consider supporting us, or help us spread the word.

Let's assume for a moment that money is an issue - Crimson Wizard says it isn't, but let's pretend for a moment that it is. People asking to sell AGS don't seem to know how this open source thing works. A commercial version of AGS would pretty much split the community. The current version of AGS is open source and free, and that can't be undone. Not sure about the licensing details, but there are many contributors, so selling anything that's based on the old code would be making money from other people's work. Okay, so it would have to be complete rewrite then. But then the old version wouldn't disappear. Maybe some commercial developers would buy this rewrite, but most hobbyists would just continue using the old version, because it still does the job well and it's free - so why would they buy a new version? Maybe some people would even keep maintaining the open source version. The end result would be two different AGS branches with two different user bases - do we really want that? And I'm pretty sure the commercial version wouldn't sell very well in this situation.

So if money is an issue (again: Crimson Wizard says it isn't), then donations, Patreon, Kickstarter etc. would be the only options that make sense to me - collecting funds for a new open source version. Not sure if this would be enough. But in my opinion selling AGS itself would do more harm to the community than it would help.

I have no idea if anyone would be interested and willing to start a new (free) AGS from scratch. But let's face it, the developer(s) are struggling, because the AGS code base seems to have reached its limits. That's not a bad thing, because for most non-commercial developers AGS still works very well, and that won't change any time soon, so there's no need to panic. Maybe starting from scratch is only way out of this situation. But in my opinion, for reasons mentioned above, a commercial version is not the way to go.

Mostly I'm just looking at the Greenlight number required to get to the top 100, the current votes for Neofeud (1/10th of the way to top 100), and the announcement by Valve that Greenlight will be replaced by Steam Direct in Spring 2017.

But the greenlight rank is no indicator if your game is getting greenlit or not. That's misleading, because Greenlight is not really a competition between games. It's about how well each game is received, and judging from my own experience with Kickstarter, the yes/no ratio of your votes is much more important than the rank. That and having some constant traffic I guess, but the rank doesn't say much.

Back in the days they had low resolution to cope with, if they had higher resolutions they would have drawn stuff in hd, not in low res and scaled the pixels in different ways. They definitely wouldn't have done it this way.

In the 90s when SVGA became a thing there were games that had low resolution graphics with (sometimes optional) higher resolution elements (Portraits, GUI etc.).

Can someone confirm for me that the characters don't slide when they move? What I mean by this is that they move by pixels matching their resolution at the frame rate of their animation, rather than moving by pixels matching the screen's native resolution at 30/60 FPS. The latter would really bother me because I know that's laziness and not a design choice.

I think they are "gliding", but it's hard to tell, because the animations are pretty fast. But I disagree that it's laziness - I usually prefer the "gliding" mode in AGS games, unless the frame rate of the animation is high enough to result in smooth movement and scrolling.

BTW digitized voices are on adv since ages and most games had 256 colors, not 16. AND pixel art today exists because back in the 80s they couldn't do in a different way

Thimbleweed Park was developed as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion, so no speech and 16 colours would be the reference here. But yes, as soon as 256 colours were available, they used it. Later, more colours were possible, and they used that too. "The Dig" had 3D rendered cut-scenes, because they could do it.
This is also the case with some commercial AGS games. Some titles from Wadjet Eye Games for example mix different pixel resolutions (higher resolution portraits and lower resolution backgrounds, fonts having a different resolution than the backgrounds, sub-pixel scaling of characters etc.) You don't have to like what Thimbleweed Park does, but it's still pixel art.
On the other hand, most of Monkey Island 2 wasn't pixel art - it was scanned paintings. So Thimbleweed Park actually has more real pixel art than Monkey Island 2.

Nope, I don't share this opinion. They celebrate pixel art by using it in a modern context, doing things they probably would have done, but couldn't do back in the 80s. They couldn't do voice acting, but you can do it now. They couldn't have digital music, but you can have it now. They couldn't display more than 16 colours, but now you can. Pixel art is one thing, retro hardware is another thing. This game is a pixel art game, but not a retro game.

Yeah, and that's just a stylistic choice. But it has nothing to do with jerky scrolling. In fact, "sub-pixel" scrolling is usually smoother. Of course, they still could have done "pixel snapping" if they wanted it. It's not like this isn't possible, many games make use of modern graphics hardware and still keep a consistent retro resolution.

When I saw the first screenshots, I didn't like the mixed pixel resolutions either. But when I saw the game in motion, it was clear why they did this. They decided against a full retro look to make certain effects possible, and result is that you will have a hard time finding two elements that share the same pixel size. If it was just the scaled characters having a different resolution compared to everything else in the game, it would have been much more distracting for me. But the game is scaling and rotating the pixel art all over the place, so it's somehow "consistently inconsistent"

Scrolling is perfectly smooth for me. And "every pixel is a polygon", seriously? This is not how it works. More like: Every background/character/object is a (textured) polygon.

The mixed resolutions are of course a matter of taste. I ususally don't like it, but for Thimbleweed Park it works quite well, because the game uses visual effects you can't achieve otherwise. The pixels are scaled and rotated, sometimes the whole screen is tilted, and in some situations screen shader effects are used.
But that doesn't mean it's not pixel art. The screens and the characters are clearly drawn as pixel art - vector art is something completely different. The engine scales and rotates the pixel art and achieves effects that the developers wanted, but an engine like AGS isn't capable of. But there are no vector graphics in this game.

And where did you get that it was made with Unity? Thimbleweed Park was not made with Unity. Ron Gilbert wrote his own engine.

Just finished it, and I liked it a lot. I didn't back the game on Kickstarter back then, because I was highly sceptical. But it turns out that this is one of the kickstarter games that delivers on their promises in all aspects.
And it's a big game. Saying it is the size of an average RON game is ridiculous - of course I haven't counted the actions required to complete it, but they are many. The game has a lot of puzzles, most of them being on the easy side. Since parts of the story are very non-linear, I sometimes didn't know what to do next, but on the other hand I rarely got stuck either.
Granted, sometimes there's no real motivation or logic why the different characters are working together (or sharing knowledge without even having met each other). This is one of the main challenges in such an ambitious concept (being able to switch between five playable characters throughout most of the game), and it seems the developers just accepted the "adventure game logic" that came with this approach.
The puzzles themselves are fine. And in terms of gameplay and pacing, Thimbleweed Park is masterfully designed. The story keeps progressing with every little puzzle you solve, and the whole game flows really well. The first half is particularly tight, there's always something happening and new stuff to be discovered. Very rewarding, and this is something only very few adventure games pull off.

Now, what I didn't like about it: It doesn't just break the fourth wall. I drives a bulldozer through the fourth wall. The endless self-references and adventure game jokes got tedious after a while. Sometimes this was indeed very funny. But in my opinion Thimbleweed Park had its best moments when it forgot about its legacy and did its own thing.

Can we all agree that a cat, a dog and a human are different races? Good! (at least I hope you agree with that )

Sorry, but... no Biologically they are different species, even in completely different families, so wouldn't call them races.

I see nothing wrong or offensive in Babar's comment, but he raises some good points. Science has abandoned the term 'race' for humans decades ago, and not just for ideological reasons.

Saying you dislike Muslims is not, because specific instantiations of religion and culture is not genetic. Those systems are abstract counterfactuals and I think can therefore be legitimately scrutinised and discriminated against.

Some cultures and ways of thinking are simply better and more wholesome than others, and I will stubbornly never change my mind on that.

But even this could never be the base of disliking or even banning Muslims, because that would imply that they all think the same way, which is just nonsense. Add to that that many people are born into their religion, and you don't just change this like underwear. So judging individuals based on their race and judging them by their religion is not that much different, unless you clearly go into the different sub-groups. Otherwise you'd be drawing a direct link between the formal membership of a religion to one's character, and you'd put a single label on millions of different people, which may not technically be racist, but of the same quality.

At the moment pretty much all of the social issues ascribed to him are conjecture, things he might do rather than things he promised to do.

You can't say that all this is conjecture and at the same time write that Clinton's election would have led to a war with Russia. This is highly speculative.

But granted, looking at statements from before his campaign, Trump appears much more moderate than during his campaign (sometimes he says the exact opposite). One could argue that this means he will change again, now that the campaign is over. And clearly, many of his supporters are much more racist or homophobic than he is. But so are people in his staff, and that makes me less optimistic. Mike Pence is a homophobe, there's no talking around that. Khris just gave two more examples. And then there's Trump's new chief strategist, probably the worst of all.