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That's hardly an exploit. No, it won't crash or spoil anything. And no, you can't pull the same trick twice, you'll have to pass potions in some other way.

Devout Tragedian Muse
Attained Overused Mug
Guaranteed Video Smut
Revise Automated Dung
Unsaturated Video Gem
Devout Guardian Meets
Marinated Vogue Duets

...anagram generator for the win!

Does anyone remember Dogbert's Brown Ring of Quality? It's a Dilbert strip with roughly the same effect. Dogbert is hired to create a new corporate logo, so he sells them a coffee stain for a ludicrous amount of money.

And, because Wikipedia has a list of snowclones, and because I'm the obnoxious kind of person that keeps typing slogans until everybody gets tired of them,

I'm in ur adventure, gaming ur studio
If we don't make adventure games then the terrorists have won.
Hi, I'm AGS. You may remember me from such games as Larry Vales, The Apprentice, and Cirque de Zale.
Best. Studio. Ever.
FPS, 10 dollars. RTS, 20 dollars. AGS, priceless.
Dude, where's my game?
1.AGS. 2.   3.Profit!
This is not your father's adventure game.

Et cetera.

I think you need like five or ten slogans (or, judging by this thread, fifty), and the studio picks one at random whenever you boot.

"10,000 gamers can't be wrong."
"Awesome Generated Stories"
"By the Alicante Goat Society"
"640k should be enough for everybody"
"High resolution is for wusses"
"What's a henway?"
"Coming soon to a computer near you"

"Endorsed by Cuppit" (sorry, couldn't resist )

Yeah, I'm on the Dutch equivalent (Hyves) but not really active, I kind of fail to see the point.

This religion is ridiculous. Sounds like the guy had been drunk while watching many sci-fi movies in one night.

Oh and yeah, before starting his church, L. Ron Hubbard was a third-rank science fiction writer. His work consists of ten (?) thick books called Battlefield Earth, which never sold particularly well. A hollywood-based scientologist made a movie about it which got abysmal ratings.

That's exactly the problem I have. An organization just needs to call itself a religion and suddenly it gets special treatment.

Actually, yes. Scientology is considered a "religion" only in the USA. In most other countries it is called a "sect", which means it emphatically does not get legal benefits and/or tax cuts. In some countries such as Germany, said sect is forbidden by government.

Does anyone know the Dutch Satan Church? No, not Satanism, although they're sometimes confused for one another. It's basically a practical joke gone way too far... in the seventies, there was this man who owned a nightclub, and at some point he realized that religions had tax benefits. At that point he declared his nightclub a religion, with some added poohah, and this being the seventies, got away with it.

If your scripting is reasonably well-planned, you can substitute art for newer art without problems.

You should keep your planning flexible. If halfway through writing, you get a new cool idea, you should be able to incorporate it.

Arguably this is not the "best" way of designing things, but it is more fun like this.

Babbelfisch fur dem Gewinn!

Spoiler

Babelfish for the win!

[close]

Okay, who, apart from 1337 programmers, cares how this game is scripted as long as it works?

W00t, ph34r my t3h l33tn3ss!!

Seriously though, in my opinion advanced scripting can really enhance playability. For instance, in some AGS games, if you click some unexpected item on some hotspot, nothing happens at all. In somewhat better games, you at least get a textbox like "that didn't work". In yet better games, you get an answer like "I can't use the <item> on the <spot>" with the words filled in. It helps immersion. You'd be surprised at how an otherwise good game can be ruined by poor interface design, or other matters of smoothness/bumpiness of the coding.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990318

http://xenu.net - the lowdown on what they actually believe in (that humans are recycled shredded souls taken here by spaceship from a genocidal war in space somewhere several millions of years ago, no I'm not kidding)

Yep. Ten years ago, an adventure game could sell, say, 100000 copies, and that was considered good business because few if any games sold significantly more than that.

Nowadays an adventure game can still sell 100000 copies, but a Sims game or a MMORPG or whatever sells ten million copies. So adventure games are not considered good business any more by most companies.

Statistics made up, but you get the point.

Actually this also happens in the AGS games list. Many of the anonymous comments there are quite nasty.

who cares how it is scripted as long as it works?

I do.

This is preliminary outline to the rating document.

With respect to this, it would seem that any game using a Sierra or Lucas GUI does not have "a fully functional, originally designed interface", thus could get no more than one cup?

I could think of several popular games that this rating system would not do justice. For instance, Larry Vales has good plot and funny dialogue, but crummy graphics. Spooks is well written but appears to lack "advanced scripting". The King's Quest remakes are popular, but lack original plot since the plot was written twenty years ago by Roberta. And META simply doesn't fit in the box period.

It would seem that getting three or four bluecups is excessively rare, and that the categories for one and two would be haphazardly large, containing many games of varying levels of interestingness.

I believe the rating system is a good idea but could stand some refinement.


Oh yeah - would it be possible for a game author to improve his game to get better ratings (e.g. get a re-rate after bugfixing/typofixing/etc)?

Also, I'd like to volunteer for a future panel. I believe the current posts are filled, but at present I don't have time anyways, and in the fall I probably would.

As a simpler but not perfect workaround, you can extend the animation by adding spaces to the text. Yes, it goes by character length. Also, you can use the Font Editor to create a character that's practically empty, and add a lot of that.

7zip FTW!  Archiving is such a trivial operation these days that you really shouldn't have to pay for it.

I will play your game, Eric.  Also, optional is for pansies.

Does anyone know why, starting roughly with their VGA games, Sierra added a skip button to just about all of their arcade sequences?