Messages

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

Just because new truths may be ridiculed, doesn't mean that anything that's ridiculed is therefore a new truth.

On the topic of planning, I'd like to tell a little bit about contingency planning and how this may result in emergent gameplay.

When writing room scripts for Heroine's Quest, relatively early in development I wrote code for when you find Sigurd badly hurt in the forest. Each class has his own way of dealing with that, but when I wrote it I decided that giving him a healing potion would also work (since it seems like an obvious move). When I wrote this, it wasn't decided yet at what point in the game this scene would occur, merely that the game has healing potions.
Then later, I wrote shopkeeper code, which allows you to buy things from NPCs. For those NPCs that have a limited amount of certain items in stock, I decided to simply use AGS's rarely-used feature that every character has an inventory list. Again, this simply made sense at the time.
Finally, several months later, I wrote the pickpocket code, which (yes) allows you to take items from an NPC's inventory list. This was meant so people could steal certain quest items from NPCs, as well as miscellaneous coins and junk I handed out to some of them.

And now, even though this combination of events wasn't planned, it all fell into place. As one of the testers noticed, you can indeed pickpocket shopkeepers to steal the items they'd sell you. And though the scene with Sigurd appears very early in the game and you technically aren't supposed to have healing potions at that point, it's possible to have them anyway if you steal them from a shopkeeper; and as coded months agao, they are a valid method of reviving him. So you can solve a problem in an entirely unexpected way, because of emergent combinations.

Contingencies are fun

Can anyone say for certain that a directed energy weapon wasn't used?!?

Yes.

I am absolutely certain that a directed energy weapon wasn't used.

For that matter, I am also absolutely certain that the event wasn't caused by invisible three-eyed aliens from Pluto. Note, however, that all the evidence you've posted is consistent with the hypothesis that the event was in fact caused by invisible three-eyed aliens from Pluto. So, I would be interested in any evidence or arguments that does support the hypothesis of an energy weapon, and does not support the hypothesis of aliens from Pluto.

[average]

That's why you need the average playtime (or a decent approximation thereof), not the playtime of one random individual that got stuck.

If the average player does get stuck, well, perhaps you should have done more beta testing

I do plan dialog to some extent. For example, for Heroine's Quest, I made a list of pieces of information about certain areas or monsters, then divided these items among knowledgeable NPCs to make sure I didn't miss any. The rest of the dialogue was written on the spot.

Machinarium and Dropsy would be non-existant using that method. I might be splitting hairs here, just saying that no one method is very foolproof, and especially counting just dialogue line seems slightly off target considering we're dealing with games here and not books...

Correct; this is just the best I could find for story-based games. Clearly it doesn't apply to everything, but it's a better measure than "megabytes of disk space". Ideally you want to measure average playtime to complete the game, but that depends a lot on the player.

...and of course, turns out there's a website tracking all that. http://howlongtobeat.com/
According to this site, several classic Sierra games clock in at about three hours (KQ1,KQ2,SQ1-3) to 5-6 hours (KQ5-6,SQ4-5,QFG1-2). Indiana Jones and MI1-2 are listed at about 6-7 hours, Tales Of at about 2 each.
These clearly aren't using walkthroughs; you can do KQ1 in about ten minutes, KQ5 in about an hour if you know what you're doing.
RPGs tend to be much longer, such as 30 hours for Ultima 4, 70 hours for Ultima 7, and 35-50 for Planescape Torment.

I thought that game length was measured by how long it takes to play from start to finish when you know exactly what you need to do to finish it.

That's called speedrunning

The only things I've seen cause loss of performance within AGS are large multi-layer transparency effects and overcomplicated scripting.

What.

Oodin?

I think that size in megabytes is pretty meaningless, because this can easily be increased by cranking up the resolution and color depth or by including lots of movie scenes. Likewise, I think that size in AGS rooms is pretty meaningless because it's pretty easy to add a bunch of filler rooms in which nothing actually happens. For example, compare Sierra's King's Quest III (which has a 20-room countryside but most rooms don't contain anything useful, and an infinite procedurally-generated desert to the west) to King's Quest VI (which has islands consisting just of three to five rooms each, but each room has at least one major event and sometimes more).

The best measure of game length is possibly the size of its translation text file (not the game script, but the actual in-game text). This gives an idea of how much there is to do within the game.

Wow, that one was on my to-play list for awhile. Thanks!

This reminds me of a lecture by a ufologist I once attended. He had a story about a farmer somewhere in the US, who heard some weird noises at night, and the next morning he found a piece of metal that he hadn't seen before. And no matter what, he was unable to bend this piece of metal.

So the lecturer concluded, this must clearly be extraterrestrial matter.

Spoiler

How about NO? I would bloody well hope that we can manufacture metal parts that cannot be bent by some random farmer who doesn't know anything about metallurgy. I'm sure the UFO explanation is more fun but that's what we have scifi books for.

[close]

There is just too much here to dismiss.

Not at all, you just need to listen to the experts (instead of, you know, dismissing them). For example, that untrained laymen think it looks like a controlled demolition is completely meaningless. Do people who actually know about demolition have the same opinion?

Spoiler

No, they don't.

[close]

Experiments by John Hutchison trying to replicate the work of Nikola Tesla show that materials can do strange things when placed in an electrostatic field (generated by a Van de Graaff generator for example) and subjected to interfering electromagnetic radiation. Hurricane Erin could have provided an electrostatic field.

Ah, that explains it. It was a Russian attack with Tesla coils!

"Conspiracies are real"
"This is a conspiracy"
"Therefore this is real"

....um, no.

Dr Wood is perhaps the most controversial speaker on 9/11 but relatively unknown.

If she's relatively unknown, then by definitition she is not anywhere near the most controversial speaker.

See, the term "controvsery" means that there is substantial support on both sides of the issue. Here, that is entirely not the issue. One fringe speaker against the entire scientific consensus is not a "controversy". For example, within the field of law, legalizing soft drugs is a controversy. Legalizing cold-blooded murder is not a controversy, even if some individuals might be found in support of that.

Cool, thanks for your input!
If you're interested, I would gladly share the design document with you guys, and you could give me some feedback on the ideas? I trust you don't run away with any potentially marketable ideas, but I count on you to say if it's been done to death already

I'd be happy to help, but I really don't have time right now. If you're still working on this in two months then I'd be happy to check it out. Sorry, I'm already pressed on time as it is.

Yes, you can write platform games or shoot-em-ups in AGS, among others. Indeed, we have a yearly award for the best non-adventure game made with AGS.

Near the beginning of Space Quest III, picking up a sharp piece of metal causes Roger to accidentally kill himself with it...

Yeah, I think you got me. English was not my best subject. All I'm trying to say is that ALL of the evidence needs to be looked at and explained.

Yes, and the point is that Mrs. Wood isn't actually doing that. Rather, she's cherry-picking the points that could be used to support her hypothesis, and ignoring the points that contradict it.

Has anyone here developed/published any board games? I'm interested in all tips and tricks of the trade.

Yes, I have. I know a number of successful board game designers personally (e.g. Cwali, Splotter) and have been an official playtester for numerous games, as well as designer for a few (the most successful one being Sp0l).

Well, I enjoy complex deep strategical games (e.g. Twilight Imperium or Brittannia) but those are hard to find players for. I also like eurogames that rely heavily on trade and player interaction (e.g. Traders of Genua, Puerto Rico, Tikal, and of course Settlers of Catan). I prefer multiplayer (4-6) games over two-player, and dislike games that are essentially random with little player skill involved (which unfortunately includes many of the "classic" games such as Monopoly).

Given the huge amount of eurogames produced each year, there isn't anything particularly lacking in this field. That said, more games are always welcome. It's not exactly easy to pitch a game to a publisher, unless you're willing to self-publish.