Messages

[lengthy YouTube video,]

It's a bit of a lengthy YouTube video, but do take the time to watch it.

The longer a youtube video is, the less true it's likely to be, especially if it's on the subject of something like 9/11, or videogame journalism. Because they need to set up a narrative and all of their crazy tangents from reality, and they need you to walk through their thought process to do it. And when you summarize it (Laser beams did 9/11) it falls down. Because in the end, it's just a story, and taking bits of a story out of context sounds crazy until you have the rest of it.

Truth can be seen from multiple angles, conspiracy theories generally only have one - and they only work when you believe every part of them.

I loved Life of D. Duck and it's sequel! The puzzles were imaginative, and the aesthetic and writing were so... bizarre and naive that I couldn't get enough of it.

If you release a third one, I'll play it in a heartbeat.

I think the same should apply to the engine and we ought to replace the default Roger/interface with something less ugly.

If it comes to making a new default character/assets to beautify AGS' default suite, I can lend a hand! We could make assets for every facet of AGS, such as creating sierra style lip sync portraits to show that bit off, LA speaking and thinking animations, and so on. It'll really let new developers see what can be done in the engine as-is.

Wow, I've never felt so understood before. you got almost everything I was going for.

It's a rare feeling, to be sure. I hope to continue the depth of meaning in my next game, this has really raised my morale!

Might as well show some more stuff I've been working on, since I haven't been idle these past few months:





The game is going well, the story is all written and I'm currently working through making all the puzzles work. Some bits are harder than others to do, but the game is looking real nice and I'm psyched to get it to a place where it can be played all the way through. I've not been in a good place this last year, so progress has been slow, but I'm hoping to get much more work done it in this year!

Aaa! This looks great! I can't wait to see it in action! And in 8-bit, too? I can't wait to see the kind of palette effects you come up with.

I think the point may have been missed.
I remember when Quake and Doom first came out: Shooting an enemy and seeing exploding gore felt like an achievement, without it I think they would have flopped.
It needs to be put into prospective: Violence for violence sake is not so good. However, when faced with an enemy that is out to kill you then you have no option: it's either you or him.
Faced with this type of game / situation one may expect some violence and the more extreme the situation the heavier the violence.
Example was:  Ten death row convicts are placed on an island for a death game to win his freedom, only one may win, fight and kill to win freedom...
I for one would expect some blood and gore along the way if I saw the game advertised, else i would be disappointed and cheated.

I think you got it pretty well - Doom, Quake, etc, wanted to make shooting demons satisfying, to heighten the visceral nature of the game. It IS satisfying to see terrifying monsters explode into chunks of gore and blood, and since they're demons, well, it's pretty much a okay to cheer on them being gibbed. Because they're demons.

Now, for the game that you present as an example, it all depends on the tone you're trying to achieve. Is the protagonist sympathetic? Is he forced to do these awful things? What is the tone of the overall setting and game? Smash TV is a similar premise, and it presents itself as a futuristic game show in a dystopian, Robocop-esque future. The bright lights and over the top nature of it contrasted well with the brutality of the game. Or is it more brooding, and the brutal nature of it shows that no man is innocent, and when excused, will perform acts that would condemn a man to hell, harking more to The Long Walk in it's raw exposure of the human condition? Is the ending triumphant, or tragic? These are things to think about when making a protagonist be violent. If you wanna do over the top silly gore, go right ahead. If you want to do dark and brooding, go ahead. It's interesting either way!

"Notice how nobody is complaining about The Cat Lady? I played it myself, it's pretty good." That's only because they have the privilege of being able to actually play the game.

Notice how nobody complained about The Cat Lady before it was released?

I'm sorry but you're judging a game you have not played, and I can do the same. And saying that Postal 2 is okay, but Hatred isn't, is very very hypocritical. It's one thing critiquing and voicing your opinion and another thing actively enforcing it against a developer. It should be every gamer's right to play what they want, no matter how different it is to the public opinion/common opinion. And actively nagging and voicing how much appaled you are at a game's content and doing the best you can to boycott the game, Hatred being the game, sending emails, making reddit posts, doing youtube videos, rallying people to boycott it, disables and makes it more difficult for the developers to release it. And more importantly you're denying it from the gaming community, and disrespecting the minority who would find its premise enjoyable, no matter how surprising that may be to you.

I'm only making observations based on the press release of the game itself. Will it subvert my expectations? Perhaps, and perhaps it will comment on stuff more eruditely than I am expecting it to. Perhaps the full game will deconstruct the premise of the mindless shooter, Spec Ops: The Line style, and this is merely an elaborate marketing scheme. We do not know yet, unfortunately, and without more information, we won't until it is released. But the wikipedia page states that it's a dude who shoots civilians: the game. I wasn't personally offended by it, I don't feel it should be censored or anything, I just think that it's tacky and in poor taste. The premise has poor contextualisation, and lacks the glimmer of self awareness possessed by Postal 2. From what I've seen of it so far, it's just a bad game trying to shock people.

I'm not sure why people are thinking I'm against it for containing gore in and of itself. I don't mind gore. I love gore, my favorite musical is Repo: The Genetic Opera, I love A Clockwork Orange (and was angry that Kubrick kept it from my country for so long!), and Evil Dead 2. My ire isn't against gore, it's against the context in which the gore takes place. And I wouldn't want Hatred to be censored, I just don't think it's premise is really an appropriate one, and wanted to bring it up as an example of how sometimes ultraviolence is done badly. You can't just straight up say "Man, mass murder is cool". That's just poor design, really. There are other premises that are pretty much just as inappropriate.

In the same way you're judging this game, your game can be judged. It can be viewed as a creation of a furry-lover weirdo, full of sexual bombardment only to please furries. But is that your game?

Please, tell me where in the bits I've released for my games I've included "sexual bombardment only to please furries". I've released a few screenshots, and the game's premise, and a demo a few years ago too, and also a few screenshots and a poster for Heatwave. You can search through my threads if you want. Find me all the evidence you want, and I'll concede to your point.

I mean, unless you're erupting into ad hominem attacks against me. Then that's just not cool.

For example, to realize the stupidity in censoring things, and being as smallminded as you can, instead of embracing the offerings of one author, no matter how weird and outworld-ish and offensive they may be for various reasons (and these can exist) and attempt to enrich or grasp a better opinion of your surroundings and interests, the Cat Lady could easily be considered as a game that's offensive to women.

It's about a woman, that's portrayed as a flawed, weak, alone, worthless, loser. And she's committing suicide. So the Cat Lady is telling the story of a woman, that if she fails to find a man and be successful in her career, is deemed a failure and should off herself. Cause that's the impression it gives you, it tells the story of a worthless woman that goes crazy cause her life is a dead-end.

Notice how nobody is complaining about The Cat Lady? I played it myself, it's pretty good.

So, the sole reason you find Hatred offensive is because all it is offering is violence. Have you not played a game that just does that? Have you not played Doom? Or any FPS. Have you not played Duke Nukem. IT'S A VIDEOGAME. It's supposed to be fun/entertaining, and the definition of that is limitless, it should be. And if Hatred is violent, isn't HOTLINE MIAMI?

Doom: Allegorical trek through hell and back, violence is directed towards specifically inhuman demons and zombies. Protagonist does it for the sake of humanity. No problematic content.
Duke Nukem: Pastiche of 80s/90s action movies with a larger than life protagonist, who fights almost exclusively aliens and mutants. Has some problems with making women exclusively strippers/sexy objects. Would have liked to have seen more subversion, less direct copying of existing themes regarding that.
Hotline Miami: Dreamlike, probably drugged up protagonist with no clear identity fights his way through criminal nests who will kill him on sight. Game makes violence uncomfortable and against faceless mannequin-like people. Has a point, however weak, at the end, that subverts the whole game.

For a bonus, here's one more:
Postal 2: As the world falls apart around you, the protagonist goes through his daily life. You can finish the entire game without shooting a single bullet. You can wait in lines, and dodge violent protesters, etc. Or, if you get frustrated, you can literally go postal. In very poor taste, has some problematic content that reinforces attitudes against marginalised groups, but is self-aware enough to not take itself seriously. It ain't my kind of game, but I won't begrudge it's existence. It could have done a lot of things a lot better.

And then:
Hatred: Dude who hates people guns down innocent civilians because we want to be politically incorrect.
We don't have the full context as the game isn't out yet, but I don't hold much hope that it'd be much deeper than that.

Like, do you see the difference here? I have never said "Violence shouldn't be in games" or even "Extreme violence shouldn't be in games". Nobody is even saying that, you seem to be attacking a ghost arguement. I'm saying that we should discuss and dissect the reasons for violence in games, and the context in which it takes place. What it tries to say, as a media piece, what themes it explores. Doom is acceptable even to a devout Mormon (Sandy Peterson) because the violence is directed in the right direction - to terrifying demons. Hatred has a competent gunman shooting helpless civilians. Do you see the difference in contexts here? Do you see the difference between a heroic space marine tearing his way through evil incarnate and a shitty dude shooting up a mall? Like sure, you can do that in GTA or Saint's Row, but it always retains a level of humor and doesn't actually reward you for doing that. Generally it dissuades you because then you can't buy anything and do the actual designed bits of the game. That isn't the point of those games.

And even if Hatred comes out and it's just Sim Mall Shooter, I wouldn't say to censor it or anything. I'd just say it was an incredibly shitty game, because it fails to contextualise itself in a manner that makes any god damned sense or says anything worthwhile. If you don't think about this shit and what you're doing with the elements of your game, you'll end up with a nonsensical mess. Something can be SUPER SERIOUS and be too edgy for this world and be rubbish, or it could be SUPER SILLY and also not funny and be rubbish.

I don't know why you have a bee in your bonnet about this, all I've ever said is "be an active consumer of media, critique and discuss the themes of games", and "be an active developer, critique and discuss the themes and elements of the game you are making, and be aware of why you include the elements you do.".

Like, what is so contentious about this? Shouldn't we be allowed to critique games, and discuss how well their themes get across? Aren't we allowed to say "Yeah, this game doesn't do this shit at all well."?

So I completed A Golden Wake, and it left me a little cold, if I'm to be honest.

Spoiler

Regarding the story, I'm not entirely sure whether Alfie Banks is a sympathetic character, as even at his most innocent he seems to lack scruples, since the puzzles solutions show that he is not a very good person even right off the bat:

He approves a co-worker to be fired (there was no option, in his mind, to say "I wouldn't want either fired"), he blackmails a man into selling his land, he vandalises a hydroplane which loses a man his job, he bribes, deals in corporate espionage and theft based on what his new boss told him (how is Alfie to know that his competitor didn't come up with the design plans, and Merrick wants to steal them?), and in the beginning he helps out the Secretary expecting her to give him favors so that he can get a job. The mob stuff seems to be just par for the course rather than a progression.

The game says that he is a great salesman with initiative (with unbelievable amounts of sales), but it seems to be an informed trait, as he never actually takes any initiative, he just sits around waiting for his bosses to give him ridiculous promotions. Why did he ever expect to become Mayor? It seems rather sudden and paints him out to be incredibly entitled and bratty more than "shunned because of great talent". Was this deliberate? From the ending cutscene where his life is described as leaving a "golden wake", I'm... not convinced that it was. The only golden wake he ever left was selling houses well, he didn't actually do anything worthy of much praise. The game takes place over ten years and he accomplishes nothing. This might actually be a symptom of hewing closely to history, as there really is no room for Alfie Banks in the events that happened. This might have been an interesting take on the historical drama, but the game never really discusses it. He exists to view events as a passive entity, and aside from running errands that could have been done by anyone, he leaves no mark. He is the ghost ship that leaves no wake at all. He doesn't even get to kill Fatty Walsh, that's done for him.

Regarding the gameplay, I thought that the format used was quite dated and stilted - the game screeches to a halt while the player retrieves three items/does three tasks for a superior. It feels unnatural and lacks a certain veneer that would keep immersion. The car driving animations also held up the game, I'm not sure it was really necessary to show the player the character driving off every time. I would have preferred it just teleport you to the map once you've shown the driving animation once.

I wasn't really impressed with the game, overall, I was hoping for a hook that would never come. All through the game I was hoping for a twist, for a revelation that would make playing the game worthwhile. Was Merrick's Big Project the Pillars of Hastur or some great and terrible architecture, was he trying to become the mayor of Coral Gables himself and be a corrupt mayor? No? It was just bland real life event after real life event, which makes for very poor dramatic timing and pacing. Alfie Banks wasn't charismatic enough a character to carry this tale, and the real life events weren't interesting enough to weave a tale about.

I really wanted to like this game, but it felt like a step back from Ben Jordan.

On the plus side, the art is definitely an improvement, the music was great and fitting, and the rotoscoped animations were pretty impressive and numerous, though sometimes it did feel like more care needed to be put into places where the characters were doing nothing but standing stock still, such as Doc Dammers' stall with the tiny streetcar. But otherwise it was a well put together piece, no bugs, and the programming was quite impressive. The little background touches with the weather on background objects and moving trains and such were great additions. I'd want to see more adventures coming from you in the future. Don't ever stop creating.

[close]

To be honest, why is the topic "THIS GAME IS SO VIOLENT?" back, haven't we've been through this before? Why are you denying entertainment by censoring games such as these, oh gaming community?

Nobody's censoring anything. I'm not sure why this is a fear going on on the internet at the moment, but nobody's censoring things. I mean, the government already does that to some games already, but the gaming community at large isn't censoring anything. Criticising, sure, dissecting the reasons and becoming more self aware about the content that is created. But these are functions that make better games, and without critique we'll end up with backward, stagnant games. There's no Mary Whitehouse deciding that it is illegal to distribute or publish the games you're worried about. Individual stores removing stuff from their stock isn't censorship, since censorship happens at a much higher level. We're actually censoring less now than we ever did before.

But, with less censorship, comes more responsibility. It is our duty to critique the media, to engage it on an active level, rather than passively consume it. You say "Just let people consume stuff like A Serbian Film", but passive consumption is damaging, and we must question ourselves, and our media, at every turn. It is not sacrosanct. There are cliches, themes, actions, that are borne of our collective assumptions that must be deconstructed, and discussed.

The question isn't:
"Why is this game so violent?"

It's
"Why is this game so violent?"

Or, just ignore everyone, do the darn thing, spend a zillion hours making the game only for a handful of interested downloads?

food for thought

It's what I do. How large a following do you think the alt-furry-retro-cyberpunk genre has? But, it's what I want to do, so I do it, regardless of how many people download my games. It's the pure, unfettered opportunity to create what I want that draws me to create. To fill a niche that has not been filled. I could have replaced every character in my game with a human and probably got more downloads.

On the other hand, gore isn't... exactly a niche thing. We see it in almost every AAA game, casually displayed, to the point of banality. It's not shocking, it's not edgy, it just exists. It's really kind of trite and boring to create a game for the gore value alone - but it'll probably download enough. You see it in every newgrounds horror game, in stuff like Eversion where the subversion of the cute is the point, in yeah, Hatred and Postal and Smash TV and whatever gory bloodfest you got going on. It's guaranteed to have an audience, if it's halfway competent. Gore shouldn't be an end to itself, but a means to enhance an existing narrative's themes and tone. Gore adds to horror, or absurdity, but isn't a theme in itself. You can't consider it in a vacuum.

Is there an audience for games with the colour green in it, or the inclusion of birds? Or skateboards? Of course there is, but not for their own sake, they are merely parts of a whole.

Oh, I know what attribute is missing! The Pamela lip sync data (like, the current phoneme et al)! That's not opened to the script, but if we're going to do lip sync with our custom speech functions, we'll need it!

While we're talking about rep_exec callbacks, there's no chance that we could get the capability for non-blocking speech in with it, is there? It's the one thing that would make dialogues really shine, since right now we can't really control the pace of the conversation without hacking in fake lines of speech, nor have overlapping speech. The most hacked speech thing for me is definitely background speech, and interrupting. Unifying all the speech types (do we really need a SayBackground anymore?) would reduce the amount of hacking needed to be done with speech. No more speech lines being stored as sound effects, either!

Code: AGS

if (Game.TranslationFilename == "English") //or whatever you call your .tra file.
{
    //Do all the switching stuff here.
}

I think you'd be able to have a single GUI and change the images on it rather than switching to an entirely different GUI, so just in game_start () you need to swap the images the buttons on the GUI use depending on the translation the game is using.

Make em as realistic as they need to be. If you have an unrealistic puzzle, and you want to include it in the game, simply ask "why is this here?", and construct a reason for it to be there. Is the owner of the mansion obsessed with warding off evil spirits, and created several puzzle rooms in order to confuse them into being trapped there? Is the mansion a folly with traps and tricks to stop interlopers? Is the mansion being used by an evil cult who are too deranged to think of standard locking mechanisms?

Don't just say "Who cares?" because that's a sign of bad game design. Always be thinking "How?" and "Why?". Keep on deconstructing, and reconstructing until you have a rich experience with good contextualisation. That way the player will gladly solve the puzzles, and not have to suspend disbelief for gameplay elements, because they will be part of the overarching narrative.

Hey, would it be easy/possible to uncouple Character.LightLevel from regions? I like using LightLevel for a few effects and it's difficult to juggle moving the sprite and making sure it's on the correct region for the lighting I want on them. If it could be done manually, like Character.Scaling can be done now, it would make my job a lot easier.

I believe room background images are compressed, however, and by adding areas of pure black at the top and bottom, you're not likely to get much in the way of file size savings if you omit them and use code to compensate. I don't remember whether the compression algorithm is RLE or LZW (I THINK it's LZW? I know RLE is the sprite one), but it will compress large areas of flat colour incredibly well. You're likely to see little to no size increase if you buffer them with black areas. Likely at most around a few bytes per image.

I added a step-through collision step, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right:

Code: ags

function StepThroughCollision ()
{
  if (mPlayer.velx != 0.0)
  {
    float xprog = 0.0;
    bool done = true;
    if (mPlayer.velx < 1.0 || mPlayer.velx > -1.0)
      {
        mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x + mPlayer.velx, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
        HandleCollisions ();
        done = true;
      }
    else
      {
        if (mPlayer.velx >= 1.0)
        {
          while (xprog < mPlayer.velx || done == false)
            {
                if (mPlayer.velx - xprog > 1.0) 
                {
                  xprog += 1.0;
                  mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x + 1.0, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.velx == 0.0) done = true;
                }
                else
                {
                  mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x + (mPlayer.velx - xprog), 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.velx == 0.0) done = true;
                }
            }
         }
        else if (mPlayer.velx <= -1.0)
        {
          while (xprog > mPlayer.velx || done == false)
            {
                if (mPlayer.velx - xprog < -1.0) 
                {
                  xprog -= 1.0;
                  mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x - 1.0, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.velx == 0.0) done = true;
                }
                else
                {
                  mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x + (mPlayer.velx - xprog), 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.velx == 0.0) done = true;
                }
            }
        }
      }
  }
  if (mPlayer.vely != 0.0)
  {
    float yprog = 0.0;
    bool done = true;
    if (mPlayer.vely < 1.0 || mPlayer.vely > -1.0)
      {
        mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y + mPlayer.vely, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
        HandleCollisions ();
        done = true;
      }
    else
      {
        if (mPlayer.vely >= 1.0)
        {
          while (yprog < mPlayer.vely || done == false)
            {
                if (mPlayer.vely - yprog > 1.0) 
                {
                  yprog += 1.0;
                  mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y + 1.0, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.vely == 0.0) done = true;
                }
                else
                {
                  mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y + (mPlayer.vely -yprog), 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.vely == 0.0) done = true;
                }
            }
         }
        else if (mPlayer.vely <= -1.0)
        {
          while (yprog > mPlayer.vely || done == false)
            {
                if (mPlayer.vely - yprog < -1.0) 
                {
                  yprog -= 1.0;
                  mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y - 1.0, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.vely == 0.0) done = true;
                }
                else
                {
                  mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y + (mPlayer.vely - yprog), 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
                  HandleCollisions ();
                  if (mPlayer.vely == 0.0) done = true;
                }
            }
        }
      }
  }
  
  //mPlayer.x = ClampFloat(mPlayer.x + mPlayer.velx, 0.0, IntToFloat(Room.Width));
  //mPlayer.y = ClampFloat(mPlayer.y + mPlayer.vely, 0.0, IntToFloat (Room.Height));
}

I mean, it works, sort of, but now moving platforms are broken and jumping while running doesn't work, and the character still falls through thin platforms.. I also don't think I'm quite understanding this right. :<

If any of you need an artist familiar with working with VGA, just message me. I'd enter, but I don't think I'd be able to program and write a game in that time. I've done a game jam before, and that was pretty fun.

The fonts are uncopyrightable, being bitmap fonts. Only scalar/vector fonts are copyrightable, as computer programs.

I wouldn't use the default Sierra font, not because of any copyright concern, but because it's pretty overused.