Messages

[FIGHTS!]

Sorry to dig this up again, but I had some free time so I made some more sprites in this series:



Life Partner Ray is done, and a new character joins Dennis on his quest - a blue mage! Logic dictates in any self respecting JRPG that any user of monster magic has to be a beast man. And what better way to learn a spell than to be hit with it? That way you can catch more than just rabies from fighting wild animals.

I tried to make the portraits look at least a little serious, because that'll make it all the sweeter when Dennis comes out with barely intelligable ramblings.

What do you all think of these?

FIGHTS!

But in the end I say that I'm glad that tim has gotten an overage but my main concern is his fidelitity to the PNC industry as most of his games are 3d microsoft driven games, Not saying that those games aren't nice, they just don't feed my personal nostalgia.

Psst, hey, secret information! Tim Schafer has worked on:

# 1990 Maniac Mansion (NES port), tools programmer, SCUMM (LucasArts)
# 1990 The Secret of Monkey Island, co-writer, programmer, additional designer (LucasArts)
# 1991 Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, co-writer, programmer, additional designer (LucasArts)
# 1993 Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, co-designer, co-producer, co-director, co-writer (LucasArts)
# 1995 Full Throttle, project leader, writer, designer (LucasArts)

So I don't think you have anything to worry about. The only reason he has a lot of 3D action games under his belt is because that's what publishing companies will publish. Monkey Island is a pretty neat, little-known game, you should play it sometime, get to know this obscure guy's real flavour.

[2.0]

Ok, this is what I've come up with from all of this however i keep getting parser error at :   Required_XP .....

int expierance = 0; ///is a global var int
int Required_XP = 15; ///is a global var int
Increase_Factor = 2.0 ///is a global var float

Is there any reason why you're using a float for what is effectively integer multiplication? It seems needlessly complicated for something that could be just *2 or << 1.

In order to do float math with an Int, you need to convert it to a float with the IntToFloat and FloatToInt functions. The reason why it hasn't got to the type error is because, I think, you need to express the function as:

Code: ags

Required_XP = Required_XP * Increase_Factor;

I don't think AGS HAS *= as one of it's thingies, only += and -=.

Oh victor, I meant mmo. sry for the confusion.

Bad, bad idea. Too much effort for not enough payoff, you need a player base to keep it sustained (which you won't get with an amateur MMO made in an engine not suited for MMOs), and AGS doesn't handle simultaineous action from more than one source very well, because it's an adventure game engine. Not to mention it'd cost you money to keep the server up and manhours maintaining the server and the skill to create a server that can handle the workload of a MMO in a clean, efficient way.

2 Player Co-Op, done cleverly (where events from one game can effect objects in the other), I can see. Adding MMO stuff to adventure games is just a decadent, pointless idea and I don't know why people keep bringing it up. MMOs wither on the vine even if they're made by competent programmers for the genre they're meant for in engines that can handle it.

[1) How important is narrative within a videogame to you? 2) If a game has a poor plot but good gameplay, is that preferable to a game with poor gameplay but a good narrative? Or are both equally important?3) Have you ever stopped playing a videogame because the narrative was too poor? If so, what was it?4) How do you feel about gameplay/story segregation? Examples: You dodge a trap in game, and later in a cutscene, the character falls for the same trap. And the inverse, a character suddenly being far more competent in a cutscene than his in-game actions would imply. Should a character be as competent in their actions as the player is?5) Do you feel that with growing technical abilities in game engines, narratives in games have become more sophisticated as well, and have benefited from a more filmic feel?6) Do you think that different gameplay styles affect how we view the same plot? For example, rescuing a fair maiden from a dragon's lair, presented in platformer, first person shooter, and point and click adventure game style, with the only differences in the presentation being how the game plays. Dialogue, pacing, and aesthetic remain identical.]

So, I'm currently writing my dissertation for my animation degree, and my chosen topic was the interaction of narrative and game mechanics in videogames, since that's a topic that resonates with me.

As part of this, I wanted to get people's opinions on writing within videogames. This forum is particularily good for this, as adventure games are often story-heavy. I am writing about the role of narrative within videogames, and how breaks within the gameplay world and the narrative world can severely negatively impact the experience as a whole. I have referred to Crimes Against Mimesis for some historical perspective in Interactive Fiction, and have contacted some game developers for an insider's perspective, but I need the end consumer's perspective, since if they don't want heavy plot, there is no need to try to integrate it as fervently as they could. No need to supply what you don't have any demand for.

I have a few questions to ask of you all, answer any or all of them if you like, and if you have your own developer's perspective on gameplay/narrative integration, I would love to hear your insight.

1) How important is narrative within a videogame to you?

2) If a game has a poor plot but good gameplay, is that preferable to a game with poor gameplay but a good narrative? Or are both equally important?

3) Have you ever stopped playing a videogame because the narrative was too poor? If so, what was it?

4) How do you feel about gameplay/story segregation? Examples: You dodge a trap in game, and later in a cutscene, the character falls for the same trap. And the inverse, a character suddenly being far more competent in a cutscene than his in-game actions would imply. Should a character be as competent in their actions as the player is?

5) Do you feel that with growing technical abilities in game engines, narratives in games have become more sophisticated as well, and have benefited from a more filmic feel?

6) Do you think that different gameplay styles affect how we view the same plot? For example, rescuing a fair maiden from a dragon's lair, presented in platformer, first person shooter, and point and click adventure game style, with the only differences in the presentation being how the game plays. Dialogue, pacing, and aesthetic remain identical.

I hope to hear from anyone who has any opinion at all, it's all important to me

My god, it's finally coming. After seeing some of the top secret work behind the scenes having a prophetic fever dream about this game, I can tell you I am stoked for it's release!

What I don't get when people say "Keep your gayness to yourself" (which is what a lot of people in this thread have stated) is; what does that actually mean? Can someone "Keep their straightness to themselves"? What counts as flaunting your sexuality?

If someone is aggressively (and stereotypically) straight, with the beer swilling, football watching, lewd comment at attractive women making, does that make you just as uneasy as someone who is aggressively (and stereotypically) gay?

Would a gay couple be able to share a kiss in your presence, if say, they were in a public place, the same kind of place a straight couple would share a kiss? (Not talking french kissing here, just the passionate displays you see on train platforms and such) Would they be able to hold hands?

If it is just the sex act that makes people squicky, do these same people get uncomfortable if a straight man or woman talks about their conquests?

I'm genuinely curious as to why people qualify "I don't mind gay people" with "So long as they keep it to themselves". If that's true, shouldn't all people keep their sexuality to themselves, no matter what it is? After all, a guy talking non stop about hot chicks is functionally identical to him talking about hot guys. He still wants to nail a person, they just have a different gender.

Have the Toonstruck guys thought about Kickstarter?

I would fund the hell out of a Toonstruck sequal drive. No word of a lie, I would back it in a heartbeat. If this resounding success sparks off one of theirs, it would make me very happy indeed.

Wow, this truly is amazing. Just on the promise of a new game, Double Fine raised enough capital in a single day to make it. I don't want to be presumptous, but this is promising on a wider scope than just this one game. It could be the blossoming of a whole new way of funding video games, as this proves it can be a resounding success.

I'll be sure to pick it up once it's hits stores! Screw it, pledged!

It's a bit of a weird one.
It takes the rectangle x,y,w,h from the screen, and draws a colourised version into the sprite you use to call it (spr in this case).

e.g.

Code: ags

  DynamicSprite *spr = DynamicSprite.Create(20, 20);
  spr.ColouriseArea(10, 10, 20, 20);
  DrawingSurface *surf = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
  surf.DrawImage(10, 10, spr.Graphic);
  surf.Release();

Will replace the 20x20 area beginning at 10,10 with a colourised version, using a lookup table generated with ProcessPalette, whatever that does.

Yeah, this function is for the backgrounds of GUIs and stuff, and I guess I didn't pay enough attention to what the function names were called.

ProcessPalette simply finds the equivilent greyscale luminence of every colour in the global palette and maps the colours in the given array to them, so that when the Colourise functions are run, the resulting image still looks correct in terms of luminence.

I never expected anyone to actually use my module. I'll whip up an example game that uses this module and try to document it as best as possible. I've been meaning to use it myself anyway. x3

[shoot the perpetrators on the streets]

In WHAM-land, anyone caught downloading or sharing illegal or copyrighted material would be banned from having a high-speed internet connection for a year at a time, their connection speed capped at 512 kb / second or lower. Repeat offenders would get temporarily banned from the internet altogether, effectively excommunicating such individuals from most social circles and media outlets, as well as receiving serious monetary fines (the proceedings of which would be used to fund more effective monitoring of network traffic and reinforcing the LAW).

And if all else fails, we shoot the perpetrators on the streets for being assholes and not taking a hint.

shoot the perpetrators on the streets

And so, on that day, fifty years ago, fire was stolen from the hands of the people and given back to the gods. The flow of information stopped, for the common man was afraid anything that they shared with another might be considered contraband and shot. People no longer sung in the streets or referenced things that they liked, as copyright hung over their heads like the Sword of Damocles. Any performance could snap the string, ending their existance, and sending the message the corporations always wanted - that ideas were theirs, and all who expressed them had the wrath of the gods brought down upon them.

In an increasingly connected world, we were isolated. Unable to publically speak as all ideas were copyright. We thought that this would protect us, emancipate us but all it did was imprison us in a nightmare of vague claims to ownership by indominable monsters.

We were reduced to passive consumers, no longer could we use the tools we were given to create new things, but instead paid for the privilige of watching the gods dance in front of them. Anything could be taken from men, the gods could create scarcity, and thus charge whatever price they desired for the gifts they could so easily take away. But the price for this had already been paid.

Chained to the highest skyscraper, his liver torn out by eagles every day, broadcast globally, was the image of the original thief, a symbol of the new age, the rage of the gods against man, cravenly looking on with awe and terror:

The Postmodern Prometheus®

[historian who discovers the holocaust was fake, and is hunted by rabbi assassins]

Apparently Hackademic is icycalm AKA Alex Kierkegaard AKA Anthony Zirbas, etc., i.e. the owner of the website linked to in the first post which requires a €25/year subscription to fully view.

If this is the level of writing going on on that website, I'm pretty turned off to the idea of buying. This was a pretty poor advertisement. Rambling, incoherent text, inflammatory wording, little to no understanding of market trends or media as a whole, and arrogance that borders on hubris. It's a naive and pompous diatribe with pseudo-philosophical elements designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate. The comparison of Indiana Jones being better suited to an action game is ignorant of the (fiscal) popularity of Tomb Raider, and the failure of the Indiana Jones action games of the late eighties and early nineties.

Also, you did not refute my RPGs are a lot like baking cakes. Clearly they are. When you bake a cake, the person who wrote the instructions is getting you to use the oven to change the cake mix to a cake. In other words, this is a really shitty game, which amounts to watching something change slowly. Which is what RPGs are, if you take away the story and combat. This is undeniably true. The next time you see 'final fantasy x', you will think 'final fantasy cake-mix'.

I will refute this. It's also incoherent, but I'll try my best.

RPGs, in their purest, tabletop form, are mechanics for simulating the world. Good RPGs, like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and others, blend together the story and the mechanics to create a believable world. Bad rpgs slice the two apart, and the story and the mechanics do not complement each other, they compete. In a good RPG, you USE the mechanics to advance the story. It is... like a car and a train with a driving toy in it. Both get you to the end, but the train will continue the story with the toy amusing you through it. The car has you use what you're doing to get you there. Active vs. passive participation in the exploration of the world. Final Fantasy will take you to the end of it's story while you play a different game. Planescape: Torment will use the game to tell the story.

Your analogy is quite frankly, baffling. Cake mix would be a sandbox game, in which you use the mechanics to build a story. What you are describing, is watching paint dry.

Also, if you remove the story and the combat from a story and combat based game, of course you are left with nothing. You just took out the core of the game.

People are being pretty resentful when all I am doing is giving them the gift of knowledge. Imagine for a moment if a Greek philosopher, one of the good ones not a loser like Socrates, got in a time machine, came to our century, crammed alot of knowledge about science, then played computer games and told you a little about them. What would you do? You would resent that person for claiming he knew more about games than you, even though you had probably put zero effort in to understanding them. What does that say?

So now you imply you are a great philosopher? Okay. These greek philosophers come and play the games, and what would they think about it? They lack the necessary cultural knowledge, filmic language, game language, to fully appreciate the game. To understand a game, you need to know a lot more than "things are made of phlogiston and ash". They would probably compare it to ancient greek theatre and literature. Would they tell us more than we already know? Maybe. But would THEY be able to fully appreciate it, growing up in a culture almost completely alien to the one that produced the game? They could, if they researched everything around the game, computers in general, and narrative conventions that have changed considerably since ancient greek times, when stories were told with choruses and masks.

Now, this is nothing to do with you as a person, hackademic, but your arguements are full of holes, and they are hidden in poorly structured purple prose. You think you know more than you actually do, and you are incredibly arrogant, assuming we know less than you do and that you are some great teacher of knowledge shining the light of your incredible philosophy dow...

Okay, let's try to get back on topic. Okay, so Mr. Gilbert made a game about a Jewish detective and it was a hit. Now, someone who hadn't read my insightful essay would think "I should make a point and click adventure game about a historian who discovers the holocaust was fake, and is hunted by rabbi assassins, because that would sell like Mr Gilberts". STOP. THINK. Should this game really be made, or should it be made as an action game? If your story was more like the movie national treasure, then a game in the SW section would be acceptable. But if your story focused on these ruthless rabbi assassins, who honed their combat skills punching palestinian children, then you should make an action game. It's about identifying niche stories for different genres.

... wait, what.

Enough of this manga nonsense, do something normal for a change.

Haha! He kind of looks like Miles Edgeworth with that hair.

But on a more serious note, doesn't Dennis' hair have two long bangs either side of his face, and spikes out the back? It's a pretty important part of his design, is distinctive anime hair. Replacing it with Advent Children Cloud's hair seems to betray the character a lot.

And I'd agree with bringing his eyes and nose down. Right now the face looks really elongated. Always remember the ratios the human face has. You can pull those out a bit, caricature them, but for the most part they remain constant:
http://animatedbuzz.com/tutorials/images/proportion01.jpg
The eyes are halfway between the top of the head and the chin, the nose is halfway between the eyes and the chin, the mouth is halfway between the nose and the chin. It's hard to get to grips with at first, but I know you can do it.

BTW, Radiant is in need of some OSD sprites for his MAGS game. Would you mind if he used these? OSD is open source, after all.  

Well, if he wants them, he can have them, so long as they remain open source. x3 I'd hoped to get some critique on them first, though, so they're as good as can be before someone uses them. x3

Also, guess who else joined the party:

So I wanted to keep my spriting arm fresh, and I had recently discovered that OHRRPGCE is still actively in development. It being my favorite RPG program, I decided to make some OSD sprites.



Walkabout/Standing/Stepping/Attack A/Attack B/Use Item/Hurt/Weak/Dead

So, how are these? Anything I can do to improve them? And most importantly, are they Dennis?

It looks like pretty standard digital painting to me, very conservative palette use, very clever palette use. The bright, vibrant colour is created by variances in hue between colour shades and contrasts when painting. No clever technology, but clever people.

I dug around, they did develop their own video codec:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.VQA
10fps 256 color. Might be useful for someone. Certainly useful for me, as Smacker still has it's patent.

Snarky, those who don't appreciate VGA-style retro graphics or pixel art, don't download stories or read books. They download games. And when they download our games the conflict starts. There is no author who wants to read comments like these.

The problem is that the definition of the term "computer game" has changed.

I think this is a little naive. Retro styled graphics do have a niche appeal, and there is a cutoff point for people as to how primitive they can stand graphics to be. Even though I love old graphics, I'd have to say that if someone released a game with Atari 2600 level graphics, I wouldn't appreciate it properly.

For some people, low resolution graphics are something that they can't get into. The fact that the pixels are as big as your head breaks their immersion from the game and stops them from enjoying the narrative since they're not used to playing like that. People who grew up with low resolution graphics can go upward to higher resolutions without a problem, but you can't expect people to go backwards before their time. Could you, for example, play an adventure game with NES quality graphics? Dithered Hercules graphics? Atari 2600? It would be harder, and out of your comfort zone (presumably), especially if it was a modern release.

Low resolution stuff has nothing, nothing to do with story. (I love to play platformers with low res, low colour graphics!) You don't magically get a better story if you half the number of pixels on the screen. People will still complain, just like people complain about black and white films not being in colour. Films are stories and they still get bashed on sometimes. Imagine watching a film with early CGI effects released nowadays. Regardless of what the story was, people will still go "Huh? What is this? Why bad CGI?".

[And until you stop salivating over Final Fantasy and learn what a real rpg is, you never will.]

@WHAM: I play and review a lot of FF & kh games to get a better understanding on things that might help me with ideas for mt games. however I always plan it out on paper cause though it looks nice I might not be able to even code it.

Don't play CRPGs to learn how to make RPGs. Especially not inbred ones like Final Fantasy. This is exactly what I was talking about. Don't do that! Don't! Bad Icey!

@Scavenger: I could def review that for help with my games however there are a lot of reason why that type of fight wont help me. Example being that my next OSD game's Battles are setup weird but they only work if I focus on making them work. When Dennis attacks the enemy with his sword the Damage is based upon the swords current ATK # and the Attack never misses. The attack number is increased when you level up. +1 EXP is gain every time you attack a target.

That's a boring mechanic. I meant random per attack. 1d8+Str is better than dealing Str in damage. It means you could get a good hit off, or a glancing blow. Learn how attacks work before making these ridiculous and boring mechanics.

My point is that I never really worry about adding things like DEF, DEX, INT, etc... cause to me leveling up in this game will not be hard but it will take some time. And as long as you have Potions/HI-Potions and the right Command Cards then you should be straight.

There's no point in having any kind of character, then. No big bruisers, no agile monks, no fragile mages. Just empty shells with a sword. The game mechanics has to reflect the story. The deeper and more well executed your mechanics, the more involved the player will be in playing. If you're lazy and have crap mechanics, noone will want to play your game. Currently, you have no understanding of what an RPG is, thus you have crap mechanics. Stop that.

I just thought of something! the best way to gain EXP in the game will be to face a opponent with a low ATK # and use low MP ATK # cards to attack it and just keep healing it and keep healing yourself. You just have to have a lot of ether's to restore your MP.

And thus your game is broken. If you had more well thought out mechanics, you wouldn't have ripped off Final Fantasy 2, widely considered to have the worst level up mechanics of an rpg. And it's still better than what you're offering.

Really, will you stop thinking what you're doing is adequate and learn? Everyone can see that your rpg design is really poor. Like, it's some of the worst rpg stuff I've ever seen. You rip off Square Enix and take superficial elements and think that's an rpg.

No. No that is not an rpg. You have to look deeper otherwise you're going to churn out crap for the rest of your life and you'll get nowhere. Square Enix will laugh at your face and say "Man, this guy has no original ideas whatsoever! He's just regurgitating our stuff back at us!"

You will never create an rpg with your current mindset. You have no idea what an RPG is, and you whine and beg and blue sky all your fancy superficial ripped off ideas. You may think you're the bee's knees, but you're not getting it.


And until you stop salivating over Final Fantasy and learn what a real rpg is, you never will.

@ghost: I never knew it was that hard to make a Pokemon game.

Then this will blow your mind:
http://www.d20srd.org/

Left column only. In an RPG, designed to be calculated by humans, there's hundreds of hours of work balancing classes, magic, races, monsters, special abilities, magical items, and different environmental effects. And still it isn't 100% perfect.

The core is relatively simple, roll d20, add your modifiers. Is the result higher than the target number? Then you pass. Is it not? Then you fail. But the devil is in the details, and the conditions under which you have the modifiers.

And this is just basic, raw mechanics. Implementing them in a way that makes it fun for the player is a whole other level. RPGs are hard to make. They are hard. When they work, they're excellent. When they don't.... they suck worse than any other genre, because you lose cohesion over what's going on. At least a bad shooter plays like a shooter. A bad adventure game can still be completed, even with dead ends and walking deads et al. A bad platformer isn't fun, but is still technically a platformer and you can see it's flaws right there laid out at you. Bad jumping, bad collission detection etc etc.

A bad rpg? Poorly balanced or scaled or implemented? Is not a game at all.

I already know how to make a decent short RPG. I think I will survive if I just build off what I know now.

So far you haven't made an RPG. You've made visual techdemos that superficially look like RPGs. Do you know how RPGs work? Like, could you write down what each stat does and what bearing it has on the battle system? There's a lot more to them than "Turn based, people's numbers gets reduced each turn". Do you know how an rpg plays, behind the scenes? Without this knowledge, you're not making a game.

AGS is more than capable of creating an RPG. You could implement Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons, GURPS, or even FATE or FUDGE into AGS and have a workable RPG system without breaking your back on complex programming (so long as you don't have a grid system). It might take a while, but it's possible, and I can think of several ways to do it.

I don't think you know how RPGs work, otherwise you wouldn't be asking so broad a question. You don't need C++ or XNA or any kind of fancy thing to create what you need. You need the right knowledge, and that knowledge can only be attained by studying the progenitors of CRPGs, not the CRPGs themselves. Don't be arrogant in thinking you know everything you need to know - you have only scratched the surface of RPGs, you must go deeper!

Doing an RPG without the right knowledge is like making a war film without knowing anything about wars except for "Saving Private Ryan". You don't create a good war film, you just create a shallow, bastardised imitation of "Saving Private Ryan".

RPGs are one of the most complex game types you can create, and if it isn't done correctly or in a consistent, balanced way, you end up with an unplayable mess.

Forget limit breaks, forget fancy levelling up skills, forget licences, forget fancy job systems and summoning and everything you've played from those thrice damned Square Enix titles.

Just find a tabletop RPG, and play it. Read the rulebook, and transfer the knowledge to AGS. It'll give you all the math you need, crystal clear in black and white, with initiative and combat resolution all laid out for you.
I recommend:
http://www.theredboxblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/dd-bbox.jpg
Since it's incredibly basic. Incredibly. Someone else might suggest a more modern one that's more streamlined, but this is where RPGs began, really. It's the base of Final Fantasy. It's the Ur-RPG.

Until you know this, and how RPGs evolved from this, you know nothing about RPGs. And don't contradict me, since the most successful RPGs have built upon tabletop roleplaying knowledge. Even your Final Fantasy. This is indisputable.

Sure, you can design an RPG if you want. Just know what an rpg is before you start.