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This looks beautiful in every single way. Please finish this. And don't hold back on the brutality. Just don't. Don't worry about what others want. Make the game you would want to play or make.

Really, really fabulous work.

I just randomly got this idea in my head today. What about Homeward Bound: The Adventure Game.

[no, I am not making this]

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate E.T. on the Atari 2600 since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for E.T. on the Atari 2600 at this micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate. 

Any horror, sci-fi, or adventure film, really. I have a hard time figuring out what wouldn't work. All it takes is a little imagination.

I'll say E.T. as an example, just because that game has such a rocky relationship with video games. An adventure game would be perfect for it.

Gorgeous!

You have a weird view of having fun there. I personally hate going to a restore point, especially when I don't know what happened and I loathe restarting a game because of a dead end, maybe if there's some auto-save, that might be ok, but otherwise, it's just becomes work and not fun.

Oh, you'll get no argument from me on the fact that I probably have a strange sense of fun, but I think things like this are often looked at through the eyes of someone who can only remember the frustration and not the reward on solving the correct path. Also, I'm definitely not saying every game has to be this difficult, or that games that aren't are broken and bad. I'm simply saying I prefer them that difficult. As I said before, sometimes memorability is better than difficulty.

Let's not turn this into another debate about walking deads (even if your maze metaphor is pretty crap because you can work your way back from a dead end in a maze butyouknowyeah).

Yeah, that's called restoring a save game.   You'll not put egg on my face, Eggie!

Seriously though, working your way back from a dead end in a maze is cheating unless you start over from the beginning in my opinion. In an adventure game, the only way to work your way back from a dead end should be restoring a save game or restarting.

But that's actually almost as limiting - you have to be at the right location at the right time, you have to try different ways because you die...all the time you have to repeat your actions or save often, but even if you save you're not exempt from a dead end, nor are you ever aware that you actually are at a dead end. Instead of not being able to do much, you are able to do lots of things but are not really allowed if you want to finish the game and see what happens and see new puzzles...as I write this, I think it's actually worse than "limiting" gameplay.  

The other thing where you have like 9 verbs/commands to choose is tempting at first because it's kind of "realistic", but in reality you have to do 2 clicks for EVERY action you want to do, even worse if you want to try more than one inventory item, exponentially growing if you want to try multiple verbs with multiple objects.

Any experienced adventure gamer should be looking for dead ends or possible ways to lose in an unfamiliar game. Mazes have dead ends, and solving them requires finding the route that goes from one end to the other. So I compare adventure games to mazes with obstacles in the right path. A maze without dead ends would be a straight line. One click, okay two click games are really, to me, like a maze with less or no dead ends and only obstacles, making it incredibly linear and easy. I also consider dying a dead end, btw. There's no such thing as a non-limiting adventure game, because even mazes are limiting no matter how difficult they are. There are just easy adventure games, and hard adventure games, and no matter what the open-endedness comes to a halt at a point, and most adventure games have an end. And I prefer hard adventure games, hell, even mindnumbing tear-your-hair out ones. It's possible to make an open-ended adventure game I guess, but by the time you solved all the puzzles, you'd just be wandering around doing basic stuff like looking at that guy again or talking to that dragon and re-reading the dialog options you already exhausted. Well, I guess there could be more to exploring it all after the main story, but adventure games are more fun to me when they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a more open, but not open-ended, approach to getting through it.

You could also have an adventure game like a maze that has obstacles in the right path and obstacles in the wrong path as well, but THAT I would consider bullshit design because the game had you to do a bunch of work in a puzzle designed to send you to a dead end, and that would piss anyone off. It's like a puzzle where you do something difficult only for the outcome to be to lose all of your inventory for good.

EDIT: Well, okay, you can have dead ends in two click games, and the amount of verbs or a parser only affects the difficulty and amount of things you can choose, not so much dead ends, but my comparison on mazes and adventure games still stands.

EDIT EDIT: I think any dead ends should be intentional though, and unintentional ones are also bullshit. Keeping gameplay balanced is also important.

I don't like one click interaction with games. Too linear. Eventually you can just click on everything until every puzzle is solved without having to really think about the progression, your options, and what you can and can't do. Some games managed to still get away with difficult puzzles with it, but most of the time I don't like it. That said, I'm open to new methods of playing adventure games. I'm a huge fan of parsers, especially difficult ones in text adventures where you have to be more specific. I like huge difficulty. I like getting stuck. I like trial and error. I like the long list of verbs in early Lucasarts games. I really don't share vincetwelve and theo's opinions at all. I get the immersion thing, but I never had a problem with that in adventure games. I want to play a damn game, not a damn movie. Telltale lost me after they started simplifying things too much. Now you can't even explore outside boundaries in their damn game. I mean, boundaries are good, but not when they confine you to the space of a puzzle or item giving you no choice but getting every puzzle right immediately. No, the Sierra method of game design which requires trial and error and has dead ends and deaths and ways to get stuck, and the same with text adventures, are the kinds of adventures I like the most.

Not every puzzle has to be difficult though. Sometimes memorability is better than difficulty, and that's what makes Lucasarts' and Revolution games and games like the Journey Down or Legend of Kyrandia great. They're not blister your brain difficult, with the exception of Maniac Mansion and The Dig, but they're lovely and memorable. Actually, I think The Dig was a one click interface, but I can't remember. If it was, it's a rare instance for me where it was hard as nails, and incredible in its design, and really underrated, but still used a really simple interface.

I've had so many canned projects or projects I've given up on in the past before I gained more responsibility, talent, experience, and the urge to see things through. I have enough mistakes in my past to be really ashamed of myself, but I don't let that drag me down, and I keep trying to improve myself. I'm finally at a stage in my life where I will finish something no matter what, and I will not slack off. There are so many ideas for adventure games that I have or series I'd love to write into an adventure game that it's unreal, because I love the genre so much. It actually surprises me that the two projects I want to do the most out of all of the ones I've thought of are original ideas, because there are so many shows like MacGyver or Futurama I'd love to translate into an adventure game.

BTW, Joseph, your Simpsons template is amazing. I really feel like it should be used by SOMEBODY. Maybe after Draculator II is finished, that could become the next AGS Community project. I feel like the Simpsons would work better the more people work on it.

I'm personally anticipating A Night At Camp Ravenwood. The guy working on that looks like a right genius and all that.

Wretcher (my #1)
Space Quest 2 VGA
The Journey of Iesir
Night of the Meteor
Draculator II
Timeless Journey
My Burden To Keep
Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth (Where is it Mark? WHERE!?)
Rise of the Hidden Sun
The Forgotten Element
Legend of the Lost Lagoon (If there was any project I would take on and finish for someone so it would be done, it's this)
Ben Jordan Case 8
The Legend of Leitor's Edge
Primordia
Venator
Raiders of the Lost Ark

Hey, congratulations. This is a fantastic idea. I can't wait to see this make progress.

Teasing? Would I tease you guys about what could possibly be within those spooky buildings, or what a marshmallow could be used for? I wouldn't do that.

Hah, spelling fail!

I don't know what you're talking about. 

Just giving an update. I should give updates more often. Progress is steady, although I do get lazy from time to time. The game's still being made, though. That's something that'll never change, and it'll definitely not take as long to make as Duke Nukem Forever. HELL NO. Anyway, this is a new scene to show off, just to show the project is far from dead.

That's interesting, I just got a quote from Dualnames saying almost the exact same thing.  So let's all do it collaboratively, if everyone is interested.

I'm fine with that, although Dual probably knows more about the game's story than I do, as I haven't read up on that.

It all comes down to Merrick's character, basically.  Is he a mean guy who will do whatever it takes to escape and survive, or basically a nice guy who just happens to be a vampire and therefore has certain uncontrollable urges to bite people?  I would lean towards the latter (which would definitely make the game more light-hearted).  Once you've taken that step the nature of the exchange between the scientists and Merrick becomes more comical.  Maybe we can even have one get up on a cabinet and try to beat Merrick off with a broom....

The broom idea is funny. I definitely like it. So what I need to know-

The basics that MUST be communicated regardless:

1) There is a solar powered probe they have been working on

What is this probe, why are they working on it, how did it get broken, why does it need fixing, and how is it fixed, or do we need to write that ourselves? If the info is already thought up, that's fine, but if we need to write it, that's fine too.

5) Fantastic opportunity for a bit of back-story....

Bring me up to speed on the back story so far.

This is basically a proof of concept mockup of a game project I thought up a few years back, and just haven't done anything with yet, although I plan to someday. I realize that the sprite is off, but it was basically a sprite I cobbled together to show how the game would work. Basically, it wouldn't be run on verbs or verb coins or verb icons or parsers, which is why you don't see any in the screen. I was hoping to develop something a little more contextual. I've done plenty of work on the game's story, just none on the game, but this is basically the first thing I've ever released of it-

Sure, I'd love to claim the dialog exchange between Merrick and the scientists when he bites them. I'd love to try my hand at it. I just need context, and to know what exactly I need to write, and what they might discuss.

I actually like yours more than mine. Gives off more of an impression of effort.

If the crash and boom screens aren't already done, here's a couple I threw together from the game's palette.




I might also be interested in writing the exchange between the scientists and Merrick, but I need to kind of know the context and what it should consist of. Why am I interested? Because I really want to see the project succeed!

As far as tone, that's a tough one. I think comedy should be good, but there should be moments where the game takes itself seriously to develop the characters. That can be done in a short game as well. It depends on how zany you want to go. I wouldn't be afraid of really dark humor as well. It fits with vampires and it seems like there already is some dark humor to the game. As far as musical atmosphere, or some things that might give some good inspiration, um, lessee-

For music, I recommend instruments like the ones used in this song. Ignore the actual singing, although some sort of slow lyric-less singing would increase the eerieness. It's very slow, very seductive, very eerie, and very vampiric, ignoring the actual singing.

Tabata is right. Her jiggling around looks really unnatural, like she's stuffed something in her bra, or she has a dong on her chest. Well, I apologize. That's disgusting, but still, it looks really unnatural for someone with that build to have any jiggle.