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Awesomesauce.com!

If you haven't, you have to have Until I have you.  Cause then at least you have it. 

One can never have enough kickass cyberpunk platformers,

--said everyone, always.

Thanks for the suggestion. 

The way I've done it so far is to make an invisible clone of the character, and then position the invisible clone all the way to the left of the screen to make sure the portrait shows up on the left side of the screen.  This works with "Portraits based on character position" setting anyway.  Mainly the issue is there are a few times where a portraits takes up screen real estate that needs to be seen while the char is talking (object they're talking about, other char, etc.)

Is there a way to change the portrait location of Sierra-style portraits in-game?  For example, if the game at the start is set to show Sierra portraits "Based On Character Position" would it be possible to force the portraits to appear on the left side of the screen for a certain dialog?

Thanks

Working on future telephony and assorted gadgetry.  I need to stop watching The Expanse or every manufactured object is going to turn out to be transparent and octagonal.



CARBON: "Damn, it's got a quantral-encphalograph lock.  The only way to open this phone is by brain-scan."
SIX BILLION DOLLAR BALLER: "Easy peasy, dog.  We just scoop up the doctor's brain jello, stuff it back in him brainpan like Thanksgiving turkey, then scan his head."
CARBON: "A.) 'That's flakkin' disgusting.  B.) The brain needs to be in its *original* condition, not a bunch of scrambled eggs.  And most importantly, C.) The consciousness scan requires you be alive and awake and 'conscious', since the scanner reads electrical brain activity."

Also, I'll take my 20% royalties, Apple, when this comes out on the i-Thing 8. 

This would seem to be the easiest topic of all time, given that anything can be an interest, right?

WRONG!!!

"What is your name?"

"Random AGS Member!"

"What is your quest?"

"To enter the Fortnightly Writing Thing!"

"What are you interested in?"

"The airspeeds of unladen swallows.  Wait, no, Assyrian Capitols-  AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! (fall in pit)"


(By the way, this is my entry, entitled, "Excessive Self-Regulation". ) 

So perhaps the lesson is, "Don't do anything too original, until you've got the market cornered, or you have massively wealthy or well-connected angel investors / relatives and can afford to lose money."

I definitely struggle with degree of genrefication and what hashtags I'm going to tack on to Neofeud when shooting tweets out, put in the synopsis.  If you go too genre, you risk blending into the herd, but at least some people might actually take a look at your thing cause it has the word 'cyberpunk' or 'steampunk' or 'it's like Monkey Island but on Mars' or something people recognize.  If you go really original, try to be an auteur and do some setting or something never done before, you either have to have CRAZY good and massive marketing and distribution to ensure that it's played by more than a handful of roarin 20's wonks, or professional economists, who *happen* to also be adventure gamers.  And, the game has to be mindblowingly, literally *mindblowingly* good.  You have to blow people's brain matter out of it's current configuration, and restructure their noodle to account for this brand new "Way of doing things".  You do that, and people fall in love with it, you sell like crazy, become a phenomenon, a legend, get asked to all the important events, lifetime achievement awards, etc..  That's how William Gibson *created* the entire genre of cyberpunk, by blowing everyone's mind with Neuromancer, winning the Triple Crown of the Hugo, Phillip K Dick, and Nebula awards.  Then Shadowrun borrowed the nuyen, the mohawks trenchcoats and 'hackboxes' and said, 'it's cyberpunk, but with elves!'

If you meet those requirements, maybe you pull a John Romero.  Doom was insanely good, and ID software got the word out, and the next year, the entire genre of 1st person shooter became a thing, with copycats turning out left and right.  Now you can tag stuff with, "First-person shooter, demons" or whatever and at least some people will find and play your thing.  It won't be as good as Doom, but they just want more of that awesome thing they had when they were 14 or whatever.  If it IS actually a good game, and does something new, that's a bonus!

Now, if you don't want to be rich and famous and have a gulfstream and all that, and you are trying to run a stable small business as an indie game dev, it seems that you would want to think like a grocery store.  You want a steady supply chain bringing in nice, recognizable tomatoes.  Maybe those are your nice orangey post-apocalyptic games.  If your post-apocalyptic tomato is not recognizably post-apocalyptic (weird green color) then it might actually *taste* good, and it's just an heirloom, but when people are in your market, they're going to buy all the nice orangey, nuclear-apocalypse with dirt and rust and rag-swaddled protagonist tomatoes.  The green and purple tomatoes might not get sold, and you need that money to keep the lights on.  Then you have your nice dark, maybe a little blue-ish cyberpunk eggplants.  If it's not too dark and black helicopters and missing the trenchcoats, people might leave those pale eggplants in the eggplant pile, "Wait... something is wrong with this eggplant.  This cyberpunk doesn't have enough mohawks and post-industrial angsty programmers!"

In Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces the central premise of the book, which essentially involves corporate street-war where it's legal to speed, fire missiles at other cars, etc. only becomes legal because the son of someone really, really rich and important does it in a totally glorious, Fast-n-Furious way, and then what was illegal and frowned upon becomes not only legal but an entire sport and multi-billion dollar industry.

This translates, in a way, to anything that has to do with entertainment, especially in music, gaming and film.  You've got to play by the genre rules, unless you're either totally awesome or totally rich or related to Warren Buffet.

For OROW, Creamy and I made a game about quantum physics called Dislocation



The game I am presently working on, Neofeud, also involves a whole lot of mind-bending quantum physics, cosmology, consciousness science, and the like.



This craft, for example, is meant to be a form of 'quantech' device that utilizes consciousness itself, in particular the observer effect to affect the 'probability' of the wave-function collapse.  I can't go much more into detail without spoilering everyone with key plotpoints, but let's just say, I'm operating on your wavelength. 

The Artist, Re-Animated.

"The philosopher Jean Beaudrillard once said, 'The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice, and therefore intelligence'.  I was designed to be the portrait of the artist," --intentionally convoluted quote from the creepy dude.

If only I had a transhuman manticore/Hindu God to hammer out these animations.  Perhaps when I get the big tax refund.

Boss fight against him will be a #huesday digital arting-jam.  May the best pixel artist win.

Hehe, I can neither confirm nor deny this suggestions, sir. 

The in-game father of Artificial Intelligence and solver of the Hard Problem of Consciousness.  Oh, and the meaning of life, the universe, and also kicked time-travel in his sleep.

Of course, being reality and not Gary-Stu sci-fi happyland, Noah Goertzel lost his tenure, had all his research stolen from him by an asshat businessman, and had to take a public high school teaching job to make rent.  He may or may not be doing some "alternative economy" work in his off-hours to supplement his income.  And I'm not talking about driving uber.



He may or may not be distantly, in a galaxy far-far-away, related to Roy Batty.  Roy Batty and Christopher Walken secretly eloped and had a vat-baby.

I guess I could try voicing something but I have difficulty not sounding like either a gangster or a programmer.  So unless you have Ice Cube churning out Killer Apps in your game, you're outta luck. 

I can also do a rather convincing Billy Corgan impression, though.

Also, Athena looks cool, real stompy!

Looks great!

Is this connected to the X-Files by any chance?

This looks right up my alley!  Well, everyone's alley, but hey!

I unfortunately will probably just end up voting but encourage everyone to take as many drugs as possible.  I mean, enter the competition! 

Thanks Danvzare. 

I try my best to get everything up to the standard of that animation.

Thanks for taking the time to do the overpaint!  I'll consider those ideas if I go back and redo this. 

There was no stick figure underneath, although I did get a reference animation sheet of a woman walking in high heels.

I was thinking about more boob physics but I want to avoid #socialjusticecrusades against the sexualization of female characters.  She should be pretty, because she is royalty and a public figure, but also she should be taken seriously, because she can have your head removed / area code nuked at whim.  Perhaps I'll have a secret Konami cheat code to unlock bounciness that you only get by pre-ordering and Kickstarting at the $100 level. 

Also thanks Blondbraid and Cassie for the input.  I should maybe put her on all the Neofeud PR and stuff. 

Really awesome style, with the black-n-white graininess at a resolution below the pixel art itself.  Never seen that technique before!

Good luck with this!

Here's the princess walking.  Man this took three days!  I have no idea how to animate complex gowns / flowing clothing.

Thanks Cassie, stay tuned for the new build!



Spent all weekend on this and boy are my eyes tired!

Junkyard revolution!

Quick update on progress: I am going to be officially rescheduling the release of Neofeud to "TBA" given my present situation with angel-investors flocking in to help fund the project.  My Neofeudal patrons have enabled an extension of development beyond March 2016, and so I will be increasing not only the total length of the game, but the completeness and buglessness, and general goodness of Neofeud with the added time.

At 1366 resolution, everything takes at least twice as long to build, but hopefully, the end-product will be exponentially as epic, in that Silver-Screen sense.  Not to blow my own golden trumpet but I think Neofeud does have that Star Wars / Blade Runner "We have never scene this before" edge to it, coupled with a Breaking-Bad kick-to-the-head storyline, and I think it needs that extra hundreds, thousand hours of love to reach its full potential.

Go big or go home!

You gotta love them trailers into submission!

Great sun rays there.  Definitely gives everything some depth.