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Language is a tricky thing. I'm kind of like Stupot's teacher insofar as I have a degree in Japanese Linguistics from a relatively well known university for Linguistics in Japan. In general, the linguists who have mastered a language as a second are actually far more qualified to teach about the language than native speakers, even though natives are more likely to be accepted because they've been speaking the language themselves for their entire lives (usually). This isn't to say that it's always the case - a lot of the time any jackass with a degree can get the job because they're called for - It's duly the case for English in the rest of the non-English speaking world.

What you should expect to see is the people who have gone through the process of language learning (as opposed to aqcuisition) will have a much more solid grasp of the grammar and its structures because they have had a point in their lives that they are forced to think of the language in terms of quantifiable rules, and are more likely going to be able to break down a language into its base parts. A native speaker, on the other hand, will be forced to take a skill that they already have and try to break it down into segments, which is a much more difficult task because we're faced with our own language issues and have trouble looking at something that seems 'natural' from a detached standpoint.

An ideal setup would be one person who has taken the time to master the language through tertiary means, and another who is a native speaker, so that you have a solid theory base as well as someone who has the 'clout' for being a native, who can give you the colloquialisms, and teach you how to speak incorrectly, correctly.

I have a feeling that your teacher has a language block, so to speak - possibly even a very mild type of paraphasia that screws up their listening/language reproduction. They can't tell that they're saying it wrong, and may think that they're hearing one thing that means another - it's the only reason I can really think of that would lead them to believe 'norse' has a 'D' in it.

If you really want to take a shortcut because animating is time-consuming, people are likely to notice, but you can use the existing z-axis lines to represent the top of your bookshelf in each frame. They're relatively evenly spaced, so it should fit.

You'll still have to redraw the faces of the books, but that shouldn't be hard at all. Besides, animating isn't an easy task and the more hard work you put in, the more people are going to appreciate the finished product. Of course - I'm kind of an extremist when it comes to trying to animate things convincingly.

Since you weren't really asking for anatomy questions, I'll leave any of those aside (not that there's much to be said, mostly just dynamic posing, sort of things). I'd say the largest issue you have is a whole lot more colors in your palette than you really need. Especially for the character that's using mostly blue/green tones to the right, your color count is up around 20 right now, when it could very easily be reduced to around 12.

Also, though it's not a huge issue, you could probably simplify the shading a bit in places using, perhaps, a top-down light source, which will make it much easier to animate in the long-run and probably help to alleviate some of the issues with shading.

And regarding the Firefox bilinear filtering issue - it's actually becoming a big problem for pixel artists, because it's slowly becoming a standard. I actually wrote a blog about it a few weeks back here, if you want to hear my own personal opinion on it. Basically, it's an issue caused by the mozilla team implementing an image processing filter developed by cairo graphics that smooths images using bilinear filtering when rescaled. It helps a lot of images when scaled down, but when scaling up, it can cause images to appear blurred (at least when you expect to see the pixels up close and personal).

Fortunately, it looks like the problem is very close to being resolved. You can keep an eye on the actual 'bug' itself on bugzilla via this link here, if you're interested. It's seen a lot of action recently, and it looks like it should be fixed relatively soon.

Until then, I'd suggest backing up your favorites and downgrading to Firefox 2 (which is what I did), or using a browser that doesn't support bilinear filtering yet, like Opera or Internet Explorer.

Why, it's the Hodzinsky family, of course! Just one of numerous references to the original. Not that they were really explained in the original either.

Hi, rbaleksandar, and thanks for playing.

For some reason, the random number generator likes to focus on one thing in sequence. I'm not really sure how the algorithm works, but I assure you, you can catch hats, boots and fish. While testing, I once had boots come up six times in a row (That's what inspired me to put in the 'Isn't it annoying when you keep getting the same item over and over' quote in the game). At an early point in the game, you had twice as much chance to catch a boot than anything else, so I'm glad I decided to even the odds.

What you catch is entirely randomized, so that can happen. And with only 3 items available to catch at the moment, it tends to get a bit monotonous. I'm already working on a deluxe version of the game which will have a much more varied list of things that you can haul up out of the water there.

I'm really glad you like the animation. Since the game's a little light on content right now, I wanted to go all-out in the graphical department, in true modern remake fashion (Pretty, but doesn't do much to improve on the original concept) - I put in a good number of hours getting those drawn up.

And Leon - also, thanks a whole lot for playing, and rest assured, the 'random events' will happen. I just didn't have enough time to get anything implemented for the MAGS build. I'm surprised you say you 'missed the remarks', since all of the original content was basically left intact, with one or two small tweaks here and there. I do admit my own sense of humor tends to lean more to the 'dry wit' end of the scale than just nonsense. I probably didn't catch Scid's characterization 100%.

Seems more Shadowrun-esque to me. I'd have to say that Kastchey was definitely on the right track. Depending on the area you intend to have the sprite in, you could go for a back-lit type of shading scheme, or something similar to what you already have, if not a bit more directional. At the moment, your anatomy is somewhat off, unless you're going for a more cartoony "Lauchpad McQuack" sort of look, in which case you may actually want to vary the width of the torso and legs even more.

If you'd like, I can certainly offer a few different light schemes, and how they'd play on your character.

[Edit:]

Almost done with mine, Klaus.

I just need another few hours. 24 should be far more than enough.

Edit: Done!

Man, I was telling myself I was just a hair away from done all of 12 hours ago, but it's finally finished. Apologies for the late entry, and even though it looks like the contest is going to default to me, I really hope people enjoy the game.



Download Red Flagg: Don't Call me Blue (Redux) Here!

How to play:
The game uses a relatively Standard Sierra-esque interface.
- Walk
- Look
- Talk
- Interact
- Wait

To start fishing, just have a seat on your cushion, grab some bait from the bait bucket and click 'interact' on the water! To check what you have in your inventory, click on your cooler while sitting down.

What still needs to be done:

• Music/Sound (Right now, it's 100% silent)
  
• Custom Font (Because basically everything else is going to be customized
  
• Customized/largely gutted GUI (There're a lot of things left over from the default GUI that need to be taken out or replaced)
  
• More things to fish from the lake! (Currently, there are only 3 objects you can fish out, but I am planning on expanding in a big way)
  
• Other fun secrets! (The world is pretty quiet at the moment. I intend to bring the old lake back to life)
  
• The house (Maybe? If it seems necessary)
  
• More minigame-esque interaction (Interaction is currently prety bare-bones. I'd like to expand)
  

Edit 2: Changed download link, previously had Debug enabled.

Okey-dokey, just to let anyone who cares know, I am officially in, and expect to finish on time. I've been working 'round the clock. I just hope there's some competition!

[Edit:]

I suddenly had a rush of inspiration, and am interested in participating, but I'd like to take a look at Red Flagg. I know - very short timeframe, but I think I can pull it off as a one room game. The Bicycles for Slugs mirror doesn't seem to work, sadly. Can anyone either mirror the file, or send it to me via e-mail?

Edit: Whoops! Okay, I totally missed that. That's what I get for deciding to make a game at 3:00am in the morning. Alrighty, I'll get right on it - thanks tons, Leon.

And you don't need to go with something specifically 'cool' sounding either, all things considered - a lot of the time that just backfires. Just work out something that fits with your development team. Sierra (though a cool word) was based in an area of california near Yosemite National park (Which is consequentially also the reason for the Yosemite spinoff game group of Sierra back in the day), and Half Dome is a very easily recognizable geographic landmark in Yosemite, so they choose to stylize an image of Half Dome for their logo.

You can easily name your studio or dev group based off of their geography, as in the above example. In my case, my dev group for an as-of-yet not widely spoken of game title is "Caffeine Zombie". Primarily because my team work late, staying awake with copious amounts of coffee/tea/other caffeinated drinks. Our logo is a stylized image of a hand holding a coffee mug, bursting out of a grave.

There are plenty of things that you can factor in to make an interesting group name.

10 ) Nu:Tone - Brave Nu World
9 ) Clazziquai Project - Pinch Your Soul
8 ) C-Mon & Kypski - Vinyl Voodoo
7 ) Hybrid - Morning Sci-Fi
6 ) Amon Tobin - Supermodified
5 ) C-Mon & Kypski - Where the Wild Things Are
4 ) Ferry Corsten - L.E.F.
3 ) The Herbaliser - Something Wicked This Way Comes
2 ) The Herbaliser - Blow Your Headphones
1 ) C-Mon & Kypski - Static Traveler

I know the list is a little top-heavy with C-Mon & Kypski and The Herbaliser, which edged out a lot of good albums, but I guess when you have to make a decision, some good music gets pushed out. I've also notice that my Top 10 is densely populated with Ninjatune label music.

For my own story work, I don't really have much by way of a special program I use to organize my notes. A lot of it is developed free-form, though this isn't to say that I don't organize things at all. When developing a plot, I like to think of it cinematically - an opening, an ending, and a middle part - and generally I like to start with the ending so that I know what elements need to be present during the course of the game in order for it to crescendo to the point that I intend.

Because of the linear nature of Adventure games, it's not extremely hard to go that route - Monkey Island could've been written as a screenplay, and it still would've worked. So generally I build a story from the edges inward. For me, it's extremely important to know the characterization and motivations of each, individual character that will be in the story, and how they react to one another. I do most of this in my head, but I can certainly see the benefit of creating flow charts, though they tend to get a little complicated if there's a lot of people and complicated interactions.

Aside from the beginning/end and important characters, I try to work out a handful of key events during the game that should lead to the penultimate event. They can be relatively simple things, depending on the complexity of the game, but once I have those in there, I like to keep them 'floating', which gives the semblance of non-linearity. After that, it's a matter of working out smaller events surrounding each key event, which can be tied in with each other to create more complexity as necessary.

I'm sure a lot of this could be worked out through event tree charts.

As far as dialogue is concerned, I generally make things up on the fly. There are a lot of important topics that need to be covered in the game, which are governed by the individual events, so I'll often consider what the characters involved in an event would have to say about what's going on, and work around it that way (Which is another reason why I put a high stress on individual character personality and so on at the beginning of the writing process).

I think it looks splendid. My main concern with this image would be its functionality in-game, unless you intended to draw separate sprites for different angles. Because of the extremely close vanishing points you've got, the resulting fish-eye effect is going to mean that at the bottom of the image (where your path is), is going to need nearly a 'top-down' sprite, where you're going to need a 45 degree or so image when standing near the chair, and a side-on one for the balcony.

Now, if this image is to be used for a cutscene with sprites drawn specifically for the image, it'll look great. All-in-all, I think it's really well composed, and though I agree with Kidney Failure that the image is somewhat 'washed out' color-wise, I honestly don't think it hurts the image at all. Though by and large it's contingent on what kind of mood you're trying to set.

There are a lot of things that are going to factor in to whether people are going to be willing to pay for a product or not. There are examples of both successes and failures to achieve this goal coming out of our community.

The first thing that you're likely to come across is the cost of your product - its implied value, if you will. As a developer, of course, we know that there's a whole lot of work that goes into these projects, time, energy and our own personal resources that may very well cause us to believe that a product is worth more than many consumers would be willing to pay for. In today's game market (casual and otherwise), the general trend is towards focusing on accessibility and total play value (initial experience, replay value, total amount of time that someone is willing to spend on the game itself).

As the adventure game is a by and large niche genre now, it's harder to really market them to a wide audience. We have had the benefit of companies like Telltale bringing them slightly back into the mainstream with releases like Sam & Max and the Homestar Runner (Strong Bad) games, but retro itself is a dubious selling point - these commercial releases are reasonably sized and utilize relatively newer technology.

I'm not sure, honestly, how much people are really going to pay for something. If it's going by the episodic format that seems to be cropping up a whole lot recently, think somewhere in the range of $5 USD, and a full length game probably is going to suffer if charging more than $20 USD. This is my own opinion, of course, and it may be very useful to hear from people like Dave Gilbert and the Herculean Effort guys to get an insight into the real current market.

To answer each of your criterion as listed in the first post, I'd say you want a game that people 'speedrunning' would play for at least half an hour, perhaps longer. But content preceeds length, of course - a well-written story that is engaging even in a short period of time, may well still be worth it.

For GUI usability, this is actually a slightly complicated issue. In the hardcore adventure gaming community (i.e. us), people are very picky about the GUI. Intuitive is hard to accomplish, and you're often bound to run into people who complain about your interface no matter how you slice it. The general wish is to be able to innovate - reinvent the wheel and have something that's both easy and fun to use, but it's often the case that people will get frustrated with an alien new control scheme, so I would suggest the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid). For this very reason, with my current project, Kuma Story, I developed the user interface to include only 2 interactions: Move & Interact. This does mean that I can't be as creative (in a manner of speaking) with descriptions or dialogue, since I'm not including any, but it will be more accessible to non-adventure-gamers.

Quality of Audio/Video: Of course, the nicer the better - AGS has limitations (It's not a 3D engine), so you're likely not going to be making another Sam & Max: Freelance Police (though 'Hit The Road' is a possibility). But very well drawn high resolution graphics are a possibility (and likely to get the best reception). That said, people do pay for games that still have retro, low-res graphics. I can't vouch for it, but I imagine that if the story's good enough, even ultra-retro EGA graphics could be viable. Your sound should match your video, though. It wouldn't feel right to have a beautifully rendered orchestral soundtrack on a game that looked like the original release of King's Quest 1.

Voice acting, I honestly don't think is a big deal. Sure, it's nice, but there are times when it will work against you. Good voice acting can give more incentive to buy, but bad voice acting makes an otherwise polished game feel bad. If you're going to take the voice acting route, make sure that your actors all do good jobs, are convincing, record quality audio (No hissing, no pops) and have consistent quality in all audio. Otherwise it starts to sound messy. The human brain has a much easier time processing disjointed visual than audio - it's like watching a TV with a blurry or slightly staticky screen versus a TV with sound cut-outs. Sound makes something nearly unwatchable.

Story is very subjective, and probably the hardest really to quantify. The only suggestion I can give you there is to think it through very deeply, make sure you have a cohesive plot, few if any plot holes, a story that people would be interested in learning about, and be sure to have others read through your work and critique it. Because an extra set of eyes and ears will always catch things that you don't.

I was thinking I hadn't seen you around in a while. Actually, I checked Yeki a few months back and it looked like the site went through a complete overhaul, and couldn't tell if it was still related to you or not. Online Casino and a bunch of really ambiguous descriptions of what PC Games and online games are... though I might have just had bad timing. Nope. Looks like it's still like that. You still running Yeki, or did it get snatched up by someone else?

Welcome back, good to see that we can finally reset the timer again. You missed... Something, I'm sure. I've been here and I can barely remember.

I'm in, Darth, if you're still accepting volunteers.

Damn you kids make me feel old. I'm creeping up on 30 already.

And yeah, I was actually harkening back to good ol' FlukeBlake's first few days of AGS in either this thread or the other most recent 'Sorry I got off on the wrong foot' apology thread (Funny how much stuff is doubling up recently). I find it almost odd to think of myself as one of the 'older' crowd on the forum - not just in terms of how long I've been on the forum, but just born way back in the days when the Vic 20 was actually taken seriously as a home computer.

And Oliwerko - you didn't miss much; Cindy Lauper, MC Hammer, big hair, the mullet, hot pink nylon windbreakers, He-Man, GI Joe and Captain N: The Game Master.

Besides, what does it matter what religion other people are? Most religions I know preach tolerance (regardless of whether it's widely practiced or not), so you shouldn't mind being on the same forum regardless of what faith, or non-faith as it may be, the other users are. Honestly I really don't care, nor do I even want to know what religion most of the other folks here are - it's irrelevant.

What brings us together as a community is not religion, but our mutual love of adventure games and game creation (Though the worship of CJ here is certainly bordering on 'false idolhood'). People who want to share their religions should certainly feel free to do so, so long as it doesn't impede other users' enjoyment of things, but let them tell you, instead of asking them.

As SSH mentioned, if you're dead-set on figuring out who among us are of the same faith as you, why don't you make a game about christianity? Or one that teaches a moral lesson? Dave Gilbert and the folks at Wadjet Eye certainly proved that it can be done tastefully and interestingly for people even outside of Judaism.

It's a great pleasure to have people on our forum from all races and faiths - we're an awesome and friendly little group of people. You're welcome on the forums, just spend some time getting comfortable here - post in some other threads, enjoy some ongoing conversations and get a feel for our community. And try making an adventure game!

Welcome again to the forums, then, Alex.

I think all of us have had some down points in our lives, and sometimes that comes out in the way that we interact with others. Our positive and negative traits are amplified by the anonymity of the internet, but honestly, I don't think anyone's going to hold it against you, whether they know what's been happening in your life or not. Truth be told, a lot of our prolific and respected forum members here started out on the wrong foot. The nice thing about the AGS community is that people here are forgiving, and will give you a chance to 'redeem yourself', if there's any particular amount of redemption you think needs to be had.

I never personally noticed anything particularly untoward about your posts. I might have missed the posts that you're referring to, or maybe I just have a much longer fuse, living in a largely xenophobic and oftentimes offensive country. Regardless, if you've offended anyone, or if you think you've wronged anybody on the forums, just make up for it by being a cooler cat going forward.

Actions speak louder than words, right?

And hey, for whatever gravity the textualized wishes of some random dude probably thousands of miles away broadcast over the internet holds, I hope all goes well for you, your family, and your future. AGS has been an outlet for me in a pretty trying time myself - we all need a creative outlet, and what better than game design to do it?

Good stuff, Jakerpot,

It's coming along nicely, and you seem to be grasping the single vanishing point linear perspective technique much better now. There are minor issues in the depth of your 'stacked' boxes, but they aren't glaring, so I think you can probably survive without having to tweak them too much. If you do want to work out early on how to make sure one element isn't going too far back and messing up your perspective, I'd actually suggest working up from the ground, using the corner of the floor as a guideline, then doing your vertical lines on each box and other objects sidled up against the walls.

It's by no means a commonly accepted art term, but I refer to the objects I make in 2D space within the confines of mock-3D (in linear perspective) as being within 'bounding boxes'. Reckoning back to my days of level building in Quake way-back-when. A 'bounding box' is a cube around a physical object that sets the limits of its clipping planes. So by building a bounding box around an object in your 2D room using the walls as guidelines, you'll be able to make sure that nothing looks like it's going too far up, down, back, forth, left or right and invading another object's personal space.

One thing I'd suggest, actually, is getting your base colors down earlier on, instead of doing a full b/w outline of everything - otherwise it's going to be a nightmare to clean up all those black lines - unless you're planning on having black outlines around everything in the game.

As it is so far, the background seems to be coming along nicely. I'm looking forward to seeing it continue to grow.