Messages

[lot]

I think what Evil's trying to say is that there is already an existing forum thread for advertising to start a team/asking for help with your game, which can be found here.

It's a big faux-pas on the AGS forums to post up something like this, since it's a mistake that a lot of people make when the stickies at the top of the forums aren't read. Go ahead and post on the above-linked thread, and hopefully someone will show up to help you out. This thread'll be locked by a moderator shortly, but don't take it personally. Welcome to the AGS forums, and hopefully your stay here will be a long and enjoyable one.

I made some levels and wrote a chapter for one of the "Gurus" books.

That's awesome, I own a copy of Tricks of the Doom Gurus, which I assume is the one you're talking about. The disc had a scratch when I finally got a hold of it, so my friend Mike and I had to do the 'Work, damn you!' chant over my 386 trying to get it to read. I should track that book down again. I was big on Doom before FPSes saturated the market, and used to make a lot of levels for it... Nothing good, mind you, except for a fully-featured Winnebago. Those were the days. Maybe once I scrape some of my other projects off my plate, I should try to actually make a proper mod for that baby...

Looks like no matter which way I go, I'm looking toward a life of exploration, and maybe some killing during the daytime. And Greg:

General Replicant Engineered for Gratification?
Hoo-hah! There's no shame in being a pleasure-bot.

Spoiler

FOMI can also be found here.

[close]

It's a pity that Scurvyliver Entertainment's FOMI series got the axe from Lucasarts. Copyright infringement is an ugly word.

When I'm in the US, I drink a lot of Root Beer - lots of IBC and Henry Weinhard's. When I'm in Japan, I usually drink a lot of this stuff called Amino Supli, which is basically like an amino suppliment sports drink that tastes great and horrible all at the same time. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I drink it and go 'Man, this stuff is bad', but just can't stop 'coz despite tasting bad, it appeals to me. I also totally agree with Kinoko, Calpis is great.

This link will take you to the entry for Mourir en Mer. I'm downloading it as I type, so the download does work at least right now. Also, if you're a Firefox user, AGA (I think) has created a plugin that allows you to search the AGS games database from the comfort of your own browser toolbar. It's really quite handy, and is also consequentially how I found the link. It even searches game descriptions, in case you can't quite remember the game's name. Searches for 'Larry Loader', 'Ruby' and 'Tweaker' haven't garnered any results, but you might be able to come up with something.

I have yet to search for a game I couldn't find, though I'm admittedly a lot newer to the AGS scene than you are. Good luck finding your games, and welcome back to the forums, for what it's worth.

I think these guys look great - For some reason they remind me of the members of Weezer. My guess is that it's the horn-rimmed glasses. Even though the sprites themselves are pretty small, they have a lot of personality. The biggest problem I could fathom with these two is that their lack of facial features in general aren't overly conducive to very expressive characters. Nonetheless, I wouldn't go so far as to say that's a necessity at all with these guys.

If anything, really, I'd say that the dark line on the rim of the ballcap of the guy to the right looks a little odd. The complete lack of concavity in their torsos make them look a little portly, but that (in a way) adds to the realism of it.

Overall, these are some pretty boss lo-res sprites. I'd like to see them in a game sometime.

I've found the same thing of webcomics - those that were once funny have mostly run out of ideas, and then there are many that just were never funny to begin with. I enjoy reading 8-bit Theatre for nostalgic value, but I have trouble reading it for long stretches. This means that whenever I miss a week or two, it takes a lot of resolve to go back and read all that I've missed (one problem with plot-based comics).

Penny Arcade is loved and hated by many, and I'm sure there's really no reason for me to even have linked it, since I'm willing to bet most if not all of you already know it. It's at least consistently readable.

Now, I'm not sure if anyone's read this one before, but I'm a big fan of Irritability. It makes fun of most of the things I enjoyed as a child and through into my adulthood, and I'd say it's worth a read. One of the few comics that I've continued reading since I started without lapse. This may not be saying much, since  Mike Woodson is very sporadic in his uploading of comics.

Kinoko, your friend's comic reminds me of "Happy Noodle Boy" for some reason, which (at least to me) is a good thing. Fun for all. And since Kinoko seems too modest to do it herself, I'll link The Katt's Lair, home of her comics, which I, at least, enjoy reading.

Edit: I almost forgot to include You Damn Kid, which I also enjoy reading from time to time.

[Pole Position]

For as long as I can remember, my Dad has had an old "TI Home Computer 99/4A". I remember back when I was about 4 getting Pole Position for my Dad for his birthday. He's long since stopped playing video games, but we had long, long hours of fun playing Alpiner (With that annoying and condescending lady that talked down to you whenever you made a mistake), Tunnels of Doom, Pirate Adventure, Parsec, Munch Man... Ah yes. I think I'm gonna get it out of its box and set it up here in my room.

We also had an Atari 2600, that my brother bought from one of his school friends for, like, 20 bucks. Back then, Snoopy and the Red Baron was state of the art, I tell you. We also grooved on Berzerk, ET... Yeah. But the one video game moment that I remember the most was back when I was about 8, and my family went to Disney World. I don't actually remember Disney World all that well (Except for Space Mountain, which was my first roller coaster ever), but we went to Toys 'R' Us and got an NES, with the Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge; hooking it up in the hotel room, and watching my Dad dying on the first goomba four or five times before he proclaimed: "There's nothing to do in this game but die". And the game that wins the award in me for the most fights started between my brother: Street Fighter 2 on the SNES, and all of it's thousands of remakes. We just couldn't play it without nearly coming to blows once one of us was trapped in a corner getting sweep kicked over and over again...

And I almost forgot to mention Commander Keen, which was the first game we had on our old 386. I found my Dad playing it in the computer room of our house one day after school, and after he turned the keyboard over to me, I was hooked. I sucked at it... but I was hooked.

Okay, so that's not 5, but 12. Oh well.

Right on. Good luck in your composition and remember that before you buy anything, if and when you eventually do, download a trial version and see if it fits your personal composing style before you actually make the investment unless you have a lot of disposable income, which most of us don't, yknow?

I was originally going to do a movie poster for The Adventures of Bayou Billy, but couldn't find a picture where Paul Hogan looked menacing enough, so you get this instead. I think Pleurghburg would make a really cool movie.
Stock photo background courtesy of "thedaft" at stock.xchng.

You say you've already used FruityLoops, which is a good step in the right direction. There are a number of great programs out there for composing music. I do all of my composition with Reason (My personal favorite). If you've already got FL studio (The software formerly known as FruityLoops), it's a good program, and the one I taught myself with before buying Reason. Also out there are Cakewalk, as you mentioned, and their product SONAR seems to be really worth it (My extremely talented colleague GeoffKhan composes with it).

The problem with the above, though, is that you'll have to be willing to shell out a good 300 dollars or more for these programs. They tend to be quite pricy, but it's worth the extra simoleans for the extra functionality. With one of said programs in hand, you may wish to venture also into the realm of Soundfonts, which can be obtained here and there on the web, at places like Sf2Midi or Soundfonts.it.

A cheaper alternative would be a straight Midi sequencer without so many of the bells and whistles, like Quartet x2, which I can't really say anything about, as I've never used it, but it's only 20 bucks, so it may be worth the investment. Way back in the day, AdLib sound cards used to come with a sequencer, though I can't quite remember the name. I had one in my old 386 when I was in Elementary/Junior High.

As far as free audio software, a quick look on the Big list of freeware programs thread yeilded a few programs that you may also want to take a look at: Audacity, Anvil Studio and Skale Tracker.

As far as composition is concerned, the links on the posts before mine are really worth a look, and I'll just add Falconmusic's page as well, which I found in the Tutorials thread. I've never taken a class in music theory but I'm a second rate composer. I'd like to say that it's not 'essential' to composition, but it certainly seems to help, and most of the truly 'good' composers on the forums will tell you the same. In the words of Blackthorne:

learn music theory if you want to be good.  If you don't wish to be good, ignore musical theory completly.

As sound effects and what-have-you are concerned, I'd suggest investing in a program like the late Cool Edit Pro (Adobe recently assimilated the product and turned it into the much more expensive Adobe Audition) if you want to start recording things yourself - they are also handy for sampling and sound editing, which can be a nice alternative to using 'Sound Recorder'. I'd suggest trying out the 30 day trial of CEP2.1 and if you decide you're willing to dive into your wallet that deep, it's a reasonable investment. You can also, of course, always go to a site like Flashkit for public domain sounds, as long as you don't mind that someone, somewhere has used the very same sound.

Hope some of this is useful to you.

Well, I'm not sure if it counts or not, but I thought I'd enter my sprite as well. You might (or might not, who knows about these things?) recognize him also as my avatar.


SpacePirateCaine from my own comic, "Something to do with Life!"

At present, StdWL! is unpublished, but it is a comic, so I hope it doesn't get me disqualified.

These webpages (1) (2) (3) have more information about the TIFF format than you ever wanted to know.

To summarize, however, TIFFs are image files that are nearly uncompressed, which means that they're really big in file size. Because of their size, they aren't really used by very many people, except in photo editing. The benefit of using TIFF files, however, is that they are nearly universally supported.

Just because three's a crowd - I agree as well. Releasing the game with the older backgrounds would be both a good way to have a product under your belt, and generate interest if you decided you wanted somebody to assist you with the sprites. Paintovers of the Roger sprite even are passable, but with the altered background you made, it'd almost seem a crime to do something sub-par. The detail is wonderful, and I would strongly suggest stylizing them all in a similar manner even after the fact in a re-release.

That said - the retro EGA backgrounds you already have are, as YakSpit pointed out, not likely to hurt interest in your game. Admittedly, the more detailed backgrounds are likely to attract players at a glance (The "Ooh! Shiney" instinct in us attracts us to pretty things first, usually). Even releasing it as a 'beta' here could garner enough interest from a sprite artist to help you out.

If I might, however, allow the Critic in me to step through before I wrap up my post, I've never been particularly fond of spraycan bushes on less-detailed backgrounds. They look awesome on the higher detail background with the shadows below, but I'd prefer to see a bit more of a bottom edge also in your EGA version, should you decide ultimately not to release it EGA-only. A shadow or something so it doesn't just look like it's floating there, and sharper edges on the foliage so it doesn't look out of place with the outlined rocks.

And now I'm done. Looks great, and I'll be looking forward to playing the game when it's ready.

It looks great, NuttySquirrel. My only thoughts on how to improve this background would be primarily dependant upon the type of sprite you're using. Unless your sprite is very 'smooth', it may be a good idea to sharpen the background up a bit. At the moment, as Voodoolake mentioned, it does have a very 'painting' feel to it, which is by no means a bad thing: the backgrounds for Monkey Island 2 were done originally as paintings. However, they were sharp, and ultimately pixelated with fine edges in such a way that the Guybrush sprite, as well as all the rest of the sprites, looked 'right'. Anti-aliasing and smoothness are positives in my book, but it's important that your sprites don't feel 'out of place' on your backgrounds. By keeping the level of sharpness consistent with the cave mouth, and land beyond it, I think it would look awesome.

I was under the impression that the land outside the cave mouth was a small cliffy rock outcropping, as opposed to a strip of beach, which in a sense works back to what Goél pointed out. If it's intended as a beach, I think the illusion of cliff-hood may be caused by a few things.

It seems a tad 'raised' beyond the plane of the ground inside your cave. Bringing down the far edge of the beach, may help to rectify this, though I could very well be wrong on this point. The second is the edge of the beach itself. There is a dark line, followed by a light line, creating the illusion of a rim, which works well if it's rock, but doesn't convey a sense of 'beach'. If you are making it as a beach, I'd suggest almost making the sand seem a bit smoother, and give it a dark 'wet' area towards the water. Oceans, also, are rarely calm, so a bit of brine at water's edge would do well. If it's a cliff edge, I don't really see the need to change anything about it.

Your sky and horizon line seem perfect to me - a beautiful slightly cloudy day, so aside from the few details I outlined above, it's overall a great background, and I'd be interested in seeing the final product.

So far "Movie poster" and "Cheese" it wasn't able to guess, but I suppose the big fallback is that a good many of these questions are quite subjective, like 'is cheese hard?' There's no option for 'Sometimes', though I suppose that would give it an edge, as it'd have more 'options' that way. I'm going to keep at it for a while and see if I can come up with something it has no clue about.

I think that game movies usually have the potential to be very good, but the wrong people are given the license to do them. Let's face it, this guy who's buying up all of the horror game licenses and turning them into garbage movies is who really is giving these games bad names. I haven't seen the movies themselves, but a large chunk of the media agree that they're crap. C'est la vie. As far as the Resident Evil movie is concerned, I think they did a good job. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know a whole lot about the resident evil series, as I've yet to play the orginal. Perhaps it isn't necessarily to game canon, but I have yet to see an adaptation of any one genre to another that doesn't take liberties one way or another with what they create.

Now, in regards to the Final Fantasy movie, which so many people hated, including myself at the beginning, I think that it has a really much worse reputation than it deserves. Did it have chocobos? No. Light Warriors? No. Crystals? Glass windows, but no. There wasn't a whole lot tying the movie to the series canon, except for the obligatory "Character named Cid", and the overlying 'World in Peril, must be saved by collecting something and about halfway through somebody integral to the story is suddenly in clear and present danger' formula. I, too, would've liked it a lot more if it more resembled 8-bit Theatre simply because even though there were no chocobos or white/black mages in Final fantasies 6,7,8 and 10, they still had magic and the same old crystal theme song. I thought that they probably could've even gotten a couple extra brownie points if they'd even bothered to do that, but if you actually take a step back and think about 'The spirits Within' without the 'Final Fantasy' brand-name stamped to it, it wasn't all that bad, and as a CG movie, it could even be described as groundbreaking.

Square did what they've been doing for a long time - they made something pretty that doesn't necessarily cater to their established demographic.

The Mario Movie? I'm going to need to take another look before I can really say anything about it, but think about what would've happened if they'd actually made the movie like the mario games?... It'd be disturbing. Mario really wasn't meant for the silver screen, but even so, they did it, and like the Spirits Within, it wasn't such a bad movie once you stopped thinking of it as ruining all of your dreams of bright happyface clouds and ginormous green pipes. And hell, it had John Leguizamo - that's gotta be a plus.

I guess what I'm saying is that yes, game movies are rarely like the games they're meant to portray, and that really pisses a lot of us off, but some reasonable stuff has been made. The benefit of the ensuing crapfest that is the trend of game movies is that there's a slim chance someone will eventually get it right, and when they make whatever movie that is, be it "The Legend of Zelda" or "The Adventures of Bayou Billy", it'll be all that much sweeter.

Next: The Car of the FUTURE!

8. Even if you don't die this time around, chances are that in the inevitable sequel, you will.