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...would it be possible to have crowds of aliens milling about?

[.NET PROFIT]

from out of left field comes...

.NET PROFIT

It is the year 2055.  Justin Hunter, a security consultant freshly hired by CyberWatch Incorporated, has just been transferred to their Beijing office where most of their most hush-hush R&D occurs.

It all just goes downhill from there.

Features:

* Fully-functional CyberLink palmtop allows interaction with the local .NET
* "Jack in" to .NETspace to help solve your problems in the "real" world
* hi-color, 640x480 resolution images
* SCUMM-style interface

09/02/05 update:

Phew.  I had thought I'd had a functioning SCUMM gui, but as I delved deeper into interactions beyond getting the sentence constructed I realized I had something very fancy that didn't actually *work*.  I spent most of yesterday rewriting my SCUMM interaction scripts, and now it's all good.  Gonna get back to the artwork in another day or so.

Script's about 25% done, but I'm going to do the rooms and what-not on an incremental basis

09/06/05 update:

Yesterday, I finished Justin's walkcycle.  Today, I decided it sucked and redid it from scratch.  much better.  Now that Our Hero can walk and talk, it's time to modify the SCUMM interface a bit and get crackin' on the implementation of the first act!

09/10/05 Update:

SCUMM system is pretty much complete.  new screenshot of Justin in his hotel room posted to the thread.

09/12/05 update:

Replaced a few screenies showing off intro and opening cinematics. Fixed more bugs in the SCUMM system.  Oy.

I'm with Ozwalled. I'd also like to mention that the picture frame on the right is also off, with regards to perspective - the 3-D part of it seems to droop downward.  Otherwise it's proportioned correctly.

That said, I love the character.  A super goose.  Hehe.  Does he vanquish foes with his Honk of Justice?

His perspective's a little odd, too - the rearmost eye is a little too far up and to the right, which makes him look more like a flounder since the main view of the character is straight-on from the front.  Ditto the rear leg.

Otherwise, hang in there!  It's a great idea for a game and a solid character concept.

such is life... can't please everyone.    The sprite needed to be re-drawn regardless, 'cause the scale was off and the legs... ick.  I think a combo of the two might work - the new sprite's cleaner style with the old sprite's more impassive face and opaque glasses.

*bump*

I re-drew the background and the main character's sprite.  Better?  Worse?  I'm still at a loss as to how to shade the room itself, so I may just leave it.

cyberpunk hurray
finish it

yes sir. 

Just so y'all know, I figured out why the play screen was letterboxing while the title screen wasn't.  If you import an image that's less than the full-size resolution of your game, the game'll letterbox it somehow.  The CyberLink boardroom was 640 by 280, and didn't have any filler space at the bottom... so it was getting shifted down somehow, so I shifted the status bar up to compensate, and it all got squashed.

I just fixed it, and I'm re-doing the boardroom pretty much from the ground up to try and incorporate everyone's critiques - and I'm also re-drawing Justin (the redhead, our hero) from scratch.  New versions for you to look over later today or tommorow.  Should go a lot faster now that I'm not fumbling through the process as well as trying to make some good art. 

Is there a way to tile backgrounds? So scrolling is constant? Like, a car driving on a street? It would be better than just making a room with massive width.

If you don't want the car to actually go anywhere and just give the appearance of motion, you can try using an animated background.

Okay, so I did something similar to the following (in the interaction script of an inventory object called iCyberLink);

string text, trigger, name;

command.getText(text);  // this gets the text of a GUI label

iCyberLink.getName(name);  // this gets the name of the object

StrFormat(trigger, "Use %s", name);  //this formats trigger so it reads "Use CyberLink"

if (StrComp(trigger, text) == 0)
{
   // run interaction for object if text reads "Use CyberLink"
}

Trouble is, both StrComp and StrCaseComp refuse to return 0 (indicating identical strings) when I compared trigger and text.  In fact, in no way, shape, or form could I get any combination of a literal ("Use CyberLink") and/or a variable containing the string ("Use CyberLink") to compare against a second variable containing the same text.  I even printed out both strings prior to comparing them and they did in fact have the same text in them, and in my eye, should have returned a match.

What am I overlooking?

Wow.Ã,  Lots of great comments, here.Ã,  Few responses and questions, to clarify some things.

I like overall style but the neck/head on the red head's sprite look odd.

That's probably due to the shadow under his chin.Ã,  It came out too dark.Ã,  I've removed it.

In addition, most importantly, your player character needs work. The whole style seems to collide with itself. The jacket is quite intricately shaded, yet the face, pants and shoes are not. Why not make it all in the same style as the suits on the Japanese guys? It would make it look cartoonier and better in my opinion.

Duly noted, and ironically, the original draft (good thing I still have itÃ,  ) of Our Hero was flat-filled like the other two, but it just bugged me for some reason.Ã,  Didn't look right at all - but I can't shade to save my life.Ã,  Every time I tried it just looked like someone dumped a bucket of paint over him, so finally I just half-transparencied a leather jacket and slapped it over him to give some kind of surface to the character.Ã,  Guess I'll be taking that back out.Ã, 

The style of the player character face also looks different from the other characters. I hate it when the npc's in an adventure look interesting, but the player character is flat.

Can you clarify this somehow?Ã,  The character's American instead of Chinese like the other two - or did you mean something else?

In addition, the chairs closest to the viewer should be bigger than the farther ones.

Noted.

The logo on the wall looks a bit out of place. What really craps the illusion is the sharp edge where the company name block meets the rest of the logo. You should have drop shadows for the edge as well as the text. Just imagine how it would be in real life. Would it be a sticker, a piece of topographic plastic or perhaps a light surface?

I'd envisioned a flat plastic oval imprinted with the pseudo-3D logo itself, but that's apparently not coming across very well.Ã,  The logo looks good when it's not stuck in a wall, so I think it's a little shadowing issue.Ã,  I'll look into that.

Third, I would like to comment on the color scheme. For my eyes, this scheme is way too bright. The wall is almost pure white and it doesn't fit. The ceiling and even the floor is way to bright as well. Also, you seem to have shadowing for everything else than the most important, the walls. Imagine where the light sources are and try to create realistic gradients for the walls and ceiling. Usually, we try to accentuate important areas by using bright colors. Right now, the viewers attention is driven straight to the bright wall and the logo, when in fact it should be directed at the characters and the door, as they are the most important aspects of the scene.

The room's done in CyberWatch's corporate colors, which are blue and white.Ã,  That's probably not a good idea, in hindsight.Ã,  Hmm... well, believe it or not I sat there trying to figure out how to shade the room for a long time, but I got stumped.Ã,  It's a morning/midday setting and the overhead lights are on (tried to draw them, they looked like poo), plus there's light streaming in from the window.Ã,  To me, that'd leave no room for shadows - if I'm wrong, can someone offer some suggestions as to how to place some shading?

Does your whole game have a distict blueish hue to it?

No, the game's going to be mostly urban greys, neons, and what-not... but the two corporations have blue/white and green/white corporate colors for their offices.Ã,  The title screen is black and green to give a faux-holographic/digital look.Ã,  I'm re-thinking that, now.Ã,  Guess you'll see another C&C request from me for the title before the weekend is over.Ã, 

Finally, I want to comment on the composition. I see that you have a regular letterbox used for verb boxes, but you also have 16:9 letterboxes. Why so? By doing this, you sacrifice a lot of the space. Also, the GUI looks odd when there's a black space under the verb boxes. A frame for the inventory items might add a defining touch to the GUI.

That's just the way the screenshot came out.Ã,  The game's in 640x480, which looks square and takes up all the screen real-estate in-game... but for some reason it letterboxed when I did a printscreen.

(exept from the red outline on the maincharacters face).

Oddly enough, in Photoshop that color comes out as a tannish hue, kinda like a slightly-lighter version of the businessmen's skin tone.Ã,  Looks fine, but when I import it into the game (16-bit high-color, although the image itself has been reduced to 256 colors to filesize) that tan turns into a deep pink.Ã,  I also lose most of the gradient shine in the hair, and as you can see it looks like a stripe.Ã,  Any hints as to how I can clean that up?

Thanks everyone,
TG

[.NET Profit]

Gents,

Here's the first screenshot of the game I'm fiddling with, a cyberpunk adventure called .NET Profit.Ã,  It's a spiritual successor (I hope) to that great classic of yore, Interplay's Neuromancer.



I'm primarily interested in a critique on the art style and sprites, since it's my first whack at anything like this, but feel free to pick apart anything you see.Ã,  I can take it.Ã, 

Thanks in advance,
TG

* EDITED - new background, new EGO sprite.

bin,

Spoiler

go into the "hygiene" room and use the sharp knife on the hole in the mattress.

[close]

I've managed to reconstruct an LEC-style interface using my own graphics and scripting... since this template appears to be either MIA or incompatible with 2.7, would anyone benefit from my posting a tutorial of some sort?

If so, how do I define them?

Apologies if this is in the manual, but I couldn't find it.

However ... calling DOTT style (even mock DOTT) is a touchy subject 'round these parts lately!!Ã,  Tread lightly

I propose we call it NOTT.  As in, "Not of the Tentacle".  Since, technically, it isn't. 

Johnny Depp has never given a bad performance. Hmm... His Elm Street performance. I cant remember much of it, but from what I can remember it was ok. But then again he was younger and less experienced. Anyone know much about this?

I know that it was either his first role, or that he was enough of an unknown at the time for it to be as if it was.  The role itself wasn't too bad.

Hey That Guy!

A lot of those comments you make are very fair. It's just that we have different views on certain things.

Anyway, I gather that you enjoyed the game, which is what it was made for.Ã, 

Indeed.  You nailed the classic low-res colorful style perfectly.  I think after I finish the games I'm working on now I'll try and do one of those myself using CC as a model.  It's one of the best-looking low-res games I've seen come out of AGS so far.

Sorry about the spoilers, I thought I tagged everything that would be a giveaway.  I'll try to be more mindful in the future.    I'm also rather unique among adventure gamers in that I love playing them, interacting with the stories, and what-not, but I'm terrible at solving puzzles.  I'll either get the solution right away or I'll just never see it.

I disagree. The magazine thingy is by no means a stumper. It does not stop you from doing anything at all and you can get to the end of the game without it.

In hindsight, you're right.  I'm not sure why I thought the magazine was important early on, all I know is that for some reason I didn't progress in the library until I'd found it.  That's probably a misperception on my part. 

Pixel hunt? I think the hotspot is large enough in comparison with others in the same room (it's larger than the drawers, the coat, the pennant or even the poster). Perhaps the word is "unexpected" or "difficult to find", but I honestly don't think it's a pixelhunt. I fact, I was trying very hard to avoid those in this game.

Hmm... yea, "unexpected" is probably a better term. 

Spoiler

You have no real "nudge" towards mousing over the whole bed because there's no real indication that you should... especially since you'd have an idea of what you might be looking for with a definite goal in mind.  You'll never know you even need to be looking for a magazine until you've already failed the game for not having it, worst-case scenario.

[close]

With a desk, there's always the implication of "something may be in one of the drawers.", so you're always motivated to go rooting around in a desk in adventure games.  Not so much the edges of beds.

Spoiler

The list is not there the first time you go. So you might notice a large (in comparison), bright green poster that takes up half the noticeboard later on. In fact, all other notes were drawn in dim colors (light grey, pink, yellow) so that the poster really stands out.

And Carmen gives you a very explicit comment about the green poster she put up in the faculty. I think that's hinted enough.

[close]

Really?  Hmm... I can't recall Carmen saying anything about that at all.  I must have missed it somehow.  I'll be playing through it again to get a higher score in the near future so I'll pay better attention to her dialogue.  I played the game over the course of a few days so any verbal hints got lost in the shuffle.

How many times, playing an adventure game, have you found you had nothing important to say to a particular character until you realised he has something you need?

Spoiler

The difference is the response generated by the main character as to why he doesn't want to interact with the object.  An emphatic "I'm not going up there, I'll get in trouble" tells me "this object is not to be used."  Something along the lines of "I don't have any reason to be climbing the walls of the geology building right now" tells me "I just haven't figured out why I would want to go up there."

[close]

A similar puzzle in a game I played recently whose name I shall not mention here springs to mind.  It was a red herring involving two people standing near a door.  I tried to open the door, and the character said "those two guys are in my way."  So I got to thinking "hmm, how do I get them OUT of my way?".

Spoiler

...but how many of those wacky solutions to puzzles have you seen in adventure games? I would have never thought of "picking up dog" or using "dodo on valve" (dodo being a monkey - I can't remember his actual name) i.e. using a monkey as a "monkey wrench" in MI2?

[close]

A few too many, to be sure.  I *hate* those "Wacky" solutions because they fall under the "guess what the designer was thinking" category, which is the primary spark for my admitted love-hate relationship with adventure games. 

Anyway, in the grand scheme of things some of my objections can be chalked up to my own imperceptiveness, and I did enjoy the game enough that I'll want to play through it again.  Thumbs up.

Aussie,

I'm nearly done with CC and think it was a fantastic effort.Ã,  The art's superb and the story is pretty unique, far as adventure games go.

The puzzles, however, drove me a bit batty.Ã,  I had to pretty much use a walkthrough for the first third of the game at least... which spoiled a bit of the fun for me.

More specifically,

1) One of the first and most crucial puzzles (the magazine) was a serious pixel hunt.Ã,  Those are real stumpers and can block a player for quite some time, so to have one right off the bat kept me from advancing the plot at all until I came here for some hints.Ã,  If you're going to do a pixel-hunt puzzle, IMHO, you should bury it in with other stuff the player is doing at the same time to give him a little more help in stumbling over it, since his eyes are open for other things.

2) The Top Ten Books hotspot is right next to a Noteboard hotspot, and visually, the books list is a part of the noteboard.Ã,  I couldn't solve the puzzle related to it because I'd moused over the Noteboard, read it, got nothing related to my quests, and moved on.Ã,  It would have been better to either have Andy read the noteboard and say "hey, there's a list here" or not have the noteboard at all and just have the list.Ã,  Otherwise the player risks missing it entirely.

3) Speaking of not seeing stuff related to your quests, the fact that objects change useability status based on whether you need them or not is, to put it bluntly, infuriating.Ã,  For example;

Spoiler

The ladder outside the Geology building, when you first try to use it.Ã,  The main character says "I'll get in trouble if I try to climb that", so you figure you can't use it.Ã,  So later when Theresa gives you the exam quest, I was saying to myself "well, the ladder is a logical choice but Andy already said he won't use it, so there's gotta be another way."

[close]

It becomes a brute-force method of solving the puzzles by having to re-visit every hotspot you couldn't use before to see if Andy suddenly wants to use it now.

4) Some of the more obscure puzzles have no hints at all.Ã,  I never would have thought to

Spoiler

put the thumbtack on the board to make a harpoon.

[close]

I'm a firm believer in the solutions for puzzles at least somehow being hinted at in-game so I don't have to play mind-reader and guess what the designer was thinking.Ã,  That puzzle was one of those times.  Guessing the alarm code was another.

Anyway, despite these issues I'm enjoying the game a lot.Ã,  Would definitely enjoy seeing more of your work in the future.Ã, 

Anarcho,

I'm in the middle of playing Emily Enough and I think it's great.  Some of her quips are just priceless  - like "what, do you think I pick up everything in the vain hope of using it later?"... sums up the entire adventure genre in one snarky aside.

Quick question... how'd you do the multiple lines of text fading in and out during the intro?  Looks great...

Gents,

Let's say I've got a few situations I need to keep track of in-game, like whether or not the hero has visited six specific locations and I want to trigger some kind of event once the they've set foot on the sixth.

Now, I can think of several ways to do it.

One, I can create a global script variable called "numVisits" and bump it up every time they first enter the relevant rooms.  Two, I can stick a custom property on each room and flag it once the player enters, then loop through the rooms and check.  Or three, I can do some variation of the above.

Now, I'd wager that custom properties and special states of each object get saved when a game is saved automatically, but what about script variables?  Can I globally declare a few int counters and rely on them being the same values I set them to during gameplay when the game is restored?

Hope this makes sense, and thanks in advance.

TG