Messages

Nice game, I have to say I didn't have any problems with the puzzles here. They may have been illogical or strange, but the hints in several dialogs made them pretty clear for me.

I also thought at one point that the radio moderation interfering the dialog was a bit distracting, but I just paused the dialog for a moment and listened to the radio show first, so it wasn't much of an issue for me. And the radio show gave a lot to the atmosphere, especially in this nightly setting.

Lastly, I actually wanted to congratulate you on choosing a title that puts the game in the top position of any alphabetical list, but now I found out it's in fact the last entry in the game database

Looking forward to the second part!

Looks very promising!
And I like that there's an extra "screaming" font

I have one minor critique left: The bottom of the one rock behind the log should be covered by flowing water, especially in the animated version it looks as if the rock is hovering in front of the water, having its black contour line untouched by any water.
Otherwise, great!

Though, most of your download links seem to be dead, or at least for me. Only the box.net link worked properly, and I was looking forward to playing with Silly Story Maker =/

Oh right, sorry, I forgot to upload this to box.net (arcor.de has a monthly traffic limit of 1 GB, so I guess it will be available there in February again, and I think I won't hit the traffic limit anymore if this game isn't in the newly added games section anymore).
I've uploaded it now, you can find it here. It's also a slightly updated version (to make up for the incovenience of clicking on dead links). You can now specify an approximate number of lines (= actions/subgoals/puzzles) so it won't generate stories that are only one line long or that are too long.
Have fun!

[s]

Haha, I love the review, Domithan, thanks a lot! Really good job, and not only because it happened to be my game there.
And I guess I should use your awesome background-music-voice-remix in a next game, just to annoy everyone

The SillyStoryMaker sounds like fun, I bet it can make for an awesome MAGS theme.

Hmm, I'd have to win a MAGS contest to make it a theme, right? Mmmaybe someday...

I loved the references to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Was there more than one? I'm only aware of one, but my mind may be so soaked by Douglas Adams' stories that I don't even realize the references anymore...

As for the graphics, I hope I can improve my skills (and maybe more importantly, patience). And since I love to automate stuff, I try to write some programs to help me with that, too. Might be especially helpful to make some fancy animations, like... for steam clouds or something.

I'm really glad you all enjoy the humor, as I'm sometimes not sure if dialogues/monologues are funny or just seem funny to me when they first come to my mind. You know, the awkward moment when you tell a joke, nobody laughs, and you are like "but it was funny in my head..."

So, thank you all for your feedback, and if I'm never going to make a game again, it's surely because of the pressure to meet the expectations

Also the phoenix looked a little uncomfortable lol. Like he was burning alive rather than just on fire. For some reason I felt sorry for him.

Oh, I can assure you he's doing fine, he loves it snug and warm!
But well, yeah, it's not a convincing depiction of phoenix, it would probably be better if the bird itself was on fire or made of fire and not just had a fire below him (although I just saw that in heraldry it's pretty common this way).
I'm more bothered by the unnatural wing-flapping animation though. His wings seem to be glued in the air... next time I'll only include things in the story maker's list that I can draw/animate well enough

Oh, one question: How long does it usually take for a game to appear in the games section on the main page? I'm about 50% sure I added it there when I had finished the game (in October), and don't want to re-add it in case it's already in the database and just not yet approved by the rating panel or something.

It's immediatly added! Something must have gone wrong that time, do it again!

Okay, thanks!

Glad you liked it!

But you could have added the voice file right into the original archive - it's not particularly hefty.

That's true. I thought I should exclude it as a convenience for those who find the speech annoying (e.g. because it's too fast), but this thought doesn't make much sense since one can judge only after having heard it... I've changed it in the start post now.

To TALK to Vifidus, the bear, Xan must first TALK to Vifidus, the bear.

Oops... well, I guess you have to talk to him twice then

Concerning future projects: I'd love to, I have to see when I have enough time (especially since I would want the next game to be a little longer) and story ideas (that is, if I don't use such a randomizer again, I generally use my tools no more than once).

Oh, one question: How long does it usually take for a game to appear in the games section on the main page? I'm about 50% sure I added it there when I had finished the game (in October), and don't want to re-add it in case it's already in the database and just not yet approved by the rating panel or something.

Totally forgot this thread/forum/game, sorry!

Thanks to you two, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Is this SillyStoryMaker something that we can play with?

Well, yes, I can give you the program, but it's really nothing great and I haven't had the time yet to make anything more sophisticated out of it. Download it here [edit: a slightly updated* version on a more reliable server can be found here], and you'll have a zip file containing the exe and some text files. The text files contain the items, locations and characters that may be in the game, and you can edit or replace them by other lists as long as the file names and format are the same.

Possible values for characters are divided in three lists "animals", "creatures" and "jobs", but there's no program semantics behind that, for every character one value of one of these lists is chosen at random (animals are less likely with a 20% chance, the others have 40% chance each, I don't know why I chose to do that, probably because I'm worse at drawing animals than I am at drawing people or monsters).

I've compiled these lists by searching for vocabulary lists on the internet, or wikipedia categories and articles like "List of legendary creatures by type". Sadly, there is no such list as "real and imaginary objects of past, present and future that are small enough to be carried in an adventure game and are neither too specific nor too general" on the web, so the items list is really not good.

Now if you start the SillyStoryMaker and press the only button in the program, you'll get a one-line description of the "global situation" (name and job/species of the player character, name of the world) and some kind of "backwards walkthrough". The program essentially creates a goal and a tree of subgoals to reach these goals, and eventually all remaining subgoals in the tree are reachable from the beginning, like picking up an item in a room you can reach or talking to a character. A short sample story is this one:

Ter is a sphinx who lives in Tyxypipernia.
Ter must TALK to Daros, the painter AND GIVE the earring to Illamevomman, the flight attendant.
In order to GET the earring, Ter must USE the block with the coin.
In order to GET the block, Ter must GO to the pub.
In order to GET the coin, Ter must TALK to Dygeffafaler, the goblin.

Now you have to use your imagination on how the hell this can make any sense. Especially the "use X with Y to get Z" things are hard, in this case it's relatively easy: one could use the block to make a hole in a [gold] coin to transform it into a [golden] earring. But instead of an earring, the program could as well have chosen a car, and that's where the "silly" from the title really comes in...

One problem is: You can't give the program a minimum or maximum number of goals to create, so a game may consist of just "pick up one item and you've won" or it may become too complex - I set an arbitrary break condition of 99 or 100 goals, then the story will end with "STORY TOO COMPLEX!" in the last line. In these cases, just click on the button again until it gives a story of the desired length (or take the remaining subgoals as elementary goals, e.g. by giving inventory to the player from the beginning).
[*) this problem is fixed in the updated version 1.1, you can now specify the (approximate) desired length in terms of lines/actions/goals/puzzles.]

Another problem: currently there is no check for duplicate items. you might have a goal "to get the car, you must first get a car" or even "to get the car, use the car with the car". First, I'd number the duplicate items throughout the story to avoid confusion, like "to get the car1, use the car2 with the car3". Now again, you need some imagination to make (at least a bit) sense out of this. Maybe car1 should be a working car, and you need to combine the parts of two broken cars to build one. Or in the first case, maybe you want a specific car (say, a blue car), and can interchange it with a car you don't need (say, a red car).

Well, I think that's basically it. I'd love to see other games made with this program, of course!

[Download:]

Hi. It's my first post here and my first game.
It's a short (maybe 10-30 min, depending on how much you want to explore the obviously unimportant things just for fun) and easy adventure called "Tales of Otubania", which is a rather unoriginal title.

There's not much to say about the story without giving it away. It was a bit of an experiment: Instead of coming up with story elements and puzzles on my own, I wrote an "artificial intelligence" that builds a "story" out of random rooms, characters and items. As the program doesn't make use of any logical reasoning (so far), the results are rather silly (or dadaistic?). So I took one of these random stories and tried my best to build a game around it. I kind of like the result.

This is what it looks like:



As you can see, graphics are average, but acceptable in my opinion. The only horrible thing might be the walking animation of the player character, as there are not even up/down views and only two frames (but footstep sounds, yay!).

Since it's been my first AGS game, I wanted to try out as much features as possible, and so I also did some voice acting (which, in general, might be a bit too much effort put in a small and not-so-good game). The voice acting's not very good, some parts are pronounced wrong or with strong accent as English is not my first language. Also, after I did one part of the recording, I noticed that I should not have cut the individual lines too early, as now the spoken text may be too fast. But then I didn't want to re-record or re-cut it, so if it's too annoying to you, just play the game without the voice pack.

Now, I hope you'll give it a try and enjoy some of the jokes and the unusual experience of a randomized storyline.

Download:
Game (including music and voice): http://home.arcor.de/tith-ags/TalesOfOtubaniaSpeech.zip (11 MB)
If not available due to traffic limit, use this download mirror, but be warned: it's one click more to do.
Game (including music, without voice): http://home.arcor.de/tith-ags/TalesOfOtubania.zip (2.5 MB)
Voice pack: http://home.arcor.de/tith-ags/speech.zip (9 MB)

Thanks for your attention,
any feedback welcome!