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I found 'Balloonface' the most entertaining game of all; granted, graphics, music and puzzles were behind other games, but as a whole, I enjoyed it the most, mainly because of the entire surreal situation and the wacky dialogue.

I liked 'Dance till you drop' a lot, mostly because of its atmosphere; the music is great, just as the graphics. I didn't mind that the game was linear (it's a short game, after all), but the UI was a bit on the rough side (very small controls made it somewhat hard to work with the inventory, etc.)

One particular thing annoyed me: the safe bug with the impossible date of birth. I didn't know that Richard Simmons is a real person, so I never realized that I could've searched for the date, so I tried figuring it out, but couldn't. This took most of the enjoyment out of the game. 

The other game I loved at first was the Gladiator, but then I didn't finish it: I already talked to the characters in the cell, but then I had to leave and there was no save. After getting home, I just couldn't get myself to start all over again. I think omitting save in an adventure is a huge mistake (no matter that old games worked that way - people didn't like it even then.) I was amused by the whole cracked-game idea, though and loved the way the game started

Good to know your critical abilities this time around are at their sharpest, Traveller.

It's easy to criticize others when I still didn't release anything playable (more precisely, anything at all...)   

Here's a quote from Helm on the first page of this thread.  I quite agree with him.

In action, it was proven that people voted great on all categories on the games they liked. This made the top few games come out with boosted scores across the board, whereas I think it would make more sense for some games to win scripting and graphics, others music etc. This was also the paradigm in the AGS Awards, with Apprentice sweeping most awards ( in my opinion) needlessly. People don't seem to understand the concept of categorical voting on any other level than rewarding the creators for nice 'gaming experiences' on the whole.

Last time I did that, too, simply because (for me, at least), Automation was a clearcut winner (The Bar came in a very close 2nd). This time, though, I didn't find anything clear-cut, so I would've gone for categories. It's no big deal, though, I was just curious.

I just voted on the games but got curious why the voting system has changed from last time? I found it finer-tuned for voting to vote on each specific area of a game (graphics, music, etc. and then aggregating those to get a winner), rather than giving a single score for each game.

Just curious: when will voting start? (I don't want to miss it.)

And now: cheese on toast!



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Secondly, I hate the fact that I'm going to have to buy an uber-expensive ring just to get engaged.  Jewelry has never made ANY sense to me.  $3000.00 for a small shiny thing that does nothing but sit on a finger?  What's the point?

"It shows you love her."

If it takes me spending $3000.00 to show I love her; 1) I'll buy her a nice Plasma screen HDTV which she'll get FAR more use out of than a little ring and 2) I would doubt the love existed at all if it boils down to spending money to prove it.

I had a 6-minute wedding with my wife a few years ago, with just the absolute immediate family as guests. It wasn't because we couldn't have paid for a big wedding but because we didn't want to; we had the same line of thought: we can spend that money on more exciting things. But then again, she's also my best friend.

I guess he tried the old voting address (for the 1st OWOR competition, which contains the new voting page.) It seems unfinished, though, I didn't click anything yet.

Erenan,

Spoiler

It's 48, not 46 (1984-36).

[close]

Dance til you drop code:

Spoiler

Look at the calendar, figure it out from there, or keep reading for the code:

7 12 46

[close]

I don't quite understand:

Spoiler

(The year is 48 (1984-36).) I have a problem with '12', though: the 2nd Tuesday in 1984 is the 10th of the month, not the 12nd. It's only the 12nd this year (2005). This looks like a major bug to me in the game, unless I'm missing something.

[close]

I'm stuck with the same problem in Dance till you drop...

Quite frankly I don't know how that could be figured out (I think I have a fairly close idea about the solution, but nothing worked so far) and that kind of ruined an excellent game for me...    I still want to finish it though, but I need a walkthrough.

Sidenote: how do you create a spoiler alert (the one that has to be selected to be readable)? I tried [div class="spoiler"] but it doesn't work.

spongeylogan,

I PM-d you, please get back to me when you get a chance.

Thanks,
Traveler

Behold the nightmare!    :o



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I agree with Al_Ninio that the hut colors are off. You could try using lighter colors for the walls and less saturated colors for the wood. The other problem in my opinion is the perspective. I tried creating a quick-and-dirty mockup of the correct perspective and marked the colliding perspective lines in your original picture. I don't know if it helps, but take a look:



My perspective drawing is not entirely correct (I din't actually use vanishing points, just approximated them), but you get the picture.     Try to change the perspecitve on the door, the windows and the patio roof, that will help a lot.

Hope this helps.

I see at the bottom of each page that it takes 18 queries to construct a page. If I open 10 topics during a forum visit, that's 180 queries for a single person. If there are 10 users active at one time, we're talking about 1800 queries in a few minute interval. That's quite a lot, considering that the server is shared with other websites, which place load on the machine as well.

Does anyone know what these queries do? I once downloaded the SMF source code, so I could search it through to see, but if someone knows it for a fact, that'd great. Let's see if we can somehow cut down the number of queries to construct a single page, I bet we would make a serious cut on the processor load. Obviously, this would mean cutting some forum features, but first let's see what's what, then we can decide.

I'd vote for keeping all forums in one place, if it's feasible. What do you guys think?

Also, C# (and the .Net Framework) lets you combine multiple languages. I'm not sure, how simple would that be with Java, but I suspect not very simple.

I'm working on a project where we have roughly 5000 classes (the build output is about 1200 DLLs), where about 1/3 of the code is C#, 1/3 is C++ and the remaining 1/3 is VB6. I believe it'd be quite an undertaking to do something like this in Java, but I never liked Java in the first place, so I don't really know.

C# has a lot of flexibility and the syntax is very close to C/C++. It's only problem is performance, but that's an even bigger problem for Java    . (Although I was very pleasantly suprised by Firefox, I must admit.)

I'd still recommend C++, though, for one simple reason: using C++ you'll be forced to understand the hardware (at least to some extent.) That understanding is crucial to design and write good programs - if that's what you have in mind. If you just want to mess around, C# is good.

If I were you, I'd go with C# or C++. C++ gives you much more power and control over the computer (although most of them are possible even in C#, but with a lot of extra work.) C# is simpler (mostly because of automatic memory management and the extensive framework library) but performance of the .Net framework is waaay below the performance of C++.

There are several free C++ compilers and the .Net framework comes with a command-line C# compiler. (If you plan to do any serious programming work, command line is your friend, learn to use it.  )

Nice game, fovmester! I just finished it, it has an amazing atmosphere. I liked the humor, too, good job! I hope Part 3 will be out soon.

Barbarian, how did you make the character? It looked excellent?

The rat comes back from the dead! I'm lovin' it!






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