Messages

I always thought that things filled with milk would have little staying power unless you keep them refrigerated.

Watching over my lunch hour!
EDIT: Oh, fine, just go out for dinner during my lunch hour!  I didn't want to watch anyways!

[Tens!]

This game is about real estate in the same way Resonance was about particle physics.

Why, that will require tens of minutes of research! Tens!

I think to make a really good point-and-click-esque adventure on touch screens, you have to do more than just straight port the concepts from mouse-driven p&c's to the touch device.  The interface must be radically redesigned.  (This isn't always possible, when you're porting a game of course. But if designing a game from the ground up with touch in mind.)

Touch devices lose these abilities:
-No tool tips or mouse-over feedback
-No mouse-position-triggered guis (i.e. an inventory that slides down when the mouse is near the top of the screen)
-No right-click
-Keyboard not as easily accessible
-Less precise clicking ability

But gain these:
-Drag and drop (touch and drag) easier and more natural
-Swiping the screen, dragging around, and moving your finger from one side of the screen to another much easier and faster than doing the same with a mouse
-Multi-touch ability
-Gesture recognition

So you need to design the interface to avoid the things you lose and take advantage of the things you gain.

One idea I've thought of is, instead of touching the ground to walk the character around, you could drag the background. So, on a long scrolling hallway, instead of clicking where you wanted the player to walk, waiting for them to walk there, and then clicking again after the screen had scrolled over a bit, it would be faster for you to just take your finger and drag the whole background to the side in the same way that you would scroll a website or email, but horizontally.  The player character would then walk or run (or warp if they fall behind) to keep up with your scrolling.  This would be a hassle on a mouse-driven PC game (imagine having to click and drag the background horizontally several times to move from one end of a hallway to the next.  Annoying).  But on a touch device with scrolling momentum, using your finger to flick the background to the side a few times to cross a long hallway would be quite easy and much faster than clicking and waiting for the character to walk.  You could also implement a replacement for tooltips this way, by highlighting any interactable items near the center of the viewport for example.

The "best" solution will be the one that fits your game design.  This idea doesn't work for games that aren't composed of long scrolling hallways, for example.

But that's just one idea.  You've got a whole new set of possibilities, think outside the mouse-driven box.

Awesome! Consider me excited!

I've thought about doing this myself.  Good luck with it Grim!

Skip five years of gaming while being busy and then come back to it.  You will want ALL THE GAMES.  (Plus catching up on 5-year-old games is so much cheaper than playing them when they come out!  I haven't paid more than $15 for a game in a long time!) 

Since I don't own a PS3, I'm very interested in this OnLive-like streaming of PSX, PS2, and PS3 games.  If they can pull that off and the title selection doesn't suck, I'll definitely be buying a PS4 for that feature alone.

But would I do it again?  Yes.  And I will.

But very slowly.

I'd be quite likely to share *some* numbers with someone who asked me politely in a private message, but shy away from doing so in public.

My slice of the Resonance pie is pretty small, but in the seven months it's been on sale, I've made about 90% of what I made in the same period at my day job as a software developer.  Of course, that's five years of work versus... well... seven months of work.  What I'm saying is I'm not quitting my day job!   But would I do it again?  Yes.  And I will.

Don't worry about it!  We've done pretty well so far!

Cat Lady snagged the best story from the editors, and Resonance nabbed best Gameplay (editor's and reader's choice)!  Plus lots of runner up placements for our ilk, and more award announcements to come over the next two days.

I nominated Donna for a couple categories!  Sorry Goldmund.  The mass voting across the board for a few titles is a problem, though this year I'm finding it hard to complain...

Thanks for all the noms people!  This is the one that matters to me most!  I'm really psyched for this!

The music for Resonance was done by me, but in the awards page it reads Vince XII. The bastard stole my place!

Lies!  I wrote all the music and did all the SFX myself!  I also drew all the backgrounds and animated all the characters!  ME!!! 

Spoiler

Yes, those nominations of course belong to Nik (sfx, music), ProgZMax (character art, animation), Nauris Krauze (backgrounds), Janet & I (programming), Dave & all the actors (voice work), and a bunch of people helped me with writing (among them Dierdra Kiai, Dave, & Janet!  Thanks everybody!)

[close]

I agree that the Periodic Table needs to be in the game for the player to find.  I don't like puzzles that require anything outside-the-game information to solve.  I even put a calculator with a pi button into Resonance just so that a player who didn't know the first few digits of pi could connect two dots.

I think that, if adequately hinted at, it would be sufficient to have the code as an examine-able inventory item and the periodic table be a poster on a wall that you can examine.  Using code on poster could give a further hint ("Yeah, these MUST be related!") maybe even popping up a screen showing the code next to the periodic table for quick reference.  You could then drag the individual elements from the periodic table onto the paper with the code written on it.

Just an idea!

Finally listened and I must say, you have gotten further than anyone else at solving the ARG that I started in the early nineties.  Well done.

Sorry for your loss, Peder.  Best of luck working through the situation.

I really do want to make my own game..

That's all you need, go do it!  Everything you mention is perfectly doable.  Just keep in mind that no one's first game is awesome.  You have to try several times before you get really good at it.  Just make sure your vision is not too ambitious.  Make some smaller stuff so you know what you're up against before starting that magnum opus.  Keep it simple, experiment, and have fun with it.

Wow, that's a really cool place.  And you're right.  Someone could use it for something like The Oracle.

At one point two or three years into working on Resonance, I dreamed that I found a bug and figured out the solution to it.  When I woke up, I checked the code and it was a real bug.  I fixed it using the code I had already written in my dream.

[Available here]

Ooh, I checked the boards just at the right time!!!  For your consideration:

Available here (games page entry)

Story:

A particle physicist's mysterious and spectacular death sparks a race to find his hidden vault and claim his terrifying new discovery. The player will take control of four characters whose lives become entangled in the search for the scientist's vault. They will have to learn to trust each other and work together to overcome the obstacles in their way and to keep this new and powerful technology out of the hands of a dangerous organization.

Features:

• Four playable swappable characters
  
• A twisting, riveting storyline
  
• Full voice acting
  
• Unique long-term and short-term memory systems
  
• Cheat death by rewinding time
  
• A unique and intuitive interface
  
• Hundreds of beautiful hand-pixeled animations
  
• Dozens of gorgeous digitally painted backgrounds
  
• A beautifully orchestrated soundtrack
  

Screenshots:

           

Thanks guys!  It's been an amazing year finally finishing this beast!

[Rooms:]

Cool table Radiant!

I'll share this again, because I like it.   Resonance's stats:



Some other stats:

Rooms: 77
Lines of code (including white space and commented out lines because I can't be arsed to figure it out otherwise): 106368 (ish)
Lines of recorded speech: 5167
Non-speech Audio tracks (sound fx and music): 304

Gameplay time is tricky to estimate, but I think the game should be around ten hours on a first playthrough.

Rooms and sprite count probably don't strongly correlate with gameplay length, though.  It depends on how densely a game is designed.  Radiant's Warthogs, for example, I remember as a pretty dense game, with lots going on on every screen and reuse of all the rooms/puzzles.  Some other games might be very decompressed, with rooms purely for scenery that you breeze through in a few seconds when walking from A to B.  Some of the "rooms" in Resonance are title screen, end credits, and various computer interfaces.

Congrats on the release guys!