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TheYak, I'd shake your hand if it weren't so far away from my own.

i am afraid you cannot refute the logic.

I'm afraid that there's no logic there to refute.  Please explain how logic can apply to such a statement about faith.  Aren't faith and logic kind of like college room mates who are both all clean and neat and looked like they'd get along well on paper, but once they move in together they can't stand to be in the presence of each other?  And furthermore, aren't I wonderful at metaphors?

Besides, being skeptical about the truth or refusing to believe it doesn't in any way diminish its truthfulness.  Its a loosing battle, and the sooner you realize that the better.

Actually, don't bother answering my question.  This is why it's poinless to have these countless threads about Christianity.  To you, it's a foregone conclusion that what you believe is the absolute capital-T Truth.  And any argument against your beliefs must be true because it's saying that the Truth is not true, and therefore must be a flawed argument. 

I'm not saying that the people on the other side of the argument are super flexible in their beliefs either, but some of us, myself included aren't sure about this whole god thing and are willing to listen to logical arguments from both sides.  But I'm certainly not willing to be talked down to, which is what you're doing.

Don't you think it takes more faith not to believe in God than to believe in Him?

If I say yes, does that mean that I'm beating you in the faith race?

Wow, that's looking all kinds of better.  I like the recall function, and I like that you tell me when it's been activated.  It's works as a little hint to keep you moving in the right direction.  Keep up the good work!  It's looking really nice!

Mr. Colossal beat me to it, but:

Skyfire, he was making perfect sense.  You say that Nintendo takes a game, adds new special effects and rerealeases it.  He said that Square Enix, Capcom, Konami, SCEA, Bungie, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, SNK, EA, Sega,  and Ubisoft all do the same things.

the bulk

The majority

of who I brought up

of Square Enix, Capcom, Konami, SCEA, Bungie, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, SNK, EA, Sega,  and Ubisoft

are third parties

are third parties

with heaviest support on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

who make games for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

Put it together:

The majority of Square Enix, Capcom, Konami, SCEA, Bungie, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, SNK, EA, Sega,  and Ubisoft are third parties who make games for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

So, saying that Nintendo is lazy by your qualifications also applies to every other game developer.  They just make fancier graphics and lay them on top of the same tired gameplay.  However, what ruins your argument is that Nintendo is now actually trying to encourage new gameplay in a stagnant industry.  What's lazy about that?

Honestly, I don't think I'd need to do this for a 26 year old.  Just admit that you lied about your age.  It's not a big deal.  Everyone will have forgotten about it in a week and you can start making more of an effort to post in a mature and intelligent fashion as if you were older than the minimum age limit for this forum.

Perhaps we could get Kim Jong Il to give up his nukes in trade for a certain forum member:

These are both excellent suggestions, though I think one of them may be overkill    I'll definitely start doing the zip thing.  I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before...  Hopefully this will appease the file-redundancy gods.  Damn their insatiable appetites!

I do it once a week, though I should obviously do it more often, especially when I'm making really fast progress.  But the game's size is approaching a Gig and my laptop is quite slow by today's standards.  It takes so long to back it up...

Edit: The game folder's size is approaching a gig, not the game itself...

Today, I was working on my AGS game at work.  I've been working on it for about six or seven months now and I was on track to finish this week.  The home stretch.  It was time for lunch, so I headed out, leaving AGS open.

When I came back from lunch, my computer was off.  The teacher who sits at the desk next to mine told me that some men came in to work on the electrical system and had to shut down the power for a few minutes, so he turned off my computer so nothing would get messed up...  My computer... a laptop... with a battery...  with two hours of battery life... Which would have gone into hibernation mode if it ran low on batteries and saved everything it was working on automatically...  My laptop which he did not need to touch!

I thought "Shit shit shit... Ok, maybe everything will be ok.  Everything should be fine.  Calm down.  Don't punch the teacher in the face."  I boot up the computer, load up AGS, ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR!  My sprite set had been corrupted.  Somehow, the teacher had managed to close down the computer and AGS and ruin my game...  I don't know how you do this, since AGS would automatically suggest saving before the computer would shut down.

I couldn't open the game.  Luckily, I had made a backup, but it was about a week old.  I copied the sprite set from the backup into the current directory to see if anything could be saved.  This time I could open the game and all my coding from the last week was intact, but hundreds of sprites were gone.

I went through filling every sprite slot with placeholder sprites to get rid of the error messages.  This took hours because everytime I put in one placeholder sprite, I had to go through hundreds of error messages as the editor notified me time and time again about each missing sprite in my current open folder.  It was gutwrenching.

Finally, I replaced every missing sprite with a placeholder and then began the task of replacing the placeholders with the proper sprites.  Luckily, most of my sprites were saved with numerically labeled files in nice organized folders on my hard drive.  But I have about fifty GUI sprites that I imported by building the whole GUI in Photoshop and bringing in the buttons/mouseovers/animations piece by piece via screen captures.  Of course I still have the Photoshop files, but I'm going to have to redo all of the screen capturing and importing tomorrow.

All in all, I'll probably lose two days of work to this, but I'm super pissed because this week was supposed to be such a good week...  I was supposed to finish... 

If you prefer, the thread could spiral into some X-rated Phoenix Wright slash-fiction.

"Ssshhh," hissed Edgeworth as his cold hands caressed Mia's inner thigh.  "It's just you and me, now."

"I object!" shouted Phoenix, whose muscled frame was silhouetted in the light of the doorway.

Mia's breathing hastened as Phoenix pulled out the gavel that he had stolen from the judge...

Yeah, I don't know where this post is going...

Sorry Sylpher, my last two posts were both attempts at sarcasm.  The DS is a remarkable system which I've spent more time on than any other system since it came out.  Phoenix Wright is my favorite game that I've played so far this year.  My story about it not being on any shelf in Japan is true because the thing is sold out, while no one is touching the XBOX 360s.  I was trying to point out the stupidity of Skyfire's post with my attempt at sarcasm, but obviously the better way would have just been to tell him that he's an idiot.

In reality, I'm probably way too excited about the Wii than I should be.  I can't wait to play it with my wife and hopefully finally get her interested in a video game other than Super Monkey Ball (which is a great game by the way).  I think Nintendo is completely going in the right direction and if this strategy works sales-wise, it's going to be good for the game industry as a whole, which is good for me.

I didn't take the time to read those numbers, Slypher, because who can trust numbers?  Not me!  No, I trust my own two eyes!  I live in Japan, which automatically makes me an expert on video games.  If I walk down to the local Best Denki and look at the video game section, they don't have a single DS in stock!  Obviously, they're not wasting any shelf space on that retail-abortion.  Now, the XBOX 360 on the other hand, they've got plenty of those!  Clearly that one is the better system!

The Wii is just another one of nintendo's gimmicks and it'll fade out soon after people realize they paid $200 to have their gamecube controller split into 2 pieces.

I couldn't agree more.  Like the Nintendo DS.  Just another gimmick.  That thing went right down the toilet as soon as people realized they paid $150 to have their Gameboy split into two screens.

[Unclear hotspots and exits.]

I'm going to give this demo the same treatment that I gave Prototypical so I hope you can take the constructive criticism as well as Candall did and use it to make your game even better.

I'm no artist, so I'm not going to touch on the quality of the backgrounds except to say that I like how different each area looks.  Each world seems to have it's own atmosphere which is expressed through different color schemes and textures.  So, nice job there.

I'm also not going to comment on puzzle design here.  What I'd really like to help you with is the playability, because here, the game has a couple of faults.  I'd like to address two that were prominent in this demo:

1) This is the most important suggestion and it is one that you need to address, or the frustration of playing your game is going to overshadow the fun of solving the puzzles and uncovering the story.  Unclear hotspots and exits.  Navigating around the world is difficult because it is not clear where I can and can't click to proceed.  If you're not going to use the effective "look four ways from every node" approach that worked well in Myst, the forward and backward with branches works well enough.  But only if it's clear where I can and cannot go!  Reread the suggestion I made in your Critics Lounge thread.  That suggestion is still, in my mind, very important and it went completely unaddressed. 

Let's give an example.  On the first screen, I am looking at a field of ruined stone structures.  It's not clear, just by looking at it where I can go.  The only way I can figure out where I can go is by slowly dragging my cursor over the screen and noting the places where it starts blinking.  The player should not have to do this.  If the player can't look at a background and instantly tell where each exit is, then that is not a successful background.

Another example: After you walk down the right-most branch on Ignis, you come to a beach.  I saw that there was something in the water, figured that I'd have to return later with some item to fish it out and proceeded to back up back to the start.  After looking through all the other branches I was confused, because I had been everywhere and hadn't found anything to do except pick up two pieces of paper and talk to the girl.  What's going on?  So I went back through every screen (and there are a lot, because you made a lot of in-between screens that have nothing to do except continue forward, or back up) and slowly scanned around with my mouse to look for a path that I missed.  I eventually found the path that I missed.  I can turn right from a point on the beach.  But there is no indication on the screen that I can turn there.  No path to signify that I can turn there.  The only way to figure it out is by getting lucky and putting my mouse over that side of the screen.  This is called pixel-hunting and it's not fun.  It's frustrating.

Remember, as the developer, you know exactly where you can and can't go in the game, so it may feel natural to you.  But the player hasn't had the luxury of seeing the source code.  They are your target audience, so if they find the game unplayable because they can't find an exit that's supposed to be clear to them, it's not their fault, it's the designer's.

2) Inconsistent cursor use. You rarely make use of the eye cursor, which is a shame because there's plenty of eye-candy around.  It would be nice if I could click on items and get a description of them.  These descriptions help flesh out the charactor, because right now, your character has nothing.  I don't even know who I am, why I'm there or how I got there.  (of course there might be an intro explaining that in the final version). 

Right now, the eye cursor blinks when it passes over an exit in the same places that the finger cursor blinks, but I can't use it in these spots.  If the eye cursor is blinking, I should be able to click on whatever I'm pointing at.  But I want to click on more than just the room exits.  You can, using scripting, make the hand cursor blink only on exits or interactable items, and the eye cursor blink only on items that you can look at.  Then, let me look at lots of stuff on every screen.  Otherwise, just take out the eye cursor all together, it's not serving any purpose right now except for looking at inventory items.

Moreover, sometimes, for example the statues in the maze, clicking the hand icon on an item gives a description, but the eye icon does nothing!  This doesn't make much sense.

And finally, there's no reason to use the eye cursor on the Main Menu, much less default to it.  Use the scripting to disable the eye cursor while the menu is up.

I hope this criticism didn't sound too harsh.  I only want to help you make a better game.  I know that addressing these points may make you have to redo a lot of graphics or scripting, but trust me, it'll be worth it in the end and your end-product will be all the better for it.  And I'll bet a lot of the people who play your demo will agree with me.

"Pink pajamas, penguins on the bottom. Pink pajamas, penguins on the bottom."

This is an interesting merging of two ongoing threads.  Strangely, I think it fits better in this one:

Amish say they "Forgive" School Shooter

from the article:

"If you have Jesus in your heart and he has forgiven you … [how] can you not forgive other people?" Rhoads said.

Discuss (because it entertains me and I'm not edumacated enough on the matter to discuss it myself).

He inspires sexual confusion in a lot of us.

I think they prefer "those people."  Don't forget the italics.

Seriously.  They're just people.  They're gay.  Call them gay.  If you think of the word "gay" as an inherently bad word, then you're part of the reason that none of your gay aquaintances are risking coming out of the closet.

You don't need to feel awkward around gay people.  Gay is not contagious, and even if it was, the only bad thing about being gay is being treated as if you're not a person by your peers and by your government.

I just reread the thread and can't understand why homosexuality was even brought up.  Sex spam isn't sent to women on the off chance that they might be lesbians... It's sent to everyone because email is free and for every million you send, one idiot will pay you off.  I can't understand why you came out of left field just to announce that you dig chicks...  It suggests sexual confusion more than anything else.

I am admittedly somewhat nervous around homosexuals because I don't actually know any...

I guarantee that you do.

Scripting, all is rubbish. The Ivy asked for hlep from Vince (a male!!!! :O).

Actually, Vince emailed The Ivy to offer help before she even knew who Vince was... but whatever.