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Hey, you know what, Snarky? I think reading that post several years ago gave me the idea to do it that way!  I forgot about that, thanks!

This tool made all the sound effects in infinity bit!  It's fun to mess with!

In Resonance, to get slow-moving, smooth-scrolling sky backgrounds in some of the scenes, I took the sky background image, blew it up 10x, made 10 frames of animation each shifting the sprite 1px left, then saved them all back to their original sizes.  The result was a 10 frame animation of the item moving 1 pixel (after playing the 10 frames, you shift the object one pixel and return to the first frame).  I used these frames for the tenth-of-a-pixel sprite movement.

Might be hard to integrate that into the parallax module, I'm not familiar with how it's written, but the big drawback would be swollen file sizes if you use this technique liberally.  I only used it in a few scenes.

Dude, thanks for typing that out!  It's the thought that counts!  I've got to get my hands on a copy of that mag!

Woo!  It's been awesome to hear about the boxes arriving around the world this week!  Some people have been tweeting pictures.

In other news, Felicia Day digs Resonance!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Wef0694aY

Huge congrats!  This is an amazing accomplishment!

Oh Jesus, Large Marge... Nightmares for weeks!

You've got it figured out.  You've noticed the contradiction in what he's telling you, but you haven't called him out on it yet!  This is where your LTM comes in handy.

Why?  What is your PC?  It should run on pretty much any Windows machine made in that last several years.

Ooh, thanks Ghost!  Any chance of a scan?

And for anyone who was waiting, Resonance is now available via the Steam Store!  No more excuses!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/212050/

Oh, no worries, Ascovel!  I'm not in defense mode.  Just explaining my motivations!

The bottom line is that the game is supposed to be fun and I think solving a substitution cypher is a fun brain excercise.  Like Sudoku.  If it was a more complex cypher that required pencil and paper or, going the other direction, some cypher that just requires the player to type in a password, I'd be worried that it wouldn't be as fun.  That's all.

Crimzon: All of it.  Shane's herculean accomplishment of making all the fiddly animations I asked for in the game definitely took him a while!  But the real bottleneck was scripting. 

I can't even begin to estimate how many man hours it took.  The first six months of the game were spent putting all the game systems and main GUIs together.  The game does not use AGS's built in inventory or speech system.  All of it was custom coded.  After that, implementing each room would take a month or more because of all the different ways you can examine/interact/combine objects with all the different characters.  I designed the game to be more complex than I ever should have.

Add on to that all the writing!  Four different lines for examining each object in the game... (though we cheated sometimes) plus all the STMs.  I was a fool to think this STM + 4 player characters was a good idea!

The best part of coding was doing all the little interactive or tactile sequences, like the maze or key/magnet or puzzle box.  I loved programming those, they were so much fun.  But they still took time.  A week or two for each.  So, when Janet was working on all that other boring stuff, I worked on these!

Finally,  my personal life was responsible for significant slow downs.  When I was the only programmer, I was working only after getting the wife and kids in bed.  I'd stay up as late as I could function and then have to get up three or four hours later for work.  That's why the game may have never gotten done without getting Janet on board!

The reason I went with a substitution cypher is because it would have been solvable by the average player.  I could have gone harder, but that would risk it being too hard for most players plus very hard to implement a good way of solving the puzzle in-game without requiring the player to transcribe symbols onto their own notebook for translating.  The pigpen cypher let me have an easy-to-use interface for solving.

It also works in the story despite the fact that a brilliant physicist would surely know some better cyphers:

Spoiler

It's the same pigpen cypher he taught Anna to use when she was a child!  If you complete the maze fully by finding all three hidden memories and then jumping down the last chute, Anna gets a bonus LTM of her uncle teaching her the cypher.  This LTM also gives you half the code.

[close]

[claims]

Ack yes, that's an embarrassing logical inconsistency in the game left by a dialog being edited late in development, and no one noticed the inconsistency because the explanation was already in the head of everyone working on the game, so you just don't notice the lack of any explanation for it.

Explanation:

Spoiler

Right after the rooftop escape, Ed, Bennet, and Anna all regroup at the baseball field for the first time.  In the original (and second and third) draft of that scene, Ed explains that after Bennet and Ed dropped Anna off at her apartment (after talking in the hospital the first time) Ed and Bennet went back to the police station for some more questioning.  Ed then went back to his apartment, but claims someone was in his apartment and they attacked him.  He then caught a cab back to Anna's apartment, worried that she, too, might be in danger and found Bennet sitting outside.  Bennet was "keeping an eye out" to make sure Anna was safe.  While talking, they heard Anna's screams from the roof and headed up the stairs. 

This exposition was all cut because it took to long to explain and because it just confused what really happened.  And then we forgot about this little bit of text when you click on his apartment in the map not making sense any more.

What REALLY happened (Super spoiler):

Amul sent the thug to scare Anna, instructing Ed to go be the hero to gain her trust.  Unfortunately for Ed's plans, Bennet was waiting outside keeping an eye on her apartment and saw Ed on his way in.  You can learn this by asking Ed at the end of the game using the LTM.

[close]

That's what happens when you work on a game so long.  You get so close to a story that it's hard to see the big picture.

Well spotted!

I have succeeded at enjoying yet another BlueCupToolsâ,,¢ Podcast.  I succeed at everything!

Engine portability is definitely the biggest factor in my decision for whether or not to use AGS for my next project.  I love AGS, but if you're trying to make some money, it no longer makes commercial sense to work in an engine that only works (reliably) on Windows, unfortunately.

Please prioritize official engine ports for Mac/Linux (and maybe Android and iOS)!

I'd like to host another Chain Story if there would be enough interest.  It's been about 2 years since the last one!  They always turn out pretty funny!

Some of the past chain stories:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41299.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33723.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41001.0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=38663.0

[Ali]

Thanks everybody!  I'm glad you're all liking it!

Thanks for the feedback Ali!  I agree with you that the STM is probably one game away from being done right.  (But I have no plans to make a game even nearing this complexity anytime soon, so someone else will have to make it!)  If I were to explore it in another game, I would not make the player have to drag items into the STM to use them in conversation.  I would instead have the player choose "memories" as a dialog option which would open up a screen allowing you to flip through screenshots of every room that character had visited and select any object from there.  It eliminates the backtracking and the confusion of having to drag items out of the world and into your inventory.

Same with the character control which could have used some of those extra features you mentioned (in particular the insta-summon feature but I can't imagine the entirely new realm of bug possibilities that would have opened up!).

Jared: I'd be very surprised if you saw this game in a store!   Maybe it was Resonance of Fate?  (Which, by the way, has a lower metacritic score than Resonance!  Ha!)

Pierrec: Thank you!

Another masterful episode.  Now I finally know how to import sprites into AGS.

PMed!

Tom, if you haven't booked a place yet, I stayed at this amazing place that I found via airbnb.com when I was in New York in June.  It was very affordable and incredibly comfortable.  Let me know if you're thinking of going that route and I'll send you the info.