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Dayum, that's a hell of a view.

... but what's all that white stuff?

Sounds great Kinoko!  I'm very excited for you!

I'd now like to share some interesting parallels between our situations that jumped out at me.

My town just recently merged (don't ALL Japanese towns have a merger every year?? Seems like it)

Yes!  Mine is merging next year, in fact.  We're going to become the second biggest city in Okinawa .

Apparently I'm 6 blocks from my school, and 10 minutes from the ocean.

I'm (less than) 6 blocks from the ocean and 10 minutes from the school!

I was preying I wasn't following a shitty ALT who made them all bitter.

I did follow a shitty ALT who made them all bitter!

You're place sounds awesome and big!  I'm jealous.  My apartment is way too tiny, especially with a little Twelve on the way.  But the view makes it all worth it every morning when the sun rises over the ocean, illuminating the mountains across the bay...

Sounds like you've got a great placement.  I hope you can get a bunch of stuff on the cheap from your pred.  Good luck!

I was just playing too, lgm.  Perhaps I should have inserted a wink of my own.    Nebraska is boring.  I wouldn't recommend it for Mittens unless you're looking for... you're looking for... aww crap...

'Bout time you heard from your Contracting Organization.  I leave in two weeks for a trip through Shizuoka, Kyoto, and Osaka.  Mostly visiting family, but Kyoto's all about fun!  If I have a chance to pop by Kakegawa, I'll warn 'em all that you're coming (all 100,000 of them).

Sounds like you're in for a good time.  Personally I like my little town of 12,000.  Do you know how many schools you'll be visiting?  Elementary, Junior High, Highschool?  Are you a municipal or ken ALT?

Congratulations again!!!

Hey!  I'm from Nebraska!  Bite me!

isn't nebraska incredibly cold?

no

Man, the Dark Eye is REAL creepy.  Plus it's claymation, adding to its relevance in this thread.  For those that don't know, (except Rui beat me to the post, so now you do know) Dark Eye tells a bunch of Poe's stories in a First Person Adventure.  Often, you have to play the story as the murderer and then go back and play it as the victim...  very cool.

I actually played this and used "I'm studying for my literature test" as an excuse during High School when my mom told me I was playing too many games.  And you know what?  I think it actually did help my scores on the Poe tests...

The creepy thing to me was the way her eyes looked straight at you whenever anything freaky was happening.  Watch her eyes!  Ugh...

I, too, had a ridiculous fear of dolls at a young age.  When I was in fifth grade I used to read those "Goosebumps" books all the time (remember those?).  They were not really scary at all, but I was particularly freaked out by one with a living ventriloquists dummy.  Just picturing that dummy sneaking into the kids room at night game me nightmares.

After one such nightmare, I awoke to find my talking Pee Wee Herman doll staring at me and in the moonlight I could have sworn it moved.  I freaked out and bashed his head in.  I'm not kidding.  To this day I regret doing it because that thing is a damned collectors item!  (Though I recently aquired a replacement to right my childhood's wrong.)

That week seems like it may be ok.  I'm probably in.

Even though I hate you for declaring me a loser (or "non-winner" as I prefer), I'd just like to say that your Nightmare reference excited me.  That game freaked me out as a kid.  Until I had played it like forty times and knew exactly when that damn gatekeeper was going to appear and curse someone.

never could beat him in the staring contest...  I swear they just paused the video...  bastards...

P.S. congrats InCreator.  loved the comic.  sorry you had to win the way you did. (what with the promising of sexual favors and all...)

Boo to this:

* No flash!!!

Why the hate?  Flash can be used responsibly and can greatly improve the quality of a user's experience at your site.  Flash intros and ads that fly in front of what you're trying to read are bad, but just because a program makes these bits of bad UI design possible, doesn't mean that that piece of software is bad all the time.

Stop the stereotyping of innocent software!

There are some fantastic sites and web-applications that are improved by the use of Flash or would not otherwise be possible without Flash.

There are two things that I really hate in this world: Ignoring all the benefits of a piece of powerful software while irrationally claiming that it is inherently bad, and Java.  God damn Java...

I remember reading in a news article about the site that the images range from spankin' new to around three years old.  I can date the picture of the apartment building I lived in last year to be 13 to 16 months old since there is no grass surrounding the development and that is when they put in the new sodding...  Can't see if my car's there or not.  I always parked under a tree. 

I'm sure they're focusing more on getting hi-res for the rest of the world rather than updating parts that are already hi-res.  I'm hoping that they get hi-res of my city here in Okinawa.  I want to use this technology for a fun class about America and my hometown, and the kids will certainly want to see where they live in Sashiki as well.

Ah, cool.

Google is the coolest.  They just launched Google Earth.  It's an application that you download to your computer (Windows only right now) that allows you to see the whole globe, fly around it, zoom in, search, make notes, save, draw street lines directly over the sattelite pictures, and tons more stuff...



http://earth.google.com

Have fun!  It's just a beta version now, and it's streaming the data a bit slow, but I think that may be because I'm using through the business firewall.

Yeah, it's not really happening...  at least not for #2.  But, Ponch, I was totally planning on squeezing him in as a surprising and controversial interview somewhere down the line if these were being warmly recieved.  And I agree, it would be either a complete trainwreck, or one of the most insightful things ever.

But now, since you ruined the surprise... scratch that idea... 

Seriously though, I've made email contact with the person who I hope to be my next victim, and if all goes well, it should be a pretty good one.

The thought of Twelve Interviews #2: Flukeblake makes me giggle like a schoolgirl. It might be a trainwreck or it might be really insightful look into one of the forums most misunderstood members.

I was gonna write how much I disagreed with this notion, but I couldn't find expletives strong enough

Make yure you find them by Friday, because that's when I'm posting it...

If they put Spelling Bees on ESPN, why not Staring Contests?

I'm glad you guys enjoyed the interview.  But I see the concern and would like to address it.

First of all, I'd just like to state what I had imagined as the aim of this interview (or possibly series of interviews).

The goal of the interview (and any subsequent interviews) is not to promote an upcoming or newly released game, and it's not to talk about how great the interviewee is.  The goal is to get a few game-making tips out there from people who have finished successful games or people who are particularly accomplished or knowledgeable in a particular area related to the game-making process.  If just one person on this forum reads an interview and takes away something that he/she will apply during the production of his/her own game... success! 

Now, for the others, the seasoned vets out there, who don't need any advice on the game making process, they can read the interviews and possibly at least gain some entertainment from the more off-base questions or humorous replies that might be found in the interview.

I thought that this would be a perfect place to share a few of these insights via interviews (rather than the interviewee just starting their own thread just to share a few tips that they've picked up along the long and bumpy path that is adventure game making).  Here some of the less experienced (like myself) could pick up the tips as well.  Not just the ones who are ingrained into the community enough to DL and read an ezine (or an Azine or bzine... though I'm not really sure what those are mOds...  ).  Personally, (and seriously no offence, I'm going to go check it out as soon as I finish this reply) I've never read Vel's eZine nor do I even know, through casual reading of these forums, where to find it.  As such, I'm not sure that the 'zine reaches the audience to which this interview was meant to be tailored (reference Helm's and Evil's posts above).  Though I completely recognize that I could be 100% wrong and these eZines could be read by tons of people looking for inspiration for their own game.

As far as a sticky thread goes, that was just a passing suggestion by one poster, I don't really think it would fit a once a month or so feature like this, nor would this feature deserve such a distinction.

And regarding publicly "exposing" someone in a public forum:  it didn't seem to anger anyone, least of all Kinoko.  People post their opinions all the time in this forum.  An interview is just a way get out a few opinions without having to blurt them out in a post unprompted.  If feelings are hurt by one person being put on a pedestal for one thread, I would stop this immediately.  Please let me know if that's the case because that would totally go against the aforementioned goals.

As Andail mentioned, there's no fair way of selecting who's going to be featured (I feel that "honoured," apart from having an extra 'u,' [/american-centric thinking]  is a bit of a loaded term.  The interview, while it may make the interviewee feel special, isn't intended to bestow honor on the person, just allow that person to help others in the community).  The people chosen would be chosen by my own biased whim (though I'm always open to suggestions) as people who, I felt, had achieved something great along the lines of that month's topic.  And regarding people asking if they can be interviewed, those are at least partially in jest.  It should be clear that releasing something excellent and having some experience to share is the best way to find yourself getting any kind of attention in this community.

If these faults that have been pointed out make the feature more fit for something like a 'zine then I would certainly put it there if there were a 'zine that wanted it.  I'm not planning on producing one myself, but since three people, all of whom would be considered "seasoned" on these forums, have suggested restricting this to a 'zine it is certainly something that should be considered.

Sorry for the long post.  Thoughts?

ETA: Turns out I had never noticed Vel's eZine because when I would see a thread with the word eZine in the title I would generally ignore it, revealing my own personal unfamiliarity of eZines.  Found and read through a few copies of the AGS eZine.  They were well produced and a pretty good read.  I enjoyed the interview with Dave Gilbert, it was informative, but it had different aims from my interviews as it didn't ever touch on tips for developers.  One thing I couldn't surmise from the 'zine: How often are they produced?  Only the latest issue is dated and the games reviewed inside give me only a vague idea of the timeline.

It was really cute.  But you're right, no real logic to it.  I'm going to play more (assuming they make more) because they are quite endearing.

Vince:
That's "Ponch", baby! Potch is that other guy (the guy who wasn't on CHiPs"!). "Ponch" needs all the press he can get ;-)

How do you know I wasn't talking about "Potch," huh?  Maybe Potch deserves muchos bonus pointos...  Why does everything have to be about YOU?  Like that time we went on a date and you wouldn't shut up about yourself: "Aaaah! MY hair is on fire." "Help ME!"  "Put ME out!" "Me me ME!"  That's why I don't return your phone calls.  (Sorry, fixed it)

I wanted to make like a peepwood, so I wrote a really long reply to this thread giving comments to everysingle person who released something, but then the site went down for a while and I forgot to save my comments, so they're gone.  And now I'm too lazy to rewrite them, so everyone should just know that they got a gold star in my book.  I do want to comment on a few people's work though.

Bernie, your cat game was SOOO much fun and I wasted waaay too much time on it.  (I'm gonna waste some more too... I didn't finish yet!)

Guybrush Peepwood, your game shows a lot of potential.  I can't wait to see how you tie together the use of the character into the game.  Puzzle design is going to have to be a big consideration of yours.  I can picture some pretty cool puzzles coming out of this unique gameplay.  The sprites are very nice as well.

Space Pirate Caine, your art is, as usual, amazing.  I can't wait to see it in motion.  Good luck with the coloring...

And finally, HOLY CRAP STEVE MCCREA, this is some of the best AGS related news since AGS related sliced bread!  Is this a recompile that creates new executables for the Mac, or some sort of AGS engine emulation for the Mac?  Hook us up with some more info.  Allowing our games to be played on the Mac will expand AGS' audience by quite a bit.  You, kind sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

Wow, thanks for the kind words, guys.  If this game were going to ship in a box, I'd put some of those quotes on it.  Just being put in the same graphical ballpark as RotHS makes me blush.  The truth is, I can't draw, so when I started, I knew I wanted to adopt some sort of eye-catching style to make up for my lack of artistic talent.  I fooled around with a few styles before settling on the rough coloring-book style that you see here.  I'm glad that it's being warmly received.  My style has improved greatly throughout the development of the game, and each background looks better than the last. (You can see a big difference between the remote control screenie and the fridge for instance.)  My first and latest BGs are at opposite ends of a quality spectrum.  If I decide I want to take up even more time once I finish production, I may fix up some of the early graphics.

Honestly, my biggest focus and goal when I began this game (which I intended to only take two months or so to make) was to make an original, simple, and intuitive interface and I really can't wait for you guys to see it!