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Yeah, I would definitely say that some warnings like that could help the "adequate communication of peril" if it wasn't possible to make it clear that there's danger.  If the player clicked twice on the outlet with the fork, yeah, I would definitely say that some barbecue was in order!

And yeah, autosaving has been used in a bunch of games.  I usually see it saving at the start of certain events or based on the player entering a new area.  I can't think of any games that just saved every five minutes, though.  There might be an issue with that though, for example if there was a timed puzzle like defusing a bomb, and you were two seconds before the bomb blows up with no chance of finishing and then the autosave kicks in, so when you die and reload, you'd just die again with no chance of saving yourself.  So, you would have to be careful with a timed autosave, turning it off in certain situations, but it could probably be used to good effect.  I still think that the first two ideals I discussed need to be followed at all times, even with an autosave, though.

[1) Adequate communication of peril.]

I've written bunches about my opinion of adventure game deaths but I want to restate them here and see if you agree with them, Anian, since you seem so devoutly, religiously, opposed to adventure game deaths.

Basically, I postulate that adventure games are not always bad, though they have been grossly misused by some games in the past.  I further contend that used appropriately, they can heighten the tension of a game and provide more of a connection between player and character.

So, here are the three ideal rules for adventure game deaths:

1) Adequate communication of peril.

The player must be able to recognize a situation as one that would be lethal to the character.  This may be communicated by having it be obvious peril such as a pool of water with electricity running through it, which logically would lead to serious injury or death.  The player will know to avoid this until the peril is averted (electricity turned off) or find an alternative route.

Alternatively, if the peril is not obvious, such as a security system on an alien ship, it can be communicated by example: a fly buzzes down the corridor, and as it passes near the detection sensors, it gets zapped by a laser beam and falls to the floor in ashes.  The player will know that he cannot walk down that corridor until the security alarm is deactivated.

If the player is in a timed puzzle that will result in death upon failure, it must be clear that there is a limited time to complete the objective in addition to it being clear that failure will result in death.  Ideally, there should be something to allow the player to know how much time is left.  In Resonance, there is a scene where someone is breaking down a locked door that you're hiding behind.  You have only so much time to escape before this person will kill you.  To communicate the fact that the puzzle is timed, the door slowly becomes more and more broken.  Pieces of wood splinter, the door shakes more and more violently, small holes open up.  This also gives you somewhat of an idea of how much time is left because you can guess when that door is about to give.  Of course, I must also be careful to give enough time so as to be fair to the player, but that's a whole other topic.

If the peril is not adequately communicated, then the game becomes an exercise in frustration.  If there are two doors, and walking through one of them will get you killed by a guy with a flamethrower, and there was no indication that that might happen, I'm quitting your game.

2) Consistency in character mortality

If a character can die in the game, then any perilous situation can cause death.  Do not let the player roll through the whole game without any consequence in the face of grave danger and then suddenly hit him with a sudden death near the end.  This will lead to players getting complacent in their saving and then getting really pissed when they have to replay a huge portion of the game.  If death is possible, it should be possible from the beginning of the game.

One kink in this is that it's difficult to communicate to the player that the character is mortal and could die in the game before the first time the character actually dies.  You could put a warning right at the start that says "The characters can die in this game, save early, save often." but that breaks the mood and kind of sucks.  I'm not sure the best way to inform the player that death is possible, but one way would be to have several ways for the character to die right near the start of the game, so that when the player discovers the character's mortality, he doesn't need to replay too much.

3) Punishment for death proportional to means of failure

This one is the hardest because it's not something built into most adventure games.  Usually, if the player dies, he had better hope he had a recent save to go back to.  The punishment in this case is that the player has to replay everything after his last save. 

Using this means of punishing the player for failure, players who don't save often are punished more severely than players who save after every action.  Since I see the process of saving the game to be a process outside the game, I don't see this as fair punishment.  In other words, I want to punish people who play the game poorly more than people who play the game well but made a mistake, but I don't think that a person who saves frequently is playing the game better than a person who rarely saves.

One possible way to punish people differently for poor play would be to have that "Try again" button, but have it take you back farther in the game if you died by doing something that would be considered bad gameplay like "use fork on electrical outlet" than it would if you died failing at a task that was very difficult like defusing a time bomb within a very short time.  However, I still don't think this is quite right, since playing or replaying your game shouldn't really be a punishment... it should be fun.

I made a system in Resonance to address this third point.  I'm not sure how well it will be received by players, but I have high hopes.  While playing the game, you get points for doing good things (exploring, solving alternate puzzles, etc) up to a maximum of 99 points.  So once you have 99, you can't get any more.  And when you die in the game, it subtracts a number of points, and then lets you try again at a point just before you died, so you don't have to replay much, but you do lose points.  If you try again and die again, you'll lose more points and try yet again.  If you run out of points, then game over.  You'll have to go back to a previous save.

Other than losing points, there's no penalty for dying.  And since you can only have a max of 99 points, and you can get much more than that in the game, you might as well use them.  Bad gameplay (stick fork in electric socket) would lose more points than failing at something difficult, of course, making it more likely that you'll get a game over if you play poorly.  At that point it falls back upon the old save game.

So, basically it just provides a little extra challenge and tension (over a game with no death) without making you feel like you have to be constantly saving.  Plus, poor or stupid gameplay gets punished more harshly than simple mistakes or failure at difficult tasks.

For players who don't like the system, they can choose between 1) This point/rewind system, 2) Infinite rewind, no points system, and 3) No rewind, die->reload, classic adventure system. So hopefully everybody can find a way they like to play the game.  That's how I'm approaching the topic of death.  I'm not saying it's the best way, but it's the solution that I came up with for satisfying all three of the ideals I listed above.

Thoughts?

Final ruling on mine from the great and powerful Trihan?

Ooh, I need this.  I have this line in an email in my game that I have no idea how to punctuate.  To make things worse, it is written by a newspaper editor, so it had better freaking be right, right?

Listen, about that story you're working on, tread carefully.

Do I need a semicolon in there or something.  I don't think that second comma is right...

Nudity, mostly.

So,...

Resonance will have nutidy then?

Cause I'd love to check ProgZys pixel art in nude models and stuff! 

I just saw this post.  And actually, yes, there will be nudity in Resonance.

Hey nerd.

Now that three-button mouses are pretty much commonplace, there should be more support for it.

Just make sure that the middle mouse button isn't necessary to play your game, or that there's another button (spacebar?) that you can use in it's place for players who are using laptops to play the game (or the rare people who don't have middle buttons on their mouse)!  Don't want to alienate too many players, right?

Just wanted to do a quick update to announce TheJBurger as the newest Resonance team member.  He's putting together some awesome detail/closeup images to help add to the game's already impressive sense of immersion!

Yay J!

Nudity, mostly.

It's not looking very likely that I will be there in person, but I'd love to present some Resonance via webchat if you're into that!

Awesome work here!  I use this same effect with GUIs all over Resonance.  I wish I had this module when I started so I wouldn't have had to script it all myself.  I would definitely consider using this in future games rather than port over my own messy code from Resonance.

I'm not sure how you would be having this bug with the pathfinder while no one else has this problem.  I have rooms with walkable areas similar to yours and have never seen a similar problem.

However, I had one person email me about having a bug in Linus Bruckman where she would keep getting stuck when the player would walk off a corner.  No matter how hard I tried, I could never reproduce it, but she could send me a save game that had the player stuck off of the walkable areas.  She said it happened to her every time she played, but no one else ever had this problem.  I was never able to help her.

Could there somehow be an issue with the way one computer calculates the path while other computers would calculate it fine?

WHAM, can you upload an example room that has this problem (without your jump back to walkable area fix)? To see if other computers have the same problem while playing?

Think small!  Getting too ambitious will guarantee that you will fail.  

Find ways to cut corners but do so with style.  For example, with Anna, I'm not much of an artist, so to save time, I traced the main character over someone else's 3d render and made all the rest of the graphics in greyscale using extensive copy/pasting.  

Focus on one or two unique things to make the game great, because you don't have time to throw too many WhizBangWow things in there.  For Anna, I was mostly concentrating on the pseudo-3d presentation with keyboard control.  The story is kind of pasted in (but wound up working out really well which surprised me at the end of the week) and the puzzles are super cliche, but that's all that I had time to come up with in the small period of time.  The game succeeds, I think, on it's atmosphere and immersion, which are instilled largely by the pseudo-3d and direct control that were the focus of my development.

D'oh.  Totally right, GuyAwesome.  I don't use AGS dialog system in my game, so I forgot how you no longer need to use the old dialog_request mumbo jumbo.

Would it not be possible to just have multiple dialog options that are the same, but one of them containing more info?  Then you turn off the one with more info until appropriate (and turn off the other one).

When you turn the option with expanded dialog on and the original off, it would have the same effect as marking it as unread.  The only downside is that you'd have to potentially copy/paste a lot of dialog if it's repeated between them for each version of the option.

I don't see what all the fuss is about.  They seem like good guys to me.  Now excuse me while I go home and rape my wife.

(Where's the emoticon for "holy fracking barf?")

Autoerotic asphyxiation accident used to be my number two choice for how to die.  But since my number one choice used to be getting kicked out of a window by Kwai Chang Caine...

Ooh, thanks for the head's up Ed!

Happy Birthday Stu.

Thanks Mr. Imagineer!  And here I was thinking about how much I was looking forward to YOUR game!