Messages

About the ending:

Spoiler

I'm guessing I got the good ending... for the new family anyway, but not for the couple that lost their child... so good or bad, guess it depends on the POV.

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You're correct.

Spoiler

I like to think that both endings are "happy", but the one withouth the hand is a bit more happy for the daughter.

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Nice one WHAM! Really nice one!
I enjoyed it a lot!

And the bubbles thingie is brilliant!!
I appreciated it a lot as not native english speaker 

Happy to hear you enjoyed the game. Did you get the good ending or the bad one?

But then you most also wonder who your making your games for.

I've always been a firm believer in the "make games with features you would like to play" -school of game design.

Thanks Cassiebsg, glad to hear you enjoyed the game, at least for the most part.

The game is designed at 640x480 resolution and I believe it defaults to scaling up 2x. You should be able to drop the scaling in the setup exe that comes with the game, although if you already beat the game, this is a bit of a moot point now.

The "no-saving" this is an idea I like to do with games that have time-based elements. I feel that if it is possible to just load back a couple of minutes, this allows people to practically ignore any time-based elements of the game, saving and loading to achieve game objectives in minimum time to ensure they have as much time left as possible. Then again, Cold Hand Reef was supposed to have a few more time-based actions that I had to cut due to the deadline, so...

Argh! Excuses, excuses! I could've done better, let's just leave it at that.

Lastly the speech bubbles: I had an idea about allowing you to skip individual speech bubbles with the mouse, but due to AGS restricting you from running a cutscene inside a cutscene, I decided against it. The idea came too late in the game's development and would have required me to go back to fiddle with code I had made at the very start of the project, and I dreaded doing that, fearing I might break something.

Well this post turned into me just defending my poorer design choises, so let me distract you with this picture of a lemur:

Spoiler

Is there a better end than the "handy" one?

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Yes.

EDIT: ooh, and thanks for posting the game on the french site! I didn't understand much of the post, but I got the "anglo-allergy" -part.

It's nowhere near perfect, but I hope the unclear symbols didn't ruin the whole game for you.

Creamy: Yeah, I found it really hard to convey certain concepts via symbols. The left one in your image is my universal symbol for "nothing found", ie. a couple of flies. The second one is a needle and some thread.

Cassiebsg is correct. The mouse cursor moving up on its own is meant to indicate to the player that moving the mouse up can be used to see what tasks there are to be done.

I need that shirt...

That's without the intro (which automatically skips after the first startup of the game).
See what happens when the sun sets...

Argh... where's the save option?

The game lasts for 12 minutes. There is no save function.

@Ryan: You make a valid point, and allowing multiple commands would allow the game to certainly move faster. However, faster means more work for me and removes a certain element of challenge from the game.

I always designed the forum games with both visible and hidden mechanics and use things like actual dice rolls in the background to determine results of some events (such as combat in the first game). In your example, allowing the players to pick up all items in a room before confronting the monster in the closet means that, if any of the items might be useful in fighting said monster, we have just eliminated the challenge from the monster encounter. It calls for a slightly different game design and forces me, as a designer, to ensure that the shotgun and the monster are further apart to avoid such overlap as described above, instead of having the order of events as the deciding mechanic.

As such, when the players have to vote to decide what is most pressing and most important right now, it creates some additional challenge in the decision making process and as a game designer, I like that idea more.

However, reading through the original thread, the issue was mostly that there were only 1-3 players playing and voting at a time for most of the game, and this leaves very little to vote on, so I think I will eliminate the voting for as long as the player count remains reasonably low, instead running 3 most voted or first posted commands at a time, with votes giving an action precedence in case of conflicting commands (example: 1 person posts "shoot the dude in the hat" followed by 2 people posting "talk to the dude in the hat about leather jackets" would result in a nice leather-based chat and not a shootout).

Here's my entry link to GIP forum. Yay!

It was great fun and feels pretty awesome to finally have a game out there that I can be proud of

Cooool... I know what I'll be doing tomorrow!

Hint: It's a picture of a very cold place in the game

The game is: Space Marine!
FOR THE EMPEROR!

Which reminds me, I once had one but then life happened.

I remember this. I was a bit envious of the more hand-drawn look of your version. I could never trust myself to reproduce characters even remotely similiar to previous images, so I had to go the way of copy & paste.

Looks like we have enough players to get a game started. I'll check in with the mods about opening the thread in the activities board. It'll take me at least a few more weeks to get started, though, so don't expect anything too soon.

I hear they found the Huggs Bosom not that long ago...

Lazy devil

Looks great WHAM!  The "universal language" deal is innovative; I'll check it out.

It was a surprising amount of work, actually, and made it extremely hard to keep track of in the code.
Where usually you'd use something like:

Code: ags

player.say("I love pie!");

I would instead have to use something like

Code: ags

Speakbubble(player.x, player,y, 2, 65, 68, 50);
Speakbubble(player.x, player,y, 1, 77, 0, 40);

In hindsight, I could have planned this better...

Anything is within the realm of possibility.

And I'm sooooo praying for a sequel already!

Maybe:

Spoiler

Where you play a certain character from under the water's surface?

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Hee hee hee, you are more right than you think.

Spoiler

But the 'sequel' won't be about the character you think it will be about.

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I think Mandle might be a bit over-enthusiastic here, but I'm proud of the game too.
Release thread here: www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=52632

May the best game win!