Messages

Wonderful, creative work!

The faces are different from the original look, but I actually really like the 3d treatment you've given them. Genesta, in particular, is a completely different look, but in the original KQ4, I always thought Genesta was unattractive, particularly in close-ups. The ears and big eyes give her a nice, ethereal quality.

My criticism is mostly on the texture of the clothes. Graham's tunic, in particular, looks like stretchy latex, and is so tight, it shows his ribs. That particular costume would fit Spider-Man better than the King of Daventry!  Other than that, I love Graham's face, although I could go for some more gray in the hair and some wrinkles (he's retiring, remember?).

Wonderful models, and beautiful colors!

Shoot. If you're going for deep poetry, how about Death's Challenge from KQVI?

Man may pass the portal,
and seek its Master, Death.
Man may pass where Death has trod,
and challenge like Scheherezade,
He who reigns beneath the sod,
to spare a mortal's breath.

And then, of course, there's Igor from QfGIV:

Ha, ha. Little bit of graveyard humor, there.

I'm a huge fan of Laura Bow!

What I love is that I played all the way through Colonel's Bequest the first time, not realizing that there were layers of things going on that I was missing. By the time I got to the end, I knew I had to play it again. I found so many more clues and watched more suspicious behavior. But it wasn't until my fourth or fifth time through that I actually solved it all: bodies, culprit, and secret treasure.

However, Amon Ra was ridiculous. The amount of conversation that you have to slog through to get the information in your little black book... And then, at the end, the evidence never really does stack up. The story doesn't hold against the clues you've picked up.

If I have a recommendation for any new Laura Bow game, it would be to (1) make a credible series of murders and really plan out a logical solution, (2) THEN plan the red herrings.

Read the book!

also

I love The Dig.

Now you've got me wanting to read the book!

I always felt that the overall story was excellent, but it just didn't work well as an adventure game. I can't tell you how many hours I must have wasted walking in circles looking for rods or trying to power up the spheres. And that stupid skeleton! And that awful picker-upper machine! And the moon magnets... oh... the moon magnets... 

But the drama was better than any game I'd played to that point. Brink's growing madness, the overall atmosphere, and particularly the voice-acting were truly top-notch.

I insist. I LOVED YOUR GAME. XD

Just finished this and it was unexpectedly wonderful! I mean, I expected it to be very good, but it definitely exceeded my expectations.

It may seem self-indulgent, but I honestly can never get over how many really very kind and positive remarks Arden's Vale has gotten. I really appreciate every one. Thank you so much for playing!

What impressed me the most, though, was the coding of things like the UI (that little hotspot indicator gliding around was very fancy), and the 3D parallax. How did you do those side walls in the corridor? Raw-draw them yourself based on 3D calculations, or what?

Thanks! Arden's Vale is my first game, and in every room I made, I wanted to do something that really messed with my programming skills, which also led to the sliding menu bar, the mobile hotspot labels, multiple simultaneous animations, etc.

The hallway was definitely the clincher, though.  I tried half a dozen major approaches, but ended up calculating and drawing each frame "by hand", with and without the door. It still takes a lot of in-game calculation, since, as the character moves, the door (and the pathway down) actually have to slide further left than the screen does to complete the illusion.

[Arden's Vale]

May I suggest Arden's Vale for your nomination consideration?


You play Riel, who, to save her sister from a deadly enchantment, must steal a magical stone with healing powers from a vengeful enchanter. After infiltrating the enchanter's castle, you must survive sinister traps, talking gargoyles, quite nearly logical puzzles, terrible puns, and finally the enchanter himself. But beware, for not everything is as it seems...

This game has already won the Game With the Most Random References to ATOTK Award, the 2011 Inventory to Hotspot Interaction Overkill Award, and the Most Family-Friendly Evil Bad Guy in a Game Released in August Award.

Additionally, I like to think it would be a fitting nomination for the AGS Awards under:

Best Puzzles
Best Short Game
Best Player Character
Best Animation
Best Music

Game Details
Download

Thank you for playing, considering, or at least considering playing.

If you could make it where the mouse-over displayed the gem type, 'fire gem' 'earth gem' water gem' 'air gem' that would help so much.

Done and done!

Thanks to Charles, I'll be working on a version 1.2 over the next few months, including a new and improved lock puzzle.  Any other suggestions from players would be awesome!

Does the game need more music tracks, non-retro sound effects, language translation, speech, additional responses, backstory, etc?  What would best enhance the game?

Second one seems like it could work though, but it's not that original. Reminds me of this game and a lot of time-travelling stuff ranging from movies to books.

Of the two ideas, I'd be more interested in playing #1, as #2 just seems very "been there done that" (and it'd be hard to live up to DOTT). 

I agree with the point that time travel really is an overdone theme.  I thought with switching between the present and past on command and not as a chapter by chapter basis, it would really feel fresh.  But the more I start fleshing out puzzles, the more the ideas feel like Day of the Tentacle.  So that much, at least, is still a work in progress.  However...

- Rely on a huge number of inventory items to do a more object-centric game
- Add more characters and more detailed dialogues for a story-driven game
- Code some mini-games, so people will spend more time on puzzles

I really hate the idea of artificially prolonging games.  One of my favorite games as a teenager, The Legend of Kyrandia, very quickly became my least favorite game just as soon as I got bogged down in a must-draw-a-map, frequent-unskippable-death-scenes, hours-of-repetitive-exploring, underground fireberry labyrinth from gamer purgatory.

Of all of FrancoFranchi's ideas, the one I'm most drawn to adding more characters and fleshing out a more story-driven game.  In dialogs, resources are reused to the nth degree, but as long as the writing is fresh, it doesn't matter.  Gabriel Knight, anyone?

Now I need to go play "Prime Minister's Questions" and... that other one...  Can anyone remember the name of the murder mystery game that touted a new dialog system along with traditional clue-finding?  All I remember is the slick-looking, nearly all-white screenshot. 

Quite frankly, I'd crop the Cirque du Rien picture in half vertically.  You really, really need the extra line to space out the score.  Each other song only has 5 or 6 measures per line, which is much more visually appealing than squishing all the notes like that.

As long as the music is uniform, the whole set looks visually appealing.  The pictures are fine in different sizes.  Just ask the chicken.

All that said, I love each piece of artwork, especially the "Truth be told, I..."  One of my favorite artists is James C. Christensen, and the style here is just phenomenal.

What I maybe liked most is the different approach to puzzles, and the wide spectrum of possibilities you took in consideration.

loved it!! the amount of interaction with objects was great.. you did an awesome job antipus! are you planning on a sequel?

Thanks so much for the comments!  I had been working on having every inventory object have a response for every hotspot in the game, but ended up cheating towards the end of production. Hopefully they were all on silly enough interactions that nothing you did on purpose had a non-response.

Right now I'm working on a smaller, but hopefully equally enjoyable project.  If I do expand Arden's Vale, it probably won't begin in earnest until next summer...  And then who knows how long that will take.  :

The game has been jayisgamesed!

Sweet!  Thanks for the head's up!

Thanks to everyone who's played the game so far!  But now it's even better!

All known bugs, including the one fatal crash, were fixed.  And then some of the graphics were improved.  And then a new piece of music was added.  And then a new way to end the game was put in.  And then there was some additional tweaking.  And then it was called v1.1 and made available for download.

Enjoy the new version!

I'd really be sad to know that such great game ideas like yours would be included in any non-artistic project...

I don't mean for the project to be non-artistic.  I just have played too many AGS games that had wonderful ideas, but had so many distractions that the game suffered.  This includes poorly-planned puzzles, spelling typos, and counter-intuitive GUIs, as well as bad graphics.  I enjoy quality games over quantity.  I WANT artistic games.

But that's the problem with  Arden's Vale.  The plan called for 40 rooms, a dozen characters, a huge story, etc.  I could never produce that much and maintain a decent quality, so I just made a portion of the original game, but spent a lot of time on each scene.  It's the best quality I could muster, but the game is short.

My hope with these future projects is to plan them on a much smaller scope that would approach the initial design with my own limitations in mind.  I can write music and code and design and plot, but art is just painfully slow.

I really like the second idea (bonus points if you are expelled from school FOR being held hostage BY aliens IN a Chilean mine)

And that is just awesome.

[Game 1: Cops and Robbers.]

I hate the idea of using other people's resources.  In Arden's Vale, while I used objects and background ideas from other games, I always redrew them by hand.  It just helps the graphics look uniform.  But I hate the time it takes to create all the resources on my own.  It takes forever!

So here's my thinking: cram as much story and as many puzzles into the smallest possible space room-wise.  Like a OROW game, but more complex.  I'm currently fleshing out story and puzzles for two new games and would like some feedback before I actually start working on the coding/graphics/etc.

Game 1: Cops and Robbers.
You play the policeman in a certain given scenario and attempt to corner the thief.  You follow protocol, use intuition, and somehow, miraculously, the thief escapes.  Then you play the thief and have to figure out how to escape while the computer cop does roughly what you did as a cop.  Same room, same situation, two different play experiences.  Repeat for as many rooms as can be devised.

Game 2: Yesterday's Child.
You play a character who has a really horrible day (you're held hostage, attacked by aliens, expelled from school, trapped in a Chilean mine, whatever).  If only you'd known this would happen yesterday, you could have done something to prevent it and save yourself!  So you switch alternately back and forth playing today's you and yesterday's you, moving, locking/unlocking, destroying etc. things yesterday that make today's character able to make it through the day.

Both game ideas would reuse items, characters, and most importantly backgrounds in unique ways that facilitate easier production.  But both, at the same time, would require much sneakier puzzles to make the games function and be enjoyable.

My question is: does this approach sound feasible?  Which game would you rather play?  What kind of awful pitfalls do you see in this kind of game?  Would either even work?  Do you prefer games with more locations anyway?  Can you think of more practical ways to get more bang for your graphics buck? Any other comments?

I'm almost done with v1.1 including all sorts of little tweaks and additions.

A few people have mentioned a walk-behind bug...

Spoiler

after opening the castle door from the inside,

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but I can't seem to reproduce it.  Can anyone be more specific as to where this occurs or send me a screenshot?

Thanks again to all who have played so far!

If you ever wish that Arden's Vale had speech, Skullkid3 posted a YouTube video of his first playthrough, including some really hilarious comments and truly "spot-on voice acting."

It really made me laugh and was kind of gratifying to watch somebody play through it.  Enjoy!

Solid game! Good work!

Thanks!  Glad you liked it!


Calling all bugs!  I'd like to release a v 1.1 (or something like that) with all bugs and crashes fixed in the next few weeks.  If you've found anything goofy with the game, please PM me or post here.  I'm already working out the one crash I know about...

Spoiler

If you stand in front of the mirror in the enchanter's room when he zaps you.

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Anything else? I'll even take suggestions and gags to slip in! Did you ever click something somewhere and wish it had a cool joke instead?  Like when you talk to the reflection of yourself, for instance?

I like the flash style, since it's different than the traditional pixel-poking sprites.  I love how smooth you can make the animations (as opposed to 6 or 8 frames).

The others have already mentioned some of the visual oddities about this go-around.  One of the things that caught me, though, is that the cycles don't go at the same speed.  Side-to-side it takes her a lot longer to take a step than it does from the front.  You should always, always make each view match length.  Specifically, you could shorten the side view whenever the foot comes forward; it takes too long to pull the foot back.

Good work, it looks like a fun character and a fun style!

hello. i run into a peculiar bug playing the game and cannot finish it:

Spoiler

So after i left the treasure room with the stone and i escaped the wizard hanging on the tapistry...i go into his room,so i hide in the scenery,leaving a reflection of me on the mirror and wait for the wizard to hop in and fall for the old baba-yaga trick, but the game crashes every time and i have this message: in "room5.asc" , line 141 Error: Character.loop: invalid loop number for this view"

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srnikolas,

Someone else reported the bug, too, and I'm working on it.  I never thought of going to that particular place at that particular time, but you've got really clever reasoning.  You can still finish the game, though.  In two ways, actually.  The easiest is:

Spoiler

Don't go back in the enchanter's room; find another place to hide instead.

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Additionally, there's a very different route...

I've been toying with a fun idea for a project, and I'm wondering if it's possible to play two music tracks at the same time, synched with each other, on separate channels, say.

On top of that, can I control the volume of each channel independently?

The real idea is to have a major and a minor version of the same song seamlessly fade in and out of each other without restarting the music each time the fade occurs.

I'm using AGS v3.1.2, but I saw that the new version has totally reworked the way music is handled.  Could it do this, perhaps?

The closest I could come is having one track play with "PlayAmbientSound", but any fadeout of the sound volume kills all the other sound effects...   Hrm...

Great game, it's a pity it's that short. Now i'm waiting for someone to write a full walkthrough so i can get the last 3 points that keep me from understanding the whole thing

I'm curious myself if anyone has found the last three points yet.  For your information, the lock puzzle gives you a different amount of points depending on the difficulty level, with the maximum being 5 points on the hardest setting, then 3, 2, 1, or 0 if you cheat. So if you cheat, an otherwise perfect score would be 45.

Considering this game features two of my pet peeves (silly fantasy character names & Myst-style 'figure out this machine' puzzles), I wasn't expecting much but this turned out to be hugely enjoyable from start to finish  

That's about the best compliment I've gotten about the game.  I realize that you can't please everyone, and everyone has pet peeves that usually turn them off right away.

For me, I always hated the pockets of unlimited size and the accidental solving of puzzles by clicking enough random items in enough places.  I decided to never give Riel an item she couldn't fit in the satchel, and made all sorts of puzzle adjustments to prevent accidental solving.

I only have two minor criticisms and they both concern the story:

Spoiler

a) The tone-shift is crazy extreme.  It starts with an incredibly po-faced earnest heroine vowing to save her sister, then shifts into goofy wisecracking mode as soon as she gets to the dangerous fortress.  As the real game story was just "get this Macguffin", it was pretty jarring.
b) You don't learn anything about the story beyond the intro/ending - you get told everything you need to know in the opening scene and that's that.  None of the books tell you anything about the land, nothing in the enchanter's possessions gives you any idea about his motivations etc  - you don't even get to confront him at the end, which is a bit anti-climactic.  

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Those criticisms are completely valid, and I wish I'd had the ability to build a richer environment with deeper characters.  Part of the problem is that this is only part of a much larger story I initially wanted to tell, but realized I'd never be able to finish if I tried to make the whole game.

For those who want a bit more the full story, here are a few nudges in the right direction:

Spoiler

How does the doctor know so much about the enchanter and what is in his possession?

The doctor told a lie in the introduction.  What did he lie about? (The 50 point question...)

Duke Silvius is the Duke of Brynthe. Why would the enchanter have his portrait?

Why does the enchanter have a model of Arden's Vale in his bedroom?

When you escaped the castle, why didn't the enchanter chase you?

If you watch carefully, there is no ring in the introduction.  What does that mean?

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For added cheesiness, try talking to your reflection.