Messages

It depends. If you're going for a ginormous tribute to Sierra parser adventure games vibe in your game, you gotta have tap. Other than that, you should go for press as it's definitely more intuitive.

Take my posts with a grain of salt if you're playing the remake. A friend who played the original just tried the remake and found the puzzles much easier thanks to the hint system. Said the platforming, monsters and bosses got a whole lotta harder, and some items switched places (some items found mid to late in the game can be found earlier and vice versa) and the remake also feature more insta death traps than the original.

Also the remake is now sold on GOG.com, in your face, Steam Greenlight!

I prefer the first and second options as the third option backfired too often with me, with the character saying something I didn't want them to say.

I will probably give them as much as I gave to Al and Josh, Scott and Mark or Tim and Ron to redeem myself for pirating Dr. Brain and Quest For Glory but I don't know if I will play the final product. The Quest For Glory universe is certainly more developed and engaging than King's Quest or Kyrandia, but without its iconic gameplay (which in my opinion is what makes the games some of the best RPGs in the video game medium) I don't know if it will be the same.

Well, one of the things they changed in the remake is the introduction, which I believe is easier to get into. In the original you're just thrown into this giant enigma with no idea what you're supposed to do. The first ever time I played this game I think I was stuck outside the ruins for nearly an hour with no idea what I was doing wrong. I gave up and I only gave the game a proper second chance when I kept seeing it crops up in these Top list of indie video games. Plus there is the grindy beginning where you need to buy a ROM to save your game, the hand scanner and a ROM to translate the stone tablets, a grand total of one hundred thirty gold to grind in pots in the ruins, before the fun part begins, and in-game you're not told any of that stuff, heck, saving is kinda a puzzle in itself if you haven't read the manual.

With the original you've got to be really hyped, and keep telling yourself, "You're gonna love this game, you're gonna love this game, it sucks now, but later it will be awesome" until you can translate your first glyph, begin your grail diary and stumble on your first puzzles, that's where the fun begins. In the remake I heard the game holds your hand in the beginning, until you know the basics at least, to shorten the gap between when the game begins and when the fun begins.

And a second thing they fixed, at least judging from the trailers, is when you solve a puzzle, there will be an animation somewhere in the ruins to tells you what this puzzle you solved or this switch you flipped changed in the dungeon. In the original, if you solved a puzzle and nothing happened in your immediate surrounding, you had to visit every rooms in the current dungeon and keep a sharp eye open for any minor change since your last visit. In the remake you still have to revisit every rooms, but there will be an animation that tells you something happened.

That's why it's considered a bit easier. But to compensate for these two changes, I heard the secret bonus dungeon just got a whole lotta harder in the remake.

And yes, don't watch Let's Plays. Under it's platformer shapes, this game is really an adventure or puzzle game, and Let's Plays are bound to spoil you something. Interestingly enough, it's a test more than an adventure game, I can understand checking a walkthrough for a game like Secret Of Monkey Island, or Fate of Atlantis, because, there's an engrossing plot in these games, if you're stuck but you're hooked to the plot, the temptation to check a walkthrough to move forward and see how the plot unfolds is there.

In La-Mulana, the plot is so minimal, the ending so "A Winner Is You!", at least compared to what traditional adventure gamers are used to, that there should be no compulsion to check a walkthrough, it's mainly a test, a challenge, the only reward you get from this game is personal gratification, it's all these "Ah-HA!" moments when two seemingly unconnected bits of information finally connect together and a puzzle piece falls into place. Playing this game with a walkthrough is busy work.

It's somewhat a strange way to defeat the problem of walkthroughs prevalence on the internet.

I believe only the version on tape or floppy for real C64 is commercial. It appears Georg moved Joe Gunn to the C64 section of his site sometimes after I posted these reviews. Here's a working link for Joe Gunn:

http://www.georg-rottensteiner.de/files/joegunn_gold.zip

WARNING: This rambly posts has no head nor tail thanks to all the emotions reminiscing about this game brings to me.

I played the original in 2008. We're talking four weeks spent exploring, mapping, sketching, taking notes, breaking four ballpoint pens, solving puzzles, headaches, torments, getting stuck on one puzzle, giving up...

Restarting from scratch six months later, rewriting everything because my original notes were a mess, two more week playing, solving that one puzzle that got me the first time around, getting stuck once more. Give up...

Fire it up again some weeks afterward, finish the game, for the first time, "Now where's that bonus dungeon?", torments, torments, torments...

A metroidvania with more than four hundred rooms to explore. An homage to the MSX (the original at least) and Maze Of Galious. A game whose challenge seems to be figuring how jumping works and how to kill dem stupid birds at the start, but quickly crushes you under a mountain of puzzles, each one more tormenting than the previous.

It's such a fantastic game, what every Indiana Jones action game should have been, should aspire to be. Ya know, every traps, every puzzles in the Indy movies, La-Mulana is that turned up to eleven, and solving it... I'm lacking words here, the game is so tormenting... finishing that game without any outside help is easily my biggest accomplishment as a gamer. The satisfaction for solving that game, I've never found anything quite like it with other games.

It's not a perfect game, the fun begins when you get inside the ruins, start reading glyphs and solve your first puzzles, but the beginning is plagued with useless gold grinding so you can buy the tools needed for that, and the bonus dungeon could have done away with that ginormous dick move ("120 000 here." if you've played the game), I've not played the remake yet, I don't know to what extend these two issues have been fixed.

If you like the game, there's also Joe Gunn, an homebrew C64 game which has the same type of gameplay (a metroidvania focusing on solving puzzles), but easier and on a much smaller scale, but still amazing nonetheless. I think I discussed the game on this forum a long time ago. I wrote reviews for both these games and Spelunky on the Fountain of Youth forum.

But yeah, if you think adventure games needs puzzles and exploration, or if you think it kind of sucks that today's designers don't challenge their players anymore, that game's for you. It's challenging, it's so damn challenging, and at the same time, it's not frustrating, for a game that's such a throw back to the Nintendo Hard era, it's extremely player friendly, I recall three instances where the game test your platforming and action gamer skills, and two of them are for optional stuff, and there's also no walking dead either, I believe there's one, but the manual warns you about it so it's easy to dodge. So, if you're always up for challenges as long they're friendly, you've got no excuse to skip on that game.

And keep a pad of quad paper and a bag of pens nearby, you will need it.
Edit - I just checked, twenty pages, 13" x 8" covered with notes and maps. That's the amount of notes I took during my second playthrough.

If you haven't done so already, try to get yourself covered by IndieGames.com, TIGSource, Destructoid, Rock Paper Shotgun and other indie video games news outlets. Bribing Dave Gilbert for his little black book of websites to plug your kickstarter would be a good investment too. Let's overfund this baby.

Enough words, time to play that demo!

The download completed successfully!
Will play it whenever I have the time. Damn evil job, stealing all my free time.

And ironically, by posting prototypes, the Space Venture Kickstarter is receiving flak and some removed pledges from people thinking the final product will require to be played in a browser or Chrome, or people thinking the game's not polished enough, forgetting it's a damn prototype.

If you can push the puzzle design all the way up to eleven with this, I'm all for it. Bring it on!

 

I don't know what's going on. I tried to download it a dozen of times or so in the last days, both with Opera and Firefox, and every time the transfer interrupted a couple minutes afterward.

Anyone else getting an error when trying to download the file? The download starts, and after a couple minute, the transfer simply stops.

It's on!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/251414413/tex-murphy-project-fedora

Shouldn't we build a space port first or something? I was and still am under the impression the Enterprise was built in space to avoid having to escape earth's gravity and atmosphere. And yeah, it's never going to happen. There's plenty of cheaper and better spaceship design out there, choosing the cool factor over every other rational and logical reasons not to pick that design is rather stupid.

Would they rather feature it if it was free or with a 1$ pricetag.

There's also plenty of sites that would cover it without the price tag: Indiegames, TIGSource, JayIsGame, PlayThisThing, Pixel Prospector, if it's truly awesome, RockPaperShotgun, Kotaku and Destructoid might pick it up too, and if they do you may also try bigger gaming sites. And the indie adventure game community is much bigger than this forum, there's plenty of forums dedicated to adventure games out there where you can announce your latest game.

The problem is most indie creators just create their game, announce it on this one obscure forum they happen to hang out at and call it a day. That's not how it works, you want your game to find its players, you gotta advertise the crap out of it, talk about it everywhere you can, adding a price tag won't magically make it desirable, nor will it make it on everyone's lips and computer screen.

For once, I think I can get behind all the awards and nominations as 100% correct.

Well done to both the contenders and the voters.

I don't know, I can think of two games that deserved a nomination in a specific category. But I cast a single vote and didn't nominate so I can't complain.

We made it! We've reached $650,000 with less than one hour to go. That means a new location, with new characters and puzzles, more plot and jokes and a new girl to woo!

I voted... only in the Best Animation category but I voted!

But it can be done. The Portal 2 coop campaign and Gobliiins series are proof of that in my opinion. It's a matter of implementation, fine tuning and streamlining the experience. Obviously that means keeping the gameplay tight and linear, with very few rooms accessible at any one time during the course of the game but cramming them with puzzles, characters and interactions, because you want players to stay close and solve puzzles together (and not run out of puzzles), not part ways in a King's Quest huge game world. That also means sharing inventory to reduce the item trading in Coop games.

That means handling conversations with NPCs so both Player A and B have unique convo options, maybe Player A can explore while Player B talks if he's not interested in the discussion, maybe the PCs can throw quips during conversations if they are close to conversing NPCs while exploring, unique conversation options could also be available when both players are conversing at the same time with a NPC.

It also mean fine tuning and streamlining the plot progression. Brevity is the soul of wit, so short cutscenes, short intro, let players have fun and immerse themselves in your world and love its characters before you bring the epic plots. Vehiculate the plot through the environment or during the gameplay rather than long cutscenes, and always keep your players playing. For longer plot, consider a series of short episodes rather than a long game to accomodate player scheduling.

Learn to walk before running. There are no precedent for such a game, so think two players before eight players multiplayer or MMO, think coop before versus, and think one or two room prototypes before epic games like Secret of Monkey Island or Gabriel Knight.

How about a two rooms whodunit? One room has the murder, with clues and red herring, one room has the witnesses and murderer, players play as Sherlock and Watson, find clues, interrogate suspects, argue between each others and try to find who's the culprit.

The sooner we'll get rid of our bad designs and figure out what works and what doesn't, the sooner we'll be able to tackle bigger projects, longer, with more players or players with opposing goals, which will open up new plot possibilities.