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Spoiler

Like I said, scavenge ressources, improve the situation on the station and hopefully increase the speed of the researches for a cure. I haven't played that game in a while so I don't precisely remember.

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Spoiler

Unknown virus kill the entire population of earth, sparing only the people on the space station, which is in fact a clones farm. Only the elite of the station are aware of the virus. In order to prevent the truth from making the station crew lose all hope or become completly insane, they lie about Earth situation and create this project which is in fact a genetic research program that use the clones on the station in order to genetically modify them and find a way for station crew to go back on earth hopefully.

Unfortunately, none of the treatment works. And instead, the clones develop the Yellow plague and turn into dumb zombies. 1213 seems to be the only clone, with 0916 who react positively to the treatment. 0916 eventually become a monster too and get extremely violent. 1213 is still doing well and seems smarter than the rest of the specimens but suffer from short memory span.

The management (Peterovich) are unsure about 1213's capabilities, fear he'll turn super violent like 0916 and keep asking Westbury more and more testing and hazard course, which, combined with being stuck in space for nearly a year, drive Westbury on the edge of madness because he believes in 1213's capabilities and is tired of being stuck in space while they could send 1213 on earth, to scavenge ressources, improve the situation on the station and hopefully increase the speed of the researches for a cure.

One day, a mad Westbury leave 1213's door open and ask 1213 to escape. All this is in fact a gigantic test, Westbury's final test for 1213, to prove Peterovich and the management and their red tape bureaucratic policies that 1213 is not like the other clones, that he is smart enough and ready to be sent on earth. By the end of the game, you kill the final boss and Peterovich finally get the chance to witness 1213's true potential, but instead of seeing 1213's potential, Peterovich's sole reaction is shock at how valuable the robot you just destroyed was, at which point Westbury kill him in a fit of rage.

O'Hagan probably discovered Westbury's madness and wanted to put an end to it, which Westbury couldn't allow because he was tired of being stuck in space station and had to kill her so 1213's final test would not be put to an halt.

Or something like that.

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I hope that help!

Damn you Babar. I had written a whole lot of replies already to a lot of the messages posted above (Particuliary the whole "the demise of adventure games is due to 3D graphics" debate when IMO it's mostly due to the gigantic change in the demographic that occured from 1998 to 2000) without looking at the date only to discover it's a 3yo thread when I reach your last post!

I don't think it's wise to design a story and then try to fit a gameplay to it, just like it isn't wise IMO to design gameplay then try to fit a story to it. Good designing should involve designing both the gameplay and the story at the same time for a game is better when both the story and gameplay (and also every other elements of the game) works together and strengthen each others.

I cannot help you regarding a methodology on puzzle creation, but for your problem with fitting puzzles, there are more type of puzzles than item on item kind of puzzles, sometimes adding a new verb to the traditionnal walk, look, talk and interract can change the dynamic of the puzzles. Reading your plot summary and your problem to squeeze fitting puzzles I was kinda reminded of Monte Cristo but also Full Throttle which required you to use your muscles in an intelligent way and where even arcade sequences were puzzles in disguise. Punching and kicking your way through puzzles, rather than focussing on complex item on item interaction. Or Gunmute, an IF game where the puzzles consist of killing a series of bad guys, using your gun, either by finding when to duck and shoot the enemy, either by shooting objects surrounding the enemies.

I don't know if it's the case for your story, but if your story feature swordfighting, have you ever considered the idea of making swordfighting less actionny and more brainy, where the goal is to find an intelligent way to get the advantage and defeat your enemy, using the environment, climbing on chairs and tables, clicking on improvised weapons when disarmed, cutting candelabra ropes and other tricks generally associated to swashbuckling?

For the escape, "something happening after this time that makes escape possible" sounds like a good solution. You could also make the sentence shorter, rather than being imprisoned for life, why not a 7-10 years sentence? But I find the idea of escaping more exciting.

I bought and played it during the holidays, when Steam were having their mega sale. I must say that I didn't like the original game, Tower of Goo, at all. I played Tower of Goo for 15 minutes, you try to make the highest tower possible, it falls down, you have your 15 minutes of fun, the best most flash games can achieve, and you quickly forget about it.

So I was very skeptical when I began to play World of Goo, but after playing it for 2 days non stop, it became easily one of the most awesome and original game I played in recent time. The gameplay, the musics, the story, the atmosphere, the graphics... all synergize to create one crazy, original and artful experience that manage to fill you with a sense of childlike wonder. You got a dozen different type of goo ball to play with, you must not only build towers, but bridges and all kind of crazy other structure in order to reach the pipe that bring your goo balls to the next level. I wholeheartedly suggest that game to everyone who haven't played it yet. When I bought it I thought 10 bucks for 2 days in a row of non-stop joy was a good ratio, if you have the chance to buy it for 5 bucks, do so.

Personally it's the reviews that kept me revisiting HOTU rather than the downloads. Downloads I have no troubles to find, but reviews of games, may they be old or recent, PC or console, professional or indie, as long they were good games and overshadowed by other titles, now that's something you don't see everywhere. I am glad to see all this information will not be lost after all.

I don't think it's a good idea to frustrate the player with arbitrary rules in order to make a story more realistic. While the "Don't find the solution before the problem" sounds nice on paper, it's not that great in practice.

I played an adventure game that was exactly that, the puzzle solving was so linear and there were so many story events triggered, locations unlocked and objects becoming pickable only after you looked at specific objects that it just didn't work. And it didn't take very long for the game to turn into a very long row of interacting with every objects I previously encountered everytime I got stuck, in hope that the game would react differently this time. The game was Speculum Mortis in case any of you want to see the game. That being said, now that I've told you that you must interact with many objects you've interacted before with no results, I've probably eliminated most of the frustration out of the experience for you.

I'd say, having the protagonist say "I don't need that, at least not yet." or something to that effect is an acceptable method if you don't want the player to pick an object before finding the puzzle, but I totally second what people have said so far about not doing it too often and being careful with backtracking. Also, like Vince Twelve said, X triggering Y when both are completly unrelated is bad design, and I think it's even worse when Y is trigerred by a passive action, like looking at an object, without a cutscene or a clue to tell you this particuliar action made the story progress forward. Because when you solve a puzzle, you at least know that this action made the story progress forward.

It's past bedtime and I'm finding it difficult to find the words to say where I'm trying to get to, so I'll use an example. Suppose you're playing a game, and you decide to load a previous save, for a reason or another (crash, verifying something...) You'd solve every puzzles you previously solved, re-take everything you had, you'd hastily exhaust every conversation subjects with NPC in order to quickly get back to where you were before, but would you examine every minor objects and hotspot you encountered? The important objects which triggered important cutscenes? Surely. But everything? That's where requiring the player to find the puzzle before the solution can become problematic, when it is necessary to do passive actions, rather than active actions, in order to make the plot progress and/or unlock a new possible interaction.

Dave Gilbert's The Shivah and Blackwell series were pretty unique too IMO, with their non-traditionnal way of dealing with discussion and puzzles.

I know, super old thread revival but I only managed to play that game yesterday.

What rocked:
Totally rad animations, it's quite possibly the first time I smiled for animations as trivial as walkcycles.
All the jokes, 4th wall breaking and more particuliary the many running gags.
The possibility to set the dialogs speed.
The incredible amount of unique messages for all possible interactions. It's a bit of a two edged sword actually. Lot of unique messages is definitivly a strong point, but I found myself wasting 10 minutes or so just clicking on everything, OCD-style, when entering a new room, and with this amount of unique messages, I know I missed a whole lot of jokes and funny remarks, which make me sad.

What did not rock:
No music, I spend most of the game humming musics from DOTT.
Sometimes there are just too much dialogs.
Many useless delays in between sentences. I remember sending a PM to ProgZ regarding useless delays in between sentences in Ace Starkiller but that was nothing compared to the insane amount of useless delays in BTDT. What's worse? It must be some sort of glitch or bug for surely it cannot be a feature, but around the end of the game, starting at the frozen dimension and the museum, delays got significantly longer, ranging between 5 and 7 seconds each, so when you get one of those discussion which consist of "sentence, delay, sentence, delay, sentence" or 2 delays one after the other, the insane amount of downtime is enough to drive someone mad, MAD!

That's pretty much it, I sure hope one day you will have enough money to allow yourself to make a sequel for that game. Or you could sell deluxe editions of your BTDT games. But you must make a sequel.

I know that Sarinee was no longer updating the website since 2006 and a lot of the download links went down over the years, even if the reviews were still there. But on February 9th, the webhost went bankrupt and Home of the Underdogs is no more. :'(

I hope it will be put back online, even if it's only the reviews, but so far there is no indication that it will happen.

What does it means for the RON community?

I've finally got around to replay Day of the Tentacle and yes, "perfect" is the only word that can describe the puzzles in DOTT. The puzzles' overall originality is amazing, each puzzles are zany, yet are all perfectly logical and fit seamlessly in the game's Chuch Jones-esque atmosphere. The game also hardly feature those cliché puzzles that have become so prevalent in today's adventure games, like clues collection, locked doors, fetch quests, conversation trees/triggers or puzzles solved with tools or improvized tools.

The puzzle difficulty also walk the fine line between challenge and fairness, the puzzles are not that hard, yet the solutions are not given away, and there are sufficient hints slipped all over the place for the harder or more obscure puzzles, yet I must recognize the hint for the game's hardest puzzle is unfortunately only told once, and is so easily unnoticed if one doesn't pay very close attention to what the characters say.

I must say I recommand everyone who want to witness the greatest example of brilliantly designed puzzles to play or replay DOTT. If you played the game before, try to pay more attention to the puzzles rather than mindlessly solve them by memory, get yourself artificially stuck, look at everything, talk with everyone... so you can better re-experience the puzzles, and if you are lucky enough to have forgotten one or several solutions, it will be even better!

I don't think it died, it's just that unlike in the older days, makers can now choose between 2D and 3D while in the past they didn't have that choice. With the rise of casual gaming and indie games like Braid, World of Goo or Crayon Physics in the video games related medias and the fact that recently some developers have finally realised that some genres are better off in 2D and other genres are better off in 3D, like Capcom did with Mega Man 9, I believe 2D has a very bright future in front of it. At least brighter than 8 or so years ago, back when everyone mindlessly jumped in the 3D bandwagon, at the detriment of many genres and franchizes.

FoA II probably need a hundred new team mates. I'll be honest, I'm not holding out for them anymore, simply because they've been sourcing team mates for the past 10 years. I just don't think it's going to happen, not at least before 2020.

2020 is a good estimate, but the sourcing team mates problem is old news and is not unique to FOA2. Most early fangames projects suffered the same problem, where many useless people join a team just to see what the team is working on behind the scene or people whose sole contribution to the project is a couple of "brilliant" ideas for the game and the plot but who are otherwise completly useless to the project, or talented people who join a team without having the free time or dedication it takes to work on a project for several years in their free time. In 2005 or whatever year it was when they cleaned their website, a lot of those useless, disappeared and gone team members were removed from the contact page, as of now I think only 4 or 5 persons are working on it.

The latest update I ever heard on the project was sometimes in early 2006, back when the project was still discussed on the AfA public chatroom. Jens was now drawing backgrounds on a regular basis and keeping us updated and for once, the project seemed like it was finally getting off the ground after all these years of "we're busy working on the engine" news reports, then in early 2006 their writers decided to rewrite most of the plot to remove all the bad ideas the plot had collected over the years (see the "too many cooks" bit in the above paragraph), which rendered most of the backgrounds and non-engine related work completly useless. This news was the last I heard on the AfA public channel, we didn't discuss FOA2 much after that. (So you know, I am not a member of the team, I lurk on their public chatroom, they have a private one they use for the project.)

IMO, if there is something that actually prevented that project from making real progress during all these years (other than the facts the students they were a decade ago are now busy with jobs and RL issues), it's most certainly all this energy wasted on this obsession they had to create their own engine rather than use one of the already available adventure game engines out there, and this issue with the plot, where as long there is no outlines and no finalized details, every other aspects of the game must be put on hold.

The sole games I remember caring for the points were the Indiana Jones games, as points were mostly for alternate solutions rather than useless actions and your score was carried with you even when you died, reloaded a previous savegame or restarted the game. It really added an incentive to find all those alternate solutions to puzzles. Otherwise points don't really bother me and it doesn't spoil me how far I am in the game as generally solving the last puzzle in a game earn you 50 times more points than every other puzzles in the game, at best they make the games seem longer than they actually are.

You know what I miss now? That little sound that was played in the late Sierra games when you solved a puzzle and earned a point, man, that sound was so great to hear when you were stuck on the same puzzle for a long time.

I don't think adventure games need to be saved. Adventure games are quite possibly as alive as they will ever be. You can run SCUMMVM on pretty much anything, thanks to Telltale and other companies there are still some good adventure games being sold every years, adventure games took over the DS even if they are slightly more casual than the older ones, adventure games and interactive fiction are thriving on the indie scene... the sole thing that could make the adventure genre healthier than it is right now is if Telltale announced the production of Monkey Island 5 with the colaboration of Ron Gilbert.

If the genre doesn't seems as healthy as it was back in the days that's because the demographic changed. Adventure games and puzzles were popular back in the days because before the internet arrived only nerds owned computers. You had to like solving puzzles and brainteasers because getting a game to run in DOS was a puzzle in itself. Nowadays everyone and their moms own a computer, for the internet, drawing, chatting, work, school, video, music... the demographic changed and the market changed to suit this new demographic, and what was once one of the most popular genre has become a niche, but just because we are a smaller percentage, I don't think we are less numerous, and I don't think we need to spread the word or anything. At best you can make newer fans aware of the good old titles like Monkey Island, FOA and DOTT, and make older fans aware of indie adventure games and the better commercial titles of the recent years, but overall I think the genre is doing fine.

Many people have told me how much they like this approach, and it actually makes sense. Left click always picks up an item from your inventory, right click without an item always examines your inventory, and right click with an item always uses that item on another item.  Right click outside the gui is reserved for examining or defaulting the cursor back to walk, and with an item left click uses it on your surroundings.

I find it to be very intuitive and much quicker than dealing with extra buttons or toggles and it's not something I will be changing, sorry.

I am not asking for extra buttons, what I am asking for is that once you pick an item in your inventory, left click will use that item, and right click will de-select it, and this no matter if you're using that object on your inventory or on the background.

How the game is right now:
Left click with item on background = use the item
Right click with item on background = deselect the item
Left click with item on the inventory = choose another item
Right click with item on the inventory = use the item

How I think it should be:
Left click with item on background = use the item
Right click with item on background = deselect the item
Left click with item on the inventory = use the item
Right click with item on the inventory = deselect the item

Maybe that's just me, but I personally find the second method less confusing and quicker than constantly having to remember that in order to use an inventory item I must click the left mouse button on the background but the right mouse button on the inventory. Anyway, your call, that won't stop me from playing the sequel.

I finally got around to play that game, it was far from perfect, with its extremely difficult puzzle right at the begining of the game (If I hadn't played and loved your past games, I would have deleted that game after spending an hour without making any progress whatsoever on that puzzle), the untie command that I would have never figured out if I didn't use every inventory objects on everything out of despair, and the SPACE key to talk that I managed to miss even after reading the readme file, but in the end it was a great and funny game, the voices were bloody amazing, and I can't wait to play that belated Xmas Limey Lizard game.

There are only 3 things I hope you will solve in your next games:
First, unless if a puzzle require you to physically interact with someone, simply combine the talk action with the interact action, the game will be more intuitive that way.

Secondly, the game can get quite confusing when you use inventory objects. To use an object on the background, you must click the left button, but to use an object with another inventory object, you must use the right mouse button. For the whole game I found myself de-selecting whatever item I had selected because of those contradicting buttons functions.

Lastly, add more savegames. I know you have that philosophy regarding the number of savegames, but the reason why I won't bother finding the secrets and alternate endings in Limey Lizard (unless if someone release the list of secrets) is because I am not interested in restarting the game from scratch everytime I want to try something in a section I can't go back to.

I'll go with Dualnames with this one, DOTT is quite possibly one the best game when it come to great puzzles all around. I've been toying with the idea of replaying that game for the puzzles rather than the jokes or the story. Take everything that's not nailed down without solving a puzzle, and then ask myself what I got to do next, what is the problem, how to overcome it, etc.

In the last year, the sole puzzle that gave me that "Ah-HAH!" feeling was the scale puzzle in La-Mulana (an indie metroidvania focusing on puzzle solving rather than action). To solve that puzzle one has to piece together 4 simple looking clues, do a gigantic "A 6yo kid would have seen it coming!" mistake and understand a couple of things about the game world before attempting to solve the puzzle again, but in the end, that "Ah-HAH!" feeling is totally worth it.

I'd say that sickbay bug in Space Quest 6 which took me 7 years to discover how to overcome, the bug that crash the floppy version of King's Quest 5 two actions before the end of the game (that has to be one of the most insulting bug ever), and all those fatal errors in No Action Jackson. I try to find more but those are the only frustrating bugs I can think of.

The eternal RON future debate, one of my favorite topic. I'll try to keep it short for I'd rather not repeat everything that was said in the previous thread.

In the 5 solutions:
Solution #1 and #2 (without the optional part of solution 2) seems the most appropriated for RON.

Solution #3 could work or not. I have the impression that the problem is not that RON lacks interesting story hooks, but that people have different priorities right now than big community projects. Just do a quick poll and you will see there are still a lot of talented people and a lot of long time contributors who want to revisit the town for the Nth time but they'd rather finish their original projects rather than put them on hold to make a RON game.

Solution #4 goes against the principle of RON: a community created universe where everyone can add their own chapter to the series.

As for solution #5, a reboot of RON would be a giant insult for those who spent months of their time to create the current storyline, but also those who are currently working on RON games right now. It would quite possibly result in a drastic drop in interest from everyone who participated in the RON project so far.

Rather than erasing the current RON storyline and start a new one, a much better solution IMO would be simply to let RON continue its existence and create a new collective universe from scratch set in a different place, time, or atmosphere, something completly unrelated to the RON storyline, like they did with Maniac Mansion Mania.

One last think to consider before attempting solution #3 and #5 is: Are there enough people here with enough interest and free time to manage a big community project like RON? RON began and flourished in a time where most people here:
A) were in high school or college and had plenty of freetime in their hands,
B) all awfully lacked the skills and the talent to make the quality games we see today
Back then, RON was a nice way for everyone to have fun, practice their skills and be involved in a great project that wouldn't be overshadowed by games like Pleurghburg, Apprentice or the KQ remakes. Now that people are much more skilled, it wouldn't surprise me if more people nowaday prefered to work on their own project rather than a collective one.

I also think Stupot hit a very interesting nail here.

Awesome game! I first played the 1.0 version before coming back here (out of frustration over the game's stubborness to not let me use the nail polish like I wanted) and download the latest version, and I must say you did an excellent job in the latest version at adding with all those additionnal clues that greatly improved the game's responsiveness, great job there.

Excellent story!

Spoiler

After the strange phone call I immediately hid under a pillow fort and layers of security blankets expecting a serial killer or some monster to pop into the house by the end of the game, when it was time to climb down the attic stairs, I knew something bad would happen, I was completly prepared to any possibilities, yet the ending completly caught me off guard, nice job!

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As for the music, I loved the title screen music, but I didn't hear much of the ingame music (the one played during 95% of the game) because the volume for that music is too low IMO. In order to properly hear the ingame music with all its subtleties, I must raise the volume a lot which make the footsteps and the phone sounds too loud. But otherwise all musics greatly fitted the story and atmosphere.

Sole glitch and inconsistency I could find in the game were:

Spoiler

Glitch: If you put the hairclip back on the wife's hair when she is asleep, if you go in the kitchen while the wife is awake, the hairclip will be floating in space.
Inconsistency: If you go in the kitchen when the wife is awake, the package will still be on the kitchen counter as if she didn't open the package at all.

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