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Hi folks,

I've been experimenting with a new sprite style, and would like to take a moment to see what all can be improved on. It's been quite a while since I've done sprite work, so I know I'm a little rusty.

Anyway, I've been wanting to update a character of mine to a new style. I'm mainly doing this to see if I can give my characters a much wider range of expression. Here's a comparison of the character update. The new version is on the right.

I know that the new one is still really rough. I may go back and re-draw the character by hand and then paint over it, but at the moment I'd love some input.



About the character: Peter Ballard is a sullen teenager (in a tongue-in-cheek emo style) who hates his life, hates the world, and is too lazy to do anything about his situation. All he does is get high and slack off in school and at work.

This one was just for fun. I'm putting together about four or five short AGS game demos I've made and plan on having people vote on their favorite ones in order to give myself a little direction. But enough about that, I decided it'd be fun to include a few "tongue-in-cheek" type of games, and I'm actually quite proud of this one. I'd just like to see some general impressions, and just kind of keep this around to show how my artwork has been progressing.

Title: I Dream For Neckbeards (Might revise to "I Dream Of Neckbeards" or even "I Dream For a Neckbeard"; I can't decide which one is linguistically better). A neckbeard is a term referring to a basement-dweller, usually one that programs for Free Software projects like GNU/Linux or something like that. They receive very little sunlight, and due to low-levels of social interaction, don't worry about things such as hygiene, specifically shaving.

Premise: Just some goofy little tongue-in-cheek commentary on the Free Software movement, with an incredibly disjointed perspective of a Microsoft-run Orwellian-style society. Basically like a really comically bad version of Neuromancer. The Protagonist gets the fated Blue Screen of Death, goes to the store to buy a new copy of Windows, and promptly runs into a crowd of Free-Software Anarchists that are brutally beaten by the Software Police. A dying man presses a disc into the proganist's arms, and some stupid magical quest begins, with Big Brother following him close behind.


Anyways, pedantic ramblings aside. The title screen. I wanted to go for something that clearly mocked the old Tandy, IBM, and Amiga error in hardware. Those gross beige-boxes, essentially.



2X

Basically, I got bored today and decided I'd draw myself a sprite. Haven't done that in a while, so I figured I'd see what I could come up with. I'm actually very happy with how he's come along so far, so allow me to introduce Billy Piston.

Billy flunked out of the respected space academy he had gotten a scholarship for. Over time, Billy became very jaded with the universe around him. With a crappy minimum wage job hauling radioactive waste all over the solar system, Billy has degraded from the nice young kid he used to be. He's an angry, jaded, hardcore-loving, dope-smoking no-good punk. Billy would be a protagonist, on just another ordinary run to deposit some waste on Ganymede when he fell into a dark plot to save the very race he hated the most...humanity.

Anyways, any criticism on the sprite would be much appreciated.


NEWEST VERSION:



2X



OLD VERSION:


4x



Note: Those things on his boots are supposed to be spikes of some sort.

http://www.scoutshonour.com/digital/

I saw this on OSNews today, and was blown away. What is it, you ask?

It's a game for PC, Mac, and Linux. Coded in Python, the setting is the desktop of an Amiga-like computer in 1988. Connect to BBS's, get away with telephone fraud, have an online relationship, get into nerd arguments, pirate software...

And by far, this has been the most brilliant thing I've seen in a long time. It has a sort of charm to it that I find unrivaled in many games today. Definitely recommend it.

[ChaosOrder Studios]

Hi, folks. You may or may not remember me, I tend to slip in and out of this community every now and then.


ChaosOrder Studios Presents:

No One Likes You

Synopsis:

Peter is your typical teenager. He smokes pot, is failing school, hates his parents, has no friends, and has never been laid in his entire life. In other words, everything is perfectly normal, except his parents are fed up with his behaviour. It's up to you to step into his Vans designer shoes and try to pass your classes, get laid, and make some friends for once in your life.


This game is clearly a satire of most adventure games. It is designed for a "mature" (or immature) audience. The humor is juvenile, the shots are below the belt. This won't be the type of game most typical adventure gamers will want to play due to the content and various levels of obscenity.

That said, it's a delicious romp.

Now, some screenshots.


Always a bright and insightful one!


Use Peter's computer-within-a-game on your computer to do stuff. Or not.


Enjoy the tedium of dysfunctional living! Do household chores!


Disturbing environments that yield some horrible truths about the real world!


A death sequence that changes depending on how you die!


Featuring an utterly morbid game interface. Guess which button is to quit?


Development progress:

-Backgrounds: 30%
-Scripting: 40%
-Animation: 10%
-Music: 0%
-Cutscenes: 5%
-Voice Acting: 0% (No, I don't want a million PM's from people asking to be voice actors.)

I will also attempt to ship this game with native Linux and MacOSX binaries.

We're desperately in need of a composer. Actually, scratch that, we probably could use an animator as well, seeing as I'm doing pretty much all of the positions by myself.

Update Thurs, March 11th

I would like to welcome Suicide Pencil and m0ds to the development team. SP will be doing programming and code cleanup, and m0ds has agreed to do music for the game. Squee!

I've tried doing a search on this through the forums, but nothing has come up that I quite have in mind, so here goes:

I want to code in a segment where you [EGO] have to steal a cheese grater from the kitchen, and your mom [MOM] doesn't want you to take it. [MOM] currently runs on a series of looping scripts to make it look as if she is working in the kitchen. She walks to the fridge, opens it, cuts some carrots, heats something up in the microwave, etc.

However, I have no idea as to how to code this: She doesn't want you to take the cheese grater, so you can only take it while her back is turned. If she is facing the player character [EGO], I want to have the player reach for it, the mother to scold him, and the player character to shrug and walk away.


So, I guess my question is: What function do I need to determine if the Mom character is facing the player character while you try and take the cheese grater?

This is an idea I had earlier today for a conceptual interface to facilitate both adventure gaming and action gaming in the same game. I call it the Bastard interface, mainly because it borrows ideas from various 90's Heads-Up Displays, as well as some interface elements from Zune Software 4.0 (in my mind anyways)

My main focus here is usability criticism, not art critiscism. I want to know if this works from a functional point.



I suppose it goes without saying that an explanation is needed, so I'll explain things from left to right, as well as some external not-depicted functionality. (Might do mockups for those later?)

From left to right:

The protagonist's head is shown looking off to the side on the far left, and acts as a sort of special status indicator. If the player has a good balance among stats, he will smirk. If shot at or injured, he will occasionally grimace.

Then we have the typical "health bar". Moving the mouse over it will present a simplistic bubble dialog with an indicated number of health packs.

Likewise, we then have my unique spin to gaming implemented: the "Give a Shit" bar. As someone who has a very low attention span, I pondered upon how interesting it might be to implement in a game. Let's suppose the protagonist's "G.A.S" level is incredibly low, and the player has read, say, some kind of walkthrough or is attempting to cheat. With a low G.A.S level, the protagonist will be less perceptive to the world around him, and will ignore things that may be out of the ordinary. He will walk slower, or sometimes even walk in the wrong direction if his G.A.S level is low enough. The bar is raised by several things:

1.) Consuming some sort of drug or amphetamine (as it happens in real life)

2.) Suddenly walking into a fight or witnessing a crime will automatically cause the bar to rise as the player is suddenly extremely interested in self-preservation.

3.) Contextual information is learned that syncs with things the protagonist cares about. Suppose you play a womanizer and suddenly walk up to a hot chick. Your interest levels would marginally rise.


Also, the G.A.S indicator also opens up more options in the dialog system. After all, if you don't care much about something, you're not going to want to carry on a conversation for very long.


The gun in the picture functions for two things: weapons and inventory. Left clicking will present a list of available weapons, right clicking will open up a list of the last 5 used inventory items (can be determined or queued by player. Whichever item is selected last will end up in the box. Contextual information about ammunition is given. (Or, if it is a fist or baseball bat, an infinity sign is given)

The four circles are simply for in-game functions: Inventory (The other one is a sort of inventory-on-hand), Stats (In a sort of RPG-style/QFG style), Save, and Load.

The final part of the interface is on the far right, and it's the "Notes and Notifications" section. Rather than just having something give a score, I've been pondering about possibly presenting actions and notifications about things that the player happens across to reference later. For example, if the player is given a quest or a piece of necessary information, it would pop up in the upper corner and then just be in the notes. The note tab slides out to present both character statuses, learned information, and quests. I haven't designed what the notes actually look like, as that in itself is a usability question.

Anyways, if anyone has any suggestions or questions that'd be great.

Hi, guys.

I've been a part of these forums for quite some time now. About 6 or 7 years, I estimate.
While I've always had a desktop computer of some sort, and they've gone through several transformations altogether, the time is coming for me to graduate High School and start out in the entirely different universe known as college.

Now, I've decided a desktop is simply too large to lug around with me all the time. So naturally, I want a laptop.

The problem is that there's a plethora of options, and I'm not sure what I really want or need. So I figured it would be best to ask my fellow AGS-er's what they would recommend.

A couple ground rules:
-No ridiculously small laptops. I can't stand netbooks, as I can't comprehend why anyone would want such a small, underpowered device.
-It has to be able to run Linux. If it's UNIX-compatible, then all the better. However, I love Linux just as much as I love, oh say, Solaris.
-While I never consider myself to be a heavy gamer, something capable of playing Fallout 3 and Counterstrike would be nice.
-I need something that has long-term-support of some type. A 3-year warranty or tech support would be lovely.

Most importantly, though, it can't be over $1,500

If anyone can bring up some advice for a good brand and model to choose from, feel free to share your experience.

Oh yes, and finally: what I'm going to use this laptop for:

-light gaming.
-Paperwork/research/presentations
-Programming
-Music recording/podcasting
-Digital imaging/graphic design
-Film editing.
-general tinkering

[play on words]

Hi, everyone. It's been awhile for me, I guess, but I figured this would be the best to tell people about what I've been up to as of lately.

I have started a short story series. I assume that not a whole lot of people have read it yet. (No surprises there.), but I figured that at least sharing with some old AGS community friends would be a nice thing to do.

All my stories are under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

The current series I am working on is a surrealist set of short stories depicting things that I find to be fundamentally wrong with the entire social, political, and economic systems in the United States. These opinions of mine are taken to mass extremes and peppered with bizzare wordplay.

The series, in short, is called "Die American", a sort of sick portmanteau play on words of "Buy American!"

Anyway, I have just finished my second installment of it, and would love to see what you guys think of it.

The stories are disturbing, somewhat graphic (literaturewise, not visually), and involve bits of sexuality, violence, hatred, judgement, and frustration.

I have provided PDF and OpenDocument versions for all, and the second episode can be found in this entry.
Feel free to comment/love/hate/share. =]
-Alliance

It took me all year to write these. I'm really proud of them, and I just want to show everyone because I finally have something to be proud about.  I've been working really hard at it. I wrote it using OpenOffice.org 3.0, GIMP, and Inkscape. The resulting product isn't the most visually stunning thing in the world, but it's a bunch of poems that I wrote to cheer myself up.

Blog entry is here. (With links to the files)

I offer them in PDF and ODF (OpenDocument Format) on my blog (through Blogger and DeviantArt), and I'd love to get some input on my work.

Also, any work I publish will be under a very permissive license known as Creative Commons, the specific license I'm using will allow you to pretty much do whatever you like with my work, as long as I get the credit for my original work.


Well, It took me all year to write them, and I'd love to share them with you guys.
I just figured that we all deal with stress from time to time, and I think someone might get uplifted by a poem or two from in here.

Cheers, everybody!
-Sean

It seems that nowadays, she just keeps getting greedier and greedier.

NewsWeek article

Here's an insightful (well, more funny than insightful, but it was in the comments) blog entry I ran across on the subject.

What's your opinion on this?

Okay, so I took the default Roger, and modified the crap out of him to look like me. I'm somewhat pleased with how it came out, but it needs some tweaking. I can't quite get the arms right, and the shoulders seem a bit big. I'll keep working on it, but here he is for now:


1X


2X

Latest Edition:


1X


2X


Sorry if the second image is slightly stretched, I'm not quite sure of his actual dimensions, and Firefox 3 beta 5 makes the bigger one look blurry to me.

Bit of a rant here, I'm kind of shocked and angry.
So, I've been having and internal religious struggle. Last year, I wasn't praying very much, and my parents got divorced shortly thereafter. Well, I've been struggling to bring God back into my life, but the religious zealots these days are just disgusting.

Here's a demonstration of a discussion I brought up in a thread on a Myspace Christian Group. The thread was by someone else, talking about how Christians are brainwashed. My reply consisted of this:

To be fair, a lot of Christians I see just don't think for themselves. They believe that what other people preach to be the absolute truth, they never ask questions.

Take for example, this:

Me: "Is evolution possible?"
Guy: "No, it's absolutely impossible, infact they've disproven it."
Me: "But, isn't God capable of doing that?"
Guy: "Well, maybe, but he didn't."
Me: "Are you denying the power of your own God?"
Guy: "No, only sinners like you do that."

Problem is, people read too deeply into things, and never look past simple words. They think that "God had to do something x way, because the Bible infers something that is connected that way."

God wants you to ask questions, he wants you to ask why, he wants to help you find solutions and explain things. So do it. He loves us so much that He allows us to think for ourselves, so do so.

Well, I felt pretty good. I gave a very intelligent, levelheaded answer, pointing out the wonders of thinking for yourself.

The replies consisted of the following (and my answers).

Them: "No, that's impossible. They've proven scientifically that animals can not evolve from one another!"
Me: "Really, then why are there different species of millions of animals?"
Them: "Well, um, that's part of God's plan."
Me: "But, couldn't God use Evolution?"
Them: "God is all powerful, but evolution is impossible."
Me: "Did you just deny the power of your own God? He can do anything, according to the Bible."
Them: "Aah. No, I did NOT say that, only a sinner like you does that."

Are they really that thoughtless? I pondered.

The thread degraded into everything bad. I got called a disgusting Sinner, that I was wrong and going to Hell, and that only the Bible was truth.

Seriously. They're absolutely brainwashed. All I wanted to do was tell them to think for themselves, and they didn't even want to do that.
There's something very wrong with the world today.

I've seen this software on several sites now. It's called Planet, and it's a nifty blog aggregator, meaning that it collects the latest posts from user's blogs, and makes it into a news-like, seamless piece.

An example would be: http://planet.gnome.org/

Each post shows the user's head (called a hackergotchi), and the post right beside it. Users can visit the personal blogs to post comments, and everyone gets a good amount of traffic.

Planet's an Open Source project, it aggregates from many different kinds of blogs (Blogger, Wordpress, Myspace blogs, Wordpress, Livejournal), and it does it through reading the RSS feeds (it also supports RDF and Atom feeds), and it's highly customizable.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, I've seen about a hundred zillion posts on these boards about "Hey, I have a blog", and sometimes that person doesn't get all that much traffic on their blog. I figure this would be a unique way to open up the community in whole new ways.

To join, a user only needs to fill out a form, which is mailed to the maintainer(s), and they set everything up. That way, no spam bots get in, and everyone can enjoy reading everybody's blogs in this way.
It's just a thought. I'd love to see the AGS community use this. It'd be neat for different game developers to talk about their lives on a day-to-day basis in a format like this.

You can check it out at: http://www.planetplanet.org/

Okay, there's been threads like this before, now it's my turn to step forward and ask.
There's this song that plays at work alll the time (I work at Chilis, by the way), and there's always this one song playing that is oddly catchy. Now, it's rather hard to make out words properly due to everyone talking, but I'm trying to find this song.

Some clues:
-It sounds sort of like Queen, or some 60's/70's pop band.
-The one part I can sort of make out is this "Ah, ah, ah (doo-doo) Missing in my home...(doo doo doo)..I hope you know/*something something su-uhm-thing* (doo doo doo)
-Has several high pitched male voices just jumping in and doing backups (the good kind of high pitched, as in Queen, not the bad kind found in modern music)
-I asked one time, and was told it was Modest Mouse, yet NONE of their songs sound like this.
-It starts out with piano, and has bass guitar in it.

Can someone please, please help me? It's so addictive, but I want to hear it in its entirety.

Hey, folks!
Seeing as it's ALMOST Christmas, Moonbeam Games (the new team that I work under) has been working hard all day today, to give the adventure game community a little Christmas present.

The Plot:
Our hero, Melvin Fartknocker, is on Christmas break. However, he has a rather extreme wish for a gift. He decides to go to the North Pole to ask Santa personally...little does he know of the adventure before him, and the greatest reward of all...

Screenshot:


Yes, I ashamedly used the Roger sprite again...but this was a last minute thing, so oh well!

Get the game here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?category=0&action=detail&id=974

Feel free to hang around our forums at: forum.moonbeamgames.com
Also, the music by DrewCCU is EXCELLENT.

Oh yeah, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I just ran across this today. It's based on Linux, is Open Source, has a VERY nice look to it, is supported by 34 large corporations, and just looks freakin' awesome.

http://code.google.com/android

Also, they're thinking of teaming up with the OpenMoko dev team, which is great.
For more info, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28mobile_phone_platform%29

All I can say is...awesomeness!
Can't wait to get one, and get SCuMMVM and AGS Linux engine on it.
Whahahaha!


EDIT: Crap, now I feel stupid. Moderators, please move this to General Discussion. I guess I'm having a spaced-out day.
EDIT2: Thanks, scotch!

First off, I have always, always kept a blog of some sort. However, I have had them scattered all over the place, and I finally managed to merge them all into one wonderful product.
Also, I'm going to start reviewing AGS games, as well as include wonderous ranting on this fabled blog of mine.
Yes, it's only Blogger. But, I like it a lot, and I need help getting traffic going, as well as comments, so feel free to read it at:
http://seanrtilley.blogspot.com/

EDIT: Also, my slightly incoherent typing is due to the fact that I'm very very tired from getting off work at 2AM.
Cheers to you.

Well, I've decided to make a walkthrough for this um..."masterpiece" of a game.  Here it is, in all its glory.

Spoiler

Well, it looks like somebody died. Look at him. He seems to be dead, but you're really not sure. You could rob him, but it's only ok if it's a dead man. So, talk to him. Exhaust dialog. Then, take his money. You will have it, so walk anywhere, in any direction. Go into the house. Exhaust dialog with the man in the yellow hat. Shove the Monopoly money down his throat.

[close]

I hope this will help those of you who don't understand the puzzles.

Well, I figured it was about time to start a game. I know a lot of people struggle to make even a decent first game. I however, have taken the opposite route. Using only crappy basic software in Windows 2000 while on vacation in Arizona, I have made a short, somewhat offensive game.
The Plot: You are an ordinary fellow named Twatty McTwatTwat. You're on a walk, and you hear gunshots. Solve the mystery, track down the villain, and save the day.
Note: This game is short, and has some swearing in it. I'm not going to warn kiddies not to download it, just be aware.

Some sexy screenshots (Windows 2000 doesn't support proper PNG saving)

Will you be one to solve the mystery?


Supporting the latest in crap graphics, and an innovative interface that resembles every other game.

Download:
http://files.filefront.com//;8246864;;/

EDIT: Oh, and here's the AGS page!
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=910

EDIT: Now there's an official walkthrough!
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=32062.0