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My suggestion:

Okay, let's do this one hypothetically. Let's say you have a member by the name of TerribleVenerealDisease. He posts a new thread four or five times a day at his peak, and around that time has (what was it, Nik, like eighteen or so?) posts in one day, and everyone puts up with it.... But then TerribleVenerealDisease gets told by a moderator to stop making new threads... But he openly flouts this several times in the course of a mere 48 hours... We have never, as far as I know, had to ban anyone from these forums. I don't want to see it start happening. However, I think a contingent of local AGSer's should be dispatched to his house to beat the hell out of him.

Not only did Andail tell you, but I quoted Andail, and now Ashen quoted Andail, and everyone has been telling you to stop... Before you post another post anywhere on this site, please answer me... Why? Why won't you stop?

I'm not sure if you even bothered reading the other thread or if you just did like so many other trolls and posted a new thread and then left it hanging, so I'll say it again, knowing full well you might not even bother to read it here: A community is about contribution. You aren't the most important member here. Not everyone wants to hear what you have to say. In fact, I'm pretty sure no one cares what you have to say. No one probably cares what anyone says, really. The whole reason any of us, besides you it seems, are here is to contribute to the adventure gaming community. See that thing in my sig? It's a game I'm working on. Where's yours?

If you're going to post something new every other day, at least let it contribute. Post an entry for a competition. Post a screenie or a character from this "Jacob's Ladder" game you're supposedly working on in C+C. Start working as long on your game as you are on posting in these forums and soon you'll be able to post a Game in Production thread.

[Vintage: Stop making new threads.]

Vintage: Stop making new threads.[/i] If you find, after extensive researching, that there exist absolutely no threads which suit your abnormal posting needs, at least put some thought into the ones you start.

Seriously. If you spent as much time working on this game that you say you're working on as you do posting new threads, you would be the single most prolific developer on these boards. A community is not about you, it's about contribution. If you're going to post so much, at least post in comp, c+c, or games in production. And I don't mean with just comments.

Try to contribute instead of dominate.

Just a few quick notes...

The pattern of the wallpaper seems a bit large.

The woodgrain on the cabinet-looking thing looks like one continuous piece of wood with black lines on it. The top looks okay. I suggest, on the lower doors, you have the grain run up and down against the horizontal grain of the rest of the cabinet.

I've never seen white tile floor that looked like wood planks before. Either make the tiles square or give them a wood finish.

I've also never seen anyone wallpaper their ceiling before. Do a google image search for "stucco."

Shade the vertical aspect of the stairs, either darker or lighter than the main color based on how you think the light is hitting it. I think you want to make it lighter. Also, the color doesn't look good in that particular image (flat, matte coloring against a background full of textures). One thing I like to do sometimes for carpet, if that's what you're getting at here, is to do a noise filter and then a slight gaussian blur.

The image might benefit from an area rug being placed in the middle of the floor.

Just my two cents. If it seems unintelligible, bear in mind that it's 5:30 AM and I haven't slept since 7:00 AM yesterday morning.

I do believe it's possible, especially since this is the country where frivolous lawsuits like some fat dumbass bitch burning her mouth on obviously hot coffee and suing McDonald's for a gazillion bucks happen every day (how can anyone be proud of our judicial system? ? ? ?)... but I seem to remember a story I read in my local newspaper, a computer column, about how the guy who wrote the column was doing a demonstration in a packed junior high auditorium when porn popups littered a huge display in front of the entire place... and he was laughing about how stupid it was in his column the next day.

apparently not 

Could this be what you were thinking?

I just suddenly remembered this one from a while back. You play a blind guy, and initially the whole screen is black, but moving the cursor around is roughly akin to "feeling your way through the room," and things start to appear, and thn disappear when you mouse off of them. As you investigate the item, it gets more detailed.

If it weren't for my background, which I added just for effect, I could totally use that in a game. In fact, I've kinda been thinking about it...

I think two is a couple, three is a few, and four or more makes several.

Sorry, pal, but if you don't read the BFAQ, people will react a bit harshly. Hopefully this hasn't wiped out the enthusiasm you mentioned. We're a very helpful and close-knit community, and even when topics about cartoon characters have been known (recently) to make people up and leave, it's still a great place to be. Just make sure you read the BFAQ and the tutorial in the manual. When I started with AGS, I made my first complete game with absolutely no scripting knowledge whatsoever, from scratch, in a week, simply by using the aforementioned resources.

How cute.

Now I am craving onion rings. Yummy.

Oh, so that's what that was... I'm glad it passes by in a tenth of a second, then.

Obscure? You poor, poor brits...

Ha! You got me, Ashen. That's the best April Fool's joke ever... You made me trick my computer into thinking it was April 1st, only to have nothing happen when I loaded AGS. You essentially tricked me into causing April Fools day to occur and then play an April Fool's joke on myself! That's fairly awesome!

I added you, too, even though I'm not sure I've ever seen you before this...

I've been around for a few years, but I've never tried to start AGS on Valentine's or April Fool's... Christmas, yes... But the picture flashed so quickly I had to open the thing a few times to get the gist, and it still looks like two male AGSers' homoerotic tribute to the scene in LOTR:FOTR where Frodo is lying on the floor of the Prancing Pony reaching up for the falling ring... wherein the One Ring is in actuality made of fried onions and Sam is lying next to him licking his face.

[tall, bald black men sporting tatoos would gang rape her!]

This whole concept of internationalism as presented by Snarky certainly makes me think about the Third Reich. There's no balance of power. I purposely do not find myself inclined to investigate the inner workings of this American system of government, but from school I remember the system of "checks and balances" as they call it responsible for making sure the US government administration stays within the bounds of what is desirous of everyone involved. Why is America the international police force? Because it has the biggest weapons? Certainly not because it stands on the highest moral ground. And yet, there is NO ONE in the international scope who is capable of checking and balancing us. And when they try, we lay them waste. We're still moaning about the dead of 9-11, but we fail to note that we had before and have since caused the exact pain and suffering to others multiple times over. So, our people die and we go to war over it, but we put down the efforts of anyone else who goes to war because their people die? Who gives us the right? God? Is it because George Bush is a male Aryan Christian?

As is evident in the by-now-long-forgotten-by-us Boston incident, the United States government uses fear to control its people. The other tool it uses is patriotism. If you aren't afraid of imminent death at the hands of mad arabian terrorists, you think that the government has your best interests constantly in mind and everything they do is beneficial for you, thus making people stand up for ignorant concepts such as an international community. Goddammit, people don't want to be members of an international community. It's obvious Helm doesn't, so why force it on him? It's obvious I don't, so why force it on me? It's obvious everyone in the Middle East doesn't, so why force it on them? I've been to Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, and up in the mountains of Mexico where few outsiders have ever been. These people could care less. They just want to be left on their own. They don't want things to change. The Masai thought my laptop was cool, but when the novelty had worn off they went back to trying to get me to drink reindeer blood. They have a way of doing things, and they are fiercely proud of it.

My fiancee is Chinese, from China, and is currently living in Datong city in Shanxi province.  You know what that silly girl told me she was most afraid of when she was here at college in America? She told me she was afraid that tall, bald black men sporting tatoos would gang rape her! She said she had been taught that such things happen all the time in America in her schools. I tried to explain to her that she lives in a Communist country and that was propaganda, but she didn't want to hear otherwise. She's happy just the way she is.

So why do you think internationalism is such a great thing? It sounds like a wonderful dream of a utopian society to some people, but those people need to realize they are not the only bloody people on earth!

America's only goal is the redistribution of wealth. We do NOT live in a country of the people,  by the people, and for the people unless said people are predisposed to be wealthy and can assist those in charge of the government to further their wealth. Everything is about money. This is not so much a country or a government as it is a really big industry, and people who are against it are scabs with kneecaps just waiting to be broken. The only reason we are in Iraq now is for their oil. It's obvious. We claim that intelligence showed they possessed WMD's, but where were they? No, the only real reason we had to invade was to control their oil. People on both sides are dying en masse because George W. Bush is an oil tycoon.

Furthermore, I'm a little tired of this whole lauding the nobility of the US soldiers... I have worked in a large hotel used primarily by soldiers in the second largest military intelligence training facility in the country, and I have seen nothing from these men and women but complete depravity. One of them was passing out pictures of Iraqi soldiers he had shot and killed. I used to hear them tell their war stories, and you could always tell when they were talking about a particularly gruesome battle when they started hooping, hollering, and cheering. I've worked in hotels all across the country, including one famous tourist landmark in Newport, Rhode Island, and I've never.... ever.... EVER had to have so many people removed by the police as at this hotel. I've never seen so many prostitutes go in and out of a hotel. And I have most definitely never heard anyone talk about shooting a ten year old girl in the god damn face with such a tremendous smile. (EDIT: I understand this is unfair to those men and women who, like Snarky or any of us would if we were US soldiers, believe their government is trying to do something good and are honestly, albeit blindly, fighting for freedom)

So this government can sodomize itself furiously without vaseline for all I care, as I'm sure it's soldiers have been doing to pubescent Iraqi girls for some time now.

Looking back, this is an extremely long post. I probably shouldn't post it, as it is also very off-topic, but I think any topic related to movie production can be quite helpful for an aspiring screenwriter.

Actually, I've seen three of the six, and although I thought them excellent, and extremely original (especially Pan's Labyrinth) there are obvious ways, to me at least, that they were made to be marketable. To be marketable here is the key phrase... I didn't, in my initial post (and maybe, looking back, I didn't make this very obvious) mean that a movie that is going to be sold to a Hollywood production company needs to be a form-baked recipe passed through a cookie-cutter machine in a factory run by slavemarket Cambodians. Pan's Labyrinth, to me, has the distinction of being one of the best, most original movies to be made in quite a long time, but it is not without marketability. It was designed, through and through, to have a marketability value. Of course, there are other factors to be looked at: just like a certain Mr. Steven King, who wrote one bestseller and now, according to Family Guy, can get away with writing books about lampshades and have people flock to him, Pan's Labyrinth is the child of one Mr. Guillermo Del Toro, THE official Mexican movie man, next to Alfonso Cuaron (who, by the way, is responsible for yet another movie on your list: Children of Men).

Let me also draw your attention to movies like Jet Li's Fearless and Hero, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and the recent unfortunate flop Curse of the Golden Flower. These constitute movies that were tremendous Chinese/Hong Kong box office smashes. Hollywood didn't make them, produce them, or assist with the making of them in any way. An American production company paid money in order to be the vehicle for their being brought to American cinema, and for the reason that they were tremendous in their country of origin and the production company rightly assumed (except in the case of the last film mentioned) that they could make them money. You would never see a similar movie to these being made by Hollywood itself, because they aren't marketable to American audiences until someone slaps all the different laud on the box that the movie got in it's country of origin. It helps that they feature Chow Yun Fat, Ziyi Zhang, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, or Jackie Chan, who have become famous in America. Some of the most brilliant films being produced today come from Asia. Although I must say I absolutely love Ringu and Ju-On, there are so many better movies being made in Japan that will never find their way to America unless someone remakes the hell out of them so they're more suitable for American audiences.

I've got the problem solved... I write movies and make them myself. Independent movies have a much greater appeal to the intelligent filmgoer, and every now and then one slips through the cracks and becomes mainstream. The thing that makes that happen, however, is when a film is found to have marketability. Even going completely outside the norm makes for a type of marketability... then they can slap "New and Brilliant" on the box (but only if it has passed the test of becoming popular in its own independent circles first). Blair Witch Project, which in my opinion was one of the stupidest movies ever made, had the distinction of being a completely original piece the likes of which had never been seen before (this is an untrue statement... movies like "The Last Broadcast" had been making their rounds in the indie circuit for quite a while beforehand). This in itself is marketable.

A movie has to be pretty damn innovative before production companies will decide to purchase it if it isn't already made like every other movie. Either that, or it has to have SOME redeeming market quality (do you honestly think Star Wars: Episode 1, AKA the lamest movie ever made, would have been made if it hadn't been attached to the Star Wars franchise or George Lucas?). Production companies, by and large the responsible entities in getting movies made, don't care about the entertainment industry itself... they don't see the inherent brilliance or beauty of the pieces they decide to shell out for... they see only dollar signs.

This having been said, a movie about unions and shoe factories in the early 1900's, on its own, has no marketable value. As I read the script, and even Marvelo's introductory post in this thread, I began to see grandiose visions of where this might go if given the proper treatment. On its own, however, such a movie has no marketable value. Unless it is, for example, about something extraordinary like Pan's Labyrinth or Children of Men, it has no power to stand on its own. However, such a movie with great writing and dialog, a poignant plot and plot devices which really strike the viewer can go on to become a big success. Look, for example, at movies like October Sky... how crappy do you think a movie about kids who play with rockets would be... but the movie itself is brilliant, beautiful, and heartwarming. Newsies, about kids who deliver the newspaper, is one of the most memorable movies in cinema. It doesn't seem like the same Hollywood that produces such bullshit as Fast and the Furious and Van Wilder would be responsible for that type of thing... but still, they were made and enjoyed success because they were made to be marketable. October Sky was supposed to have been a true story. No it wasn't! I know people who were involved in the real story, and the movie was completely remade to fit what would be marketable. Sherman O'Dell was, in real life, two different people, but according to the production company, they already had too many main characters.

So, not to detract from your post, friend, but if a movie is going to be made by a mainstream production company, it must have certain redeeming qualities... ie., it must be able to make the production company a large sum of money.

All right. I've gone through, read it, and noted some things that are good and some things that are not so good. First, the good: you have a decent prerequisite character base built up. You've got the n00b who I suppose is the guy who's going to try to bring about change, you've got the rough and tumble oldbie with a heart of gold, you've got your dick authority figure and you've got your unseen boss towering over the lot of them. Let's use a certain excellent novel/movie which came to mind as I saw these characters unfold: Steven King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," better known as the movie "The Shawshank Redemption." You've got your Andy Dufresne, Ellis Redding, Byron Hadley, and Sam Norton. Click here if you aren't familiar with it.

Second in the good department is the idea... Overall, it's the type of thing good movies are made of.

Tertiarily, you've got a good setting and background events which are building up to foreshadow the eventual outcome, and the need for the union.

Now, on to the not-so-good.

As you mentioned, your dialog is really quite bland. Bad in fact. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm a professional author (although I aspire to be) and that I'm a master of conversation, but I think that my strong point is dialog, and I'll tell you what I do to get good dialog in my story: I put down the goddamn pen (or laptop, as the case more commonly is), get up, and start talking to an invisible area of the room. When I conclude speaking to it, I move into the empty area I was speaking to and reply to myself. Being a good improvisational actor is key to being a good dialog writer. I would even suggest you (this is going to sound really lame, but hear me out) get a digital recorder and record these semi-monologues, then transcribe what you've said onto paper, changing it only by making it more readable and grammatically correct.

There's another issue: your grammar, and in some places, your spelling, leave a little to be desired. Having studied the fine art of manuscript submission (and subsequent refusal), I can tell you that even a second-rate script will at least get glimpsed if it has good spelling and grammar. A ton of great manuscripts and screenplays find their way into, and never again out of, a slush pile due to these little oversights that an editor will see right away and not be able to let go of. DON'T allow your grammar checker and spellchecker on your word processor to do the job for you. If you want to screenwrite, you have to think of it as your baby. You can't just fart a baby out of your womb and then stick it in an incubator. You have to take care of it yourself, and at the very least hand it over to another human being who knows what they're doing (an editor, in this case). This is really glaring in the misspelling of "door knob" as "door know." Know is a word, so how is your computer going to knob it's wrong?

Next: as I was mildly interested in writing a screenplay once, I looked into it a bit. I don't remember exactly what it said, but I think I remember one site saying each page of the script is supposed to equal about ONE minute of screentime, except in long sections of quick dialog. I read through this script and quickly lost interest because it seemed like a series of quick-cuts, more like a music video about unions rather than a movie about them. You need to stretch this ten pages into twenty or so to give your screenplay an appropriate introduction. Introduction is the most important part of a movie, because no matter how great the rest of the storyline is, without an appropriate introduction as a foundation to base the rest of the film on, everything else falls flat. You can't rush it.

The scene where McCuntley is beating the shit out of absolutely everyone felt more like a scene from the Incredible Hulk to me. Me mad! You worker! Me bang, bang, BANG! In a movie like this, bashing people about is a PRECIOUS COMMODITY!!!!! You got that right, I said it was a precious commodity! The beating of the main character, and especially the destruction of his hand, is something that will get the audience to push themselves into the next level of active awareness, like moving into a higher realm of plot-consciousness. Take, once again, the Shawshank Redemption (if you haven't seen it, by the way, I must suggest you do, especially if you want to know how to write a successful movie script that people will be talking and thinking about for years after they see your film)... In the beginning, we have a minor character that is never again seen in the movie being beaten nearly to death by Captain Hadley. Ooooh, the viewer thinks, this does not bode well for our hero, Andy. Then, you have some minor beatings of Andy and his friends. Ouch, thinks the viewer, this is getting worse and worse for him. Something had better happen soon to change that poor man's luck. Then, you've got one of the bigger "ouch" scenes in the movie, where Andy gets raped by "the sisters." But this is the kickoff, and things start to change. Andy gets motivated. He enlists the aid of Hadley by helping him with a money issue (employing his knowledge from his past life as a banker) and in return sees the head of the sisters pay for what he did. Later on in the movie, we see the final blow fall when Warden Norton has one of Andy's friends killed to cover the secret money laundering and bribe-taking that has been going on in the higher echelons of the prison, and that is what gets Andy to finally get busy, escaping the prison and screwing over everyone who's ever screwed him.

So, using this as an example, you see why you can't just throw this beating scene in what should be for all intents and purposes less than ten minutes into the opening of the film. Ration it out. Don't stick the main character's hand in a mechanical press in the opening scenes of the movie. You had the bit of foreshadowing about the guy who died... that's great. I bet we'll find out the foreman did it later on in the story. That matches with the minor character getting beaten up in the beginning of Shawshank. Now wait a bit... Let things get a little more sticky before chucking him down the stairs, beating his ass and ruining his hand.

There's a lot more that I could say, but I'll let you give this a look and if you want more input I'd be happy to give it. Here's a couple sites that might help...

http://www.screenwriting.info/ is a site devoted entirely to helping screenwriters through the process.
Fiction Factor is another one of the many websites I use for help when it comes to all things write-oriented. http://www.fictionfactor.com/scriptwriting.html is their section for screenwriters. I suggest you look over each of the articles carefully, even the ones you think you already understand (such as the one about genres). There's always something to be learned.

And remember, don't just write off what I've said by saying "But that's how it really would have happened" or "but I just don't think that fits..." Hollywood knows what fits. They know what makes a good movie. I've heard a lot of people complain about Hollywood's movie making techniques, and I'm one of them. The movies put out in the 80's and early 90's had much more intricate plots and story than anything they put out today (albeit they may have been fairly cheesy, but that's just because of the mindset of the people of the time and their limited technology). No one would make a movie like Back to the Future or Red Dawn or Highlander or Aliens or Ghostbusters or Waterworld or The Postman (those last two are two of my favorite movies, although I know not many people liked them) today, unless they were remakes (and you'll notice many remakes being made today). That's because people are stupider today, and they want their movies to follow a certain format so they can be familiar and not wind up getting lost in a plot that someone actually thought about and cared enough about NOT to add tremendous amounts of explosions, gunshots, and CGI to (I'm looking at you, George Lucas, you bastard!). The sad but simple truth is this: if you want to sell a movie, you've got to follow Hollywood's pattern.

Holy crap...

   I was just stopping by to say I heard the president of Cartoon Network was stepping down as a result of this thing (you know, that Boston thing that seems to have been forgotten here) and found a civil war breaking out... and it seems there's already been one casualty.

  I'm guilty of eagerly waiting for some poor overly-patriotic schmuck to say how the wars are benefitting US and world freedom so I could delight in Helm's subsequent reign of terror, but this is ridiculous. No wonder we're not allowed to diverge from thread topics. We were talking initially about how America's scare tactics to control the population led to the Boston bomb scare over a bunch of light brights, and now someone's left the forums. What the hell?

  I for one blame the United States government...

You said Castlevania, so here in all his glory is the successor of Doctor Abraham Van Helsing, none other than the intrepid vampire slayer Simon Belmont. I think it's, like, 12 colors, but I forgot to count 

Doesn't appear to be working.

I can do the Monty Python woman's voice... Who did that? It wasn't John Cleese... I think it was either Eric Idle or Michael Palin... Anyways, I've got that spot-on, and seeing as how this is a British comedy game...