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Thanks Nikolas, this game it is: VærdiKampÃ, 

I'm ecstatic these days!Ã, 
Tuesday night I was awarded the Golden Joystick Trophy at the Nordic Games Conference in Malmö, Sweden! A game I made won the In the People's ServiceÃ,  Game Competition, and I got a bunch of prizes: a super cool new casemodded powergamer pc, bundles of games, software and pro licenses for game development tools, free office space, and money and industry contacts that will help me start a game company. It's overwhelming, I've been interviewed for the radio and magazines, and finally feel somewhat reassured that my games are being noticed.

Værdikamp(battle of values), the game is now hosted at the Danish national radio and television service's game site, but it's in Danish, so only the Scandinavians here will understand it. It's a fairly simple flash game where players fight the evil mind police in lifting censorship on thoughts in the 'Outer Mediasphere'. The players are then asked questions about the thoughts they free from censorship, and asked to express their own opinions on them. Players' opinions are remembered so as to update the overall statistics on how people relate to different thoughts, ideas and dilemmas. Players can also enter their own thoughts that will then become part of the game. Simple concept, but potentially an interesting sort of uncontrolled sociological experiment.

Next year, this competition will be open for participants from all the nordic countries, so bear it in mind - winning or just entering the contest is a sure way of attracting attention from the industry, academia, press and fellow developers. My thanks to this community for all I've learned, and still hope to learn, here - and for AGS, the first tool that made it seem even remotely possible that I couldÃ,  be making my own games.

Game sounds fun from what you tell about it's story - what's the demon's job? something that can be done by a possessed refrigerator?

About the song, it's hard to tell how it wil work without seeing the cutscene that it's for. There are some rather long passages without lyrics - will the game characters be talking here, and how will that work together with the lyrics of the song? If there's no talking in the cutscene, I think the instrumental passages are too long or need more variation. Also, the voice isn't the best quality - not sure I understood every word of the song. Could be blamed on my bad speakers, though. Perhaps the bass and drums could kick in a bit earlier too.
Well, my 2 cents.

Ok, this is how far I got tonight.


On Black bg: http://www.itu.dk/people/hermund/PNGS/captain3.html

I adopted most of ProgZmax's ideas shamelessly, but at least had fun applying them myself in the GIMP. I'd say the ship and the bunker/fort look a little more interesting now.

I also gave the mountains in the background a new texture and a slight distance blur. Honestly I'm not 100% satisfied with them, but I think this is the closest I'll get this time around.

The city lights, despite efforts, are pretty much the same, a little redder, and less bright in the distance. Imo the transition between city and mountains still looks artifical, but nothing I can't live with. I'm off for that star

Wow, lots of suggestionsÃ, 

ProgZmax: I really like the paintover - illustrates the points very well. Some things I'm definately going to adapt:
* Settlements/antenna in the mountains.
* More elaborate ship design
* Amazing details on the fort: top window, blue side window, see-through effect on side tunnel, the door opening to the inside of the spaceship.

.. if I can make these effects in the Gimp, that is.

I want the city distant, mainly increasing the rush of being aloft rather than making it look closer. Maybe I'll try some domes, towers and enclaves, though.

zabnat: thanks, but NYC is seen from very far up. I'm aiming for something closer to looking down at silicon valley from the hills at night, for nostalgic reasons.Ã, 

I'll go with Xellie's and 2ma2's idea that the mountains in the background need new texturing and/or depth-of-field blur.

Thanks for all the help!

oh no, I said I would do all those things? I better get started.

Here's an update.

* added cliff fort to support the tunnel.
* added distant sun effect
* adjusted lights in city below (still looks best in uncompressed version)
* less post-processing (sharpening/blurring stuff) after the rendition - good/bad?

I tried repositioning the vessel, but couldn't find a better place for it. Compositionwise, perhaps it's at a strange angle, but the perspective as such is realistic.


Hi-quality: http://www.itu.dk/people/hermund/PNGS/captain2.html

That looks really good - how did you make those rocks?

Ok, glad if I got some overall mood and atmosphere right.

I'll try positioning the ship differently and reworking the tunnel/cliff intersection to make it give more sense.

It is actually supposed to be a city in the valley below. I think it shows more clearly in the less compressed version (mainly because the reds aren't desaturated as in the jpg), but I'd like ideas as to how I can make it read as a city, and not a canyon floor that 'also' looks a little like a city.

Thanks so far, I'll get back to work

I got around to doing another end-game screen for my space game, same series as the ones posted here: (first 4 images) and here: (5th image)

The picture is not a background, but shown at the end of the game, if the player has achieved the overall rank of 'Captain.'

C+C? How does it read? Ideas for improvement? Paintovers?



Here's a less compressed version of the same, on a black backgroundÃ,  (700kb): Captain

Great that the game is progressing. I still think the ground looks very hot, more than it looks polluted. Maybe you could try a different color scheme. Otherwise you could tone down the bright yellow to a sand color, which would look natural with the red rocky parts, or maybe give the ground a blackened crust, with the red and yellow veins showing through cracks in the crust. Also, consider putting paths in there like suggested by Vince Twelve. That would allow you to put all kinds of fire effects outside the paths and still have somewhere for the player to stand.

I like what you did with the pillars, they look much less artificial now. However, it would add some 'musicality' (word?) to the composition if they weren't all flat topped and the same height - if some of them were broken or such.

Maybe the head librarian could be distracted/distressed if the kid kept asking him for books with insulting, or at least easily misunderstood, made-up titles, like "The Head Librarian in the Rye", "One flew over the Head Librarian's Nest" and "To kill a Head Librarian-Bird" Lol, they stink, I know. Should be easy to come up with something funnier to use. Eventually the head librarian would then give the kid anything just to get rid of him.

One question was left unanswered. How did Mr Eck go toilet?

I think that particular question was left unanswered by history for a number of very good reasons.Ã, 

Sorry if I'm taking this thread a bit off the topic, I'm just not sure it isn't the best way for it to go. It's posing a difficult question, sure, but history will tell what was the AGS dream team.

I messed around with midimaker a while ago and made these two little tunes.

1: Short tune, almost a sound effect or sound caption of sorts - could be used on 'game over' in a karate game or similar.
Chinese

2: Happy tune, jid-pop inspired. I imagine it used for a fast-paced side-scrolling game.
Jidpop

Any crits? Oh.. and feel free to use these tunes, I'm mostly just posting them to get opinions and because they'll probably go to waste otherwise.Ã, 

What's with the stupid ass kissing threads ...

Yeah, I agree - I dont like ass kissing either, which is why I chose prince randian and johnny eck for my dream team. Guys with no asses rule!

I think Prince Randian and Johnny Eck, the "Half Boy" could have made some very interesting games, had they still been around.

Ok, so I put the font tags 'outside' the table, and gave the whole table a default background color. Thanks for the hints. Haven't uploaded the new file, though - server trouble.

CSS is cool, no doubt.Ã,  Ã, 8)

Thanks Esseb, I know I don't use styles as much as I probably should - guess it will take some time before I remember css tags like i do html. A bit tricky with two different syntaxes for the same elements and attributes. In this case, the cells get their color and font in a loop, so typing was light.

Ok, thanks a lot all, I think I found a solution.

The txt files that are read in seem to contain traces from copy and paste actions, showing up as square characters. So every string is now parsed and stripped of non-ascii characters before being echo'ed. Glad I found this function for it, definately wouldn't have come up with it myself:

Code: ags

function clean_string_input($input)
{
Ã,  Ã, $search = array(
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '/[\x60\x82\x91\x92\xb4\xb8]/i',Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  // single quotes
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '/[\x84\x93\x94]/i',Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  // double quotes
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '/[\x85]/i',Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  // ellipsis ...
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '/[\x00-\x0d\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f-\x9f]/i'Ã,  Ã,  // all other non-ascii
Ã,  Ã, );
Ã,  Ã, $replace = array(
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '\'',
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '"',
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '...',
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, ''
Ã,  Ã, );
Ã,  Ã, return preg_replace($search,$replace,$input);
} 

Don't know what gets people into coding like that, but happy something does, as it seems to have fixed my problem. 

Thanks, it makes sense. When I look at the source from IE, it shows up fine, when I look at it in FF, the lines don't wrap - I get one very long line containing all the output for the table - looks very strange, with overlapping words...

w3c invalidates because of char encoding issues, so I'm sure there's a problem with the html header and/or charset I echo from php. Never understood doctypes and character encoding optionsÃ,  especially not when reading in from txt files to php-generated html.

the url is here if anyone wants to marvel at the madness.

I just recently set up a php script that reads in information from a .txt file to php arrays, does some sorting and displays the data in a html table.

Now, this works fine in IE, but in Mozilla Firefox, some text strings are read in (and displayed) wrong. Some of the strings are displayed correctly, while some have inserted special characters looking like little squares = ⌂Ã,  in between *all* the original characters, making the text very hard to read.

To complicate this furhter, extra linebreaks are inserted in the strings by firefox at random, it seems, and only some of the new lines have the extra special character squares inserted.

If anybody knows what this could be, please give suggestions, I tried a lot of things already but best 'fix' so far is a "Best viewed in Internet Explorer"-comment on the page.Ã,