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You can have this one - it's a machine gun prawn I made a while back. I don't think I'll be using as super villain as originally intended, and it could do with some nicer shading and more contrast, so it's somewhere to start doing pixel-art.

1 - yeah - changing the wind direction could be explaned better on the intro screen, I guess, and maybe its an unneccesary feature entirely - but I thoght people are used to using both mouse and keyboard for games, so why not use it for a new kind of gameplay.

2 - Oh, did I forget to tell? I cursed the game. Anyone playing it will die unexpectedly very soon afterwards. Sorry 

Ok, maybe it's a bit too difficult. But did you try controlling the direction of the wind by moving the mouse around. The flying terror is affected by the wind direction...

You're right, there should be some kind of "play again"-button. I will try to implement it, meanwile, pressing F5 refreshes the browser window, which restarts the game :-)

The flying thing can be killed with a direct snowball hit... but it can be hard to hit.

I like the floating mouth thing - wish I had dreams like that, eveb if they ARE nightmares.

The most scary dream I had is a recurring one that I only have when I have fever (when I'm most defenseless), but I've been having it since childhood.

The scary thing is that it is completetly abstract, there are no recognizable figures or sentiments whatsoever: black and white dots , like on a TV-screen, fill up my entire perceptive field, and almost like in a fractal chaos, I must descend deeper and deeper into this madness, which turns out to be made up from large grinding blocks of black and white, with even smaller dots of black and white in between them that I can descend further into. The whole thing is accompanied by a grinding sound that gets louder and louder as I descend, and I usually wake up feeling totally wasted or grinded beyond belief.

The scary thing is that there's no sense to be made from it - it just seems that some hidden and horrible dimension of existence is revealed to me and leves me clueless. I'm thinking maybe it's a dream of not dreaming, just the raw mechanics of sleeping revealed becase maybe the mind can't filter it when I have a fever, like the noisy signal of my own mind showing up vividly as in a dream. And it scares the shit out of me. Hm... does anyone have a similar experience?

Shitar - I guess you're asking this question because you're considering using the situation in a game, and I think that's a vey good idea, because it is a difficult question and something people should be confronted with.

Way too many games have no real dilemmas, nothing at stake - they simply boost the player's ego by giving him abundances of powerups and super-powers, and that is just too lazy a position for the computer game media to be in.

Computer games can pose interesting questions like the one you suggest, and I seriously think they need to do it in order to live up to their potential. It is a well-known fact that winning in a computer game enhances the well-being of the player by releasing certain chemicals in the brain - so basically they're like drugs - I think they should be more like other cultural phenomae: something to reflect on and to challenge the players without making them forget the real world entirely. And by posing interesting questions/dilemmas I think they can achieve that.

Btw. that's why adventure gaming will never die - it has content!

I just handed in a small game for a Flash course at my university. It's online, so try it out if you feel up to it. If there are some great pixel-artists out there, who are just dying t get their graphics in a game, let me know - I did the graphics for this game myself, and I'm getting punked for the retarded style by my friends, so if you feel you can do this game's graphics better than I did, let me know, and we'll show'em!

Snow fight here:
http://itu.dk/people/hermund/Flash/SnowFight

(mind, if you don't have a flash plugin for your browser, you wil be re-directed to where you can get it before the game launches)

Btw. any c&c on the game as such is welcome.

Nice, clean work :-)

I really like the fonts, and think the colors are fine - although maybe just a bit too dark on the black background to work in smaller sizes. The large size would work fine for a splash screen, I think.

About the iconography, I don't think it tells very much about the company or it's games. "Goldbox editions", perhaps - but not very intuitively or immediately. I would suggest something that conveys the message more clearly, whatever it may be. Use figures to trigger the players imagination, or at least some expressive graphics to suggest an emotion or energy related to the products. There doesn't seem to be much "adventure" in the simple figure the way it is...

But as I said, I think the overall look is nice, clean and pro.

I bought "3D Game Studio Extra" a few years ago for around 50 Euros, I think. Of course it didn't even cross my mind that a product with the postfix "Extra" would be only an intermediate version of the REAL (professional) program, lacking essential features that it would cost me an upgrade to access. I think that's a bad marketing strategy for any company, and so I haven't bothered looking into the company's products any further.

For free 3D-engines try out OGRE or PANDA3D. THey can do most of the same stuff.

Wow - somebody's still playing my first gameÃ, 

Thanks for the comments, the backgrounds could've been a lot better, I agree, I'll put more effort in the graphics in my next games.

About the bug: This is a known issue, related to Win XP. Here's what you can do. Run Setup.exe a second time after the crash, and the crash will never happen again. Kinda weird, but true, and done by lots of people who wanted to finish the game in win xp. You cannot restore saved games from before the crash, but since the crash happens early in the game, you'll quickly get to where you were, because you already figured out how to get there once.

I've been working on a game for quite a while, maybe one and a half year, in AGS version 2.62, and it's grown so big that I've been reluctant to upgrade to newer versions of AGS, despite the  general reassurances of backwards compatibility. I've put so much work into this game that I would hate to see the project set back by some unknown backwards compatibility bug. But now it's been a while since the first object oriented AGS version, so I'm thiking maybe it's time I upgrade my version 2.62 to something newer. Are there still unresolved issues in the newest versions, and should I get the newest or some older 'stable', but still newer than 2.62, version?

I'll wait awhile and read the responses to this mail before making a decision, so if you've been in a similar situation and have something to say about it, please do.

Hey,

I'd love to hear you guys' comments on this:

http://www.itu.dk/people/ofktoubro/3rdWorldFarmer/index_content.html

EditÃ,  22-04-2006:
The site is up with a slightly modified version.
Crits are welcome here or at the site forums :-)

link: 3rd World Farmer

- Frederik

I agree that the sense of belonging to a family, group or nation can be surprisngly strong, but the sense that you have to go along with your group, even when it's absurdly violent, is motivated by fear of having seen what your group does to those that don't belong to it. Fear as a controlling measure in the army - I believe it. That's why I stay away from the army :-)

I found this article about "Identifying with the Aggressor", a psychological mechanism that I'm sure some of recognize to some extent, and I think it's an interesting phenomenon, in relation to both group- and individual psychology.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2194/is_8_73/ai_n6358315

About history, isn't it usually written by the "winners"?

About the Greeks and the Turks... if the people are restless, there's nothing they need more than an *enemy* to unite against and blame it on. So the people in power provide it - instead of becoming it, perhaps?

I saw an interesting program about how soldiers are trained for war. It seems that humans are the only species who intentionally murder their own kind. Lions may fight for territory, but if one of them dies, it's more of an accident - usually the fight ends long before that. But even to humans killing is a rather unnatural thing. That's why soldiers and populations at war, since the beginning of time, have been told that the enemies are "pigs", "devils", "chickens", "rats", whatever... certainly not human. By taking away their humanity, the killing is made easier, and that's exactly what the people in power need in order to win the war. It's a ind of scape-goat mechanism. Hopefully, knowing this makes it easier to regard that kind of propaganda sceptically. But I guess these "reputations" still take some time to wear off. Think about the Germans, who are still struggling with a bad consciousnes about WW2, even some in the young generation, although most of them have started looking forward instead of back. Wherever they go on vacation, they can be confronted with prejudices about their people (just like so many other can). I lived one year in Berlin, and I think there's some good to a bad consciousness or "war-trauma" too, because everybody that it involves have to give those serious matters a second thought. That's a much better guarantee of social awarenss and responsibility than the unconquered and innocent "we can't be wrong"-attitude that US is showing off on the political stage these days, at least in my opinion it is.

I think I have a brand!

Ã,  Ã,  I realize that downloading the java-plugin takes longer - just hope most people have it already. Also, maybe the downloading time is a bit short for funny games now, but my next game will be a longer download, so maybe that'll work better. Just out of curiosity, did any of you guys manage to solve one of the sudokus?

What, You don't like sodukos, or something else wrong?

- Fred.

Got an idea that maybe somebody can benefit from.

People who are downloading my AGS game "Demon Day", are now presented with the option of playing a game of online Soduko while downloading. I think it's a rather nice service to provide, and would like to know if anyone else has thought abut these kinds of "things to do while you're downloading" and whether you think its a good idea or a pain in the neck.

Check it out:

Demon Day download page (the page as such needs a makeover soon, but at least the link is there):
http://83.73.63.99/freden/

Directly to the Soduko page (requires java plugin):
http://soduko.netgubbi.dk


Feel free to link to the soduko-page from your game's download site, but please let me know if you do so. Also, if you have other kinds of online games that people can play while downloading (that don't take up the entire bandwidth), maybe we can share links from our download sites?

Well, global variables are well suited for this kind of thing: keeping track of the game on a global level, including the status of rooms that the player isn't presently in.

If you really want to do without them, i guess your problem could be handled from the room script.

In the player enters screen (before fadein), do the following:

Code: ags

Ã,  if (IsObjectOn(GATE) == 0) 
Ã,  //GATE should be replaced by the number of the gate object
Ã,  {
Ã,  Ã,  //enable all walkable areas
Ã,  }
 
Ã,  else
Ã,  {
Ã, Ã,  Ã, int previous_room = character[EGO].prevroom; 

Ã, Ã,  Ã, if (previous_room == SOUTH) 
Ã, Ã,  Ã, //SOUTH should be replaced by the number of the room to the south
Ã, Ã,  Ã, {
Ã,  Ã, Ã,  Ã, //enable walkable areas accessible when entering from south
Ã, Ã,  Ã, }

Ã, Ã,  Ã, else if (previous_room == NORTH)
Ã, Ã,  Ã, //NORTH should be replaced by the number of the room to the north
Ã, Ã,  Ã, {
Ã,  Ã, Ã,  Ã, //enable walkable areas accessible from north only,
Ã, Ã,  Ã, }
Ã,  }

instead of creating new global variables, you can use the fact that the "previous room" variable and the state of the gate object (on or off) is already known to you.

About the player closing the gate while he's in the room, you can check whether theÃ,  character[EGO].y value is to the south or the north of the gate, and disable the correct walkable areas instantly when the player interacts with the gate object.

- fred

Yeah. let's have a function like that.

@monkey: While we're waiting for it, just remember that although the large arrays can't be iterated through from beginning to end, they work just fine if you just need to acces sub-parts of them - if it's not necessary to initialize or access all indices at once. Splitting the iterations up between different functions may also help, as I think I've done somewhere in my script.

fred