Messages

Stupot, I could agree with you if it weren't for that adventure games have at least two other aspects to add to the trial and error: inventory items and advanced nested dialogues.

I agree that complexity in a game can be good and make it feel more realistic, but I really don't see how it makes a game better in any way that I have the opportunity to speak to the grass only to find that it surprisingly enough doesn't talk back.

I have to agree with most of what you're writing here. Let me add a suggestion: For those games where one or two items can give meaningful responses to more than one interaction, I think a verb coin would be appropriate -- as long as this verb coin appeared only when more than one interaction was possible (and was disabled if one of these interactions no longer were valid, of course).

"I'm so pleased everyone seems like like this (bar a few snooty humourless cunts at the AGS board).

Dan is clearly joking here, as I take pride in being the first snooty humourless cunt to write in this thread, and I didn't do so until six days after he wrote it.

My first impression of the game was "awesome". That impression never faded.

Frankly, a game can have the greatest puzzles and the most innovative atmosphere in the world, and still it won't be a good game if one misses the most important aspect any ludological narrative should have: Personalities. A good game needs at least one character with a strong personality so that the player can relate to them. And you've got SIX of them.

My favorite AGS game of the year, and I hope it gets tons of awards when that day arrives. And I agree with what many have said before me: This game screams "origin story", and a sequel would be very appropriate here.

Looking forward to your next project!

I've yet to hear anyone explain to me just why this particular game deserves four cups. Not "It's better than some of those four cup games!", but actual concrete examples of this games superior quality. The quality that the panel looks for when rating a game.

An excellent question to which I have no good reply. The reason I personally said I gave the game a "4/5" was that the dialogue in my opinion was hilarious enough to pull the whole game upwards, but honestly I don't expect the Panel to think in the same way. The game was hilarious, and the artwork was cute, but from a trying-to-be-objective point of view I completely understand that the complexity of the interface and the similarity of the puzzles pulls the score down.

Anyhow, I'm still of the opinion that a 3/5 is a pretty good grade.

The thing is that according to the official blue cups rating description, 3 cups = "a decent game", and 4 cups = "a good game"... so technically, if you think it's a good game it should deserve 4 cups in your eyes

Decent is just a degree of good. The description also says that three cups equals "give it a go". I don't tell people to give a game a go if I don't think it's good.

a couple of the puzzles did take me a little bit to work out:

Spoiler

At first I didn't realize you could click all three sections of the pillars. I knew the candles had to do with the Bible references...but I only had 2 verses!

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I figured that one out right away, but I agree that it could have been done better, especially when taking into account the inconsistency:

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With the candles themselves, one clicks the chandeliers and not the single candles, quite the opposite of the way one had to click on individual verses on the pillars.

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The most confusing puzzle in the game, by the way, is in my opinion

Spoiler

getting the can-opener from the museum. Not because it is difficult to get the can-opener (it's not), but because the dioramas really look like paintings. Examining them doesn't really reveal that they're dioramas, either. So when I needed some kind of item to cut a lamppost down, getting the can-opener from the museum was the last thing I thought of -- not because it doesn't fit with the game's bizarre logic, but because I assumed that the can-opener was painted on the wall!

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The worst part is that that frustration could have been resolved with a simple @OVERHOTSPOT@.

Maze puzzles can be good as long as there is a hint to how one solves it and the hint is somewhat intelligent done. I remember a maze I found in a MUD a few years back, where every room was identical and there was no way of figuring out where in the maze you were, and you couldn't even map it, as it was inside a cave and dropping a coin to recognize the room later (a common mapping technique in MUDs) made the coin roll away and get lost. Oh, and it was three-dimensional, so you didn't have FOUR directions to choose from at any time, but SIX. Trial and error made no reason whatsoever.

I finally found the correct hint in the room outside the maze: A postcard written by the maze creator, signed "SEND NEWS". I think I read the card five times before the message struck me... South, East, North, Down, North, East, West, South. Brilliant. Probably my favorite maze.

Not sure if I remember any clear favorite puzzles or most hated puzzles right now, but one example of a puzzle genre I really hate from the bottom of my liver is puzzles that requires knowledge of outside information (pop culture), and especially if they at the same time are somewhat hard to recognize and require you to think in the exact same way as the game creator. I can't remember any good examples from adventure games, so I'll use an example from a MUD here as well... I tried to get somewhere, and a strong black knight was blocking the way and of course wouldn't let me pass. And he's very violent, so it seems the only way to get past him is to kill him, but he's extremely tough, and I have no idea how to beat him. In the normal way it seems near-impossible, and there's not really any clues around here telling me if this guy has some special weakness either. If I had paid close attention I may have noticed that his lines had a some kind of montypythonesque ring to them, but for some reason I didn't. However, turned out the only way to beat this guy was to go back to the village and buy an axe (there couldn't be an axe available nearby, that would have been way to easy, of course), come back and chop all the knight's arms and legs off until he stopped fighting. And the only way to know this was to recognize the character from Monty Python's Holy Grail, there was no clues whatsoever that this was the way to kill him.

Ooh, and I also get annoyed when there's a code or riddle you have to solve, and you manage to solve it off-screen but can't move on in the game because you can't inform the game you have found the solution. There's an example of this near the end of "Hotel Dusk: Room 215":

Spoiler

You are trapped in an airtight room and must find a way out. Or, not really, as there IS no way out, you have to wait for a friend to open the door from the outside, but he won't do that before you have cracked a completely unrelated code hidden somewhere in the room (don't you just love it when what you have to do to move on is the exact opposite of what your life actually depends on? I don't). Anyhow, I found the code, figured it had to be a code, and assumed I had to solve it. I recognized it as a possible Caesar sipher, and through a lucky guess (guessing that a two letter word was "is") I solved the code. But, of course, the game didn't know I had, and there was no way to tell it, so my character hadn't solved the code yet. So in order to proceed with the game I had to repair a defect code solving machine, figure out how to use it, and let the machine solve the code for me!

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I love the game, but that puzzle almost made me tear my hair out. It's great that the machine is there, but why not make a way around it for those of us who don't NEED it?

Hi, I need help please ... How can I blend or cut the lamp post?

That was a tricky puzzle, as

Spoiler

the scenes in the museum look as if they're paintings on the wall, when they actually are dioramas.

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If you already knew that:

Spoiler

Take and use the can-opener.

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Bizzarely indeed. I think we can say for certain that restrictive rules have something to do with the unpopularity of writing contests as none of the four contributions so far has followed all the rules given :-)

Though I really like SSH's blog, I must admit that I'm not sure if I would want it on the start page of AGS, simply because I find it confusing and in some cases annoying when there are RSS feeds in programs originally intended for offline use. Links are okay (provided that they open in an external browser and not in the AGS interface), but please don't make the program check the web for new updates on every start and every so-and-so minutes and eventually give me a huge error message if I'm offline.

(Another aspect is the distraction factor; when opening AGS, I want to really focus all my attention on making a game. That attention is gone if I suddenly start reading about things going on in the rest of the world; interesting forum threads I have to reply to, new games I have to test, and suddenly the day is gone.)

I have both SSH's blog, VinceTwelve's blog and the New Games feed in my RSS reader, and they're all interesting reads, but their place is not inside the studio. If you choose to integrate them anyway, please make them optional information disabled by default.

Strange. The load feature worked perfectly here.

Thanks, LimpingFish, for finding the words I was looking for. I agree with everything you say.

In cases like this one, it feels particularly hard to open one's mouth to say "Yeah, this game is really good, but it's not THE BEST GAME EVER CREATED". I don't know why, but it feels so harsh and insensitive, especially when everybody else is praising the game and the game creators seem to be very disappointed with a sub-90 % rating (when, according to these statistics, only twenty of 470 games have a ranking of 90 % or higher (and that puts BTDT in the top 5 %!)).

Like I said above, I liked this game. And in some ways, it was excellent. But I don't understand what all the fuzz is about, either. And I can't help wondering why that makes one feel as a bad guy.

Anyhow, just had to write this to make it obvious that I agree with LimpingFish here, because I know it's so much easier to give criticism when someone agrees with you. And if people stopped criticizing, the world would stop improving. And I assume that would lead to its implosion.

Google can.

[The year nobody came]

I have chosen to interpret the "around 200-500 words" limitation as a very loose limit, and my short story has 650 words (30 % more than the max limit, header not included). Let me know if that's way too much, and I'll try shortening it. Also, I'm not sure if you meant that the text had to be specifically about AGS writing contests, in that case my text is of course not a valid entry.

The year nobody came (RTF, appr. 10 kB)

Not a very good text, but I'm lazy and this is the best I'm willing to take time to write. Sorry.

I wanted to make it so that when you have for example half a key and try to use it with, lets say, a door it wont work, and then when you got the whole key, it works. If you get me.

Wouldn't that be as simple as adding two seperate ifs?

Code: ags

if (player.ActiveInventory == iHalfKey) {
  [the code needed to return an error message]
}
if (player.ActiveInventory == iWholeKey) {
  [the code needed to open the door]
}

Huh, I missed that line for some reason. Thanks, Akatosh.

Ack, I know it's technically Tuesday, but since there's not voting page up yet, is it too late to nominate "Nanobots"? My favorite game so far this year by far.

Some people have what it takes to make a game without a very original story. Look at Mario, or the Zelda games. Both franchises use the same plot you're describing for Eric here: The hero has to go out in the world and save the maiden, and that's his only purpose in life. Also, both franchises are wildly popular.

However, the Mario/Zelda developers have a couple of things people like you and me don't have: fame, power, great story developers and swimming-pools full of money.

With great power comes great expectations, and that's why Zelda and Mario games still sell. I doubt anyone buys Zelda games for the thrill of saving a princess in need. We buy Zelda games either because we remember from past games that these games tend to be great, or because all the big game reviewers remember that, and therefore gives every new game in the franchise lots of attention, including long reviews often available before the game is released. And if these are positive, of course I'll give the game a go.

For all that I know, you may be the greatest game developer of all time. It's possible. But how am I supposed to know that unless you actually tell us what makes this game interesting? You don't have a big name, so you probably won't get bucketloads of reviews, and I assume you don't have that much of a marketing budget either. As long as the game is shareware I could download it and give it a play, of course, but that brings up two new problems. One: there are several new AGS games every week, and playing all of them would take tremendous amounts of time. Two: 32-bit, 800x600, hundred rooms? Sounds like one heck of a file size! Sorry, I'm not downloading something that big without being really intrigued by it. Some people may download this game for the graphics alone (they're fascinating), but I'm not one of them.

And I'm sorry to say so, but I have to agree with ambientcoffeecup on this one: "The hero has to rescue the girl no matter what the cost" isn't interesting enough.

I understand that you don't want to give away your main plot line, but I have a hunch that your game would gain on it if you gave away a little bit more. Of course, spoilers are unwanted, but if you tell us some parts of what makes your story unique, that would be a stronger encouragement to play it.

Look at the story descriptions of a couple of all-time AGS favorites: A cat burglar and a group of strangers is imprisened in a manor by some invisible intelligence. A young paranormal investigator goes to Scotland to investigate a murder of two children, and the villagers suspect it's the work of two witches. A fearsome pirate must investigate the mysterious disappearance of a fleet of birds. A ghoul girl must find a way to help her new goldfish to not die, though she has no real idea what life and death are. Twin private investigators in a town where everybody has superpowers must find a mysterious crystal. Et cetera, et cetera. All great examples of intriguing and interesting stories that really makes you want to download the game. Also, note that none of these descriptions spoil very much of what the game is about.

I guess what I'm trying to say with this way-too-long post is: Good luck with the game, but please remember that before people download and play your game, the plot is probably the most important aspect of the game, and the more intriguing and original it is, the more people will download it and give it a try. That goes for all games, but especially for games with very large file sizes. You may have awesome puzzles and amazing plot twists, but that doesn't really matter as long as you don't get people interested enough to actually download the game and try it. And having a good story is vital to achieve just that.

Still stuck though...

Spoiler

I assume I have to do something with the guys drinking beer in the pub to get them to fall unconscious so that the barman will give me his hat... but what? I know how to get their glasses refilled, and suspect I have to do something while the barman is doing this, but what?

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Spoiler

There is a clearly visible item behind the counter that you can take only when the barman is refilling their glasses.

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The key.

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Just finished it. An interesting game with tons of great dialogue. I particularly liked the fact that it seemed as if every inventory item had its own "vocabulary", so that I very rarely ran into a boring "I can't use this item here" message but instead got hilarious messages about how I don't want a dead man's hand to handle this thing or how I don't want the top hat to smell like other people's wee. This is one thing I think many game developers would be better off doing, so I liked it a lot.

What's the point of complaining so much over "low scores"? They're not that low, seriously. I voted for it, and I voted that it is a recommended game that people should put on their to-play-list. In my ears, that's a pretty good thing to say about a game, and still I managed to pull the average score DOWN with that vote. So having the game at just below 90 % is pretty darn good, isn't it?

I have no idea how the AGS Panel works and evaluates, but three cups isn't THAT bad a grade, is it? I haven't played many four-cup-games, but I seem to recall that I've found most of them great, even better than this one. So three ain't that bad.

All in all, a good game. The downside is that it's somewhat repetitive in the way that every puzzle is about unlocking a room and entering it to find the key to the next room (which, sadly, is one of the most over-used puzzles in the adventure game world) and I also think it could have been better with less forth-wall-breaks. The upside is tons of hilarious dialogue and darn cute drawings throughout the entire game. 4/5 from me.

Would this happen to be

Spoiler

the panel between the Max and yin and yang doors?

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Spoiler

No. It's between the top hat-door and the zombie doll-door.

You get into it by simply interacting with it, but I notice that when I do that, Ben or Dan says "This wasn't here before", so you may have to do other actions in the game to unlock the door. Personally I think I found it as one of the first things after I opened the lava world door, but it may have been there earlier too.

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