Messages

Oh! I assumed it would appear when the mouse cursor had y... 70 or something.

The problem with having GUI appear at y=3 is that if the player never moves the cursor that high, they won't find the interface. I remember that when I first played KQ5, the first adventure game I played, I spent a long time just walking around from screen to screen because I had no idea where to look for the GUI, and it never occured to me to hover the mouse over the top of the screen.

Now, most AGS players are used to having to mouse over the top of the screen to check if there's anything there. But since there already IS a visible GUI on top of the screen, why would we assume that there is more above it?

If you hide away the GUI that well, make sure that you have some kind of hint that it's actually there. For instance, have the GUI slide down every time a new item is added to the inventory (heck, you could even go fancy and animate the inventory object materializing inside the green beam or something if you want to).

I think a lot of it comes down to writing the dialogue to go with the pictures.

Seconded. An additional thought: This would be a perfect game to voice-act instead of having dialogue on the screen, assuming you have a good enough microphone.

Spoiler

There's a rock in the yin room. If I remember correctly, that was the one you unlocked with a cross.

[close]

One idea I think would be pretty exciting for an adventure game, would be to make a game where you don't have a primary objective. You do, however, have a bunch of optional side quests. In that way, the game wouldn't be so much about moving from start to end as it would be about exploring the game world.

For instance: You are trapped somewhere -- let's use the old cliché of a desert island, even though the idea could work perfectly with other scenarios as well. Fortunately you have a radio transmitter, so you manage to call for help, and you're told that a boat will arrive to pick you up in, say, six hours (much less if it's a small game, maybe more if it's a huge game). Now, that is six hours real-time -- not that you have to sit and play six hours in a row, the in-game time will pause when you're not playing.

You *know* that the game will end in six hours, whether you accomplish anything in that time or not, so you might as well spend the time exploring, right? Now, the island could contain tons of puzzles and minigames, all of which add up to the total score, but there's nothing you actually HAVE to accomplish in your time on the island (if the game is very huge and the total playtime is closer to ten or twelve or twenty hours, you may give the mandatory mission of finding food and water, though I suggest that this should be very easy and that there are several ways of doing so). With a cleverly designed game, you have so many options and possibilities that most players probably won't get to them all in their first sit, so which puzzles to solve and which to ignore is completely up to the player. Maybe there's a cave nearby where you find some strange cave paintings you want to decipher? Maybe you need to figure out how to climb a palm, to get coconuts or get an overview of the island or whatever? Maybe one of your fellow castaways has deep emotional problems and you want to help them figure things out? Maybe you have a crush on another castaway? Maybe there's a fallen tree blocking the road to the other side of the island? Maybe you want to find a way to kill a passing seagull for its meat? There are tons of available options here, but NONE of them are mandatory. Whatever the player chooses to do has nothing to do with getting any closer to the ending (which can be done by sitting idle on the beach in six hours); everything they do, they do to get familiar with the environment on the island. Optionally, you add a cutscene after leaving the island where having a high score pays off. For instance, you go straight from the island to a job interview where your "high survival skills" can help you score the job.

(This is possibly done before.)

Never heard of or seen anything related to the game, but the riddle is fortunately well-known enough to exist online. According to this website, the answer is

Spoiler

onion

[close]

My guess is that this is a typo, as the cc variable seems a tiny bit misplaced here. I would change line 2957 to

Code: ags

c = character[i];

Also, change line 2963 to

Code: ags

i++;

My strongest apologies if this doesn't work.

One thought on the whole "GUI-will-come-down-when-mouse-comes-up" thought: At which y coordinate did you plan to let the GUI fall down?

I think I would find it annoying if I was pushing the mouse upwards towards the save button to find that when I reached a certain point the save button was *below* the cursor and I would have to change directions just because the GUI moved.

When I on rare occasions write a game design, I think I write most of it in English. I like to pretend that I have several reasons to do so: One is that in the way I write such documents, I like to be able to cut-and-paste from them so that if I come up with an excellent piece of dialogue, I won't have to re-think it to come up with a good translation. Another reason is that I really dislike my own artwork, so even though I'm working all alone on a project I like to keep the opportunity open for possibly recruiting a team at a later point in time. (Also, my main project at the moment is based on an existing literary work, so it's nice to be able to read and write in the same language.)

Though, it should be noted that writing texts in English is my main income source, so I write it almost as fluent as my native tongue.

[If your stories suck, grab a great story from someone else.]

If your stories suck, grab a great story from someone else.
Seriously. Look to the classics. There are tons of great books that
a) belong to the great classics so that pretty much everybody has heard or them
b) are so old that the copyright has expired on them, so they're absolutely free to use
c) have great potential to be turned into awesome games

I recommend Gutenberg.org as a starting point -- tons of great stories, most of them with no video game adaptation whatsoever. So if stories are your weak spot, why not instead of struggling for months with coming up with a decent story, just find an awesome story and make a game out of it?

Not all stories are perfect for making games out of, but surprisingly many of them do. Imagine an adventure game about Oliver Twist, a whodunit game starring Sherlock Holmes, or maybe a young Hercule Poirot. I'm playing with the thought of making a game out of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" myself.

Who the H needs a game in Esperanto ?? 

The happy Esperanians of Esperania.

Seriously, no, many of us don't really need games in our own language (at least we Scandinavians don't), but it's still pretty cool to have access to it. Not something that should be prioritized, of course, but as long as people WANT to translate these games, why not?

There is a reason why popular comic books are translated to Latin, and that reason is not that the Latin-speaking world really needs it.

Hmm... I didn't think it through earlier, but is it a problem for anyone that the end date is in the middle of this Mittens thing? I just added a fortnight to the start date when I started the competition, but if that means I will the only person online to vote, maybe one should think it through a little further...

Cool to see so many people participating, though.

In actual fact I am a Game Designer and Artist who wants to see my games on many platforms for a wider market. Isn't this reasonable?

Are you willing to pay for it?

AGS, last time I checked, was freeware. I'm very happy that it is, as that gives me the opportunity to play around with it and not waste hundreds of dollars on a program there's a huge possibility I'm never going to use for anything serious.

As long one is not paying for a program, why make demands? Presenting wishes is one thing, that gives the developer an overview of which platforms are most wanted. Offering to do a port to another system is one thing, I imagine that is highly appreciated. But as long as we're not paying a penny for this program, we're not in any position to make demands.

If you're really relying on porting your games to other systems to make money, I will strongly suggest that you go out and buy some software that lets you do that, and then you make your games with it. I'm sure such software exists.

(I'm sorry if this became a very negative post.)

This is really a matter of taste, but if it's possible, I would have removed the arrows on the inventory items. It's a very good thing that you have them there when using them as cursors, but on the inventory screen they look misplaced somehow.

Also: The pure-green-lines-inventory looks awesome, but there may at some point be problems withunderstanding what they're supposed to be, so I suggest that when the player mouses over them you let them have full colors, while keeping the green design at all other times. Just a suggestion.

Peder summed it up pretty well: This story looks awesome. I can't wait to play it. I don't normally download demos, but I will on this one. The whole "two stupid guys by accident gets involved in something bigger than they could have foreseen" plotline is well-used, but when used right it can be good, and the whole idea of the two dimensions tied together by light is an excellent idea which I'm really looking forward to seeing done.

A few thoughts about things you might improve:

You've probably already thought about it, but make sure your two characters aren't too identical personality-wise. Of course they have some similarities as they are brothers, but make sure they're two distinct persons and not just two clones of the same person talking to each other. Give them individual wishes and needs, and individual ways of thinking. I was confused in your intro when one of the guys encourages the other to empty the guy's pockets, and when finding the amulet he suddenly changes completely his point to "it would be wrong of us to take it". It feels somehow as if his personality changed more than it should have done in those seconds. Strong personalities is the key to great fiction.

I loved the beginning with the professor walking through the ally, and especially the whole "newspapers blowing in the wind" thing. Kudos for awesome plot revelations with the perfect amount of vagueness!

The Eric-and-Chris-walking scene seemed odd, because it looked as if they weren't moving at all. Since the palm tree stood still, it seemed as if they did as well. If you made the palm pass by them in the background or something, it would look more realistic.

And forgive me for asking, but ... *why* the nine-verb GUI? Most games really don't need it, and for some reason it doesn't FEEL like the right interface for a huge dimension-spanning fantasy/sci-fi-plotline. I really think you would be better off with something more... intuitive. But maybe it's too early to say -- there are people who manage pull off the nine-verb GUI, and maybe you're one of them.

olaf- You do well to mistrust my release date

Oh, please don't get me wrong. I'm not mistrusting your release date. I'm admiring your release date. I know that if it was me, I would probably set the release date sometime in 2011. I don't doubt that you are able to finish half of this game's graphics in four weeks, I find it awesome. Sorry I wasn't clear on that.

A suggestion off the top of my head: Create as many seperate characters as you want there to be cars on the screen at all times. On start-up, put all the cars on the screen and start them up with a given direction and a given or random speed (see below), and write your code so that the cars move in the given direction as long as the game is not paused. If all your roads are horizontal and vertical, the cars will stay on the correct side of the road as long as you just move them in the same direction as the road goes, if your roads are diagonal I would suggest that you make the cars move towards a set point in the next cross or turn, and the cars should stay on the right side of road.

When the car comes to a roadcross (I'm assuming Regions can come in handy here), you make it run a function that first checks if the lights are red (and stop moving until they're green if they are) -- you have, of course, a variable somewhere you can check to see if the light is red or not -- and then selects a random direction to move from here. For specific crosses you could give specific commands (for instance, if you have an old tractor road or something going off the screen at one point, don't let 50 % of the cars passing it drive onto this road when in reality 2 % or so of them would do it).

Make sure that the cars at any time keep track of whether there are any other cars (including yours) nearby, so that they don't collide in each other or you from behind (this will especially be important if you want the cars to drive with somewhat different speeds, which could add a lot to the realism) -- make the cars slow down to don't collide with the cars in front of them. When a car leaves the screen, run a function that makes a new car (the same character, but since you can change all its properties including what it looks like, it's a new car to the player) enter the screen from a randomly picked exit (but check that there's no other car in that exact same position and choose another exit if there is) -- with a new look, eventually a new random speed, and so on.

Since the cars in this way always both sticks to safe parts of the road and they beware of other cars, you don't need to worry about them colliding with the sidewalk or each other; as long as you have a function that deals with what happens when they collide with YOU.

An additional suggestion: A quirky side effect for this is that there is a possibility for a car to drive around in circles on the screen for hours. A way of fixing this would be to add a variable that says how long a car has been on the screen, and if it has been driving around in circles for more than a given time (a couple of minutes), make it drive directly towards a given exit (still stopping at red lights) after this.

Coding something like this would probably involve a lot of work, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult.

Awesome. I liked the first, I look forward to this one.

Story : 70%
Scripting : 50%
Graphics : 50%
Sound : 60%

Huh ... so many parts of the game are just half-done, and still you dare put the release date only four weeks away? You are a brave person.

* more GUMSHOE! Rely on traditional detective work or abuse the magic
  of Parodise- it's up to you since many puzzles now allow you to do either.

Brilliant. Multiple-choice makes everything more realistic, and way too few games take advantage of it.

Wow, thanks for all the responses!

As I said, I won't fix this error because it lies outside the borders of what I find reasonable to fix. Yeah, the game will make a silly date on one day 115 years, but nobody will remember my little MAGS game by then anyway, and if they do, that's so small a group that I won't alter my gameplay or story for them.

I just needed to... ramble... when I discovered that I was actually at a point treating this as a realistic dilemma.

You're welcome. It should be noted that doing this has another great advantage: You can now click on hotspots and objects behind your character without having to move the character first.

all the Nanobots Easter Eggs are listed here. Might be fun to try on a rainy day; it sure beats productivity.  

Sweet! Didn't test them all and I don't think I got all of them to work, but the Hotbot one was awesome.