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The texture of the stone looks similar on the upper surfaces (top of the head; shoulders) to the texture on the frontal surfaces, making the figure look flat. The texture should be foreshortened towards the edges of the figure. It is foreshortened a little, but not enough, to my eye.

As for the fingers - often statues have solid blocks for the hands with slight grooves in them representing the spaces between the fingers, rather than individually sculpted fingers (which would be prone to breaking off, in any case). You could get away with doing the same - it would be easier to draw and would look more correct as well.

Bravo khnum. I would have offered, but Italian is not my mother tongue and so I could not guarantee accuracy, let alone the appropriate lyrical quality.

The Google translation contains lots of errors, by the way, but that's to be expected. Furthermore, it can't give you the slightly archaic style of language found in operatic Italian, such as omitting the final "e" in words ending in "re".

My comments on the English...

1. Careful with the punctuation at the ends of the lines. Commas should only go in where they would appear if this were prose (that is, if it were written all on one line). For the most part, this is what you have done, but I would recommend writing the lyrics out as a single line and checking whether the punctuation is appropriate.

2. I suggest using semicolons or full stops/periods instead of commas in the lines "I am eternally grateful, I am grateful", "The penalty so terrible, I feel your anger" and "You are the only one, the great, I will do anything" (second comma only) as these are run-on sentences otherwise. Full stops may give too strong a break; if so, use semicolons instead.

3. "If ever I was" should be "If ever I were" (subjunctive) - "If ever I was" is OK in colloquial English, but here it clashes with the poetic style used. Furthermore, it would make no sense if translated into Italian as the indicative rather than the subjunctive.

4. The capitalisation of random words has gone - that's good.

5. I think, although I'm not sure, Italian does not capitalise words in titles other than the first word and proper nouns; hence "Per l'amor di Dio" rather than "Per L'amor di Dio" (which would be "Per l'Amor di Dio" in any case, I believe).

6. "I give him all my, my everything" - is this correct? Should it be "...my all, my everything"?

7. You might want to capitalise "paradise" to show it means the hereafter rather than a place on earth or an emotional state.

8. "Hell fire" is either hyphenated or one word ("hell-fire" or "hellfire").

9. "burn my soul" should be "burns my soul".

10. "If I ever give in to temptation / I do not deserve your gift" - should this be "... I will not deserve your gift"? Alternatively, use the subjunctive and the conditional: "If I ever gave in ... / I would not ... ". Additionally, "If ever I ..." might sound more poetic.

11. "For the love of God" - End with a full stop.

Looks like I'm the only person to have downloaded this so far!

It's not the greatest game in the world, but it's quite inventive and even has an arcade-style game in it! Given that it was made in about an hour or so, I'm impressed.

Here, you won't find achingly beautiful graphics and thought-provoking gameplay with puzzles that take days to solve, but it will make you laugh. Well, it made me laugh a lot, and not many games do that.

EDIT: I got stuck and *almost* started a Hints and Tips thread for this game, but that would have been embarrassing because the game's easy... I had just overlooked something.

I thought I had posted in this thread already, but my name doesn't show up on a search...

* Proof-reading of English, French and Italian
* Translation between English and French (either way)
* Translation between English and Italian (either way)
* Beta-testing (checking for bugs, typos, inconsistences, weirdness, clunkiness, etc)

Beta-testing adventure games is hard because they are event-driven, that is, when something (an event) happens in the game, either because the player made it happen or the game did, something else happens. The tricky bit is that these events can often happen in any of very, very many orders.

So, ideally, beta-testing needs to ensure not only that it has 100% coverage (testing everything that can possibly happen or be done in the game) but also that all possible sequences of events are tested. For example, consider this scenario:

NPC1 says to the PC: "Bring me items X and Y and I'll give you item Z". Collecting each of these items is a subquest, and they can be collected in either order.

The testers will need to test the following:

* Collect item X
* Collect item Y
* Give item X to NPC1
* Give item Y to NPC1
* Ensure that PC receives item Z from NPC1

There are at least four permutations here:

1: Collect item X; collect item Y; give item X to NPC1; give item Y to NPC1
2: Collect item X; collect item Y; give item Y to NPC1; give item X to NPC1
3: Collect item Y; collect item X; give item X to NPC1; give item Y to NPC1
4: Collect item Y; collect item X; give item Y to NPC1; give item X to NPC1

Other things to test here include:

* What happens if you give one item to NPC1 and then speak to them again - does NPC1 still ask for both items (which is a bug) or just the missing item (which is correct)?
* What happens if you give both items to NPC1 and then speak to them again - does NPC1 still ask for an item/the items (which is a bug) or do something like tell the PC that the quest is complete (which is correct)?

The number of permutations can be quite large even in small games, and in very large games, like A Tale of Two Kingdoms, where there are many paths through the game as well as numerous orders in which items can be collected and used, the number of possible playthroughs is immense, and this sort of exhaustive testing is not possible.

Much the same applies to beta-testing of other software, where processes A and B may work fine by themselves, but reveal a bug if B is done before A, for example.

So what approaches can be taken to ensuring that as many as possible of the various paths through the game are tested?

EDIT: For Trance-Pacific, the beta-testers found some bugs when going through the game using the walkthrough, and another bug or two when playing the game without it and doing things that other players would presumably try as well. Attempting exhaustive testing was out of the question because it was a MAGS game and the deadline was only two days away!

Ah, I thought you hadn't quite got that far... Enjoy the rest of the game.

Zilla:

Hint 1:

Spoiler

What did you tell the woman you would do for her? You hypnotised her to get information out of her, but she thinks you were doing something else.

[close]

Hint 2:

Spoiler

You can't just walk off and leave her...

[close]

Hint 3:

Spoiler

When you have your hair cut, how do you know when the hairdresser or barber has finished?

[close]

Murder in a Wheel...

Spoiler

...otherwise known as MiaW.

[close]

Could this be a clue?

Sehr gut!

I was enjoying this game immensely until it crashed... I couldn't copy the error message, unfortunately, but looks like this is an AGS bug rather than one in the game.

In any case, here's what I was doing at the time:

Spoiler

* Asked Elsa about feather duster
* Said I wanted it to prove Mrs Winterbottom's innocence
* Used feather duster on open laundry chute
* Used scissors on open laundry chute
* Went into bedroom

[close]

The game crashed at this point. I tried doing the above again, but the game worked OK the second time round.

Do you know if anyone else has had the same problem?

EDIT: Just completed the game - excellent work! It's a shame the music was not original - did you have permission from the authors to use it?

Have you tried

Spoiler

"take leg"

[close]

?

*** UPDATE ***

Thanks to Pierre Hopquin of http://regne.net, the game now has a French translation.

I've also noticed that the text scales fine if you play full-screen - for some strange reason, it didn't the first time I tried it. So go ahead and play the game full-screen if you prefer.

Why don't Topsy and Henrietta just bring in a new, female cat.
If Tuesday Fucks its brains out, then I will happily hang up my atheist cape and go on a spending spree at the local Gideons outlet.

Topsy and Henrietta thought that Stupot's suggestion was an excellent idea, and bought a new cat, naming it Wednesday. Tuesday and Wednesday had a wonderful time together making (ahem) "the beast with two backs" (see http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/58450.html).

Unfortunately, Henrietta insisted that this proved Tuesday was a boy, while Topsy insisted that this proved that Tuesday (and Wednesday, for that matter) was a lesbian. So nothing was proved at all, and the arguing continued as fiercely as ever.

This might sound like a flippant comment, but I am making a serious point. This sort of shift of position to suit current knowledge happens all the time in religion. Science comes along and demonstrates that a natural phenomenon can be explained in scientific terms rather than religious ones (such as the Flood or the Creation), and religious believers simply move the goalposts to fit their argument. This has happened over and over again in history - one of the worst examples was the persecution of Galileo over his publication of the heliocentric model of the solar system, which contradicted the Biblical geocentric model. The Catholic Church did not apologise for this until the 1990s, a full 350 years after Galileo's death and well after the universal acceptance of the heliocentric model.

You'd be hard pressed to find a Christian these days who would insist that the universe revolves around the Earth (unless they happened to be a Flat Earther), but that was once an accepted and supposedly unshakable part of Christian belief. (Sure, scientists believed it too, but they were happy to give up that theory once another came along that gave a better fit to astronomical observations, and they didn't go around putting Christians who continued to believe in the old theory under house arrest.)

Niether [religion nor science] can give all the answers. No scientest can  tell me how I can get an 'I' out of a  few pounds of intercontected hydrogen carbon and a bunch of other elements. On the other hand faith can't tell me how a cell works. I am certin that I am uncertin scientificly.

True, neither religion nor science can give all the answers, and it never will, as each answer leads to more questions. However, science comes up with many, many more answers than religion does, and its answers are based on sound logic, unlike religion's answers, which are based on faith alone. ("God made it so - just believe rather than questioning it.")

Yes, science can't currently tell you how you come to be out of hydrogen and carbon, etc, but it is entirely feasible that one day it might. That's not scientific arrogance, by the way - several centuries ago, science could not explain how the heart worked, for example, but nowadays, it can.

Duh, I started reading this and got halfway through the first paragraph before I released why I wasn't seeing "using a walkthrough" or "trying Ctrl-X to see if the person who made the game forgot to disable teleporting to another room"

Here's an idea. Write to the people who made KOF and ask them if you can use their graphics in your game. This is the only legitimate way to do it (copyright notices usually say something along the lines of "no copying ... without the owner's permission").

You can probably guess already what they are likely to say, and that should answer your question. It's not so much that it is a faux pas as that it is a criminal offence, as has already been pointed out. You could end up in deep doo-doo, to put it mildly.

But you never know - they might say yes, with a string of provisos (such as not using more than a certain amount, not charging for the game, ensuring that the game makes it clear that the copyright belongs to them and the backgrounds have been used with their full permission). If they do say yes, then you are free to go ahead in the knowledge that you are acting within the law, but my view is that they are pretty likely to say no.

By the way, I agree with the people who say "draw your own and your game will be better for it". Either draw your own or, if you are crap at drawing, collaborate (as I do) with someone who is good at it. The effort will shine through and make for a much better game in the long run.

sholson, I'm not sure how far you've got, but here are some hints. Remember it's a good idea to speak to Eve and Nick to get help, although they might not have much to say in this room (the further you go through the game, the less help they tend to offer, but what they say will almost always be useful).

Hint 1:

Spoiler

Have you looked in all the containers?

[close]

Hint 2:

Spoiler

Report back to Grace.

[close]

Hint 3:

Spoiler

You'll get one of two responses from Grace at this point - pay attention to what she says as it will suggest what you should do next.

[close]

If you've got further than this already, feel free to post again (using spoiler tags, please - see the first posting in the thread).

What a fascinating thread. There are some excellent arguments being posted here.

Here is some further reading from Wikipedia that people might find interesting. I haven't had time to read the whole of this thread (just the first and last pages) so these subjects might have been mentioned before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockmaker_hypothesis

There are plenty more articles on atheism and related subjects in Wikipedia, but I think these are most likely to be of interest to people contributing to this thread. Oh, and I'm not affiliated with Wikipedia or trying to plug it - it's just a very useful and interesting resource.

Good. OK, well, as long as you don't bend the rules too much I'm sure it will be just fine. And there's nothing stopping you from putting a zeppelin in as well if you want as long as you don't use the same graphics as you had in your other game (which would be against the MAGS rules).

Hi Akatosh,

Yes, go for it!

Regarding "anything recognizable as something like a plane, train and/or automobile", I would say it doesn't matter too much if your graphics don't look like a plane, train or automobile, but the vehicles featured must be intended to be a plane, train or automobile.

So, for example, it would be OK to have the character take a trip in a long rectangle with semicircles along the bottom edge, as long as it's made clear in the game that this is supposed to be a train and not, say, a bus or something else.

What is not OK is the narrator just saying, "Then Fred got into his car and drove to the station, where he took a train to the airport and jumped on a plane to Barbados." That would be too easy. The vehicles and the journeys need to be shown in the game rather than just referred to.

Does this answer your question?

Thanks, Radiant, LimpingFish, that was it. I hadn't thought of that. I use McAfee, and it was set to block adverts on websites.

I could however already see both of your banners fine - how do you host yours?

paolo

Yes, I do see other people's signatures. "Don't show users' signatures." is not checked in my preferences.