Messages

Awesome demo, can't wait to see the finished game.

I have to agree with whoever said the Growling doesn't quite fit in, but I think it's just a matter of its lacking contrast. Its features are hard to determine in a way the other characters' aren't.

Love the atmosphere, though, and the art is really neat. I especially like the cinematic camera change at the end of the wizard sequence.

The guy on the left looks very benign to me. I suppose that would be good for his trade but not so good if you're wanting to quickly and visually express character traits... especially given that he's done in a cartoony style which usually is more expressive of personality at first glance than a realistic style would be (after all, in real life a murderer and a [uncorrupted] priest might not look so different if they stood side by side wearing street clothes).

I think the left one is more visually interesting than the right one, but the way you've drawn him doesn't scream opportunistic thief... it doesn't even say happy-go-lucky trickster. More jolly merchant, as someone else said.

I'm not sure what you mean by the GUI hiding the glitch, since sometimes the glitch doesn't appear when the GUI is hidden.

Also, the glitch is taller than the GUI. When I disabled GUI 0 (my statusbar) in before fadein, everything was fine, but when I disabled GUI 1 (my iconbar) in before fadein, I got the glitch. When I disabled it in after fadein, everything was fine. At first. But when I resaved that room as a new room (so that there were two identical rooms, one of which I would edit slightly), the glitch came back, but only in those rooms. In the other rooms where the GUIs are hidden I have no problems. It might be worth mentioning, if it matters at all, that the room that original gave me the trouble was room0.crm.


Everything in the folder for the game is zipped and uploaded here for dl by anyone who wants to take a look:

http://www.mytempdir.com/705838

I'm not sure if that's the best way to transfer the information. If it's not please let me know what would be better.

At least, I think that's what the problem is.

I'm making an intro sequence which, for the first two rooms, works fine. In the third room, however, which is just a Save As.. of the first one (so it should be the same, right?) I get a glitch in the bottom lefthand corner that shows a random frame of my PC's walk animation (the PC is hidden) when the room first fades in. The only difference between room 1 and room 3 is that room 3 transfers the ego character to a different room after it's played out the rest of the script.

Rooms 1 and 3 go like this:

In player enters room before fadein, I set two objects' views using the interaction editor.
In after fadein, I hide two GUIs and do start object animating on both objects using the interaction editor, followed by run script.

The script is:

Ã,  // script for Room: Player enters room (after fadein)
StartCutscene(eSkipAnyKeyOrMouseClick);
Wait(360);
EndCutscene();
player.ChangeRoom(7, 177, 138);Ã,  Ã, 


For Room 3, the ChangeRoom sends them to 8 instead of 7. Room 1 works without any problems. Room 3 has that weird glitch.

The glitch is similar to one I got when I tried to hide my iconbar GUI in the before fadein section, and it went away when I moved that command to the after fadein section. However, when I try moving the set object views to after fadein it doesn't seem to help at all (and having it in before fadein works for Room 1).

Hopefully someone has an idea of why this might be happening?Ã, 

It never occurred to me that it might be appropriate for it to not have large shadows like that--I just assumed I didn't know where to put them.Ã, 

ProgZ and fred, your advice sounds good to me, and the room works all right in testing so maybe I'll just leave it as is. Thanks to both of you for replying.

Mostly I need help with shadows. I feel like the console should drop a shadow someplace but I have no idea where that would be.

The room is lit a bit from above, and also from the window. The console buttons, the holographic poster on the wall, and the panel next to the door all give off a small amount of light as well.

Any help with where large shadows should go would be much appreciated.





x2



I think I lost a couple of colors when I converted to 256 gif, particularly what is supposed to be a purple highlight on the left side of the right-hand door.

Also, for reference--this room has several functions, which made it difficult for me to figure out how to design, but they are:

1. Cutscene (so it needs to be at least very very vaguely cinematic)
2. Normal puzzle room
3. It must be able to comfortably fit at least 4-6 NPCs

Hence the empty space, which will be partly filled up at some points by a projection courtesy of the domed holographic projector in the floor. 

This is a neat little piece you've got here. I like it quite a bit, and I don't mind the tuba; I think it works pretty well as a bass line. The only thing I would suggest is accenting the notes before the sudden rests more, and maybe even coming in a little more softly afterward with the lead-in tuba notes to give those sections more of a sense of shape and purpose.

Boy, that was fun, and all of the winners were very deserving.   

Nice job, buloght.

It doesn't show for me either. 

I can't wait for this game to be released. The backgrounds are really wonderful---the whole interface just looks mildewed and peeling and perfectly in tune with what you've described for the story. I know in the CL some people were suggesting that you desaturate them but I think the saturation really works. I have relatives from South Carolina and I feel very much that I've been in this house.

Love the title and the synopsis and can't wait to see how you execute it.

it's good, but i'd get someone else to sing it. the person singing sounds flat and out of tune in alot of places. Take this as GOOD advice. I'm a performing arts student, i know alot about this kinda stuff.

Actually, that's part of what I liked about it, and what made me say it reminded me of Brian Eno. One man's out of tune, nasal honking is another man's artistic innovation. To put it another way: Yanni is always in tune.

My view has always been that it's important to learn the rules of your craft primarily so that you can make an educated decision about when to break them.

I personally think the colors you chose are fine, but the coloring needs to be consisten among all of them. For example: only the green one and the purple one are outlined; the blue one's highlight is barely contrasted from his regular color; the green one's highlight is actually darker than his regular shade. They should all follow the same rules as the red one, imo.

As for making sprites bigger than the bones (assuming that's what you mean), yes of course you do. A person with bones bigger than their flesh would have bits of bone protuding, wouldn't they!

What I think he means is that, for example, if you have a bmp of a complete side view of your character sprite and you cut it into pieces to import into Walk Cyclist, the pieces won't line up properly. Rather than making them larger, I found it makes more sense to make them overlap one another. That is, when you cut out the thigh, make sure the lower boundary includes a few pixels that will also be included when you cut out the shin. The only exception is the foot, which needs to be just the flat part at the bottom or the bending will look strange.


Also, a question: the x and y offsets... I can't figure out what they're for. Initially I thought it was to help line up the parts but when I changed the values nothing seemed to happen. It would help if we were able to move things around a bit. It would also be cool if there were an option to save the walkcycle in body parts (although this would be a ton of bmps to save) because they require a bit of editing and it's easier to edit them in pieces than merged with what's below them (for example if the arms are chunky in one frame but the torso looks fine it would be a real help to be able to edit the arms and leave the torso intact). Just a thought.

I think he's starting to look really cool. I would add third shade to the hair color and use it to help make his awesome mustache stand out more from his awesome face. In general I think it might help to up the contrast on his head; it looks cool in the zoom but in the small one the details are a bit hard to make out. Maybe I've just made myself go blind from staring at tiny squares of colored light for too long. 

The padded door looks good, but it needs a slot near the floor. If s/he is so dangerous they need to be in a room like this one, the hospital staff should be able to feed him/her without opening the door.

I crashed it when I was trying to use the pick color function on part of the transparency section of the bmp I was working on in the generator.

"

in RawGetRGB (line 21)
from Paint (line 349)
from Paint (line 398)
from Paint (line 456)

Error: DynamicSprite.CreateFromBackground: invalid co-ordinates specified
"

Wow, this is amazing. Brilliant idea. I haven't had time to look at it really closely yet, but I can already tell that it's got the potential to eliminate a lot of headaches, especially for noob animators such as myself.

I'm kind of not as excited about the fact that the tooltips fade in instead of just appearing. I feel like they're teasing me. 

Also, is there any way to resize the windowed version? Running it in a window makes it easier to move between programs, but it's kind of hard for me to see that way.

Anyway, I think this is a really neat program and the fact that it was actually made with AGS just reaffirms how powerful the engine really is. 

It's like... Eno meets the Residents. Strange and very interesting. I'm curious to see what sort of game goes with this kind of piece. 

He could benefit from a strategic expansion of his nostril landscape.

The giant schnozz is so much of the personality of the reference pic, I think.

x2


15 colors plus transparency.


Qualen maintains that his devotion to pyromancy is purely an expression of his rapt appreciation for the sinewy grace and poetic chaos of fire. That it's been years since anyone had the nerve to make fun of his plum cape and high heeled boots is, of course, merely incidental.

Qualen's other love is the theater, although his pursuit of an acting career has not proved as successful as his pursuit of greater understanding of the mystical arts. Most recently he went out for the title role in his local community playhouse's production of Dark Queen of Krynn. His audition was graceful, stylish, and positively consumed with the "it" factor. Inexplicably, though, the part went to an obtuse, well-endowed nymph from around the bend. When asked what reasoning could possible lie behind this obviously misguided decision, the director merely looked pale, glanced at Qualen's wand, and repeated with dubious intonation that the wizard was, "too tall."