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It's interesting how movies with rutger hauer* generally suck really hard but how he still somehow makes them utterly epicly awesome to watch. This looks like yet another one of those movies.

* I am of course not counting BR as one of those as it (as we surely all know) happens to be one of the best movies ever produced.

It is very good news hearing you are considering getting into selling your games, they certainly deserve to come with a price tag attached.

I'm 100% with tzachs regarding safety of sales. Putting everything into one pot for you would be madness. You turn stuff over so fast, it would be crazy not to aim toward several smaller releases instead of one big risk project. With that said, I think a shiny version of technobabylon would, to say the least, be very intriguing... Maybe there's some middle way to go there. On the other hand, if you aim toward a small, retro crowd, maybe the look you have now is just plain perfect. A weekly chapter thing would be plain awesome, I'm confident it could get quite the crazy following if you can keep that mad pace.

Remember though, living on games means putting a lot of time into selling them. This is in no way something that happens by magic, it requires A LOT of time and dedication. It's hard work, but it can be done. Hell, I've lived on making games for almost three years now and I'm still alive and kicking.

These years have no doubts had their ups and downs, for an instance there have been several months without salary and we've taken A LOT of dirty jobs. On the other hand, several months have rocked my socks off and I have learned one hell of a lot from all projects I have been involved in. I can't say that I wouldn't have traded it for anything but I can certainly say I'm happy with the decisions I've made and I'm proud of how far I and the rest of the company have come. Me and my three colleagues at SLX Games now have a relatively steady income from our main project, and enough time to spare to spend nearly half of our man-hours on the project of my dreams. 

Being able to wake up in the morning and go to OUR office, work on OUR games, and do it under OUR supervision is to me, pure magic. And now that I have experienced it this way I'll never fit into a cubicle job again.

Enough ranting. Best of luck with whatever you chose to focus on!

[nice]

The manner in which AGS generates the outline for fonts isn't really suitable for true type AAed fonts and needs revising which i have half done in a plugin but then I didnt bother finishing it because no one uses plugins :p

For you Calin, I might consider making an exception. Such a plugin would be nice.

I also went through and upgraded the game to DX9, adding anti-aliased edges for the character sprites.

Sweet! Good call. Easy fix that will add much polish.

This gave me another idea. How cool it would be to create a verbcoin that drips away or melts over time, finally becoming completely unusable!?

Sounds like something from snakes! I like it! Awesome way of creating game-play outside of the box. (and works good on a drunk too!)

Btw, I like the finished design (though I personally prefer my bacon more well done), good job!

Dude, don't worry. "OK perspective" and Maniac Mansion don't mix and match. I think it looks distinctively MM.

Lookin' absolutely fantastic! I'm very much looking forward to exploring this city of yours.

There best be fancy animated backdrops. I have come to expect them.  8)

Boobs and half a swastika.

that's exactly what I saw. omg our brains must be interlinked. :o

This will scare the hell out of me once I get to play it, I'm confident.

I'ts gorgeous too.  :o

No doubts well deserved! Keep on kickin' asses, you guys. snakes rules!

If you like gits, don't miss the gits series. Writing-wise they're not exactly mind blowing, but aesthetically they kick ass. I have spent SO much time looking at those backdrops, man oh man...

This looks rockin'!

Man this is starting to look like one hellova ambitious project.  :o

You should consider adding AA to your fonts.

Me too, count me in towards the vote for higher resolutions.  I'm a big fan of doing my art in wide-format at higher resolutions.  I'd love to use the high-res art in games with AGS.   Crossing my fingers for this in 3.3! =D

Hmm maybe we should start a petition or something. If it weren't for that ravingly difficult IQ test CJ has us do when creating accounts for the forums I'd be there in no time -in the true spirit of democracy- making tons of extra accounts to sign my own petition! 

yeah, I think your girly avatar might causing the "sometimes". You need something awesome like a goblin with crossbones, or a wolf with a rocket launcher, or a bearded, slowly rotating smug man doing an odd suggestive gesture with his hand (?!).

Would be nice yes, I gave up trying to make it run.
Well actually a GF HD remake doesnt seem that unlikely. They just would have to re-render the scenes in hires - give the models some better textures'n stuff  - and better controls would be nice too - that way GF could compete with most modern advenutres.

Yeah I'd love to see the old low poly meshes replaced with something shinier, more in line with what we are seeing in ttg's releases. Judging by Peter Chan's original sketches for GF, more detail could add more ambiance. Also the realtime lighting and shadowcasting could use an upgrade. I doubt the backdrops are as easy as just opening the 3d scene, doubling the resolution and hitting the render button though... But they should have quite a lot of the ground work done already no doubts. A tantalizing thought, no doubts.  8)

Kick-ass project. Sometimes Calin, you're actually pretty cool.

Lovin' how it seems like you are integrating all kinds of different game play into this. Kudos.

LucasArts have given the Monkey Island series a fair bit of attention lately, and they know that Grim Fandango is a classic. Time for them to give us a shinier version, perhaps? (or at least one that's easy to get working on modern computers  :'( )

First I was going to say I hope they burn in hell if they make a GF remake but now I'm thinking maybe it could wind up being plain awesome, my mind is seeing beautiful, beautiful things... Then again... considering how blown away I was at the grand suckyness of the MI remakes I'm sure I'd be disappointed. A project of this proportion, playing around with a brand that people love so deeply, is more or less doomed to fail. Too much emotion involved for me to accept anything but sheer awesomeness. Hmm the thin line between brand rape and brand smooching is a very, very delicate one.

A simple patch or something that makes it run properly on a new pc though, I'm definitely all for that. (Though by now my GF cd's have so many scratches in them, I don't know which sides are up or down so I doubt I could get it started anyways...)

[VERY]

I really don't like the 3D character at all, I liked the stylized outlines on the 2D characters.

It's still work in progress. Hopefully, as we get things in order with our experiments, we will be able to change your mind:) I gotta admit though, the 2d style is cool, it is however incredibly inconsistently implemented and VERY, VERY, VERY tedious to work with. I'm very glad to more or less throw that old dented pipeline out the window 

You mentioned on another thread that the development was currently bogged down due to graphical performance issues with AGS. Do you think you'll overcome that problem and move forward in the near future? At least the blog makes it sound like progress is being made in other areas.

Honestly, right now I'm just ignoring the problem and dutifully saying my prayers every night to the powers that be, hoping that my wishes will come true in a not so distant release of AGS. Fortunately, since much of the work we are doing is not resolution dependent (until we actually start rendering stuff and inserting it into the project) we aren't quite as gridlocked as I thought we would be. It is however still an incredibly serious issue that may end up making us leave the AGS platform if there is no other way around it. I certainly hope it won't go that far though.

Oh and thanks for the Beyond Good and evil tip, I'll look it up! I've heard many people praise that game, silly of me not to have tried it out yet.