Messages

46

Quest for Infamy / Re: Quest For Gory 4.5 inspired this?

« on: March 08, 2013, 05:35:20 PM »

Or, to paraphrase XKCD:

"When I start the program, it just shows Hitler's face with glowing red eyes and erases all the data on my hard drive."
"Meh. Still better than Quest for Glory 4.5."

47

Quest for Infamy / Re: Frustrated with Prospero's Initiation Test? Here's a nifty solution!

« on: March 01, 2013, 06:28:59 PM »

I thought this one was programmed so you'd always get it exactly on the last try. At least, I always have.

48

Quest for Infamy / Re: Dating mechanics

« on: February 28, 2013, 06:14:30 PM »

What do you guys think this is?  Leisure Suit Roehm?   

In the Land of the Fire-Breathing Lounge Lizards.

49

Quest for Infamy / Re: How evil is too evil?

« on: February 25, 2013, 09:56:26 PM »

There are certainly games about being evil - Crystal Shard's Quest for Yrolg comes to mind immediately, as do games like Dungeon Keeper where you play as a boss setting traps for heroes. The problem is that not many people would be motivated to play as an evil character, particularly if they're as evil as you seem to enjoy. I think the element of choice would be a critical factor - something like inFAMOUS, where you can choose to be good or evil, and either is a viable way to play the character. Being evil seems a bit more palatable when you're doing it because you want to, rather than because the game forces you to. I can't imagine why that is.

50

Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: What do y'all think of "mage's initiation"?

« on: February 24, 2013, 08:42:45 AM »

I think a lot of the replay value, and possibly the entertainment value overall, is going to come from how they distinguish between the classes. It's more than just elements, at least - it seems like the classes have more of a cultural implication, and there will be different quest lines for each class. If the spells amount to more than just elemental attacks, then there's room for a lot of variety in the combat, too. I'm hoping for something like Avatar: The Last Airbender, minus the actual ongoing conflict between the Fire Nation and the rest of the world. (Although that conflict might itself be interesting, but more likely material for a sequel in this case.)

51

Quest for Infamy / Re: Bt's Corner

« on: February 22, 2013, 06:30:25 PM »

I'm pretty sure I've said this elsewhere in the forums, but what I really appreciate in adventure games are puzzles that are something other than "find object X, go to place Y, use X to Z". Flight of the Amazon Queen offers some of my favorite examples - there are quite a few puzzles that are solved through dialogue, including at least one instance of going down a conversation path, failing to accomplish the goal but learning something vital, then returning down the same path and using that information to get where you need to go. Other puzzles involve reusing the same item in multiple, clever ways - there's a vacuum cleaner that serves a number of purposes, and a knife that's handy almost any time you need to cut something. I'm not talking about the Myst-style puzzles where you toss the inventory aside and just push buttons until something happens, but things that don't make you feel like you're trudging down an ordered list of events that lead to a conclusion. Retreading old ground in a new situation can be fascinating if done properly, but it rarely is. Remember finally navigating the cave maze in the first Legend of Kyrandia, getting the Will-o-wisp spell that made moving around the cave trivial, and realizing there was no point to it anymore? It would be nice if some of the objectives could wait until after you had the spell so there was a reason to continue exploring with it. Lambo's suggestion is a similar element, where you put together information to come to a conclusion that solves a puzzle. If there's a lot of reading, though, there has to be SOMETHING to make it not boring. Voiceovers like Alone in the Dark are one possible idea, for ironic effect.

Basically, I love using inventory items to solve puzzles, but I hate feeling like an item exists just to be the solution to a puzzle. It makes the game feel contrived.

52

Quest for Infamy / Re: Rogues in combat

« on: February 22, 2013, 06:16:07 PM »

Oooo that's good.  Because I always prefer the rogue class, but it gets annoying when running into monsters and your choices are either to take major health damage or run like hell...

To be fair, that's pretty much how the rogue class works. If you're running into monsters in the first place, you're doing it wrong.

53

Quest for Infamy / Re: The very first Development Images of this project!

« on: February 20, 2013, 10:11:07 PM »

Reminds me of that game Meta where the interface is an AGS Studio project and the game is made of horrible Paint graphics. The difficult part is wrestling with the interface to make the game itself playable.

54

Quest for Infamy / Re: Thoughts on "Quest for Infamy" (Demo)

« on: February 17, 2013, 10:58:47 PM »

"I wonder if any game actually constructed a complex polynomial across multiple terms to smoothly scale loads of factors (smoothly as in differentiable and continuous multivariate functions)."

Can you say that in English? 

In other words, weaving a variable or two into the entire game's code so that changing the number to increase or decrease the difficulty changes the way the game works in many respects, preferably in a smooth way so that even subtle changes will cause small effects.

55

Quest for Infamy / Re: Favorite QFG game

« on: February 17, 2013, 07:23:01 PM »

Personally, I loved the EGA QFG2 the most. It strangely felt like it offered the most freedom while it was clearly the most constrained due to the timer - I never felt like I was pressured by the time to choose activities or miss things I really wanted to do. The text parser opened quite a few possibilities - one of my favorites is that, as a Fighter with added Magic, I could "DROP SHIELD" before any combat and use my magic freely. I think it was the only game in the series to have a unique Fighter-only "quest" (really just one event, but name any Fighter-related thing in any other game that isn't also available to the Paladin), which made the Fighter feel a bit less like an excuse to make the player fight more monsters. The combat was one of the best implementations in the series, I thought - granted, I'm not sure there was any difference between blocking or dodging in specific directions, but the high/low swings definitely mattered at times, and magic was much less of a chore to use than the later "click the magic menu, hit the spell you want, and click back to combat so you can dod- oops, you're dead" systems. QFG4 had good combat as well, and was a great game in most respects, but there were a few bugs that made it into the final product that really soured my opinion of it (and I hated the way it automatically gave Paladins a Magic skill halfway through). The VGA remake of 2 seemed okay for a while, but I got into a random battle in an alley when I hadn't saved in a while and never felt like playing it again.

As for 3 and 5... almost the opposite of 2 to me. They're so story-driven that no matter how much you explore, it never feels like the story is letting go of you. I thought 3 was pretty dull overall, and 5 reeked of the multiplayer aspect they never implemented.

56

Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Slow Day.

« on: February 15, 2013, 06:21:22 PM »

Today was anything BUT a slow day for me - and that's with the usual skeleton crew on Fridays. It was a rush to try to cram some things in at the last minute before the deadline, and I've taken off my lead engineer hat for the past few days to get into the weeds of one of the biggest problems that's plagued us in this last stretch. Things are looking pretty good! ... to meet the revised Tuesday deadline.

In short, complaining about a day being too slow tends to cause problems. I don't recommend it.

57

IQ Chat / Re: Forum Activity

« on: February 11, 2013, 06:16:30 PM »

Your dedication to my nostalgia brings a tiny, crystal-clear tear to my eye...

I take that tear and put it in the gap in the trunk of the dead willow tree to bring it back to life. It makes the next plot point happen for no discernible reason.

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Quest for Infamy / Re: Backers Contest! - Write Something Funny!

« on: February 11, 2013, 06:15:03 PM »

Departed? The "instead I crapped out" line could be Roehm's reply.

59

Quest for Infamy / Re: How I write the music for Quest for Infamy - (or quest for a theme)

« on: February 10, 2013, 10:18:50 AM »

I find myself whistling the hook from the main Volksville Village theme, over and over, recently.  I think it because it lends itself well to that sort of idle "brain-wormish stickiness", where you find it looping in your head before you're consciously aware of the fact.  This my have something to do with having played both demos many dozens of times...

It's definitely not due to overlistening. Before I found the time to play the demo all the way through (and knew where to make the saves so I could actually get there from where I was), there were several mornings when I had an unidentifiable song stuck in my head and couldn't figure out where I'd heard it. That actually happens to me a lot, and I almost always get it in the end, but over the past year or so, it's always been from QFI. This music sticks with you in ways you can't imagine until you've heard it - hours after you stopped playing.

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Banter and Chit-Chat! / Re: Other Quests for Something

« on: February 04, 2013, 06:36:48 PM »

I'm still trying to decide on a few of the answers for the Hero-U backer survey. If I'm going to have an entire wing of the university named after me, it had better be good.