Background Sketch

Instead of a boring screenshot, here's the original sketch of one of the project's backgrounds. You will probably notice that some of the elements mentioned in the sketch (first frame) are not visible in the background (last frame), like the seat or the light bulbs hanging from wires... Well some stuff get cancelled along the way and others may appear as well. Anyway the last frame is not the final edit of the room. It still needs polishing and adding a few elements here and there.

Pan - Tardigrades Teaser #9

Dexter Morning Routine

Dexter Morning Routine is a free point and click game that I created with Adventure Game Studio. The idea is to complete Dexter's morning routine in the correct order before the music ends. There are three difficulty levels missing around with music duration, objects placements, and wait period events.

Please visit the AGS Archives page to get the game for free.

The Name of The Game

After a lot of thinking and a massive amount of advice, research and opinions, there is no escape from going through one of the hardest steps for me, a name change for my little baby.

I shall call him:

Tardigrades, waterbears, moss piglets... call them whatever you like. For me, they are the indestructible. Despite their little size of about 0.012in, they can survive temperatures from just above absolute zero up to above the boiling point of water. They can also survive extreme conditions of radiation and the vacuum of space. They can go without food or water for more than 10 years. Who else can travel space like Tardigrades?

Bedroom Build

Who Is Ty

Name: Ty
Age: 120 Mercurian Solar Years
Class: 4D
Occupation: Chemical Engineer
A.S: Methane storage facility T14-53
Location: Titan

Ty is responsible for the storage of the metallic ammonium in the silos on Titan. Making sure the conditions are perfect for the metal is not an easy task due to the gravity weakness of the Saturnian moon.

Ty is Aziz's boyfriend. Born and raised on Mercury. He is more of a fan of colder climates since he spent most of his childhood on the cold dark side of Mercury. His application to join the crew of Marsi-3 was rejected due to an incident that is clearly stated on his record. He managed to get a job on Titan instead.

Alone With Ra - Epoch Teaser #8

Carter finds Javier

#screenshotsaturday

Carter finally finds Javier's body in the deserts of Titan. Taking a closer look he finds out Javier's death is not an accident after all. But who did it?

Epoch gameplay test 2

Even Dirty Talk?

#screenshotsaturday

Alex is over excited when Marsi-3 is travelling in light speed.

Backgrounds Enhancement

Sometimes I draw backgrounds that beg me to change. I keep them for the functionality while developing puzzles but then apply proper improvements. Here's the landing location on Titan that I completely hated from the start.

The ship took the entire right edge of the screen with a big entrance for vehicles and crew. I was too excited during the creation of this background specially while adding the animated river. But then after completing it I sat back and looked at it... I hated it. I couldn't believe I would actually have the decency allowing anyone play a game with this background!

So I kept it while I developed other things, code, puzzles, sounds... etc. Until last week, I couldn't bare to look at it anymore. So I decided it was about time to draw another one. Here's the result which I hope you'd find more interesting than the previous one. Here's Carter standing outside the shuttle next to an ethane lake on Titan.

Who Is Dr. Chantal

Name: Chantal
Age: 2 Saturnian Solar Years
Class: 2A
Occupation: Physician
A.S: Marsi-3
Location: Jupiter Orbit

Dr.Chantal is Marsi-3's physician. She is responsible for the well-being of the crew.

Dr.Chantal spends most of her time in Marsi-3's clinic. She is the only one with authority to prescribe medicine and therapy on board the unit.

Chantal was born on Space Station Zawl-5 orbiting Saturn.

The Naked Truth

Seems like Aziz got himself into trouble. Dr. Chantal is performing a mind-scan procedure to get the truth about an earlier incident. The truth won't serve Carter any good though, he should do something before he gets busted.

Nefertiti & Akhenaten - Epoch teaser #7

Carter In Disguise

Here's my entry for this week's #screenshotsaturday 

Carter trying to figure out how to flush the fluids that cool the engines of Marsi-3.

Insulting Dr. Chantal

Here's this week's #screenshotsaturday contribution, Carter insulting Dr. Chantal.

All NPCs of Epoch have moods, you can simply manipulate the NPCs by being good or bad towards them. Some puzzles and events require having NPCs upset while other puzzles are solved with the help of 'not' upset NPCs. Each puzzle has an alternative solution so you don't have to be a prick all the time to solve puzzles (but if you want to then be my guest!), on the other hand you don't need to be an angel too.

Higher Orbit

Manipulating characters would be much interesting with this inventory item. Find the right place and time, then get the items and information you may need from other characters.

Carter Portrait

#screenshotsaturday

Carter having a little chat with Yolanda in one of Marsi-3's corridors.

Who is Yolanda

Name: Yolanda
Age: 26 Earth Solar Years
Class: 2b
Occupation: Communications Engineer
A.S: Marsi-3
Location: Jupiter Orbit

Yolanda is the communications engineer on Marsi-3. She is responsible for all inter planetary messages sent and received to and from Marsi-3.

Yolanda doesn't have an 'office' aboard the ship. She keeps wandering around Marsi-3's rooms and corridors making sure everything is under control.

Yolanda is a unique character in Epoch. Whenever she's in a room with another NPC, you can always invite her to a three-way chat.

Espionage - Epoch Teaser #6

Games And Giving Away Grasp

Thinking outside the box, some adventure games developers add new elements to their games. This article will talk mostly about metrics and meters. Perhaps one of the most famous adventure games using meters is Sierra's Hero's Quest. The usual metrics of games' characters would always be strength or stamina, mana and so on. However in HQ they added more than that. There are fighting skills related metrics and other puzzle-solving oriented metrics such as climbing skills.

Recent point and click games started using more stats for characters. To be fair, this is good thinking and requires a lot of work in game-development terms. However, should the player be aware of how smart the game is? I think this is a critical forked path as some players love to be challenged while others wouldn't really sink into the idea of point and click games introducing such an element and see it as distraction from the main gaming experience.

I think it's a great idea to let the players know they are dealing with a smart game by all means. But there is a fine line between introducing smartness to the player for respecting and challenging their minds, and using smartness solely for showing off. This is the job of good design, which raises the question: What is the part of the game that players cannot see at all?

Code. Put most of the smartness in the background code. Some developers use meters and GUIs to display stats. This could be handy depending on the type of game and the targeted audience as well. But for myself, I can't imagine games such as Space Quest or Day Of The Tentacle having 'character strength' and 'throwing skills' being developed and displayable through out the game.

Since Epoch has many alternative paths; NPCs and dialogues, I had to introduce such elements in the game. But I hid them in the code and left their discovery totally depending on the players' intuitions and actions. One of the metrics I used is an integer variable for each character called characterName_mood. This variable is randomly initialized at the start of the game between -3 to +3 having positive values representing good mood and negative values for upset characters. Your actions during the game can change the values of each character's mood just like in real life. You can be nice to a character or give them an inventory item to add to their mood variable. This of course would make progress in the game and help solving some puzzles. However, other alternative puzzles could depend on upsetting some characters. In both cases, dialog options and replies change due to characters' moods.

characterName_mood is only one variable among many others in the game. It is hidden in the code and can only be sensed when interacting and talking to characters. So instead of having a displayed metric showing the variables' value, you can simply get a rough estimation from the replies of the characters.

An Object Oriented Alternative

This is a puzzle where you need to reset an emitter in order to send instantaneous messages using quantum entanglement through extremely long distances.

The puzzle can be solved in different ways:

1. Take a spacewalk and find the emitter in order to re-program it.

2. Take a spacewalk, find the emitter and hack it.

3. Program/hack it remotely from the space station.

4. Convince the character responsible of the emitter to do the task by triggering some events, talking to other characters, solving other puzzles...

I should mention a few points here. 'Taking a spacewalk' requires solving puzzles and hiding from some characters. Finding the emitter in space can either be by trial and error (remember the previous video showing how the player can leave marks in infinite maps) or by finding a map. Programming the emitter needs variables and methods that can be obtained. If the player already has a background on coding then this task would be a little easier. The last option 'Convincing another character to do the task' requires solving a lot of puzzles and massive socializing with other characters in order to trigger the right events.

The Notebook

Now you can write down your notes in-game style. Passwords are randomly generated in Epoch. Instead of writing them on a piece of paper you can simply use this notebook.

What's a nonlinear adventure game?

When adventure games first started, solving puzzles was restricted. For example, to open a locked door you must have a key. The game won't proceed unless you open that door. Later on, adventure games got a little alternative ways to solve puzzles. So now you can either find a key to open the door, cast a magic spell, or even pick the lock and open the door. Still, the game won't proceed unless you open that door.

Figure 1 illustrates the straight forward puzzle solve. Your goal is to get to the orange circle starting from the purple one on top. You do a couple of interactions, then an event gets triggered allowing you to perform one last interaction that would lead you to your goal. 

However, in figure 2 you get a choice in the process of getting to your goal. After performing one interaction, you can either do one of two tasks, one would lead to the failure of getting to your goal (usually death) and another that allows you to proceed and solve the puzzle. This appears more sophisticated in a flow chart while in reality it is still considered straight forward. Because being stuck figuring out a single task to perform in order to proceed the game is equivalent to dying, at least for me.




Figure 3 illustrates Epoch's approach to a nonlinear adventure game. Starting from the purple circle at the top, you get three branches to go through. The left branch triggers an event and then leads to the goal. This branch is made short and easy intentionally, as for later as a punishment, the triggered event would make it a little harder to solve a future puzzle.

The middle branch starts with a choice, the easy way triggers a 'punishment' event and the hard way doesn't. Then you get to a fork where you are asked if a previous puzzle was completed, if not you'd have to get back solving the previous puzzle or take another branch all at free will. If the previous puzzle was already solved then you would continue to your goal free of punishment.

The branch on the right is a very tricky one, in the figure it seems as if it's the easiest way. In reality it depends on high skills of the player. For instance, if the task is picking a lock and the player knows how to pick locks in real life then this is the branch for you. Or if the player is good at aiming, has quick response time and so on, then these physical skills get to the goal with less trouble what's so ever.

Figure 3 is an actual illustration to obtain an inventory item to perform a specific task in Epoch. To add more depth and free will, the whole task has an alternative solution as well. 

Figure 4 shows that a single goal may be obtained by different approaches. Each approach is unique in its own way. The cool thing is you can hop from one approach to another anytime (unless an approach is written in a specific way to lock the player for example in a room where another approach should be done somewhere else...)