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Thanks AnasAbdin, Slasher and Riaise It warms an old man's heart.

At first I thought it was something to do with Aladdin.

Here's one.

If you have me, you have less. But you look better. What am I?

'Youth' would work too. You have less age/life. Maybe?

I can show you the world,
And yet hide it from you.
I can preserve a beautiful sunset forever,
So that you won't have to watch it.
I can give you contact with everyone you know,
But you'll rarely notice a new person again.
I can make waiting hours for a taxi not matter,
Because you're already home if you have me.

What am I?

Instagram or some crap like that

Spoiler

loose?

[close]

A little moderator intervention here - are the last handful of posts relating to a sequel, i.e. a different game in production? Or is this some kind of patch?

It's a bit confusing that you're bumping a completed game's thread with info about another game.

Daywiron was correct. Damn, I made it far too easy...

New Riddle:
Look at me and you'll see you, or something else when morning's broken
You'll see your spirit when I'm close, when you have sighed or spoken

The rhymes are a bit rushed because I didn't have too much time for this.
I hope it's really hard and that nobody gets it, and I'll never give any useful hints either, as a revenge for that she-was-hiding-until-she-gave-birth-riddle

Spoiler

The ear (anvil bone). People pierce their ear lobes.

[close]

Ok, I need to know whether the puzzle can be solved with the information at hand or if it requires outside knowledge, i.e. whether the names are pop cultural references or something

Yeah I actually got that one, but the hide and seek one stumps me

Can the less intelligent of us soon learn the answer too?

Thanks Mandle and Riaise!

Yay, lots of old-time forum nostalgia in these past few episodes!

HAHA I just worked it out... DUH...

"I" is singular
"Us" is plural!

Nice one, you evil maniac.

Nice, although technically 'I' corresponds to 'we', and 'us' in singular would be 'me'.

Yes, I'm fun at parties.

Thanks for a fun episode

Am I the special guest you've been trying to get on the show (again)?
Because in that case I might have missed the pm. And the facebook message. And the email.

While Civ 2 is arguably the instalment I've spent the most time on, it did have some weaknesses that annoyed me, for instance how so many other civs would constantly be angry with you and gang up on you as soon as you grew somewhat powerful (while they treated rivalling computer civs with utter respect when they grew bigger).

It's extremely hard designing a good A.I for games like Civ, because you have to kind of compensate for the player being able to constantly save and load. That's why they're given rule-changing advantages (like how they can suddenly produce 15 tanks the round after you declare, when previously they had none). For this reason, it'd be better not to give the player any savegames at all; then they'd be forced to play carefully and think through all diplomatic actions.

Good one.

The thing with naming your game is that it's kind of hard to give general advice about it; it's one of those things that you know it's right when you hear it. Also, it seems that games with really generic titles, like Total War or Final Fantasy, don't seem to suffer immensely for being unoriginal, and weird and non-descriptive ones also generally are fine, so I'm not sure how important titles are anyway. Is there a way to ascertain that a game would have sold better had it had a better title? Not sure.

As you said, the change from God's Algorithm to Whispers of a Machine is a pretty big change, but it was like a bandaid that had to ripped off quickly - the longer we'd hesitate, the harder would it be to change it. In terms of actual title power - originality etc - the former might be stronger, but it also is less relevant to the actual game, so, yeah.

The trick to subtly include the title - or a reference to it - in your game can be cool, but sometimes it can come across as clichéd and forced. I loved the title "Gemini Rue" until there was this dialogue snippet along the lines of "he doesn't have to live this life of rue any longer", which seemed utterly shoe-horned in and a bit cheesy. It just doesn't seem like a thing you'd say unless you really wanted to use that exact word.

I'm extremely satisfied with the title The Samaritan Paradox, to the point that it might be the best aspect of the game - too good for the game, almost. Awww.

A Golden Wake is a superb title, in every way. Shardlight slightly less so, because it struck me as pretty apparent from the outset that the shards were basically painted as cool lighting effects (the kind of lighting Ben is known to use in his art), and they might not be essential enough to the game to be the basis of its title. But that's just my two cents.

Looking forward to the big 100!

Alright, this is slightly beside my point about self-referencing jokes in adventure games, but anyways:

Arguments that are against poor execution, rather than the form itself, are naturally acceptable, but saying 'relying on tropes' is akin to saying 'relying on devices and motifs' which is the backbone of all creative work. It seems as though 'trope' is conflated with 'cliché', which is incorrect.

Hm.
I'd say tropes and clichés both refer to stuff that's been done so many times it's readily recognisable (unless you get your definition from TVtropes.com, in which case 'trope' means every little single thing that has ever been said or written in any work of fiction), with the difference that 'cliché' bears a distinctly negative connotation, whereas 'trope' sounds more neutral. But whatever demotes a trope into a cliché is kind of subjective, so yeah, this is borderlining hairsplitting.

I think it's perfectly valid to say that your game or story or whatever shouldn't rely entirely on tropes - arguing the oppposite, and saying that every story can be deconstructed into tropes - is like saying all books fundamentally consist of words and letters, so therefore nothing can ever be original.

That's different to saying that stories can't have tropes - now that would be a bit snobbish. Most great stories share basic story elements.

Anyhow, if my first criticism was interpreted as a direct jab at Gibbous, then apologies to Mr Underhill. I guess I assumed that the "I'm supposed to bother you, this is an adventure game" comment was more of a demo gimmick than an indication of what most of the gameplay will look like. In that case, the demo and project over all looks so stellar I think he'll survive that piece of honest feedback.

I don't know if criticizing something equals dissuading someone from doing something. Everything works if it's done well.

There are examples of really good 4th wall breaking in both literature and film, but mostly, I'd guess, in a more surrealist, Kaufman-esque kind of setting/story. If you want to have a discussion about the boundaries between reality and fiction, or a kind of layer-upon-layer type of storytelling, be my guest. I love meta or 'mise en abyme' stuff of various genres, e.g. House of Leaves and Being John Malkovich.

I guess I just find the comedy aspect of it heavily dated. I remember in the childhood of AGS, lots and lots of games tried to be funny (because early trendsetters like Larry Vales and Rob Blanc actually were funny (the game would tell Larry Vales stuff like "you can't interact with that x, it's as feature-less as you, Larry)) but then far too many games were made that had characters telling the player to stop clicking on them, or to joke about how big their pockets must be to hold so much inventory, or "if this was a Sierra game..." etc etc.

It was funny in Spaceballs where everybody would suddenly look into the camera, but yeah, dated is the word that pops up for me.

If I sounded harsh I certainly didn't mean to dissuade anyone from having a go at being funny - my point was just that comedy that isn't funny is kind of a pain in the arse, whereas other genres tend to be more endurable even if they're not perfectly executed.

Agree 100% about self-referencing jokes in adventure games, or other 4th-wall-breaking shenanigans. Not only is it poor game design, because you implement something you know is flawed and hope it's forgiven if you just acknowledge the flaw, but it's also lazy comedy writing because it's basically the same joke over and over again with slight variations.

Third, it ruins immersion because of said 4th-wall breaking.

Comedy is super hard, and really funny games are exceptionally rare gems today. The problem is that too many people think they're funny - based on feedback by parents and drinking buddies - and aren't proven wrong by a broader, objective audience before it's too late - and also because when comedy isn't funny it's just aggressively worthless, as opposed to e.g. suspense, which can mostly be endured just fine even if you're not biting your nails all the time.

Whispered World and its ilk annoy me so greatly in their attempts at humour it makes my soul decay. It's lengthy, repetitious and poorly delivered. Granted, I've only ever seen let's plays of them.