Messages

Correct.

Cloud Atlas?

But it's not an obscure movie. It came out quite recently, in 2011, played at Cannes, won the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival, had a theatrical release in lots of countries, and was widely reviewed (the first page of Google results include the NYT, WaPo, Guardian, RogerEbert.com and New Yorker; I first read about it on the AV Club). It's available on disc and streaming from Amazon.

OK, final try:



The titles are in French and Arabic, and many reviews compare it to Lysistrata.

No and no.

It's unlikely that you recognize any of the actors, perhaps apart from the star, who's also the director:



This image was also used on film posters.

the 3rd pic looks like a musical

This is the only hit so far: the film does have musical segments, though only about 3 or 4.

No.

D'oh! The film has disappeared from the streaming service I was using, so now I have to find screenshots online. No reverse-searching!

OK, the title and credits are given in two languages (in two different alphabets), neither of them English.

Well, I thought it is black and white. And I only watched Citizen Kane's sewer scene(I wish it was sewer)  and said why not...

A sewer scene? Are you perhaps thinking of The Third Man?

New one:



It's sort of accidentally connected to the last one, thematically, but really I'm picking it because I watched it yesterday.

Guys, I'm preeetty sure it's Catch-22. Here's my thinking:

-It's a color film, looks to be shot in the 60s or 70s
-They're wearing American uniforms ca. WWII or Korea
-They're in a hangar-style building
-There's a map of Italy on the wall

(Catch-22 was released in 1970, and takes place on a US air force base in or around Italy during WWII, while Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin are black and white movies made long before WWII.)

-Also, a Google Image search for "Catch-22 film" brings up this:



(If you look closely you can see her in the screenshot above as well.)

-Also also, I've seen Catch-22, and this looks quite familiar.

Catch-22?

Another Earth?

[Changing a game after release.]

Woohoo!

I've been catching up on even older episodes, including a couple where you already talked about some of the maze-things I mentioned. Also, I never realized the color of my trees was such a topic of conversation...

I got the impression from ep. 109 that Ben has now played Thimbleweed Park (but who can tell now that you don't spend an hour talking about everything you've played every episode?), so here's another topic idea based on that:

Changing a game after release. TP has had at least two major patches since its initial release that change some major elements of the gameplay experience (one reduces the number of in-jokes, one of the most common review criticisms, and another adds the ability for the different playable characters to talk to each other). Obviously patches and DLC are routine in other genres, and some AGS games have changed significantly between e.g. the MAGS version and a later release, but what does it mean for adventure game makers and players when the version that was released and reviewed initially is no longer representative of the game as it is now?

Sure enough.

Recognized Dan Stevens from Legion, and remembered people were talking about how that movie showed what he could do. It's pretty good, right?

Next:

The Guest?

Europa Report: a film so unmemorable that although I watched it only a few months ago I didn't recognize that screenshot (which clearly shows one of the main characters).

[Community interaction:]

Ah hell! I wrote a long post and then my browser crashed. Oh well, here's an even longer version!

I've now caught up on the last 40 or so episodes of the podcast, and it's been weird to have your voices in my head pretty much constantly for weeks on end. Thanks for the shoutout in #108, ha ha.

Since you asked for topic suggestions, a couple of things came to mind while listening:

Community interaction: You interact with other (indie) game devs in all sorts of ways (online and at conventions, meetups...), and with the broader adventure game community through a number of different channels (the podcast, blogging, articles on various gaming sites, this forum, via Twitter...). How has that affected you and your work? Why do you do it and what do you get out of it (examples)? Are there some communication channels you consider particularly important for particular purposes? Is it possible to generalize about what the different overlapping communities you are part of are like?

On the other side, what are the drawbacks and pitfalls? Have you experienced difficulties? When is it just a waste of time? Are there some dynamics or tendencies in some communities or on some communication channels that you consider problematic or at least unhelpful? "Gamer culture" is sometimes accused of being "toxic" â€" and some people feel that way about the AGS Forums; do you agree at all, regarding any community you've been a part of?

How has your experience changed, for better and worse, as you've become better known? And what advice would you give to other game makers (both hobbyists and those seeking to make a career) about engaging with different communities?

Mazes: You have different opinions about them, but it would be interesting to hear a more extended analysis/critique of them, and what makes them good or bad. To me it's an interesting question in particular because there's a huge variety within what we call adventure game "mazes": Ones that are consistent and can be mapped vs. ones that just teleport you around at random and eventually spit you back out (or kill you) unless you know the trick. Ones where there's some trick or strategy to find the right path (even though you can brute-force it if you have the patience) vs. ones that are just a matter of exhaustive exploration. Ones that offer in-game automapping vs. ones that don't. Ones that offer some other gameplay mechanic within the maze vs. ones where you just have to find your way through. Ones that are procedurally generated vs. ones that are pre-designed and static. Big mazes vs. small mazes. Repetitive mazes (where you often literally cannot tell one room from another) vs. varied mazes. Mazes with a whole lot of different camera perspectives: 3rd person fixed orientation room-by-room (easy to map) vs. 3rd person varying orientation room-by-room vs. 1st person vs. top-down (local view) vs. top-down/high-camera segment-view (like in Fate of Atlantis where you can see a quarter of the map at a time, or Conquests of the Longbow in the garden maze) vs. full view of the entire thing (usually only meaningful if there's some other gameplay involved, like a chase) vs. "hidden pathways" (like the "maze of doors" that connect in unpredictable ways), vs. no doubt others I've forgotten. Then there are "deserts": large regions where you can walk anywhere but have to locate some particular place. And for mazes with clues/tricks, there are different common types: following someone, constructing some kind of compass/guide, following clues from a song/poem/headstone/recipe, noticing some subtle hint on each screen...

How do factors such as these interact to make for a good or a bad maze? And even if your maze is good, are mazes just so hated now that you can't get away with them?

When does your game world become a maze, anyway? Can you connect screens in complex ways without turning it into a maze?

I haven't got around to actually playing A Golden Wake myself yet (although I'm one of those 17 people who were really excited over a game about 1920s Florida land speculation), though it's definitely on my list; in my ongoing efforts to catch up on the last five or so years of adventure games, I just finished Gone Home (cool concept, wish there was a bit more story to carry it through the second half), and AGW or Technobabylon is probably my next one.

Clearly a good timer puzzle/mechanic requires careful design and implementation. And I was entirely on your side when Francisco started talking about limiting saves to avoid save-scumming. That to me smacks of taking something that isn't working, and instead of fixing it, just propping it up with another bad design decision. (Of course, in brainstorming there are bound to be some bad ideas along the way, and I didn't get the impression that it was more than a passing thought.)

I'm glad you brought up Fate of Atlantis, since that was one of the games that came to mind as a counterexample wrt action sequences. Not that the fight mechanic is all that brilliant, but I feel strongly that the inclusion of fighting (as well as car racing, flying, that mine cart-ish bit on the Atlantis drill vehicle, and other mini-games) helps to set the tone of the game. It gives it an epic feel and at least gestures towards its blockbuster movie origins. Even if you don't consider these sequences all that successful in isolation (personally I think several of them are pretty cool, and always appreciate the variety in gameplay), I think it demonstrates that the whole is sometimes greater than the sum of the parts. Conquests of the Longbow is another good example: is the target shooting a great gameplay element in its own right? Not really. But would it be a good idea to cut it and leave you with a Robin Hood game without any bow-and-arrow action? Absolutely not.

To me, Thimbleweed Park was really interesting, almost as much for the things it did wrong as for the things it did right â€" and there are some major entries on both sides of the ledger. I guess the split in reactions is understandable in that light, but I'm surprised at how extreme opinions are on both ends.

Well, as I'm sure you've heard, they patched it to add a "turn off annoying in-jokes" setting (or something like that), which I believe is even set to true by default. When you do play it, I think you should turn it off, to experience it in its full original glory. Or at least Ben should, to see if it changes his mind at all.

I'm catching up on old episodes, and I find it interesting how Ben goes off when talking about timers (Episode 90), but a couple of episodes later when Francisco condemns overuse of adventure-game in-jokes and breaking the fourth wall, suddenly we shouldn't generalize or tell people not to make a game a certain way, and it's all about whether it's done well or not.

Personally I lean towards Francisco's side in both arguments: I think that if it's fair and well-thought-out, there's nothing wrong with having timers in adventure games, and that there are a number of examples of games and puzzles that use them well. (In fact, Ben's favorite puzzle, Guybrush stuck underwater with the idol, is a timed puzzle: after ten minutes you die. On the other hand, I do NOT agree that it's an adventure game in-joke. It's just a slightly absurdist lateral-thinking puzzle, since the idol obviously isn't heavy enough to keep you underwater, and you picked it up before â€" if we want to rationalize it at all, we can say the reason Guybrush can't just drag it after him is that it's stuck in the mud.) I also don't think action sequences in adventure games are necessarily a problem â€" though like Ben with mazes I think I'm in a minority there, and they are admittedly rarely done well.

However, Ben's point about trying to find some more organic way to create tension and urgency is also valid. I don't think a timer should be bolted on to try to impose urgency without changing anything else in the design. If you do a timer (particularly a deadly one), it should ideally be as part of some major gameplay mechanic and central to the game.

The game that comes to mind that really convinces me that timers have a place, though, is The Longest Journey, where on a couple of occasions you're fighting monsters (I think one's a witch and one's a shark, but it's been a while) and supposedly in danger of your life. However, since the game has no deaths and there's no timer, the tension Ragnar was trying to build felt completely fake â€" you can just walk away from the game in the middle of the fight, get a snack, come back and they'll still be tussling without anything having changed. It's ridiculous. It doesn't matter how character-based your writing is if the gameplay undermines it, and urgency is fundamentally incompatible with just faffing about indefinitely.

Going back to genre in-jokes and breaking the fourth wall, I think that although you can do fun examples of them, they're seldom done well and there are way too many of them in too many games where they don't belong. "Don't make adventure game jokes in adventure games!" should certainly not be an absolute rule, but it's pretty good advice to most game makers. I forget: do you talk about Thimbleweed Park in one of the later episodes?