Jake

Welcome to the Idle Forums! Please say hi and discuss the cloud in this thread. The internet taught me that in Super Mario Bros 1, the cloud and the bush are the same sprite with a palette swap.

It really does look like someone forgot to turn off the background layer in Photoshop before flattening the image. I wonder if the artists handed the art off and then someone screwed it up at an art-tech level? It's perfectly reasonable to expect that an up-res'd version of a game would be created by enlarging the original art and then painting over it. Isn't that also what they did with Street Fighter II HD Remix? I know it's semantics but I generally try to not assign specific blame in situations like this unless I actually know what happened, because stuff like that can crop up in a million and one ways.

Ryan Jones drew the 2D art based on a shitty wireframe and flow I provided, and then I hooked it all up and did the animations. Matt Hansen did the inventory icons and some additional elements (he made me the 3D scroll which unwinds when the inventory opens, for instance, since I am still largely incompetent at Maya). I also did a some of the map, including the 3D pull-up effect from the game. Again Ryan drew the "Flotsam Island" logo and clouds and then I built it all in around the island model provided by the art dept.

Yeaaaaah!

Hopefully Sam & Max will help you out with all the girls you're seeing, not just the one!

I thought his complaint was the EGA to VGA conversion, not the presence of the closeups in general. etc, which looks like maybe Purcell drew them, or presided over their creation? Guybrush definitely looks closer to his box art version (general structural similarities Steve's original line art drawing of the cover)... versus Which has a surprising amount of reinterpretation going on, when compared to the original shipping version. The 256 color version of MI is kind of secretly the first Special Edition.

If this was already linked, my apologies http://tigsource.com/pages/edge-games One section which jumped out at me: Trademark filings by Edge Games: - Edgy (filed in US on May 16, 2009) - Mirror’s Spore (filed in UK on May 19, 2009) - Soulspore (filed in UK on May 19, 2009) - Edge of Twilight (filed in UK on June 1, 2009) "Mirror's Spore"!

Yeah it was an XP issue.

Because Windows user permissions are fucking rad and totally love it when non-administrator users try to write to directories other than their My Documents folders. Windows loves it so much that it doesn't work for most people, so we started going with the flow and saving where we're allowed. I guess we could do something where if you're an admin it saves to the game directory and if you're a regular user it saves to my documents, but then that creates one more bonus question the tech support people have to ask back and forth when someone writes in saying "I can't save."

Argh the worst. I'll look into it. Thanks.

Look for a fireside chat on the main site archive page

Reigning is the new Trine.

Haha insanity has been reigning lately. As Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec approach I imagine we'll start reigning it in? Maybe we won't, but that's when big old big names tend to start stomping around again.

It's not so much introducing the feature thats an issue but to passively remind you to even think of it throughout gameplay. I know the tutorial includes it, as it would be insane otherwise. Oh well. I know the inventory is inefficient but at least I've had people say they like the feeling of successfully combining things, which was the one thing I was hoping to get out of the configuration we ended up putting in the game.

For what its worth I originally was going for a more streamlined inventory combination UI, but I was asked to make it something which was omnipresent and more activity center-like, so that it would always remind the player that they could combine inventory, even if they hadn't in ages. Nothing is worse than roaming around in an adventure game for a couple extra hours because you didn't think to use one item on another, and this is the first time in its five year existence that Telltale's done a game with inventory combination so we wanted to make sure people knew. As for why we don't alternatively also support dragging one item onto another, if that was my decision I could answer that definitively. Walter said it better in his post, though. (Like he usually does. Hi, Walter!) Except it wasn't intended to deliberately be a hassle. It originally didn't and was more annoying by far. Your instinct is leading you astray here, I promise. There are more times that you want to just examine something once and then to try and use it than there are times when you want to go and examine many things in a row. Protip: Instead of clicking the magnifying glass to enter "examine mode," you can instead drop an inventory item onto the magnifying glass icon to examine it immediately. Because it's modal? If you mean "why do I need to click on the world to close it and then click again on the item I want to use the inventory on," you got me. I just work here. You can move the mouse to the far right side of the screen to open the inventory, hidden dock/taskbar style. Also middle mouse button opens inventory. Also "i" and possibly "r" and (as you said) Tab. You may have been implying that you knew that with "mouseover/mouseout to bring up or close the inventory might be a good idea," or you were suggesting that you should let people just roll the mouse out of the inventory to close it? (Which would probably be a bad idea because many people roll the mouse out of the inventory area and back into the game window when thinking about / looking at the inventory, but aren't intending to actually go back into the game with that action. Maybe once you've actually got something equipped though... maybe that would be good and not bad. I guess that's what they did in Curse of MI but I don't remember if I liked that or was annoyed at it for closing on me. (parenthetical statement))

Of all the non deliberate injokes this is the least deliberate. I don't think it's conscious at this point. Well, it probably is now after last episode, but it was a weird invisible specter of the podcast for a while. Another similar thing: Chris recently observed that I said "letters from you, the readers," basically every single time Reader Mail started. It wasn't deliberate, I'm just lame. I think, unfortunately for all, the same thing goes for Nick and I and the baboo.

the shambling remains of two separate recordings present... this blast! to your face "With Cheese Plate" Where we come from the games beat themseles. There's a shaved Muppet around every corner, and Samus Aran can't shut up. It will please you, with a depth that might surprise you. Featuring Steve Gaynor as Mr. Dream. Games Discussed: Cryostasis, Shadowgrounds, Penumbra: Overture, Blueberry Garden, Dead Space: Extraction, Peggle (iPhone), Doom 3, Nintendo Help

on its way?

For what its worth, here are their relative sizes when next to each other:

GDC is here, and we are there! Many guests from Thumbs' past on the show today. Bonus: watch as I get spanked for saying Ebert is full of it. GDC! Idle Thumbs Conf Grenade: "A Fish Called Xtreme" GDC is warming up, and so are we. Idle Thumbs alums Marek Bronstring, Duncan Fyfe, and Lawrence Bishop join in for an look at GDC's first days of Indie-focused content, our anticipated panels, fabricated sex scandals and more. Things Discussed: Jason Rohrer, WiiWare, OnLive, Neil Young, Peter Molyneux, Carmack's Revenge

Yeah that was a fun couple of days. He was around for a few days but I made the (correct? incorrect?) decision to go to GDC for some of that time, but hearing Ron's thoughts on Monkey Island in the context of a story I helped develop* was pretty awesome. Nope, but hopefully it will be out reasonably close to that date. I almost posted an unreleased screenshot just to shoot this down, but I guess it will be released eventually through some sort of official channel. Needless to say, when he's not standing 30 feet away on the deck of a ship, he's big. For any other weirdness or opinion about the art in Tales I can easily and happily leave each person to their own, but I can at least safely say LeChuck is the right size. * PS: this is scary to reveal. Fortunately, I'm the most junior "guy who helped develop the story" of the people who could claim to have done so, because the thought sort of still scares me shitless, a bit.

Craft a star with Nick Breckon. Tuesdays on PBS. "With StarCraft II" Special Report! Nick's back from Blizzard's preview event, ready to offer up his hands-on impressions of the StarCraft II multiplayer beta. Also, lots of side topics and diversions you can't do without. But mostly StarCraft II. And a gay pride parade. Games Discussed: StarCraft II, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Chapter Honour, Urban Terror, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

LeChuck's actually noticeably taller* once they actually get near each other (which doesn't happen that often for obvious reasons). * a few inches of actual height, plus a lot of hat. It's the same actress (Alexandra Boyd) from Curse of Monkey Island. I personally never heard Elaine as British in my head when playing the games, but whatever! She does a great job in Tales. It's the first time since Elaine had a voice that she seems like a three dimensional character, for me. It seems like the voice direction given in 3 and 4 was often "you're mad at, or at least exasperated with Guybrush," which was funny but tired me out after a while.

Awesome! I used to do a very small amount of UI and texturing for it. Good times!

Haha god I can't wait. I can't wait to the point that I'll be buying the XBLA version, and then the PC release whenever it comes out. No worms until 2008, though.