Thread: All games with PS4 Pro enhancements
Tiny Firewatch note: though it doesn't run in full HDR on the Pro, we did move up to 10 bits/channel color to smooth out the banding seen in gradients in the sky and other places.
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Thread: All games with PS4 Pro enhancements
We run at native 1080p instead of downsampling because at 1080 native we were able to turn the draw distance and foliage LOD up.
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Thread: All games with PS4 Pro enhancements
Cheers! We did the port early in the really days of PS4 Pro dev and downsampling didn't even occur to us tbh. I'm happy we were able to offer a little fidelity boost at 1080 on Pro though! Honestly unlikely at this point BUT if we do I'll update this thread :)
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Thread: All games with PS4 Pro enhancements
I'm not a programmer and don't really know and also don't know what is under NDA or not, sorry!
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Thread: PodcastERA | A spoken word smorgasbord for your ears
The film history podcast You Must Remember This did a series on the Manson Family a while back that is great. (Also that whole podcast is great but if you’re looking for a we produced, weird true crime story, that season is a good starting point.)
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Thread: PodcastERA | A spoken word smorgasbord for your ears
It’s not a fiction podcast, but you may like this comedy-laced history podcast we host called . It’s a series of short (10-15 minute) stories about absurd forgotten footnotes of history. Here’s a quick trailer for it:
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Thread: PodcastERA | A spoken word smorgasbord for your ears
If you’re on iOS, Overcast has a good voice boost/equalizer feature. It also mixes audio differently for clarity when it’s playing out of your phone built in speaker.
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Thread: PodcastERA | A spoken word smorgasbord for your ears
Thanks! (I help publish that show, and though I have nothing to do with it’s actual creation, I love it and am proud of it.) Hope you’re still subscribed to the Something True RSS as there’s a holiday special coming soon.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
I love it. I wish its puzzles were more well integrated, and that the mini games were less crusty than they are, but the writing and art and overall mood of that game are, to me, still unprecedented in most ways. No game looks like Full Throttle or sounds like Full Throttle. The melancholy ending was the first like it that I had ever experienced and it’s stuck with me too.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
The Telltale engine didn’t have real-time shadows or normal maps until they were added for Wallace & Gromit, which came out between seasons two and three.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
The Waypoint story on Police Quest 4 is a good read if folks haven’t checked it out yet. It’s about the internal fallout and public reaction to Ken Williams bringing in the former chief of the LAPD (the one who presided over Rodney King and the LA riots in the early 90s and then refused to resign in what seems like the douchiest way possible) as the new celebrity cop for Police Quest. I didn’t really follow Sierra games growing up and was just young enough to not really grasp the entirety of what was happening with the LAPD when the Rodney King video came out, so I had no idea about any of these connections. It’s a pretty crazy intersection of classic gaming and American culture at large.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
That’s the magic of 25 more years of being alive, growing up, and playing dozens of adventure games between then and now. Also you probably had a bunch of it memorized? (Adventure game puzzles somehow stick really firmly in the brain in my experience.) I do wonder if those old games were actually way harder and more involved than new ones, or if what’s really in play is that I was 12 when DOTT came out and I’m 37 now.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Personally, despite the puzzles, exploration, and narrative-driven motivation to continue, I’m worried every moment that I’m playing Silent Hill that a game-system-driven enemy is going to kill me, so it doesn’t occupy the same space in my brain as adventure games. (But you’re right that I do enjoy Silent Hill and that sort of game for many of the same reasons as adventure games! I’m just in a totally different headspace while doing so.)
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Yeah the objective notebooks in Thimbleweed are so good. I thought those + the integrated hint line were both great opt-in features to keep the game moving when you need them but also totally passive/invisible if you don’t want them.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
The Black Cauldron. It took a little bit for me to play another after that... then what I played was KQ V. Oops. Another short break. After that was Monkey Island 2, then I never really stopped.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
I definitely did. Monkey Island 2, I pirated my friends Mac copy right when it came out (and eventually later bought multiple times) but didn’t get to play Monkey Island 1 for another couple years — until both it and Loom came bundled with our family’s first PC CD-ROM drive.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
I’m excited for Lamplight City. It got a new trailer yesterday and is looking nice. It really shows off the elaborate and satisfying pixel art character animation: And , the description of how investigation and working through each story works sounds very intriguing. Sounds like there’s a lot of possibility space in each case and you’re supposed to take your own tack when determining how to solve it, as opposed to just completing a traditional single fixed puzzle chain.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Think that’s intentional so people can add it to their wishlist.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Though I think this recently changed, for about its first decade of existence the Telltale Tool didn’t have any automatic pre-streaming, and loads every asset on the frame the game requests it. So for all but the absolute newest Telltale games, every voice line, texture, animation, etc, load from 0-100% into memory on the frame when they start playing.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
omg is this an oblique reference to me being bald like David Cage? Good. Hi this thread.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Haha I think the reason I said - the dumb aesthetic similarity I allegedly have to David Cage - is why that became a joke on Idle Thumbs. That gif got me so hyped. The establishing shot is a lost art in point and clicks I think. When I think back to Loom and the first two Monkey Island games (and Full Throttle come to think of it!), some of the most striking moments are when it will cut to an epic painting to establish the next scene. Related to establishing shots are cutaways - another lost art I think. It was so damn cool that Thimbleweed Park just bathed itself in ominous and enigmatic cutaway shots. Neil Cicierega was a long time member of the AGS scene in the late 90s/early 00s and it warmed my heart to see he was going to work on a new game project after so many years away doing music and videos. I hope he finishes this. The mood in what little has been shown is great. Haha cheers, that post is all too nice :) I never really saw this thread’s equivalent back on GAF, really happy to know this one exists here.
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
Yeah that’s the manatee one. I think it wasn’t the best choice to have a manatee in a Monkey Island game - wish it was just a giant sea monster if we had to go there - but the whole team made the most of our own ridiculous early-on decision haha. It’s also the first game I worked on with Sean Vanaman, who wrote that episode. (After that we did episode 5 and Puzzle Agent with Mark Darin, then Walking Dead S1 and Firewatch together.)
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Thread: Point & Click Adventure Thread 2017 - Pixels Walk With Me
I don’t know if Telltale’s Wallace & Gromit is even available for sale anymore but I really liked the 2nd and 3rd episodes at the time. (I worked there and did user interface and menu design on them so I’m biased though.) The most terrifying news in my career was hearing we were getting the Monkey Island license. I still have mixed feelings about it but am proud of a lot of the work we did on Tales of MI. That game targeted the WiiWare download store which made sense at the time because the Wii was a huge deal, but it meant some very not-great technical things, like the download size of each episode had to be tiny. Led to some disappointing things like the character model reuse. One of our goals that I’m proud of, was to try and leave the Monkey Island characters in a better place than we found them. For instance in the original games, I neber thoight Guybrush was an actual buffoon all the time, I think he’s actually pretty competent and determined, and just everyone ELSE thinks he’s dumb. By the later games it seems he’d been rewritten to actually just be a blundering clown. Really wanted Tales, by the end, to put him back in the role of a genuinely determined and passionate adventurer who is misunderstood by a world who doesn’t get him. Similarly with LeChuck - by the end we really wanted him to seem dangerous again. At the end of MI2 in the tunnels he’s so scary, but he got slowly de-fanged over the sequels. Elaine we wanted to try and return to a position of being self confident and secretly in control of the situation even if enacting her plans put her on the razors edge of harm. I don’t think we pulled Elaine off as well as Guybrush and LeChuck at the end, but I’m glad in the end (My background: I was a fairly junior designer on Tales of Monkey Island, but I got to direct episode 3, and co-design and direct episode 5. Worked at telltale from 2006-2012 starting as a forum mod and web designer, ended my time there as creative director on Walking Dead season 1. Before that I was a news writer at Adventure Gamers, ran Mixnmojo.com from the late 90s to mid 00s and also used to run samandmax.net RIP that site.)
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