Again, I thought the Global Game Jam project I worked on this year might appeal to a few folks here, seeing as it's a tough-as-nails ARG supplemented with shockingly badly acted FMV-inspired movie sequences that make me cringe. Check it out, and don't hesitate to ask for hints as you will likely need them.

OK, back to work on my Sekret Santa game.

Back when I played through Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) on PS2, my friends and I often joked about the "GET READY!" prompt that appeared before action sequences. Together we imagined a game with dull activities like making breakfast or getting the newspaper overlayed with the "Simon Says" interface, followed by spectacular failure sequences (drowning in the milk, fatal papercut on the newspaper) and the melodramatic voice over saying "This is how my story ends. Officially it was a suicide..."

So of course my immediate reaction to the first demo footage of Heavy Rain was to whip up an overlay game in Flash. I guess the final game didn't really turn out all that different, except with a little more JASON!

Play with fingers on homerow, as if using 2-handed WASD.
That's ESDF for the left hand, and IJKL for the right.

(Finally posting this all these years later because SpindleyQ is making plans for a Youtube FMV Game program. Source code will be available shortly.)

After successfully finishing Tek Demo, I've been thinking about other aspects of KnP that haven't been fully explored. I've never made use of active object internal flags. What does "spread a number" do to alterable values? The event editor has its own options panel? But one thing really hit me as being full of potential. Klik & Play had support for a very old animation format: FLC/FLI. No sound, palletized, somewhat dodegy playback speed, and very poor compression. That, and no modern video converters seem to support the format. But a while ago, I found this old DOS command-line converter called DTA. Running it under dosbox, I could convert a directory of tga or pcx files into a knp compatible flc video. And just now I've finished the conversion path, from shooting video, to jpg sequence, to tga sequence, to fli animation.

The filesizes are awful. What started out as an 882kb avi lasting maybe two seconds turns into a 4.5MB(!) fli animation with no sound. But I have the batch processing steps down now. And my planned idea won't take more than maybe 8 videos to do, each lasting about two seconds, at double the tested video dimensions, and half the framerate. I'm looking at about 64MB of fli video, plus whatever filesize the actual GAME part of this idea clocks in at. I think this could end up being very, very funny indeed.

My first step is going to be shooting video, of course. And dealing with the difficulty of convincing friends that they desperately want to be the stars of this overwhelmingly foolish idea.

KnP FMV, here we come!