TIGSource Forums

Hi all. I'm a new poster here, though I've been trying to keep up with the community for some time. I'm an illustrator and web designer from Toronto, Canada, and have been making independent games for a year or so. I'm a member of the Hand Eye Society (http://handeyesociety.com/) here in Toronto, along with some game developers you've actually heard about. I was also the art director for a time over at The Gamer's Quarter. (http://www.gamersquarter.com/)

My first title, such as it is, was The Office Party in 2008's TO Jam (http://www.tojam.ca) here in Toronto. Then, at Jim Munroe's Artsy Game Incubator (http://nomediakings.org/artsygames) last fall I created Snow.

(http://www.benjaminrivers.com/images/game-snow_screen01.jpg) (http://www.benjaminrivers.com/images/game-snow_screen02.jpg)

Snow is a point-and-click adventure game about a young woman named Dana going to work here on Queen Street West in Toronto. It's based on a graphic novel I began late last summer (http://www.snowcomic.com/), but it's not a big, heavy-handed adventure game or anything like that. Rather, it's a sort of time capsule of this particular area of Toronto in a particular time; namely, winter 2008. Destructoid just ran an article on the game today (http://www.destructoid.com/indie-nation-56-snow-128149.phtml), and I really think they captured what it's all about.

The game is technically a beta (there are still a few bugs) but it's a complete experience as-is. The game can be downloaded from my website (http://www.benjaminrivers.com/games.htm) and run on any Windows XP or Vista machine.

I'd love to hear people's opinions on the game, so if you have the 15 minutes you'll need to complete it once (there are different ways to play the game), post away and let me know what you think.

I liked it, very sweet. :)

It's a little offputting that it runs in 320x240 full screen, and hitting escape doesn't show the cursor on the menu it brings up so it's hard to get to the 'quit' button in that way, but quitting using the bottom button bar worked.

Wow, The Beach at the End of Forever is actually really good. Amazingly effective for a game made in Scratch. (I know this isn't quite on topic, but it was on your site...)

Lynx: thanks for the note about the ESC key. I'll add that to my "to fix" list. Regarding the resolution: it is actually meant to be chunky, though I believe it's running at 640x480 with double-wide pixels on certain things for that hyuuuge effect.

I appreciate the comment about The Beach at the End of Forever, Fuzz. That was one of our first projects at the Artsy Games Incubator. It is a modification of an existing Scratch game (in this case, a version of one-side Pong). As it existed, it was Arkanoid without the bricks; with my mods, I was hoping it would become a very depressing and thoughtful little experience.

Sounds really great. Going to download it some time tomorrow, probably.

Actually, with AGS unless you include the acsetup.cfg, the game runs in 320x240 and messes up all your graphics. You also didn't include the winsetup executable, which should be there by default... I find that a bit odd, as that program allows users to set up the game to their personal graphics (and sound) preferences. Generally, everything in the Compiled folder should be distributed.

Anyone wanting to remedy this resolution issue themselves just needs to open up Notepad, paste in the following (tweak it if you like) and save as 'acsetup.cfg' in the game's folder:


In addition to these bugs, music files seem to be missing from the game based on a warnings log file that says things like '(in room 1): Music 1 not found' repeatedly. There's also a few areas you can walk that look odd graphically, like on top of that pole in the first room, and I had trouble realising it was possible to cross the road.

That said, I enjoyed the game and plan to play it again and again to look for minor changes!

Apologies if you already knew about all this. Am I wrong to comment on stuff like this for something labelled 'v0.5'? I only aim to help!

Thanks, Sergio. I'm going to have to check the EXE I uploaded, because some of the bugs that are being described shouldn't be there. I may have replaced the download with an inferior version by accident.

I'll have a look at the file this week and get rid of these mistakes. Thanks for the eagle eyes.

Glad I could help. I'd be happy to check any newer version you upload for bugs too.

I finally got around to playing this and I thought it was really good. It's great to see an 'art game' that isn't filled with loopy symbolism. The atmosphere was lovely and the simple interactive elements of the story were really engaging. I liked the way you put a lot of work into the things the player can examine, so the game has quite a bit of content the first time around but can be replayed easily.

The only thing I didn't like was the little commentary at the end which basically told you whether you won or not. I think it would have been better to let the player decide for themselves which path was the 'right' one.