What a lovely game. Took me around 5 hours to complete (although I cheated on a two logic puzzles specifically) and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Even more than the beautiful art it was the awesome awesome soundtrack that made Machinarium a great experience. Great job Amanita Design!

I'd say calling it an experience sums up my feelings too.  And while the graphics will get most of the attention for obvious reasons, it was the soundtrack that made it for me.

It's not a downloadable freeware game, in other words not what you've asked for at all, but I have first hand evidence that this will keep your young niece quiet for hours.

http://www.dressupgames.com/

And I'm sure there must be downloadable equivalents.

*exits with credibility in tatters*

Just looks like a bunch of randomly flashing pixels to me.  Can you tell I'm not a Street Fighter fan?

Now haw many pixels do you think you would really need to be able to tell what's going on?

I enjoyed Killzone on the PSP.  That felt like a game that would have been at home on the Amiga.

I'm working on the art for an "Alien Breed" type of game called "Dysnomia". Should be out on XBIG in another month or so.

Nice.  I'll keep an eye out for that one.

Get them to slightly randomise the pitch of the footstep sample though please.  That's one of my pet hates

Fruity Loops automatically saves every rendered voice in your temp folder if I remember correctly. Just load the smallest FL demo you can find and add new voice synth channel -> text and settings windows opens right after.

Yeah the voices in FL are pretty impressive.  I honestly didn't realise they could be that good these days.  Luckily there are some really crap ones too...just what I'm after 

I used this a few times:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

They have all kinds of licensing notices now, though it seems you can use it for non-commercial projects.

That's great.  I never thought there would be a simple net app that did it.  It's not quite the same as waiting 5 minutes for the C64 to load a 3 second voice synthesis demo mind

Someone has just told me you can also do it in Fruity Loops so I'm away to give that a shot too.

Thanks.

Can anyone recommend some software for doing proper old style speech synthesis?  I'm looking for something which can output whatever phrases I want to wav files with bonus points for options that let me play around with the voices pitch etc.

Cheers

This runs perfect on the little eeePC.  Perfect when you're out and about and have a few minutes spare (by that I mean perfect when you really should be working).

Any plans to streamline the ghost file handling?  It all feels a bit clunky when everything else is so beautifully coherent.

I've just done a search for this same white line around images problem and came across this so thanks for all the above suggestions. 

To fix it I needed to add:

Code:

GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].MagFilter = TextureFilter.Point;

so it was what i said

Indeed.  Thank you 

Why not just use the TitleSafeArea member in your Viewport to determine the default placement of UI elements and allow zooming like most games do?  Most of the time the default should be fine and you wont have too much empty space.

I'd imagine in rayteoactive's case it's a purely aesthetics issue.  If you have a decent sized UI and you keep it within the title safe area then you really do lose a hell of a lot of screen area.

And even if you allow the user to move the UI elements you still have to design everything else to work in a worst case scenario.

I've just done a search for this same white line around images problem and came across this so thanks for all the above suggestions. 

To fix it I needed to add:

Code:

GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].MagFilter = TextureFilter.Point;

Btw, any takes on the "title safe issue"?

It's a serious pain if you come from PC development where title safe isn't really an issue.  I ended up redesigning my game to have a panning camera so that all the arena could be seen within the title safe limits.  Having a fixed camera would have restricted me to a tiny arena.

Another alternative is to render your display to a texture and then have an option that allows the user to resize this to fit perfectly on their display. (One of those "resize until the dots are at the corner of your screen" affairs.)  This way you get to use the full available screen area while also ensuring that nothing is off screen.

I know that's not always a popular option mind so I'd be interested in what others think as I plan on using it in my next project on the 360.