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Don't sweat it!    Thanks!

Yay! This newsletter is what brought me here in the first place. Such a wide table of creativity! I still haven't read the first Apocalypse article so I've got a bit of catching up to do.

Thanks for featuring Melon Head up there, although, the hyperlinks lead to Devil's Hideout... Which is a very good game on it's own right.   

Verily, Melon Head is now released and available HERE!

There's a launch sale too until Oct 15th!

Cool! Very nintedo-esque vibes!   

Yeah, there's definitely potential for something on a smaller scale, such as a slice of melon life head puzzle. 

The release is close at hand so I got all nostalgic. Melon Head actually started off as isometric! I took a little gameplay vid of the prototype:

I thought it would take ages to craft detailed graphics for an environment like that so I switched the art style, but it looks pretty cool (it's got some more of those EGA-graphics).  :-D

Oh! Loom's EGA version is very beautiful!

It's too bad only the VGA version is available on steam and gog. This seems to be the case for many classic adventure games.

This is a really fun adventure game! I played through the tutorial and the first mission in the  waystation. The text parser is a lot of fun and finding the relevant things to look into in each room flows really well. I like to have the log at hand so I can scroll up and check things, although the Padbook and Glyphfree functionalities are designed intricately as well and they seem like they'll have a central role in the gameplay, especially after loading and losing the log. The graphics work well, even though they're grimy because the atmosphere is built in the text anyway. Though I should say the Waystation Bar was pretty atmospheric! I liked the flying simulator minigame too, I appreciate the "3D" effect with the enlarging sprites. That said, I've a hunch this game is pretty big and I've only seen the tip of the iceberg.

This game reminds me a lot of Frederik Pohl's Gateway which also has you taking missions, punching coordinates and traveling to various planets!

I ran into a bit of trouble with saving. I named my character MIGUEL and for some reason the name of the savefile became HODORMIGUEL and I couldn't load it! I began the game anew, named my character miguel again and then the problem disappeared. It's probably nothing to worry about but I suppose there's no harm mentioning it.

Aha! now I see what you've done with the art. I'll be sure to give it a go!

Yeah, I've not even played that many games from that era - I guess maybe the early Space Quest and King's Quest games used that palette and I've played those - but even from that I find it a very evocative palette.

Space Quest and King's Quest use that palette for sure, and a lot of point and click games from the late eighties and early nineties. I haven't played them much either, really. I've seen some new text parser games resurrecting the palette lately. On top of that the palette just has a high saturation and brightness we don't see that much in pixel art these days.

When I made my Doctor Who adventure game a few years back I made a lot of the graphics by making a photo collage, crunching it down to pixelly sizes, then applying an index/palette to the result (and maybe doing some post-pixelling for details), which is not a good way to make pixel art but it worked better than I felt it deserved to!

I think that sounds like a pretty inventive process!  Is the game somewhere available?

I've seen some updates of this game on mastodon and I'm happy to run into it here too! I had somehow missed that folk creatures and mythology played such a role, which is welcome news.

The EGA art style really gives me early 90s PC flashbacks; really evocative!

Awesome, thanks!

I found the color codes for the EGA palette in wikipedia and started to play around with them in pixel art studio. It was a small epiphany I got, like this is what gives games of that era their look.   

Okay, good to know! Thanks for the answer.

Hello also! 

Btw, is there any policy about digging up old threads in Exilian? The AGS Forum discourages from posting to threads that haven't seen action in 90 days, for example. I haven't seen anything like that here so I'm wondering if I've missed something in the rules.

Awesome! First of all, thanks for playing!

Interesting to hear how you thought about the breaker box. There's quite a chance to be mislead there.

The easiest way to solve the puzzle,

Spoiler

I think, is to focus on the pipes first and only then on the symbols, after all, you may get the upper middle one wrong even if all the pipes are connected. Then you would need to refer to the symbols.