[George Ohlinger]

It's a game I created and I'm looking for feedback, so I've set it up for free downloads from my webpage.

The premise is that you are already dead, so you don't have to worry about dying. You are in Purgatory and in the end, you go to either Heaven or Hell.

It's available at www.playwhat.com or my webpage www.adventuregamesalliance.com. At my webpage you need to register to download the game. If you have any questions, I can be reached at [email protected].

[Shany]

Couldn't find the game on PlayWhat.

Can you post a few screenshots so that we'll know what sort of game this is? Thanks.

[George Ohlinger]

I'm surprised you can't find it at PlayWhat, since I see it there. But here are some screen shots. It's an adventure game built around having to solve puzzles. I'd say like Myst but much more solvable.

Here is where it's at at PlayWhat, which also has screen shots and more of a description of the game.

http://www.playwhat.com/Games/Purgat...20After%20Life

[Pandaara]

Hey it looks good, what tools did you use to create it? And I shall give it a play!

[George Ohlinger]

To do the graphics I used Bryce 5.0. The game engine is written in VB6, so it was as I was developing the engine that I then created the game to proof the engine.

If you poke around, you'd see that the DB is Microsoft Access. So basically, as you create a game using the engine, you're just populating the DB. As I expected, doing all of the graphics is the hardest part, since I don't consider myself the artistic type. But Bryce did make it somewhat easier than I thought; even the animations.

The fun part was seeing a puzzle and then coding it so that a game developer could then add programmable features to that puzzle for their game. I'm sure you've heard of Minesweeper. With the engine, you could add a Minesweeper puzzle as something someone must solve to advance past a point but the dimensions are programmable, as well as the level of difficulty, as well as something I thought of called a Mine Shield. You could also just elect to make it Randomly generated.

The toughest thing to code was Sudoku, or at least coding the engine to create a randomly generated Sudoku puzzle.

[Fantasysci5]

I wanted to try this game out, but I'm having some trouble. I downloaded it from Playwhat, since I don't really like registering at random sites. It gave my their downloader, which only downloaded the 'Purgatory.exe', and when I try to start it, it freezes up my whole computer. Did anyone else have this problem?

It sounds like an interesting premise, and I really would like to try it out.

[George Ohlinger]

While the file size looks right at 571M, I tried it and it just downloads a small 1.2M file. I didn't try running it since I have no idea what it is? Maybe the dlm of dlmPurgatory.exe means Download Manager?

I've sent an Email to PlayWhat asking about it and I'll let you know what they say when they respond.

[Fantasysci5]

Yes, once you download the dlm, double clicking it will download the Purgatory.exe. But that seems to be the only thing it downloads.

[George Ohlinger]

OK, yesterday I downloaded the dlmPurgatory.exe and after hearing from PlayWhat, ran the EXE and it first prompts for where you want to download the file and then it downloads the EXE that would install the game. So it looks like it works as expected.

What happens when you ran dlmPurgatory.exe? It didn't first prompt for where you wanted the file to be saved to?

[George Ohlinger]

Are you saying you got the 571M file from PlayWhat and that when you ran that EXE it froze up your computer? If so, did it go through the full install? And then when you tried to run the actual game, it froze up your computer?

What OS are you running?

[Fantasysci5]

I'm running XP. I ran the dlmPurgatory, and it said it installed the game just fine, but all it downloaded onto my computer was the Purgatory.exe, which when I double click, just freezes everything, and ends up making me manually restart my computer.

[George Ohlinger]

I'll download what PlayWhat has and also run it to see what happens.

[George Ohlinger]

OK, I ran the dlmPurgatory.EXE I got from PlayWhat and then ran the Purgatory.EXE. I first removed the game from my PC, which is also running XP. The initial install takes a few minutes and then it runs an install for QuickTime. I then ran the game without any problems.

The Purgatory.EXE I downloaded from PlayWhat is 584,733 KB. Is yours also that size? So when you double-click Purgatory.EXE you never get even the initial installation screen, or the 2nd screen where it prompts for where you'd like the game installed? Are you sure you have sufficient disk space?

If you'd like to take this off-forum, you can Email me at [email protected] and once we figure out the issue, we can post the reults here in case it's something others would encounter.

[Fantasysci5]

I got it working now, George Ohlinger. For some reason, the setup icon was showing as a blank white box, which usually means Windows doesn't know what to do with it.

For some reason, downloading an update for my computer (service pack 3) made the computer recognize it as a setup. Thanks for the help.

[George Ohlinger]

Now if you encounter any problems playing the game, or feedback in general (even not liking it) I'd be happy to hear your comments.