Demo Quest: Source of Dreams - UPDATE 6/30 PLAYABLE DEMO

[Hollister Man]

Finally, you say, someone posts about Demo Quest 3.Ã,  Well, its better than that.Ã,  We've got a brief trailer here (VERY LARGE GIF ANIMATION)


UPDATE 6/30/04

The demo of DQ3 was released at Brittens, now available for public consumption.Ã,  It isn't the greatest quality yet, but it is progressing fairly rapidly.Ã,  Many features are only half implemented, but there is now a functional Verb Coin example, an all new GUI, and examples of several hard to use features (such as room-script on_mouse_click functions)

www.demoquest.us/dq3demo.zip

Please post any bugs, but expect several, this is a playable demo made from an untested work-in-progress, with many bits of stuff that are not completed yet.

[Scummbuddy]

whats the orangish area that says "all new areas"? Looks to be a bar.

[Hollister Man]

  Its one of the new areas

Lets just say that the door to Dar's doesn't say "This is a family game" anymore.

[LordHart]

Oooh, it sounds naughty now... pr0n?

[Hollister Man]

lol, nah.  Its a bad joke, that all.  I can't say much, it'll spoil the joke for everyone.

[Ishmael]

You utilized the futuristic city again? The dialogs concerning it were funny, IMHO.

[H Man Unplugged]

The City will make an appearance, I will tell you that much.  As will BMAN, Froggy, and Roger, mostly in their original roles.  There will be a ton of in-jokes, out-jokes, bad jokes, and puns, like every adventure game should have.  I think everyone will be very pleased with the outcome.  We can only hope

[MrColossal]

not to be a meany or anything but when it comes to the demo game I think teaching people how to use AGS is more important than a ton of new jokes and a story.

I mean, how are you going to be teaching people how to use AGS? That is what I'm interested in and it doesn't seem like you've spoken on it at all. So care to elaborate?

[Gilbert]

Actually I'd rather see the demo quest simple, stating clearly how things can be archieved, blah bla bla, etc. If it's made into a "full-size game" with eyecandies, etc, it's quite difficult for newbies to focus on different parts of the techniques used.

[KANDYMAN-IAC]

I had an idea that the demo quest could be a trilogy...

you could have different lands... like storyboarding land... where all the graphics are pencil, and through learning about the game creation process of writing the story and making graphics... the world becomes less sketchy and makes more sense.... all the characters stop talking in predefined "may name is bill" responses with masses of spelling errors...

scripting land where you learn about different scripts (like we do now)

and any other number of possibilities... i think done properly would be funking awesome...

I agree with Mr C... we are here to TEACH people, humour is woven into that second....

THOUGH if i can see merit in your process and what you are trying to create then i  am willing to create graphics, both backgrounds, character art and animations.... also i write some mean dialog (as in good... not nasty.... [tough since i made LJE, thats prolly all people think i do])

[Hollister Man]

I'm sorry, I have been a bit caught up in the art part of it lately.Ã,  The script will be completely "instructionalized," with comments and a tutorial document as to how things were done.Ã, 

Kandy: We've got three "acts" planned, but the factory will serve much the same purpose.Ã,  There will be rooms and puzzles to do with character animation and construction, GUIs of course, multi-media, and new sub-demos can be linked to the Advanced hall.Ã,  An integral part of several puzzles will be to complete a script, as well.Ã,  I'd offer you entrance into the DQ forum to see our discussions on the educational side, but I do not have Admin privileges, and am in the process of a backup of the forum so we can use another server that I can Admin.

It will remain 256 colors, to save space and to show people the tricks and secrets to making a good looking game based on a palette, although many neophytes seem to think this is obsolete.Ã,  The "Advanced" area will become a functional "teleporter" to sub-demos for things such as looping, mini-games, plugins, voices, (and lots of other things that are "donated" by anyone who wants to make them) so they don't clutter the script.Ã,  This room will be accessable from the menu.Ã,  The Educational GUI will actually work in every room, and will be accessable from the toolbar.

This way, the Demo can still be informative, but also a good open sourced example of a fun game.Ã,  The DQ games were interesting, but hardly fun.Ã,  The GUI rooms were not fully integreated (and can now be done entirely inside the room scripts), now they will be finished neatly and will have a purpose in the game.Ã,  It will feature a "launcher" that will allow the game to save, exit, launch another game (of a different resolution or program) then return to play, as a utility and example for people who wish to do this in their own game.

It is our goal to make it really fun to play through, and also an "archive" of useful tidbits of code, information, syntax, organizational methods, and examples.Ã,  I know personally, I used the color-cycle script from DQ2 in several un-released practice games.

I hope this has been a little more encouraging than my last post, believe it or not, I do understand the purpose of the Demo.Ã,  Its just so obvious during production, that I actually just forgot to mention it. :/Ã, 

[Mats Berglinn]

One question: Will the demo quest feature a full Lucas Arts Verb Coin?

[Hollister Man]

If I can find someone who knows how to make one, or can find out for myself, yes.  I have never played a game that used the Verb Coin system (I was a Sierra kid).  Even if we can't figure out how for the main game, we'll make sure there is a sub-demo for it in the Advanced wing.

[LordHart]

The Account Frozen site has it I believe...

Its sad that that site is known as nothing else but the Account Frozen site...its a great resource.

[Hollister Man]

Yeah, What I don't understand is why people don't get Godaddy.com hosting, pay $30 for a domain name and hosting, and have a site.  Their service is great, my domain was active the same day I bought it.  I'm planning on buying one for AGS stuff soon.

[Tiki]

Open Source Verb Coin:
http://user.tninet.se/~vqb114l/ilb/tutorials.htm

[Hollister Man]

Thanks!  For other's reference, that's 2ma2's website.

[Phemar]

How about a custom save/load GUI, and another one with Screenshots.

[Hollister Man]

I like the idea, maybe the in-game save/load will be a standard one, but the Menu save/load will be a screenshot one. How's that?

[Ishmael]

Or make a special area into the game, where the screenshot save/load GUI's are used, and when the player enters this area, the game get's autosaved in the normal, non-screenshot area... or something

[Phemar]

And a style area. Showing all different art styles.

And an area telling newbies *cough*legge*cough* exactly how to treat the forums.

[Hollister Man]

TK: I'm not honestly shure what you mean.

ZOR: ATM, the whole game will be very much in different styles.  Besides this, the GUI rooms will also lend themselves to specific styles. 

There will be an area that is supposed to emulate the forums, and the user will have to discover the right area to ask certain questions, otherwise the residents of those forums will not respond helpfully.

[LordHart]

Well, then you have to have a guy that looks BOYD walk on and then say, "The Penis... it slaps you!" and then walk off.

[Layabout]

Did you see the original demo quest 2 that was in production? You could learn a lot from it.

[Hollister Man]

You mean the original one that was in production 2 years ago?  Yes, and that's where most of our work is based on.  This isn't some noob spur-of-the-moment thing, here.  This has been an ongoing project for over a year now, although it has been slow at times.  It was mostly discussion of the plot, and planning the layout of the factory.

Thank ye' Jack,

Not you, we named the monkey Jack...

[DragonRose]

My thought:

When you have a variety of interfaces in one game, it becomes a whole lot more difficult to figure out how it works than if you just had one interface. You have to sort through more code to find what you're looking for than you would otherwise.

Rather than making one big Demo game showing EVERYTHING, which would have pages and pages of code to sort through to find what you're looking for, why not make several much smaller demo games, each one showing one or two things?

[Ginny]

Looking really promising, this! The thing is, I think a large game would be more comfortable and fun to use, and can teach newcomers more at once, more scripting style and organisation. However I do agree it may get difficult to use as an open source guide. Hmm, would it be possible to somehow make important scripts stand out?
Anyway, I've got a suggestion for the help/learning button you seem to have planned: You could click the button and see a GUI pop up with information about what you clicked on (when a cursor), and seperately, you could view all the tips you've seen so far in a type of library (in game, or in a seperate file, like a part of the manual. It would be nice (maybe) if each tip you see/discover is added to the list of reviewable tips, explaining functions being used or scripts
As an example: You see a character walking up and down the street, pacing. Clicking the '?' cursor on him or something like that (maybe a lightbulb?) will tell you how this was done, and add a similar, though slightly differently prahsed maybe, tip to the library. It would be best I think if the game exported values to a file outside, bolleans to check if the player found each thing. And then in the manual/tip library, it would check this file to see what it should display. When the player finishes the game, all tips discovered and not discovered will be shown, those who weren't with a certain icon or something. Hmm.. The reason it's best put in an html file is that it would be easier to write detailed tutorials, and have links to appropriate threads in the forum, etc..
Then again, I dunno, it's just an idea.

[Hollister Man]

Actually, we were thinking of making the GUI rooms as separate mini-games, even though CJ has implemented room-specific on_event() functions.  For the most part, the main GUI will be a hybrid Sierra/lec Title Bar GUI.  I posted it once in the critic's lounge.

I like the idea Ginny, in fact, we were planning a "internet" inside the game, and these would be available through that, as well as being HTML files outside. 

[Hollister Man]

Well, its that time again.  The Demo demo is nearly complete.  There will be a few bugs, and some original areas are unavailable.  Unfortunately, time just ran out for a Brittens release, so there will not be a completed hall of GUIs, but Verb Coin was added, and both parsers now work more like the original.  The majority of the rooms have heavily commented script, to ease understanding of the code.  Hopefully this will be useful to someone.

The new areas will be previewed, as well.  Not all of them are available, but you can get a better idea than from my cheezy animation.  The group has spent a lot of time on discussion and overcoming problems, only to have members go AWOL and cause us to have to re-do stuff.  For example, the player character in the Demo demo is very nice, but the one who animated her will not reply to mail anymore.  So either we learn to animate her, or make a new one (the latter is what we chose).  PenguinX has offered to finish the animations, but he too has been absent recently.

With any luck, the Demo will be progressive, with releases of larger and larger sections with time.

[Hollister Man]

Sorry to double post, but this is to bump up the thread.Ã,  If you'd like to DL the beta/demo (not a whole lot done at this point, but most everything works as it should.)Ã,  it is at www.demoquest.us/dq3demo.zip

Contains examples of a tiled-background animation technique, randomized background animation, verb coin GUI, the SCI0 and AGI rooms use the true 'left click walk, right click look' action, Appropriate music in several areas.

Again, don't expect too much, hopefully we will have all the original demo parts back in sometime soon.

[Scummbuddy]

just a quick bug, i started the game and walked directly to the left hoping to see the Girls Girls Girls sign, and i did get to the next room, so i kept walking along the sidewalk, and as i walked past the door, her sprite was drawn behind it, so i think the walk area and the walkbehind line may need some tweaking.
>>actually, i got it to do the same thing with the door with the red junk in front of it.


and I'm sure you all noticed that the bottle on the second screen doesn't stay gone when you come back to the screen.

in the verb coin room, the text is written wrong. you say that its left click for inv, and right click for the verb coin, but it really should be switched.