Speed Buggy: Manifold Destiny (MAGS September 2014)

Started by Mandle, Mon 29/09/2014 15:33:24

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Mandle



This game was created for the September 2014 MAGS Contest. The theme of the contest was "Cross Country", meaning a depiction of a journey.

This made me think of a cartoon I loved as a kid called "Speed Buggy". The Speed Buggy Team tours the world's racing circuits, always managing to get caught up in some kind of nefarious wrong-doings, of course eventually beating the baddies and going on to win the race!

I hope my game managed to capture at least some of the charm of this old Saturday-morning kids' classic.

The picture above is the title screen for the game. I will show one more screenshot of ingame play as per the rules of this forum, but I don't really want to show more than that to avoid spoilers.

Here is a shot showing off AprilSkies' heart-breakingly beautiful iconbar he made and donated to my game, making the game much more lovely graphically than it probably deserves to be:




FEATURES:

* Saturday morning kids' cartoon atmosphere. (I hope)
* Old-school adventure game puzzle solving. (I tried to pack in as many puzzles as I could)
* Music and sound effects. (again, as much as I could get done in under a month)
* Some animations even! (a few eh...)
* A mysterious bad-guy to beat!!
* A driving mini-game!!!
* A TALKING CAR!!!!!


CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

VROOM-A-ZOOM-ZOOOOM!!!

Stupot

Oh damn. Just as I was about to go to bed :-/
Downloading now. I'll play tomorrow :-)

AprilSkies


www.apemarina.altervista.org

Mandle

Cheers!

I had a problem with my initial upload where when I unpacked the zip file onto my computer the folder never appeared. After a fresh upload it now seems to be working fine.

If anyone else had this problem too please re-download from the same link. It should be sorted.

Also: the game doesn't run from the Desktop on my computer. I've found this happens with many AGS games. It works fine when the game folder is placed in MyDocuments or somewhere.

I don't know if these issues are particular to my own outdated computer/OS or not, but thought they were worth a mention.

Now for some well-deserved sleep I'd say!

Mandle

It seems the SETUP in the last uploaded version didn't work because I was an idiot...New version with working SETUP icon is now uploaded and available at same link...

Sorry!

Also fixed a few graphics things that were really annoying me, and got the whole thing uploaded just at midnight September 30th (my time zone)...

I won't be updating the upload again until after MAGS voting is finished as that would be cheating in my book...

CaptainD

Congrats on the release!

I thought it was Scooby Doo when I looked at that splash screen...?  I never heard of this cartoon.  (Whacky Races was the one I do remember...)

Anyway, will try to find time to play this - looks fun!
 

Mandle

Quote from: CaptainD on Tue 30/09/2014 17:25:08
Congrats on the release!

I thought it was Scooby Doo when I looked at that splash screen...?  I never heard of this cartoon.  (Whacky Races was the one I do remember...)

Anyway, will try to find time to play this - looks fun!

Cheers mate!

Yes, the Hanna-Barbera studio also made Scooby-Doo and, following its smash sucess, brought out a slew of "Mystery-Solving Team" shows. The fact that the driver character: "Tinker" is pretty much a draw-over of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo probably added to your confusion. Luckily they mostly kept the quality high in these cash-grabs: the animation is charming, the background art wonderful, and the voice of Speed Buggy himself was even supplied by the immortal Mel Blanc.

I guess they didn't have all that many people working for them at this time and fortunately they were all people of very high talent. The kid's cartoon business paid very little to its staff in those days, so pretty much everyone involved was in it for the love of the work itself, and not the bucks.

Kinda like indie game devs, eh?

Can you tell I did a bit of research for this project before I started? :-D

Cassiebsg

Neat.
I didn't knew about this cartoon either, and like CaptainD I also thought "Looks like a Scooby-doo rip off!" (and let's face it, it is, the only one missing in the picture is Zelda!).

Very nice game, and puzzles are a bit hard. LOL Am stuck!
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Mandle

Quote from: Cassiebsg on Wed 01/10/2014 13:46:14
I also thought "Looks like a Scooby-doo rip off!" (and let's face it, it is, the only one missing in the picture is Zelda!).

There was actually a fan-quote I read during research which said: "So, they killed off Velma and turned Scooby into a car???"...(laugh)

Tabata


Congrats for the release!
I had a whole lot of fun playing the game (nod)
and just your ingame hints prevented me from becoming crazy in the door maze  -  big thanks for that  (laugh)

Cassiebsg

#10
Great game Mandle! :)
Just finished it.

Spoiler

Loved the Lost reference... as soon as I saw the island and cloud monster, I thought "LOST!".
But you got me totally crazy at that maze!... so I just clicked...and clicked, and clicked... about 490 times according to your counter. .

If you do an improved version, could you please change the right mouse button to drop the item in the inventory window instead of doing "look"... Makes no sense to look, when you have an icon to change to the look mode anyway...
[close]
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Mandle

Cheers Tabata and Cassie (and everyone else so far) for playing. Glad you guys had fun! And yeah Cassie, that right-click feature was on my To-Do-List but I just couldn't get to it in time for the deadline. In the Deluxe Version it will be sweet!

Mandle

I've seen some comments from non-native English speakers asking for a slower text speed.

I can't really change it now as the contest is closed, but I would suggest as a work-around to hover the mouse over the Iconbar at the top of the screen whenever you get a text pop up which is too long to read quickly...This should pause the game so the text stays onscreen until you are done with it. Then just move the mouse off the Iconbar. I do this myself sometimes with games with ridiculous text speeds even for native speakers, or when the text contains a hint I know I must not miss etc...

AprilSkies

I had the pleasure of playtesting it (at least in early development). I found it really funny to play, but the final version is absolutely a great game!
Puzzles are really well designed!
Good work, mate!

www.apemarina.altervista.org

Stupot

I've just been playing it though I'm a bit stuck at the moment. So, I'm going to sleep on it and resume tomorrow. I'll give more feedback when I'm finished but so far it's great fun.

I noticed a small error:
Spoiler
when you try taking all four tyres off of Speed Buggy, you are told you can't because he needs one to balance on. But, I put the life preservers on three of the wheels and then took the fourth real tyre off. Then I was able to take all the life preservers back off, so now Speed Buggy is indeed floating in the air.
[close]

Mandle

Quote from: Stupot+ on Thu 02/10/2014 16:29:16
I've just been playing it though I'm a bit stuck at the moment. So, I'm going to sleep on it and resume tomorrow. I'll give more feedback when I'm finished but so far it's great fun.

I noticed a small error:
Spoiler
when you try taking all four tyres off of Speed Buggy, you are told you can't because he needs one to balance on. But, I put the life preservers on three of the wheels and then took the fourth real tyre off. Then I was able to take all the life preservers back off, so now Speed Buggy is indeed floating in the air.
[close]

Glad you're having fun with the game!

Spoiler
Ahhhhhhhhh...That would indeed happen...

My code did not allow for anyone to do that without it noticing...

This is now on my TO-DO-LIST for the rebuild...
[close]

CaptainD

Mandle this is a great little game!  (The animation is particularly impressive :P(

The number of puzzles you've packed into a small playing area is incredible.  Nice job!
 

Mandle

Quote from: CaptainD on Thu 02/10/2014 23:18:52
The number of puzzles you've packed into a small playing area is incredible.  Nice job!

Let's just say: The tale grew in the telling...;)

Mandle

Sorry for the double post here but I just wanted to say:

If you played the game please comment and rate on the game page...You don't have to be kind to me: I have a thick skin...

I've never actually had a game fully rated so that it was visible, and it would be nice to see...

Mandle

I just replayed this old game of mine from my first MAGS way back in the day when I was still figuring out how to use AGS and...

I actually had a really good time with it!

I still feel that the amount of, variety of, and quality of puzzles make some of the other lacking factors forgivable...

Sorry for the massive necropost, but I would be interested in how the current community finds this ancient game of mine...

And also interested in if Cassie can get through the maze this time with no hints... ;)

EDIT: I'll fix those broken Photobucket *&$%#"% links soonish...

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