Numbers of backgrounds (average)?

[Andail]

Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no. Primordia used one room for close up, and I'll always be marked for life. I believe number of rooms 60 or so.

I probably wouldn't use separate rooms if I didn't have to… but in 320x200, there isn't much you can fit on the screen anyway. For instance, there was no way I could fit the whole table of elements into anything smaller than the entire screen, so using a GUI wouldn't make much sense. I mean, using a GUI that covers the entire screen instead of a separate room would be more a matter of principles than anything else.

[Vince Twelve]

Interesting, Vince, that such a big game uses quite a low amount of rooms.

When you're paying for each one rather than drawing them all yourself, you think long and hard about your background economy!  I cut a bunch of corners, like deciding to have the city archives inside the police station instead of having a whole new location, or using the same room for the cemetery cutscene and as the view of the burning lab at the beginning, or using the baseball field as a catch-all to combine a few other rooms that weren't really necessary.

Since I did most of the closeup backgrounds myself, I was more liberal with them, which led to the large number of contained closeup puzzles.

Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no. Primordia used one room for close up, and I'll always be marked for life. I believe number of rooms 60 or so.

If it's a non-interactive closeup, especially a closeup of an inventory item or something that the player might be able to look at while standing anywhere in any room, a GUI or overlay might work better.  But for stuff with interactive puzzles (Tortoise's puzzle box, locker key magnet mini-game, re-wiring the fire door panel) it made more sense to use a room.  For one thing, the player will always be standing in the same place when they access the closeup, so there's no confusion about where to place the player when they return from the closeup.  It also allows you to keep all your code for the closeup puzzle contained in a single room script instead of creating it's own script module and cluttering up that list.

It's just a judgement call.

[elentgirl]

I used a number of rooms as close-ups because many of then had interaction on them, including some close-ups from close-ups!  I did also use objects for pop-up close-ups on over 40 of my rooms, but where the close-up needed to fill the whole screen there seemed no point in making it an object rather than another room.  In my case, the number of rooms was governed by what I wanted the game to show rather than any other considerations.

[Dualnames]

I know it's a judgment call, of course it is, just for some weird reason, I always preferred to use GUIs, and I found myself surprised to see everyone(the majority at least) is using rooms. That's all. I found the fact that I can close a UI and not reallign the room as it were, easier than actually doing so.

[Gilbert]

Not every one is accustomed to every feature of the engine and they need not be. Anyone can use whichever method which is easier to them or more comfortable to work with. Using rooms is easy for most people. You just import the background and do the necessary scripting.

Moreover, because of how things work(for AGS at least), room backgrounds compress much better than sprites, so it actually reduces the game's size if you use rooms instead of importing a number of sprites. IMO this is a big advantage.