Finished tutorial, now I'm lost.

[mr.me]

It's me again.

I've finished the tutorial, it walked me through step by step and I had very little problems.  I put in different sprites. I've created a room with hotspots that  I can examine in the test run, I have an object I can pick up and examine and a second object that I can examine.

Then the tutorial ended and I'm not sure where to look in the manual now. I still need to give the objects functions for puzzles. Connect some rooms. Create animations for puzzles and story development. I need a push in the right direction.

[Pumaman]

Have you watched densming's Video Tutorials? They go much further than the text tutorial.

[mr.me]

Have you watched densming's Video Tutorials? They go much further than the text tutorial.

Thank you, I will try that.

[Ghost]

With the tutorial under your belt, you'll also find it a good exercise to challenge yourself and create small example games. That's what I usually consider the aim of a tutorial, get you safe enough in a certain language/too to start learning for yourself. Common things to try at this point are "one room games", "focus on animation", "slightly obscure puzzles" and so on.
Best of luck!

[Trent R]

Depends on your style, but you could always just read through it. Related entires are linked, and many include a small sample script.

There's also two pages of a Scripting tutorial.

And Densming's vids are awesome.



~Trent

[mr.me]

Thank you very much everyone, the videos are answering my questions so far.

A few questions though:

1. I'm not sure if this was covered in the videos and I don't want to spend a half hour trying to find it. Is there a way to do the "Display" command so that it disappears on it's own they way "cCharacer.Say" does?

2. Flip side: Is there a way to do "cCharacer.Say" the way "Display" works where it doesn't disappear until you click?

3. How do I make text last longer so people have more time to read it?

[Akatosh]

1. I don't think there is, but you can certainly script a workaround. Just create a GUI that looks like your text window, call it gSpecialDisplay (or something like that), put a label on it (called TextLabel in the example) and use the following code.

At the top of the global script:

Code: ags

int countdowntimer=-1;
export countdowntimer;

At the top of the global script HEADER:

Code: ags

import int countdowntimer;

and in repeatedly_execute_always:

Code: ags

if (countdowntimer>=1) {
countdowntimer--;
if (countdowntimer==0) {countdowntimer=-1; ProcessClick(0,0,mouse.Mode);}
}

Now, if you want to display something like this, you need to do this:

Code: ags

countdowntimer=x*GetGameSpeed(); //replace x with amount of seconds you want to display the text 
Display("something");
countdowntimer=-1;

I dunno if this works (it's untested), but it sounds decent enough in my own head. 

2.) Certainly! Under "game options", set "skip speech" to "mouse or key only".

3.) 2.) sort of renders this moot, doesn't it? Still, you could change Game.TextReadingSpeed in game_start. 14 is default, smaller numbers mean slower text.

[Khris]

I recommend reading the manual from A to Z and browsing through both this and the Technical forum.
You'll learn a great deal about how to tackle a scripting problem by a) knowing the commands you can use and b) seeing how experienced scripters solved problems.

[twentyfour]

I'm still just going through the videos right now but I've been asking my wife what she would like to see in a game to challenge myself and so far they've been relatively easy lil tests but it helps me use what I've learned so far.

Suggestions thus far:
Make a parrot in the background repeat itself endlessly

Make it so your character can't properly interact with something until they've walked into another room and interacted with something else(her idea was the player is afraid of the key on the floor and thinks it's a mouse until he walks into room two and sees another key... silly yes, but it took me a couple hours to figure out how to do it)

Silly stuff like that. I find it's helping me think outside of what I know how to do by asking someone completely outside of the gaming community because she wouldn't have any pre-conceived notions of what the game can do.

She also asked me to change the Roger character into a kitten because kittens are cute... So not all the ideas are gems

-24

[mr.me]

Thank you very much, Akatosh. I went with answer 2 as that was very easy and I think it's best for the player to decide how much time they need to read each thing.

Thank you for the suggestions, KhrisMUC and twentyfour.