Seeking Help With Sierra-Style AGS Game "On the Prowl"

[FamousAdventurer77]

I am completely lost.

I read the manual. I read the tutorials. Believe me, I did. Maybe even too many times. But they still make no sense to me. They're not really answering my pleads of "How in the living f**k do you DO this?!" I'm more of a hands-on person who has a hard time learning straight from a book/manual without being told or shown what to do with it.

Since this doesn't really belong with the technical posts...I figured this side of the forum might be where I could seek help and perhaps a partnership(s). It appears impossible to tackle these things alone.

On and off for the past year I've been trying to make a Sierra-style game called "On The Prowl", which is something like a Leisure Suit Larry type of game only it has a female lead instead and well, not QUITE the same "flavor" obviously. The storyline is about a working class girl in New York City in her late 20s who's run into some rough times by getting fired from her job just when some insider trading and illegal activity have taken place, so she decides to live it up for the night (or so she thought.) Puzzles will vary from medium-easy to tough. I have some artwork for the introduction cutscene (if I ever figure out HOW one even animates or gets a cutscene in), a bunch of backgrounds, walking cycle sprites for the main character, and a TextEdit file with a bunch of dialog planned that I have no clue what to do with in the mainframe.

It's that scary-looking mainframe and all that scripting. The scripting vaguely reminds me a tad of those Visual Basic modules I had in CS many many moons ago. Still...how can I get them to do anything? What about making up my own that these impersonal tutorials aren't helping me with?

Please, if anyone out there would like to be a part of this and/or can help, please reply by all means. If you'd like to collaborate, believe me, your name is most definitely going into credits and acknowledgements, you will not go unrecognized. I can also be Private Messaged if you'd like to talk on AIM (I don't publicly post my SN.) Thank you for your time. R/FamousAdventurer77

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

If you have played around with the demo setup and still can't figure out how to use AGS I'm not sure what to tell you-- perhaps enlist someone to script it for you?  If you're willing to do just about everything else, I'm sure you can find someone.  It's the people that have some kind of half-baked idea but no intention of doing actual effort that puts people off.  Also, you can do animated cutscenes in one of two ways:

1.  As a sprite animation
2.  As a movie file (.avi)

Obviously with the movie file you'll have to put everything you want in the scene in the animation, backgrounds, characters, music, sounds.  What you might try is just to stick it out and work through it, searching the tech forum when you run into something you don't understand.  Trust me, people have had all the problems you have in the past, and their questions are likely answered in the tech archive SOMEWHERE.  Good luck.

[FamousAdventurer77]

Believe me...I've pored over the tech forums and tried searching for specific answers and had a hard time with it. There should be some AGS University or something, or something more interactive on how to script instead of just being referred to one manual after another.

Unless I'm THAT retarded.

When I opened the Global Scripting, I just read through it without altering and it looks vaguely like a cross between rudimentary C++ and Visual Basic. Am I right? Problem is, I had those languages in my ancient-ass CS class EONS ago in high school so I really don't remember just about anything except how to form a basic If-Then-Else statement. Do you think it's fairly close to VB at all? If it is I might not be too hopeless...I've got a copy of the Visual Basic Bible hidden somewhere and the computer club at uni might actually help out.

As for forming sprite animations...pretty clueless there. I have a JPEG of the main character's walking cycle, with a lot of different frames, but don't know how to put it into the actual game.

I'm not too concerned about sound and music, I know I can improvise there, the internet's big enough.

At this rate, doing VGA and Sierra-influenced backgrounds is probably what I do best. It's setting up this GUI, mainframe, and figuring out how to script that looks impassable. Especially since I want an interface with a "travel screen", similar to Simon the Sorcrer 1 where you click on a dot and it automatically takes you to a location. Once again...no clue where to go from there.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

As regards scripting: all you need to do is be able to think logically, in an "if-else" way. If user does this, then do that. After that, you just need to learn how to tell it to AGS. The way it worked with me: I knew what I wanted to do, and I read the manual until I found the function(s) that let me do it.

You need no previous programming experience, as AGS uses a language by itself. You just have to learn the syntax - using ints, Strings, functions, importing/exporting, using brackets. And that is just practice, practice, practice.

[FamousAdventurer77]

As regards scripting: all you need to do is be able to think logically, in an "if-else" way. If user does this, then do that. After that, you just need to learn how to tell it to AGS. The way it worked with me: I knew what I wanted to do, and I read the manual until I found the function(s) that let me do it.

You need no previous programming experience, as AGS uses a language by itself. You just have to learn the syntax - using ints, Strings, functions, importing/exporting, using brackets. And that is just practice, practice, practice.

I think this is getting warmer-- it DOES sound very similar to Visual Basic. I haven't done any hardcoding or writing in years, not since I had that class. I think I really need the language explained: at least I had a class that discussed VB and basic C++ and I was told what everything did, if I look at a list of commands with no explanations it kinda doesnt help.

That or I need to find something that hasn't been listed in the Tech Forum for a ridiculously slow learning level/those who don't learn easily out of books.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Try something simple at first. Make a character, make an object. Try playing with these functions on "Interact with" for that object:

player.WalkTo
Display
Player.Say
Player.SayAt

Heh. Maybe even
FadeIn
Wait
WaitMouseKey
StartCutscene
EndCutscene

...with a simnple test room and the manual, explore all the things you can do. Experiment.

Yeah, AGS is a bit like VB in it's syntax... I guess, though it might be closer to C++. But eventually all programming languages start looking alike, don't they?