A game about Bulgarian History

[necroshey]

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to make a post about my final year project in uni, which is an educational game about Bulgarian history. I'm aiming for a crossover between King's Quest style of game play and Machinarium style of dialogue system, with emphasis on it being more modern. My goal is to have a game made for a younger audience (1st graders or such) that can help them get into the mindset of learning Bulgarian history. I won't have a lot of time (I don't even now as I'm writing), but I'm trying to get through at least one event.

Now my major concern is how to make the characters talk with images/pictures (in chat bubbles maybe)? All I could gather from the tutorial is that the closest thing to achieve this that I can use is the DrawImage function. I would like to ask if there is another way or if this is indeed what I should be using ?

As mentioned above, my main goal is to make the game as user friendly and "ease-of-access"-y as possible, that's why I turned to the point-and-click adventure game genre. I post this in the Discussion thread so that if interested people can discuss my idea and maybe even tell me if there is a better way/better engine I could be using to achieve best results (keeping in mind of course that I'm kind of pressed for time ).

[Cassiebsg]

Keep in mind that doing a game can take a lot more time than you seem to have. However, if you look at MAGS or even OROW, you'll also notice that it's possible to do it in a very short time.
So, the question here seems to be how fast you are doing BGs and how many you thinking about; if you going to use 1st or 3rd person perspective; how many NPCs, animations and such you thinking about.

Not sure any other engine will be better for this than AGS, so can't help you there. If you going for a 1st person view, than you save on a lot of animations just for the main character.
As for speech bubbles, try using the search function above . But here's one thread about it not too old even: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=52225.msg636514418#msg636514418

[Kumpel]

Hello,

I am myself working on an educational adventure game (process of applying for asylum as a refugee in germany called The Refuge) for my master thesis and I can tell you from my experience, that you really should plan out the whole thing in every smallest detail before even starting to think about how you gonna do it visually or gameplay-wise. Not just because in the adventure genre it is hard to estimate how long a user (especially a 1st-grader) needs, to play it through - I guess that is important for you as it is for me to get the full educational effect - but also how much time you will need to produce the game. I personally hugely underestimated for example the amount of text I would have to write to make it educational and self-explanatory. I planned a 1h to 1:30h long adventure and wrote about 32 pages of text (object/hotspot/character/descriptions, dialogs, cutscenes and so on) as of now and I am not even finished with the whole thing. For you and your attempt to do it the machinarium-way (No language but only communication through graphics) this means you have to convert all this into understandable little sequences
Alright, you are doing it for kids and not for adults or teenagers like me but you better not underestimate it. I actually think it is much harder to please your target group, arouse their interest and most importantly to keep at it...

About your speechstyle question:
I am working with lucas arts style because I want the player to focus on one screen only instead of the sierra-style tiled screen. But sierra-style could make sense for you because
- it is not as time consuming as designing GUIs with dynamic sizes
- it wouldn't limit the visual space of your graphical narrations to the machinarium-ish small thought bubbles and make it much easier to place these animations at the right coordinates of the screen (always on top).

But you could also let the game do the computing of the right coordination. with a little bit of coding.

Showing that think and talk sequences is pretty easy in AGS. You could make every "thought" and "talk" an unique animated object (or character if it is needed in different rooms) and visualize/play the animation when the user interacts with the particular object/character/hotspot.

But all this sounds really complex and like work of at least a few months once again I warn you not to underestimate it!

Cheers
Kumpel

[Slasher]

character speech bubbles are easily implemented with the  Module: Phylactere...

you can get it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wlo3s0wd9hng3ca/phylactere233.zip

[Kumpel]

slasher this module is for text speech. necroshey is aiming for graphical speech (no language but communication via kids friendly pictures)
The phylactere module wouldnt work with that, would it?

[Baron]

How often would different graphics be repeated in different sequences?  If I recall from Machinarium, not often (although it's been a while....).  If it were me I would just draw each bubble with graphics uniquely and have each sprite appear as a frame/view for a phantom character over the head of whoever was talking.  I don't see how you would save any time/effort by creating a dynamic DrawImage function unless there were significant numbers of combinations of the same graphics in different orders.

[necroshey]

Keep in mind that doing a game can take a lot more time than you seem to have. However, if you look at MAGS or even OROW, you'll also notice that it's possible to do it in a very short time.
So, the question here seems to be how fast you are doing BGs and how many you thinking about; if you going to use 1st or 3rd person perspective; how many NPCs, animations and such you thinking about.

Not sure any other engine will be better for this than AGS, so can't help you there. If you going for a 1st person view, than you save on a lot of animations just for the main character.
As for speech bubbles, try using the search function above . But here's one thread about it not too old even: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=52225.msg636514418#msg636514418

I'm going for something small (like 20-ish minutes of game play) just so I have something at least to give to the kids to play and maybe evaluate. I'm going for about 4-5 backgrounds, so not that much in terms of quantity. I don't know how to do the 1st person method that you suggested, although it does sound like it would be easier to work with. However, my main problem seems to be understanding this DrawImage function (where does it get the objects from ? Inventory ? etc.). I feel like if I manage to get these speech bubbles to pop up when you talk to someone I'm going to be sitting pretty for the rest of it.

P.S.
I'm kind of new to this so can I ask if there's a way that importing a sprite/image allows me to keep the black color ? Every time I import something it seems to cut out everything that's black and making it transparent, instead of just leaving the image as is. And the option to leave the image as is just makes the whole thing black, even though I've made it transparent.

[Cassiebsg]

1st is like what you get in FPS games... like Doom, Quake... or Myst is you want an adventure game to compare. Basically you never see the main character, you just watch the words thru the players eyes. If you go this way, you can just design a GUI to be your "bubble" fixed at one point and display your pictures on it, instead of text. Saves you the all bother to figure out where the character is and where the bubble will display.

I haven't used the DrawImage stuff yet, so try the manual or someone else will give you pointers.
Here's a game that uses speech bubbles with icons instead for text: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=52632.msg636520100#msg636520100
Play test it, and if that's what you going for, try asking WHAM for help.

About importing sprites: When you import "only one sprite" you'll get an option window. there you can choose from the roll down menu that you wish it "leave as is"... Think the default is set for "make transparent the first pixel to high left", so that's what's happening.
Importing more than one sprite at a time will use the last option you set it to. So import one, set it like you want, then you can "mass" import the rest.