Murphy's Salvage: Beta

[Mantra of Doom]

I know those of you in the Crit Lounge have seen a couple of these before. I just now feel that I have a fairly good handle on this and am slowly filling in the code to my first game...

Murphy's Salvage

The game follows the crew of the salvage ship Buther... the oldest ship in Murphy's fleet. The main character is Wombat Rowe, and she's the person that actually goes outside the ship to cut up and collect the salvage. That being said, she's the lowest crew member on the totem pole and does many menial tasks around the ship. She's also never been to Earth as it was accidentally terraformed into a parking lot before she was born.

This is Wombat in her orderly room, checking out her posters. It also shows the inventory and setting button.


Down in the cargo bay with Ted the robot. Yes, I realize Ted looks like a locker, but that's his back.


The bunk of the only other full human onboard. I plan to add a few more floating objects to the mix... things that move more when you click them once they stop.


Updated Progress:

Backgrounds 100%
Characters 100%
Animation 100% - Just need to finish up some special animations for certain rooms.
Story 100% - Now that everything is set up, I'm going to go back and rewrite things to flow better.
Scripting 40% - Slow going, but its a learning experience.
Sound/Music 2% - I found a few sound effects that I can use. Not sure about music though.

[Rd27]

looks simple but still somehow nice .

Good luck for this!

BTW: I know this is not the critics lounge, but I think that the main character should have atleast somekind of shadow. This seems to be ignored in 95% in AGS-games.

[m0ds]

Aftger watching Ghost Ship & Sahara recently I'm up for playing this! And I'd be happy to do some music for it too. There aren't many games about salvagers (like there are films) so the best of luck to you!

[Mantra of Doom]

Thanks for the comments guys. I'll see about that shadow... is there a way to make part of the character semi transparent? I'm sure I'll figure it out.

I don't have any ideas about what sort of music, but the song that's playing repeatedly in my head is "Welcome Back/Space Girl" and "Mission" By the Phenomenauts... a punk/rockabilly band in space. But Red Dwarf also comes to mind. I'll try to get a bit more of the game together and then I'll see about the music.

[Darth Mandarb]

I'll see about that shadow... is there a way to make part of the character semi transparent? I'm sure I'll figure it out.

There are several ways to go about this (check the tech forums as it's been posted in there several times!)

I like the sound/concept of this game!  Good luck with it!

[neon]

Looks nice, I would really like to see the main character's animation.

[Mantra of Doom]

Updated the screens and progress notes in the first post. I originally wanted the character to float around but couldn't figure out how to animate that so I gave her magnetic boots. I'll probably research that for the second game

I'm still working on the bridge and the engine room, and have just unlocked the secrets of dialog. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to animate climbing a ladder?

Still no shadows yet, but I'm looking into it. I want to see that the basic stuff works before I add that part.

[CosmoQueen]

Looks really nice! I look forward to playing it!

[Mantra of Doom]

Hello all... again, I'd like to thank everyone here for all the great help with my first game. I have a couple of screenshots... including the new hallway with lighting effects! It makes the room look like a long corridor instead of a box. Hooray for lighting effects.



And here's the engine room, the engine happily animates... because you can't have low-grade scifi without something animating in the background.




The score so far:

• Backgrounds are finished
• I only need a couple of incidental animations :pick up, and however the heck one can climb up and down a ladder. Might need to make that a cutscene.
• I only need to do some tweaking on GUI design.
• NPC animations will be finished today.

But all this progress and of course there will be some setbacks... Since I have everything set up, I realize that I can't continue with the puzzles I had planned. Some of them will work, but I have to totally rethink the rest. I think the basic story will stay the same (Salvage worker must make sure that the ship makes it to the job so she can get paid) but how it progresses needs to be rethought. 

At this point, I will take some suggestions... because starting next week, I won't have all this wonderful spare time to work on this. Stupid job.

[CosmoQueen]

I love the new screenshots! They look really sharp

[Mantra of Doom]

I've worked out the script issues, and just have to draw up the rest of the inventory items and script the puzzles. I'd post another screenshot, but I want to keep things a surprise... so instead I just changed the screens in the first post to what they look like with the new interface.

I plan to have the game ready for testing before I go to sleep on Sunday (ambitious, I know, but a goal might keep me on track better) so if anyone would like to be a tester, please let me know either by replying to this thread or sending me a PM. I have a couple of non-ags people testing this but I would like some more experienced testers as well.

Again, thanks to all of you here, for reading this and replying. I hope you guys are having as much fun as I am (except for when I get a scripting error... I hate those).

[Mantra of Doom]

Okay, so I lied. Lesson learned though, don't go mucking about in the inner-workings of the code without making a backup.

I believe that I have to rip out all of the interaction scripts and start over again... as every time I fix one thing, three more things break.

For all of you waiting for an update, here are some cute space rats.

[Matti]

For all of you waiting for an update, here are some cute space rats.

Mmhhh... that'll be a nice meal to pass the time with..

[Mantra of Doom]

Okay dudes and ladies, We're almost down to the wire. Mods wrote some fine, fine tracks for this quirky little game. Things are coming together and aside from a pesky little animation glitch and adding a bit more eye candy, this game is almost done.

I would love it very much if I had a couple more people testing it though.

the latest beta is here: http://www.asmedleydesigns.com/game/MurphyBeta1-3.RAR

The more bugs found now the better... as I'd like to have the final version nice and smooth.

[The Suitor]

Okay a beta! I'll try to make your game crash, if you don't mind, I have a little spare time.

[Inkoddi]

About one second into the game, I spotted a bug. Right clicking on things makes the astronaut girl or whoever she is first try to use them and THEN the look message appears. I thought I was doing something wrong, but the readme.txt told me that right click is just supposed to be look, not use and look. Hurrah for broken interfaces!

I suggest running the game at least once to see if it works before uploading.

Oh well, at least left click does what it should do though.

EDIT:

And crash happens when trying to right click on the vent in Eric's room, the one with floaty things!

Code: ags

An internal error has occurred. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, contact Chris Jones.
(ACI version 3.02.1025)

Error: prepare_script: error -18 (no such function in script) trying to run 'vent3_Look'   (Room 3)

Another edit:

Oooh, another scripting error. If you click the "Riddle me this, Flyborg..." dialog option after talking to Delilah about everything, the game also crashes with this error message (Fix this by making the "Right, um..." dialog option not turn itself off when selected):

Code: ags

An error has occurred. Please contact the game author for support, as this
is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS.
(ACI version 3.02.1025)

Error: DoDialog: all options have been turned off

Edit YET again:
A similar thing happens with Eric, except that the game just gets stuck in an infinite wait loop.

The ventilation shaft next to Ted the locker imitating robot gives contradicting use and look messages. The use message says there's nothing down there and the look message says there is something down there.

And the footstep sound is reaaaally loud compared to everything else.

I suggest testing the game for yourself a couple of times, making sure that it works and is at least stable and completable before releasing a beta version.

[Mantra of Doom]

Thanks for all the input guys. All my testing, I didn't even notice until after the testers got to it that the left click was broken. I'm at work now and can't really test it until later, but I think I've worked out where the problem is.

It's one of those things where I know how it's supposed to work, and I've run through the game so many times, I miss things... it's like trying to proofread your own work, sometimes other people will always catch something you won't even think twice about.

I've already resolved the vent cover disappearing issue and the dialog crashing.

The contradictions with the vents was leftover code from an earlier version of that puzzle and has been fixed.

I've also made the ladder climb a cutscene and skippable, as someone mentioned that as well.

I've also got a long list of other things to fix and rework, including the confusing save/load system. 

I'll also try to see about that stupid footstep noise... it is insanely loud. I'll see if I can soften it somehow for the next version.

EDIT: I tried to fix as much as I can, including the Save and Load GUI. I ended up scrapping what I had and following the tutorial on the Wiki, and it seems to work now. I will be replacing the default buttons to custom ones later, but I'd like to know if this system works better.

The click interaction has been fixed! I had one word wrong in the on_mouse_click code and it threw it all off.

I've also dealt with the inventory items overlapping, and now the scroll on the inventory is actually useful and not for show. Again, the more you can break my game, the more I can fix it... wait... hmm... that doesn't sound right.

Anyway, I'll probably have a new version soon, as there are still some things that might lead to a walking dead, which is bad.