Jimmy The Troublemaker (2011-03-21 update. Final bug fix hopefully)

[Mouth for war]

This is the first game I've ever done with AGS...and maybe the last. I've been working on this by myself for 1.5 year and I really hope you'll like this game so the time I've spent on it hasn't been a waste


Poor Jimmy is about to have a bad day. His grandfather just passed away and Jimmy arrives to the attic of his grandfathers house to clean it up. He finds a spellbook in a locked chest and Jimmy thinks that magic is just something that belongs in fairy tales. Just to prove how stupid magic is he reads a spell just for fun and is magically transfered to the land of Xandia where the evil witch Josephine has gone mad with power. Will Jimmy save the world or will Josephine reign in terror forever? Why don't you find out?

This is a cartoonadventure set in a fantasyworld. There are some adult material, profanities, a little cartoon nudity stuff, drug use (not by Jimmy though) etc.  

The game contains 73 backgrounds and some of the music is made by me and the rest is taken from The games factory. There are quite a lot of different characters to interact with and...ah what the hell...It's an adventuregame, you know the drill. No need for this info







Here's the download link as well. Thank you Peder for hosting the game and for some scripting help whenever I needed help Feel free to send me a message if you're stuck in the game or if you find any bugs etc. PLEASE PLAY IT!!!! haha

UPDATED 2011-03-21

http://www.agsarchives.com/gamecard/1127/jimmy-the-troublemaker.html

[LRH]

Looks pretty awesome, I'll give it a shot, maybe even let's play it if it isn't super super long.

[Mouth for war]

No it's not superlong It takes me about 1.5 hour to play it if I only do the stuff you have to do to complete the game and nothing else (like talking to people you don't have to. Inspecting all hotspots etc.) Medium length I guess

[arj0n]

gonna check this one out, looks like cool:D

[Igor Hardy]

Congrats on finishing such ambitious project!

[Mouth for war]

Thank you Ahh I just realised I forgot to delete the savegames I've been using when testing the game. They don't work now though. If you try to restore them, the game will exit. Just open up the savegame and delete them

[arj0n]

there are no savegames included.

[Mouth for war]

Really? strange...they were present when I ran the compiled game oh well..no problems then

[Ryan Timothy B]

With AGS, the saved games should be in your my documents folder in a folder called My Saved Games. So the saved games wouldn't be in the zip.

Good to see you finally finishing this game. I'll definitely have to give it a play through soon.

[bicilotti]

Playing and, even if humorous adventures are not my cup of tea, I'm having big fun!

Congrats on finishing it!

[Peder 🚀]

Thank you Peder for hosting the game and for some scripting help whenever I needed help

My pleasure!
Congrats on releasing it!
I will have to try and get some time to play it properly one day .

[kajlin]

This one looks nice,  downloading! 

[CosmoQueen]

Wow that's a long time to be working on a game! Congrats for finally getting it done! I'll play it this weekend

[Ozzie]

Really sounds like you finished some ambitious project here, so congrats!
Just played it a bit and I have to say that I really love the graphics and animations. They look clean, lively and colourful, and the animations are well done and a joy to look at. Love the intro sequence for that matter!

Otherwise the game is not my cup of tea, though. I think I heard all variations of fourth wall breaking jokes before, but anyway, this game seems to have all of them in one place, which may be in an overdose for some.
The premise is not the most original, but who cares, the execution matters anyway. Yet, our protagonist is just "Oh well, what do we do now?", with the immediate goal  being to get out of this mess. The main character doesn't seem to surprised by the situation, and shows just a lack of interest. I don't know if the premise of a real world character being teleported into a fairytale world is used inventively later on, for that I didn't play nearly long enough.
The descriptions are a bit demoralizing. Like "That's a stupid idea" when I try to pick some berries from a bush or all the variations of "Just another tree/rock/bush". I dunno, locations are meant to be explored, so when I hear that, the fun of exploring wanes a bit.
Yet, I liked the idea of searching for spots to dig with the shovel. Strictly speaking, this is just pixel hunting. But on the other hand, when you know what you're looking for it can be a fun mechanic, like all those hidden object games prove.

Well, that was a lot of criticism, but for the price it was alright I guess. Just kidding.
I would love to see such art in another game, maybe you might make another one?

[Mouth for war]

Thank you for your criticism. It's always good to hear that. I understand what you mean with things like "that's a stupid idea" That doesn't mean I think you guys are stupid though I just wanted to give the character a bit of an attitudeproblem.

Sometimes when I've been working on this game I've just typed things in the script for Jimmy to say without thinking so much about them. Maybe I should have thought more about that. But when people are trying to talk to a rock for example...they almost deserve a funny reply This was my first game like I said and it has been a real experience and I'd love to make another game. This was more or less for practise
I value your opinions and I think that will help me in the future.

[Alun]

Haven't had time to play much of the game yet (I work as a teacher, and this has been finals week for the summer semester, so I've been busy), but from what I've played so far it looks like you've put a lot of work into it, and I'm looking forward to playing the rest.

I think you may do yourself a disservice with too much self-deprecation; your protagonist goes on a bit too much about how terrible the graphics are, et cetera.  The graphics may not quite be LucasArts quality, but they're actually quite good for an amateur adventure; I know that your having your protagonist insult the game so much may be meant humorously, or to forestall criticism and give a knowing wink to the player, but I don't think that telling the audience your game is bad is necessarily such a good idea.

Aside from that, the only real criticism I have so far is that some of the room exits are kind of small; it sometimes seemed a bit too sticky getting a character to just the right spot to move into the next room.  This wasn't terrible -- I've seen a lot worse -- but just something you may want to keep in mind for your next game.  Bigger, easier to use exits are good.

Other than that, I just have a few technical linguistic niggles I'd like to point out that you may want to fix if you end up making a second release (I don't really think these are spoilers, but I'll stick them behind a spoiler tag anyway, just in case):

Spoiler

"Crystal ball" should be two words, not "crystalball"
The word is spelled "ridiculous", not "ridicolous" (in the description of the diploma)

[close]

Anyway, just pointing out a few minor details that could possibly use improvement.  Overall, though, I'd say so far it seems you've done an admirable job, especially given that this is your first adventure.  As I said, I'm looking forward to finding time to playing the rest.

[Mouth for war]

Thank you as well. Yeah the so called jokes about the graphics is a little like you said to forestall criticism but I am aware that I'm not a good artist even though the graphics for Jimmy turned out ok but that's as good as it gets hehe. I've probably spelled a few things wrong here or there or didn't use the proper grammar. I'm swedish so my inglish mej nott bi purfekt. Hope you like the rest of the game

[Alun]

OK, finally had a chance to finish playing the game.  Cute, and a lot of different NPCs to react with that each had their own personalities.  A couple of interesting plot twists.  Some of the humor was a little crude for my taste, but that's just a matter of personal preference; other people may feel differently.  Overall, though, it was well done, with some good puzzles.  For someone who claims to be bad with graphics (and claims over and over and over to be bad with graphics...), you put in a lot of animations, which is a good thing.  And the bit about extra places to dig that weren't necessary for the game's solution but yielded random objects or supplementary info was a good one, I think.

There were a few things I thought could have stood for improvement; again, I don't want to be too critical, and I only mention these as things to keep in mind for your next game -- overall, I thought it was well done, so I hope it doesn't come across too much as I'm dwelling on the negative.  But anyway...

There was a lot of dead space in this game.  A heck of a lot of rooms with nothing to do in them.  I don't really think that was necessary; a tighter game with fewer rooms might have been better, overall -- walking around the map would be less tedious, for one thing.  And in some cases, it wasn't obvious that there was nothing to do; there were things that looked like they might be relevant but turned out never to do anything.  That was true, for that matter, even in many of the rooms that did have some things to do; they were chock full of extra scenery that looked like it should have been important but wasn't -- locked chests that the player never found the keys to, doors that didn't go anywhere, useful-looking objects Jimmy refuses to pick up, and so on.  A few red herrings can add a little challenge to the game, but this made for far too many distractions, and made the game more frustrating than it may have needed to be at times.

Most of the puzzles, as I said, were good, but there were one or two that I thought were kind of iffy.  One puzzle seemed like just a guessing game; if there were any clues, I missed them, and I got it only by trying every object:

Spoiler

Giving the piggy bank to Benny.  Was there ever any indication he wanted a piggy bank before you tried giving it to him?  For that matter, there was no real indication that the player should buy the piggy bank in the first place, except that it gave a different message from everything else in the store when you interact with it.  And then painting the piggy bank red... well, I only tried that because, again, giving the (unpainted) piggy bank to Benny yielded a different reaction than anything else, so it was clear I was on the right track and only needed a little something extra... but there was no obvious indication a priori that the piggy bank should have been red.  All in all, as I said, this puzzle seemed more like just a guessing game than anything logical.

[close]

And then, a minor matter, but one of the puzzles involved some serious pixel-hunting:

Spoiler

the tape.  True, there was nothing else useful in that room, so the player is arguably motivated to search it extra hard, but still, that seemed a trifle unfair

[close]

.

Oh, that reminds me... for that matter, speaking of pixel hunting, many of the hotspots could have stood to be larger.  It was often very difficult to find the right spot to click on an object, and the fact that the cursors didn't show their active points made it even worse.  It's okay if the hotspot is larger than the object -- it's better (in my opinion, anyway) to make the object easy to click on, even if that means that even clicking slightly off the object still works.  Along similar lines, it wasn't always obvious where the player could or could not walk, and where the exits to the rooms were.

(One other puzzle I found slightly annoying was the

Spoiler

ghost's game

[close]

.  But that may be just me.)

Anyway, again, overall I thought it was very well done, especially for your first game.  I'm only pointing out a few places where I thought there was room for improvement so you can keep them in mind for your next game.  (And, of course, all this is just my opinion, so others may well disagree.)

[david]

a bug encountered- I suppose

after visiting the gnomes' cemetery I became a small sized guy, is it okay?
how to get my normal size back?
since that time I cannot enter the gnomes' cemetery anymore

I went to the cemetery, then  went up to the gnome cemetery and then to the right  to another cemetery with a huge table and trees and gravestones around. Since that time I have become a little tiny Jimmy gnome guy

[Mouth for war]

Hmm that's weird...never encountered that. Maybe I put 2 walkable areas next to each other. You're supposed to walk up the hill again and return to the original size.