Carnival - Low-Res Folk Horror, demo out now!

[Yanek_Crispbread]

Download on Itch.io

Story:

After agreeing to take on what seems like a mundane story about the unique city and its planned road bridge, journalist James Maynard finds himself uncovering a disturbing underbelly to the local customs, and a hideous core to the notion of Venetian pride.

Not even the might of Mussolini can truly kill the Carnival.

Carnival is an atmospheric horror point-&-click set in a time of European upheaval, where the past and the future collide.

Developed by Beyond Booleans, creator of Abscission, winner of three AGS awards.

The finished game will feature:

- A slow-burn narrative filled with creeping dread
- Developing relationships with NPCs
- Inventory and dialogue puzzles with multiple solutions
- Multiple endings


Current status of the developement is:

Graphics: 30%
Scripting: 30%
Dialog: 80%
Music and Sound: 30%

[TheFrighter]

Nice! Looks like Laura Hunt's If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers! And it's a ggod thing, I love this kind of adventures! 
It will be a commercial game?

_

[Yanek_Crispbread]

Yes, I will release it on Steam when it's done

[Rik_Vargard]

Looking great! 

[Yanek_Crispbread]

Looking great! 

Thank you!

[eri0o]

Hey this is one of my favorite cities! Looks lovely, will wait for it!

[Stupot]

This looks really good. Keep the updates coming.

[Yanek_Crispbread]

At the moment I am having considerable issues with a very strange bug, which is turning the audio to white noise on restoring any game... I may have to disable saving for the demo until I can fix it, but the issue doesn't seem to be the coding. Very curious! I may have to rebuild it from scratch :/

[Crimson Wizard]

At the moment I am having considerable issues with a very strange bug, which is turning the audio to white noise on restoring any game... I may have to disable saving for the demo until I can fix it, but the issue doesn't seem to be the coding. Very curious! I may have to rebuild it from scratch :/

This is quite strange, but somewhat similar problem has been reported a while ago:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/advanced-technical-forum/problems-with-ags-and-pc-sound/
And I think i heard about "white noise" specifically elsewhere, but forgot where or who mentioned that...
EDIT: ah, it was probably you, under another nickname, on AGS Discord.

Which version of AGS is game is made with? Which "audio driver" do you have selected in winsetup?
Does this happen on other computers, for any other people, or only on your computer?
Is it possible to download the demo if I like to observe and investigate the issue?

PS. There's definitely no need to rebuild whole game from scratch, as this is likely an issue with the engine or very particular sound files, and not your game script (game script alone cannot cause this).

[MIGGO]

Wow, the low-res rendition of Venice is just something else! This looks great.

I hope the white noise bug gets solved!

[Yanek_Crispbread]

At the moment I am having considerable issues with a very strange bug, which is turning the audio to white noise on restoring any game... I may have to disable saving for the demo until I can fix it, but the issue doesn't seem to be the coding. Very curious! I may have to rebuild it from scratch :/

This is quite strange, but somewhat similar problem has been reported a while ago:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/advanced-technical-forum/problems-with-ags-and-pc-sound/
And I think i heard about "white noise" specifically elsewhere, but forgot where or who mentioned that...
EDIT: ah, it was probably you, under another nickname, on AGS Discord.

Which version of AGS is game is made with? Which "audio driver" do you have selected in winsetup?
Does this happen on other computers, for any other people, or only on your computer?
Is it possible to download the demo if I like to observe and investigate the issue?

PS. There's definitely no need to rebuild whole game from scratch, as this is likely an issue with the engine or very particular sound files, and not your game script (game script alone cannot cause this).

Yes, it was me under a different name! I am using the latest (3.6.0) - one of my playtesters didn't have an issue but then another (who did a YouTube letsplay) did have the same one. On Winsetup the audio driver was set to 'Default'. I tried changing to Directsound and it did the same.

I also did a test and it seemed that the save corrupted after a certain point on the Y axis, after the character walked a certain distance to the right! Or that may have been random. Sometimes there isn't an issue at all!

By all means, you can download from here and test - https://beyondbooleans.itch.io/carnival - this would be much appreciated!

Even if we don't find out why and I do need to start again, I appreciate the help.

[Crimson Wizard]

Alright, I found the culprit. It's the wav file called aDay1. Apparently, it fails to "seek" properly (and engine seeks the sound to certain position after restoring a save), and starts playing garbage.

This is very easy to test: play this sound and then call Seek:

Code: ags

AudioChannel *x = aDay1.Play();
if (x != null)
    x.Seek(1000); // any number really

I must investigate this further, as it's likely an issue with the sound library that we're using. It either has a mistake, or does not entirely support particular formats or encodings.

As for this game, I recommend trying OGG format instead. AGS had multiple issues with WAV in the past, so OGG may be safer. Also, it has better compression, so filesize will likely get smaller.

[Yanek_Crispbread]

Alright, I found the culprit. It's the wav file called aDay1. Apparently, it fails to "seek" properly (and engine seeks the sound to certain position after restoring a save), and starts playing garbage.

This is very easy to test: play this sound and then call Seek:

Code: ags

AudioChannel *x = aDay1.Play();
if (x != null)
    x.Seek(1000); // any number really

I must investigate this further, as it's likely an issue with the sound library that we're using. It either has a mistake, or does not entirely support particular formats or encodings.

As for this game, I recommend trying OGG format instead. AGS had multiple issues with WAV in the past, so OGG may be safer. Also, it has better compression, so filesize will likely get smaller.

Oh wow! You are a stone cold genius, thank you so much. To be honest I always use MP3 but I missed converting this somehow, usually if I have accidentally used a WAV file it just doesn't play, thank you I will change. You are awesome! Do you have any games out on Steam or Itch.io I can buy to repay you?

[Crimson Wizard]

Oh wow! You are a stone cold genius, thank you so much. To be honest I always use MP3 but I missed converting this somehow, usually if I have accidentally used a WAV file it just doesn't play, thank you I will change.

I think that in a situation like this it would be a good idea to test commonly used sounds one by one: start them save/restore, etc, until you hit one that causes issues. Somehow I did not guess to suggest this myself earlier.

Something else I'd like to ask; when reading the file's media info I found its original author and title. Does this WAV come directly from the author's website, or did you create it by downloading and converting an original file?
If you converted it, could you tell which software and encoding parameters did you use, or perhaps create a smaller clip out of it using same encoding?
The reason why I ask is because I wanted to send this file for analysis to the developers of the sound library which we use, but the existing wav is quite big (over 60 MB), which may be not convenient, and also am concerned about legal issues.

Do you have any games out on Steam or Itch.io I can buy to repay you?

Thank you, but no, I don't make games myself.

[Yanek_Crispbread]

The artist is Dark Fantasy Studios - the music is royalty free following purchase (which I did). I haven't converted it, there are MP3s included in the pack but I chose the WAV by mistake. I can send you the MP3 for analysis - I can ask the artist first as we do email each other.

[agentbauer]

This looks great and the demo is very interesting.
If you need any bugtesters, count me in.
Will you translate the game in other languages, maybe german?