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And a small suggestion:

Spoiler

In the popcorn puzzle, you have to run three times until the chimney top falls, but there was no visual hint for that. It would help if every time the top would be a little more swinging to the side or something like that so we'd see a difference.

[close]

Hm, it does that already, but I guess it's pretty subtle.

I think I found a minor bug, however:

Spoiler

If you die on the nails on the right-hand side, the pigeon still flies to the top of the roof after exploding!

[close]

Thanks! I'll make note of that for a small bugfix.

Congrats! Really excellent short game. Fun, very polished and well animated.

Not really a complaint, but I would never have beaten the hamburger man without checking the in-game hints. I guess it's difficult, but fair though.

Also, finding the hotspots was a nightmare before I actually noticed the question mark button after several deaths. I completely missed the fence and the mouse hole hotspots for instance. Nevertheless having different areas with different interaction possibilities is ultimately a feature that works very well within this game.

Yeah, I feel the controls/UI are the one thing that's lacking polish. I'm very aware of that and I might rebuild the game in flash one day if I figure out how to make the control scheme clearer (suggestions? ).

Damn nice execution, maybe this will finally shut up the "AGS = 90's pixel mush" crowd.
If you haven't tried this, download it now!

Thanks! The thing is, though, that on my notebook, it runs really badly and slow, so AGS is not really that well-equipped for hi-rez stuff.

hey! I like 90's pixel mush!

Me two! My next game is going to be much mushier. I really want to try different art styles. (but I also want to make something that runs well in AGS on older machines)

[glorious Hint button]

Hi there. This game is a little bit on the tricky side, I admit. That's why I implemented the glorious Hint button at the bottom. To my absolute amazement, it didn't work in the first build!! It is now fixed in v 1.0.1 and will hopefully give you a smoother experience should you get stuck.

Hey people! I thank for your kind words and am glad you enjoyed the game. You all get an imaginary award from me for solving (or trying to) the game in tenacious mode, which was on because...

Was the "Hint" arrow supposed to do something? When I clicked on it, the pigeon just walked a bit, so the click went through the arrow I think.

Yeah, that's a bug, thanks for bringing that to my attention. It is supposed to answer some questions that arise from the somewhat unusual gameplay. I am very sorry for the confusion. It kind of slipped into the final build, I don't know how...
Anyway, it is fixed in the new build 1.0.1.  

[Dinner for Pigeons]

OMG, I can't believe it's finished! It seems so small but it took all these months to make. It's called:

Dinner for Pigeons



What is this?
A freeware, snack-size adventure game with candy-colored cartoon graphics </foodreferences> and a gentle arcade slant (basically meaning there's a health bar and you can die...)

The story?
Close your eyes. Imagine you are a pigeon. You are a hungry pigeon. Fortunately, these are the streets of plenty. So fly over to the diner and steal an evening meal from under people's noses. Try not to get killed in the process. That is this game.

Download download download:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1421

Update: New version 1.0.2 is up that fixes the Hint arrow & a bunch of other stuff.

Many thanks to Ben304 for being an inspiration and testing the game and especially to Justin aka Dos4/GW who wrote the beautiful music and also did some testing! More thanks to the people on this forum who helped me with my AGS issues.

Note:
The game is in 1024x768 with a bunch of animations going on. Only late into the development did I realize that this is not what AGS was made for. Thus, the game might run jittery and sluggish on older machines. I am sorry.

Haven't finished it yet but really enjoyed the beginning. The reviews you got are totally amazing. Congratulations! Since it came out, I've been waiting for a post mortem blog post. Will we get one? I love reading those.

Hm, it seems that I got it to work the second way, struct definition and instance declaration in one script file. I don't get why it wouldn't work the other way, as that seems equally viable, but who am I to complain? Thanks again for your help, Khris!

The import line always goes into the header of the script where the instance is declared, not the struct itself. Just move it to Instancer.ash and you're set.

Thanks for your reply! That's what I do, though...

Code: ags

//Thing.ash
  struct Thing {
    import function DoIt();
  };

Code: ags

//Instancer.asc
  Thing mything;
  export mything;

Code: ags

//Instancer.ash
  import Thing mything;

Code: ags

//GlobalScript.asc
  mything.DoIt();

The GlobalScript is what causes the error then.

Also, this makes it kinda pointless to have two different scripts in the first place; I'd recommend using a single one with struct definitions and imports in the header and global var declarations and functions in the main part.

Can I create a script that declares a struct in it's header and then instances the struct in the script body and then imports that instance in the header? That would indeed be simpler. I tried that and got another error so I thought no go?

I hope someone can help me. Here's the situation:
I have Thing.ash that defines the struct Thing with a bunch of methods in it.
Then below that in the Scripts list, I have Instancer.asc which declares and exports a Thing-instance called mything. This is then imported in Instancer.ash.
This is all jolly. But GlobalScript.asc apparently can't find mything and I get an unresolved import error. I don't understand why this doesn't work.

Oh, what have we here? If it isn't a lovely lovely thing!   I don't have enough time to really play it right now. I started it today and the graphics are grade-a, commercial level amazing. The animations I've seen are beautiful and fluid. The radio station idea is great. The music is great. And so on. Well, the only thing that I found difficult so far was the voices on the radio. Couldn't play when there was talking or singing because I am utterly multi-tasking retarded, so I had to turn the sound off. Excited to play more soon!

Thanks for the feedback, everybody, and the steps there, Sledgy. I'm working on the folder issue. The problem is the following: models reference the textures they need. In the 3d program the artist can apply a texture to a model (or a part of it). The engine will read that link, load the texture and apply it in-game. So far, so good. However, 3ds Max can apparently only store absolute paths to textures and not relative ones. So it stores the texture as for example "C:\whatever folder\textures\1.jpg" and not relative to the folder where the model is in ie. just "textures\1.jpg".

I think what you need to do is go into Preferences > Files > check Convert Local Files Paths to Relative

Still working. Added a screenshot of the menu screen. I'm also looking for someone to collaborate on music/sounds. If you've got some spare time and think you can whip up a fitting tune, please PM me. Thanks.

This was great! Nice puzzles but dammit, you've got to be kidding me! That is the end? I was ready to play lots and lots more of it. Very inspiring.

Hm, that doesn't work for me. When I use your code, the Animate command starts loop B at frame 0 again instead of at frame 14.

Hello. I have a slight problem and I hope its easily remedied. I have a character with two animations that I want to switch between. So say animation A is playing, but at frame 13 something happens and I want to now play animation B starting from frame 14. Please tell me this is possible.

Edit: This can occur at any frame, so splitting up the animations at a certain point is not an option.

Well, there is this slight black smoke-like shade underneath the skull that's supposed to be very subtle. On the left, you can see the sharp edge where the pixels begin to have some opacity.

[Dinner For Pigeons]

I hereby officially commit myself to finishing and releasing the game I've (hardly) been working on for the last 3 months. It is a freeware one-room game called Dinner For Pigeons. You help a pigeon scour for food around a burger restaurant.

This is your unlikely hero:


Here's a sample of an NPC animation:


The menu screen:


And here's a very early screenshot of the scenery, which is much further progressed by now, but I don't want to spoil everything:


I'm putting a lot of effort into the graphics, so it has been going quite slow. But I've been motivated lately and made some good progress, especially in scripting. Here is the current status rundown:

Animation:  90%
Graphics:  90%
Scripting:  80%
Sound:  0%
Music:   0%

Here's what I get when two GUI Buttons with an alpha-channel image overlap as opposed to how it should look in a Photoshop mock-up:


The overlapping area is drawn much too dark. This is in Final 5 with AdditiveOpacity.

I think I got it to work now with the help of your repeatedly_execute() tip. I had used repeatedly_execute_always() and had run into thread-troubles. Anyway, I think it's solved. Thank you.

Hy. I really need help figuring this out. What would be the best approach to do the following:

1. The player moves (blocking) onto a specific spot and becomes idle.
2. An NPC then starts animating in the background.
3. If the NPC-animation reaches a specific frame, user loses control + player starts animating another sequence.
4. A function in the GlobalScript is executed.
5. This function calls a Room function to change something in the background image.
6. Both NPC and player play their animations simultaneously.
7. When the player-animation is done, the player performs another blocking move (NPC may or may not still be animating).
8. The player reaches its destination, the user gets the control back.

Thanks thanks thanks. The threads drive me mad.