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I made a very simple story/puzzle generator once and used it for the game Tales of Otubania.
There were basically lists of possible locations, possible characters (e.g. occupations, creature types) and possible items (inventory items and objects in the room were in a single list iirc), also there are the usual verbs. Then a random chain of puzzles is generated, like "To win the game, you have to go to location A. To get to location A, you have to use item B with item C. To get item B, you have to talk to character D in location E." and so on.
This still needs a good amount of creative work to get a relatively coherent story and of course no graphics, programming and dialogue writing are done automatically, and (in contrast to what some review articles about the game said back then) the story does not change dynamically when you start over.

The story I implemented was a very silly one, but this could have been improved with small alterations in the generator, firstly by narrowing down the list to a specific setting, e.g. only medieval locations, items and creatures/occupations, secondly by having connections between them: item A can only be found in locations B or C, in location D you can have one or more of characters E, F and G and so on.

[- Skool Sukks! -]

Hi, wonderful people of the blue cup,

It's been a while since I've been posting and since I've been using AGS, my last short visit was in 2017, but I was mostly active around 2011/2012.
Ideas for new adventure games have come and gone since then, but knowing that I have not too much spare time beside my day job (which I like and thus like to put my energy in, too) and knowing that I wouldn't use all of that spare time for making games for a longer period of time, I've filed most of them under "Make it at some point in the distant future, if ever".
But some weeks ago, at last, I got two realistic ideas for shorter games, the first of which I fleshed out now and started to implement.

Having heard that it can be a motivation for commitment to tell others of your plans, I decided to start a GiP thread this time and share what I have for now. So without further ado I present to you:

- Skool Sukks! -

Robert is not quite the hardest working student of all time, but he always goes to great length when it comes to avoid learning anything at school.
Today he failed to prepare his homework for the n-th time, n being one time more than the teacher is willing to accept. If only Robert had an excuse to skip classes...

The game will have a play time of around one to two hours I guess.
I plan to have 7 rooms, 3 or 4 mini-game-y puzzles and 8 NPCs if you don't count the boring two or three classmates who are actually studying.
I want the final game to come with English and German language and full voice acting, because amateur voice acting is fun (at least it was in my first game) and I want to use my microphone more.

Screenshots

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/8636rdotvxta1iz/v2_scrnshot1.png[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/60utxjecqq699xl/v2_scrnshot4.png[/imgzoom]

(Question to the native speakers: What is a/the room called where teachers' materials/specimen/planetary models/maps and so on are stored?)

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ri1qgjs6x9e4avl/v2_scrnshot5.png[/imgzoom]

All the stick figures are of course placeholders.
The backgrounds will change too, I did these mock ups in Blender and will then paint over to get a pixel look, an example of the previous room is the following:

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sto4uz7tcz3qf3s/scrnshot4.png[/imgzoom]

I have to redo this one because as you can see the scaling is off compared to the character; but the art style will be the same because that's all I'm able to do.

Production

Story is 99% complete, puzzles are (in the game document) at around 80% finished.
After the story was almost done I started planning the locations, then made some adjustments to get rid of one or two locations with few, if any, interactions.
Since the adventure plays in a building, geometric accuracy was quite important if I wasn't going for a crazy warped comic look (and it would probably be more the case of just calling "the perspective is off" a comic look).
That's why I tried to build all the rooms in Blender first, just with all the details that are most important for the perspective drawing and some lighting set up. This also gave me the opportunity to move furniture and camera until I had a satisfactory 2d view of every room. I would have had a hard time drawing and redrawing them directly in 2d in so many iterations.
The next step now is to trace all the edges and paint over the surfaces with a limited palette of colours.
For now, I set up the rooms in AGS with the stand-in Blender renderings and added most of the hotspots, walkbehinds etc., so I'm able to test these and implement all the interaction and room change logic, dialogs and such.
When the backgrounds and other graphics are finished, I just have to adjust some coordinates and have to redo or refine the masks.
Also, as you may have guessed from the screenshots, currently I have only the down view of my hero, this will also be one of the next tasks.

Have you (or someone else) had any luck yet?

That's not a bug! (Unless with first screen you mean the title screen or if there are labelled exits that don't work)

You deen to give su points! we shlla unerdstand this.

Nice results!

What I really like about cat's icon bar is the colorwise separation of verb buttons and game control buttons. Maybe that could be incorporated in CeasarCub's #4, e.g by using the color scheme of #5's load game button for the four buttons on the right side. This color scheme is also a bit more toned done compared to the orange/red on blue, which underlines the fact that saving and quitting the game is not an important action, but playing it is what's important!

[German and English]

Hello folks! Long time no see.

I made another game, originally for a creativity contest in a small German online community not related to computer games.
The theme of the contest was set, the medium was not.

I just translated the game to English, so both German and English are available, German being the default language, so remember to adjust the language in winsetup.
So, without further ado, I present to you:

Quest for Jesus




Download

The main theme is - as the title suggests - Christian religion, but the matter is taken rather lightheartedly.
The game is neither meant to praise nor to criticise Christianity or religion in general, though in a satirical manner it does the first - it comes in form of a pretended educational game.
Nevertheless, most propagated ethical standpoints, except for some of the exaggerated ones, should be agreeable in their essence to people of all faith and lack of faith, at least if you replace the issuing almightiness with nature/evolution or your preferred divinity in charge.
I have no deep theologic knowledge, so a Christian scholar might cringe at the naive mixture of different Christian, biblical or ethical statements, but apart from that, offending people was no objective of the game.
On the same subject: The dialogues contain some light swearing/vulgar language (once or twice) as well as some sexual references, but mostly not too explicit.

I used the Lucas Arts style 9-verb GUI, though most of the verbs as well as the inventory system are not used. Didn't have too much planned out when I began with the game.
It is a very short game with easy puzzles and - due to some longer dialogues - roughly 15 minutes of playtime, give or take.

I hope you give it a try and enjoy!

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/9EMwU3R.png[/imgzoom]
Maw Na Liza. Eyes follow you across room. Also home.
Into your head.
All of them.

Aww, I love her flirty smile!

Much better! One more thing are ãÆ'³ and ソ. They are almost the same here.

In the pangram you only used ãÆ'³ in both places, I think. But still, in the small font they are not easy to tell apart and cat's suggestion sounds good.

I too have something in the making. I already cut some corners, but there's no way I can finish it in time.
Any chance for an extension?

Meh :/

Spoiler

[close]

Only using left/right/down is definitely the way to go. Two times I got forced to go up though, I should have paid more attention so that it couldn't have come to such a situation.
Also, I think it's bad to sum up to the left and right of your highest number (or highest number of a row), because you can never combine them and use the limited space to build two big sums instead of just one. I guess this would mean that you should try to use only down and right (OR left) to gather the big numbers in one corner? (it's not so easy, also impossible, but something along these lines)

What sound does the "English" elephant make? Like "bah", "moo" or "meow", what's the onomatopetic expression for this?

Some thoughts extending on Baron's post: What if the Best Game would automatically be not eligible for any other awards? Or if each game could only get one award, the one it most deserves, so to speak? It would afford a different voting system, where you essentially vote on all games in all categories they're in, so that when e.g. the game you vote for Best Music wins the Best Game award, you still vote on the rest of the games for Best Music.
Or maybe each game can only be nominated for one category in the first place, but then, when you don't win in that category, say, Best Game, you can't win anything else either.

Category-wise, I'd say Best Animations and Best Character Art could merge into something like Best Spriting. Best Dialog and Best Story one the other hand, to me are not too much overlapping, a game could have funny dialogs without having a great story to tell, and a truly immersive story can feature rather unoriginal dialog. Best SFX could go, IMO, I don't recall having paid that much attention to sound effects or thinking "Man, that's a game with outstanding sound effects!" - they still help making good games much better though.

Have some of you had this too? You roam the internet or the media, googling this and that, living your (online or offline) life outside the adventure gaming world, and suddenly you stumble across a mention of an AGS game or a fellow AGSer!

Just now I read "xyzzy" somewhere, and wondered what the meaning and origin of the term is. And then, reading through its Wikipedia entry, where I least expect it, it mentions Primordia!

Nah, they just confirm right in the beginning og the video that everything is real!

This is how fact-checking works, no?

Mandle, vote here!

Last few days before voting closes! Cast your preferences if you haven't already!

We now need to decide the date of party (i.e. when to held the Ceremony for the Awards)!
Follow this Doodle poll and let us know when it fits your busy schedule! All times are London time.

I'm excited for the ceremony

I too like this theme! A pity I just shortened my beard yesterday

I don't know if I will find the time to enter, but there are already growing some ideas out of my head! And since I'm just coming back to the forums from a rather long hiatus, a MAGS game would be good to get started again with our lovely engine...

A point for flat design in logos is that these logos can be printed on clothing, engraved, printed black and white et cetera without changing their appearance too much.

You should get rid of the registered trademark symbol anyways, assuming that you haven't actually registered it, because then the use of this symbol is illegal.
"you may only use the federal registration symbol '®' after the USPTO actually registers a mark" (http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682)
Registering a trademark is a bit pricy. That money can be spent better, I guess.

You're allowed to use the TM symbol, though. Still, it doesn't make your games look better or more professional...

>open and look inside all boxes in the maintenance room.
Emma said, "There should be at least an entire box left somewhere."