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You were absolutely right. He's an adult and needs to take responsibility. Just because he's living with Dad again doesn't make him a kid.

Set the Background Colour Number to 16 instead of 0 and it will be black rather than transparent. It's not obvious!

You need to use Character.SpeechView

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Character_functions_and_properties#Character.SpeechView

While a lot of effort has clearly been put it, the whole thing still comes across as very amateurish.

Main things that bothered me:

• Almost no sound.
• Typos in almost every line of dialogue. This needs to be proof-read and corrected if you want people to take it seriously enough to pay for.
• The dialogue is also very stilted with everyone referring to you by your full name all the time.  If you set up two variables for the player's first and last names instead of one then people could more naturally call him by his first name (in person) or his surname (in the media).
  
• Lots of "buttons" in the computer interface don't work. I don't mean the ones that are disabled in the demo, I mean the ones that are there just for show (such as most of the ones on the "social media" page). If the buttons that work and the buttons that don't work look the same, how am I supposed to know which to click other than by frustrating trial and error?  It would be nice if there was an animation and sound effect to go with the click when it does work, as well.

As for the price, I think £5 would be a bit steep, never mind £10. Look at the Wadget Eye titles and the prices they sell for, then compare their production quality to your own.  Their most expensive titles are about £6.25 and of far higher standard than your game, so why would someone pay you £10?

All that being said, there is a good idea here and indications of an understanding of how to make AGS do things beyond basic point & click. A lot more polish is needed for this to look professional but if you keep at it you may eventually get there.

The Game Maker: Studio logo flashes up momentarily so that would appear to be the engine in question.

Good stuff! Most of the voices were distinct enough that I don't think they would be obviously by the same person if used in a game.

In the GUI properties you can set the GUI's background colour and border colour to "0" which makes them transparent, that sounds like what you want; the GUI "box" will be invisible but the buttons etc on it won't be.

The player character is a dying king without an heir. He must try to keep himself alive long enough to find a worthy heir among his subjects.

Clean #2 for me.

AGS has a built in function of animating backgrounds through up to 5 frames, and it doesn't slow down the engine.  You can then draw as many or as few hotspots as you need, which seems to address the problem. Is there a reason you want the smoke to be an additional object on top of the background instead of just including it in the background animation?

Nice little game, I like the visual style which manages to make it not seem like an AGS game at all because it doesn't look like most others.

One problem I had:

Spoiler

I can't pick up the coin when it first drops into the screen.  It's hard to point at the coin anyway because it's so small so I tried several times thinking I was missing the hotspot.  However, I found that if I left the screen and then returned to it, I could pick the coin up no problem.

I re-played the game to see if the same thing happened and it did: I couldn't pick up the coin at all unless I left the screen and returned, and there was no reason for me to do that other than sheer frustration.

[close]

Apart from that glitch it was good.

Yes PS1 titles will work on the slimline PS2, it's the slimline PS3 that has backwards compatibility for PS2 taken out that you're probably thinking of. Note that you need a PS1 memory card to save PS1 games, though, you can't save to a PS2 card so you need to switch out memory cards when playing different generations of game.

The PS2 titles I've loved and kept are the Splinter Cell series (4 games), the Tomb Raider series (3 games), Freedom Fighters, XIII, and Silent Hill 2. Personally I found Ico to be tedious and Shadow of the Colossus to be frustratingly difficult to the point of quitting but they are beautiful, visionary games.

Thanks for the prompt, by the time I've downloaded and played a game I'm usually so far from the game page that it doesn't occur to me to rate them. I've just rated four games and left comments, will try to be more proactive in future.

Try option B and test it a lot. You should be able to tweak the timers so that it's close enough to not be distracting or add silence to the beginning of the audio so it synchs up.

If you want the screen to be a single, non-scrolling background that fills the entire window then, yes, you would need an exactly-sized image.

If you want the background to scroll you need an image bigger than the resolution of the game, for example if you want a room that scrolls horizontally so that it's two screens' worth of background it needs to be twice as wide (2400x800). AGS will treat any "too big" background image as a scrolling image, it won't resize it to be smaller to fit the resolution of the game.

AGS also won't resize "too small" images for you or centre them in the window; using a too-small image results in an error. You could make a "too small" image in your paint program and give it a black border to boost its dimensions to 1200x800 if you wanted, though, to give the impression of a smaller room in the high resolution game.

I hope that makes sense.  My suggestion would actually be to make a few test rooms with simple backgrounds and just make a character walk around in them so you can be confident of how it works before committing yourself to creating all that art.

On the one hand it's a genre convention that an adventure game protagonist will grab anything not nailed down and shove it straight in their pants so to devotees of these games it's not much of an issue. I think someone who is less accustomed to that sort of convention is more inclined to look at it as illogical behaviour and therefore something that breaks immersion.

If it's something that bothers you as a writer of plot, it should be relatively easy to provide reasons for the character to be carrying the object. If the character must be carrying a stone to solve a puzzle in scene D, give them a different, logical reason to acquire one in scene A. That way, when they get to scene D the stone is a thing they are already carrying for one "legitimate", explained purpose which can now be re-purposed to a secondary function: the scene D puzzle.

I think the problem is that, with this sort of "collect every item" behaviour being a convention, some creators don't even think about how illogical it really is and therefore don't try to find a way to make it more logical or at least less obvious.

Yes, it is from an updated "old" template but the gui was made from scratch in the latest version of AGS.  I suppose the thing to do, then, is to make a new blank template game and copy all the scripts etc. over to solve the problem.

UPDATE: I did exactly that, recreated the game by copy-pasting the scripts to a new blank game. This highlighted a bunch of obsolete code that needed to be replaced which I eventually did and now all is working as it should have done.  I didn't realise that updating an old template to a newer version of AGS could cause so much trouble and will be more careful in future. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Khris.

Just to wrap this up: I have found that the problem was the health bar itself; for some reason the image for a button with a width of 100 needs to be 200 pixels wide.  So the first 100 points removed were not visible on the bar because the image was only 100 wide and changed only when health fell below 50.

I don't know why the bar image has to be 200 wide but now that I've made it that wide, everything else is working as it should, even without Game.DoOnceOnly.

Sorry for the confusion, and thanks again for the help.

That's still causing the same outcome: the object disappears but the health doesn't change.

EDIT: Ah, yes it seems to sort of be working but the health modifier doesn't seem to be changing the health bar length enough.  I'll see if I can figure that out, thanks for your help!

Could you be more specific? Where do I need to apply that function?  Applying it to either the health change or the object line seems to produce the same result as not using it.