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Just out of curiosity: Why the hate for Phil Fish? Was it his endless droning on about his former partner or just his personality?

He's also come under some fire for some comments he made about Japanese games "just sucking" and being "joyless husks".

Lol, when Jack Wall spoke up, is it weird I'd ask for Wall's autograph instead of Robyn's? 

I think in this case you'd be able to have your cake and eat it too.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/189817/Video_The_Myst_Classic_Postmortem_from_GDC_2013.php

Disagreements about whether or not "Myst" is the right kind of adventure game aside, there is an interesting thought on the design of the puzzles. Specifically, that Robyn felt the best kinds of puzzles in the game were the more organic and functional ones which appeared natural to the world. Also during the QA at the end someone asks about the Lucas Arts/Sierra style adventure games and how they might have influenced "Myst". Might that have been anyone from this community?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDSk7O5GOqY

This is geared more towards kids, but it is a good introduction to lots of basic art techniques like foreshortening (which is the technique Snarky used to make it look like the circle was sitting flat on the floor). Part way through the video you will also see that he chooses a dominant light source which then informs where his shadows go. If we was using highlights, the location of that dominant light would also inform where the highlights would go.

(Disclaimer: I generally use Photoshop not Gimp, but I believe they have a lot of similar features in this regard. However, my terminology might be off.)

You might consider making two mask layers, one for the areas that need to be lit and another for the shadows, and then applying brightness/contrast changes to get the effect you want.

Alternatively, you could take the areas you want in shadow, double them up on a new layer and then blend using color burn. Similarly, for the areas you want lighter, double them up and then blend using color dodge. Then, change to opacity on the burn/dodge layers to get the effect you want. To ramp up the obscuring effect that bright light or deep shadows have, you can also apply a blur filter to the burn/dodge layers.

If you want to find some tutorials about this, look for tutorials about balancing the exposure levels in a photo or removing shadows from a photo. Basically, you are looking to do the exact opposite but many of the same techniques would work (it will just require a lot of tinkering with sliders).

If you are looking to get exposure to people who otherwise might not see your work (not just provide a central place to download it), lots of developers (and movie producers and writers) have found torrent sites to be sources of plenty of traffic. Torrent sites love free content, more so if it is free and legal content. That said, this is not an ideal solution for distribution to an established audience.

I have three fingers and can't count to four.

What am I?

Drunk?

I was looking to provide an example of how GetLocationType can be used in conjunction with cursor modes to set up conditionals. Maybe a bad assumption on my part, but I didn't expect  him to copy and paste code into his project without modifying it or understanding it at all.

But yes, in that example code left click does all the walking and interacting but right click does all the looking.

Paying this one forward because I asked a similar question recently.

Code: ags

else if (button == eMouseLeft)  // Left click
  {
    if(GetLocationType(mouse.x, mouse.y) == eLocationNothing) // If not over anything clickable, walk
    {
      ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeWalkto);
    }
    else
    {
      if(mouse.Mode == eModeUseinv)
      {
        ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeUseinv);  // Use inventory item
      }
      else
      {
        ProcessClick(mouse.x,mouse.y, eModeInteract); // Interact with object/char/hotspot
      }
    }
  }
  else if (button == eMouseRight) // right-click, so look or cancel inv. item
  {
    if(mouse.Mode == eModeUseinv)
    {
      mouse.Mode = eModeInteract;
    }
    else
    {
      ProcessClick(mouse.x,mouse.y, eModeLookat);
    }
  }

The key to this whole thing (and Khris's as well) is GetLocationType(mouse.x, mouse.y) which gets called when you click. It looks at the coordinate provided and returns one of these: eLocationCharacter, eLocationHotspot, eLocationObject, eLocationNothing. The code above (provided to me by Snarky originally) also includes item usage, another feature you probably want with your UI.

Not a MAGS participant yet but I will once I'm more comfortable with AGS...

RoN could always be a MAGS theme. That could certainly jumpstart RoN participation as Wolf is suggesting.

I made a framework in flash for making a game like Myst during a gamejam. One of the issues I ran into was being able to see what was clickable or not (no tooltips, and I couldn't change the pointer icon like Myst did). My solution at the time was to add a GUI button that highlights all clickable things on the screen for about a second. I'm rather new to AGS, but I suppose having clickable objects animate (suppose they display their name) for a second in response to a GUI button could work.

[Supposition]

What were we talking about?

How many sales commercial AGS games garner.  Some vague figures have been bandied about, and others are freely available with some polite requests via PM.  What I'm interested in, though, is how many sales commercial AGS games ought to make.

Supposition: It is possible for the next Angry Birds ( > 1 billion downloads) to be an adventure game.  Based on the porting work of various AGSers (including Joseph DiPerla, JJS and possibly something going on behind the scenes at Wadjet Eye vis à  vis iOS, among others), this could feasibly even be an AGS adventure game. 

Query: What is it that AGS games have to do to really break out into the main stream?  And don't give me that first-person 3D environment crap, 'cause the genre has already been there.  What does an enterprising AGSer have to do to bring a 2.5D graphical adventure to the masses?   

This is an interesting question. The big things that made Angry Birds a success seemed to be an instantly recognizable and cute art style, a game loop that roughly approximates "user input with no time limit" -> "see the results" and a constant stream of new content for fans that auto-updates painlessly through iTunes. AGS games could do all of those things (it has the second one in the bag already) however the "constant new content" advantage has been significantly diminished. Back in the day, doing an update to your game would put you back on the "new games" list. This is something Rovio took major advantage of by releasing packs of levels quite often (their Angry Birds Seasons did so monthly).

The next big cultural icon game will likely come up through different means, but more or less this is how Angry Birds got to where it is. I suppose if someone had a fairly large and talented writing staff and could continuously 45-60 minutes of gameplay to a single title every month (basically episodic content on steroids) or so you might be able to replicate the success with word-of-mouth sales. However, I think there would still be an inordinate amount of luck involved in that.

1 in 2*pi*r if we know the distance based on  Khris' s math. If we don't know the distance, but we have an upper bound that we call m, the odds become 1 in Integral(2*pi*r,r,0,m)/(m). Fittingly, the limit of the odds as m approaches infinity is 0.

Best community on the internet... but I suppose you all knew that already. 

Just as a quick follow up the possible returns for GetLocationType(x,y) are only eLocationNothing, eLocationObject, eLocationCharacter or eLocationHotspot. At least, that is all I am seeing with autocomplete in the editor. Are there any other possibilities like for regions or walkbehinds (I'll probably end up modifying your code a bit).

Also, I assume that GetLocationType(x,y) will return eLocationCharacter based on either a simple rectangle or pixel perfect representation of the character as opposed to based on cCharacter.x and cCharacter.y (thus making it nearly impossible to actually click on a character).

Human interface guidelines for the older iPads suggested that buttons be no less than 45 pixels square. I think a lot of what Vince Twelve said about inventory items applies to your finger as well, that is, the exact touch point is going to be vague and so making the point of interaction as friendly as possible is advisable.

If you haven't played Machinarium, that has a pretty good interface on tablets.

Mixamo currently has a free 3D animation for Gangnam Style. If you have exceptionally high production values (3d models for sprites), that's a way you could get it into your game

Brilliant. That's even easier than I expected. Thank you very much.

I've finally fulfilled a promise to myself to learn AGS (made so many years ago after playing 5 Days a Stranger). While learning the various ins and outs of the editor, I happened upon Vince Twelve's 'Why Your Game is Broken' entry on the wiki about how the player interacts with the game. Specifically, he notes that most interactions and verbs are fairly useless because most clickable areas have only a small selection of useful options. That is, there are very few items that you can both "use" and "talk to". He makes a pretty compelling argument for a two button interface. That is, left button walks/interacts and the right button looks (similar to what has been done in any number of games like The Blackwell Legacy or Resonance)

I went ahead and managed to implement something that is 60% of the way there with this in the on_mouse_click function of the global script:

Code: AGS

if (button == eMouseLeft) { 
   ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeWalkto);
 } else if (button == eMouseRight){
   ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeLookat);
 }

The obvious problem is that with this set up the player will walk to places and look at things, but it lacks the ability to interact. Changing "eModeWalkto" in the ProcessClick to "eModeInteract" fixes the ability to interact, but breaks the ability for the player to arbitrarily walk in the walkable areas. I can think of certain workarounds (for instance, making a hotspot out of the walkable areas and then adding a "player.Walk(mouse.X, mouse.Y)") but they all seem rather inefficient, time consuming, prone to errors or otherwise just the "wrong way" to do things.

Is there a better way I should be handling this to get the effect I'm intending?

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I don't have a degree in game design or programming (rather I have a MS in Math), but I managed to get a job offer from Gameloft after sending in a resume through gamasutra's job boards. Granted, you probably *don't* want to work for Gameloft given past and recent controversies, but jobs in the game industry are just like any other job: First, prove that you can do the job they are looking to fill through your cover letter and resume. Second, prove that you are someone they can work with in the interview.