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Hey, thanks! I only ever managed to finish making two AGS games (both free, they're on my homepage and buried deep in the finished games forum), but I have a LOT of unfinished AGS projects still sitting around, looking at me in that special way that makes you feel REALLY guilty.

I keep checking back in to see how AGS is progressing. The scripting was really cool and flexible back in 2006, and it's only gotten better. It's nice to see how the engine is progressing, and now there's multi platform support and more. It's awesome. Makes me wanna play with it again.

Hi! I made a new adventure game called Drowning Cross, but I'm a Unity3d boi now. I still want to share it with all o' you here because I spent a lot of time learning gamedev on these very pleasant and friendly AGS Forums.

The game is a weird mess about a dude looking for his boyfriend who goes missing after a car crash. It's like 30 rooms long and probably takes 2 hours to complete, depending on how used you are to adventure game style puzzles.





Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091960/Drowning_Cross/

itch.io: https://origamihero.itch.io/drowning-cross

You can also download it on http://www.origamihero.com or on the Google Play Store. It's free everywhere. Thanks for playing!

Oh hey, this looks really good! Using Unity's 2d polygon colliders for walkable areas and hotspots makes a lot of sense.

Learning to code in AGS many years ago really helped me with getting into other gamedev tools like Unity. Still gotta make a game with my own adventure game framework.

It's weird, but sometimes it feels like it's more fun to make a framework for a game instead of an actual game. Anyway! This rocks, keep at it!

Does it run on iPad? If so, I'll be sure to pass it on to my buddy, whom I introduced to adventure games with my little creation (see link below) -- and he did ask me about a possible port to iPad. Nifty little devices they are!

It runs in HTML5, which should in theory work on iStuff.

I'm really enjoying the game so far!  For now, I'm outside the heavy gate.  The graphics and story are endearing.  I'm particularly fond of your music.

Overall, nice job!

Good to hear you liked it so far!

Will you be willing to share the framework for GMS when you get it running how you like it?

That's a tough one. Customizing a game requires rewriting the framework code; for example each GUI adjustment or change requires a lot of messing with the code. Even adding more verbs would require some rewriting. I'm not sure if ever get it to a level that could easily be used by others. As it is you'd need decent GML knowledge.

Just finished it. It was short but pretty good!

- I was a bit confused that

Spoiler

Kijo wouldn't take his axe to cut the tree's root, but I didn't get stuck for too long.

[close]

- I found it odd how the map wasn't oriented with North on top but that was probably done for originality's sake.
- Graphics were amazing as usual!
- The music was pretty cool too!
- For such a short game, the characters were quite likable and had their personalities, though Kijo felt a bit emotionless.
- I really liked that the full screen mode scales the game's resolution to your desktop resolution, instead of the other way around. This is something AGS has been missing for ages and which should really be universal nowadays.

Thanks for the feedback! I think the map thing is just me not paying much attention. I wonder what it would take to get AGS to resize like this... it would be a nice feature.

I've been playing this game on the html5 version and it runs pretty well except for some music stutter. Also I could not run in on Firefox although Chrome runs it well.
I'm enjoying it very much, there's a nice old-school pace to it and the writing is pretty cool. Graphics as well.
Good job!
Does the free game maker version allows you to export to html5?

Here are the prices: http://www.yoyogames.com/studio HTML5 export isn't exactly cheap.

The music stutter is really weird. It's very browser dependant, and my music refuses to loop properly in HTML5. I don't know if it's GameMaker or perhaps something I did wrong.

Happy to hear you liked it! Keeping it short makes it easier to finish stuff. The dialogue that blocks input should already be skippable with left-clicks (like during the intro). The background speech can't be easily skipped, but doesn't block your input.

There's also a HTML5 version now. Should be playable on pretty much anything than can run HTML5:
http://www.origamihero.com/boney/

Hi! Hit Alt+Enter for fullscreen. You can also resize the window to your liking. Suppose I could make it an option on the main screen.

[Game Updates!]

Thanks for giving it a go, y'all!

Man Cedric and the Revolution and Reactor 9 are my favorite AGS games ever (along with Nelly Cootalot). Downloading this right NOW!

Thanks! Those games were fun to make. Yeah, Nelly is really awesome! I'm still impressed by the visual style.

What an awesome surprise! Super excited to play another adventure from you Bernie, this one looks tip top as always. Love your style, great colours

Thanks! Drawing these backgrounds is pretty fun. It's kind of relaxing and therapeutic, actually.

Looks yummy, downloading! And to think you made this in GameMaker! That's quite an achievement!

GameMaker has come a long way and it's gotten pretty decent for making all sorts of games. It's possible to make adventure games in pretty much any dev environment - the main obstacle will probably be the pathfinding. You'll notice that still is slightly unclean, but at least reliable.

Looking awesome! Downloading.

If you haven't played it yet, you may want to download it again if you don't mind. This is why:

Game Updates!
I updated the game a little. It's just some minor stuff. The size is down by 3 MB, the background speech doesn't remain on-screen when changing rooms and I fixed a few typos. Your save games will still work. Nothing game-breaking came up so far.

[Downloads]

Hello again AGS Forums! I'm not much on here these days, but since I've made a new adventure game I thought I'd share it. Suppose you could consider it a slightly late halloween title since it has zombies and stuff. It's freeware, no ads or anything. The android version is free of ads, too.

I still love making adventure games, but I'm using all sorts of tools now. I haven't finished an adventure game for ages and I was thinking about making this in AGS (I even did so partially), but I also wanted to create my own adventure framework. And this is the result:



Downloads
http://www.origamihero.com/boneywin.zip (Windows)
http://www.origamihero.com/boneyandro.zip (Android)
http://www.origamihero.com/boney/ (HTML5, should play in many Browsers)

Story Summary
There are times when a short, middle-aged lady has to do what she has to do. For example when a zombie apocalypse is happening. Undra the witch and Kijo the orc set out to stop evil and teach a kid a few lessons about stuff along the way - or not. Because kids these days. Really. Those jerks!

Other Stuff
This is actually a Gamemaker:Studio game. I made kind of a base for future adventure games. You could consider this sort of a test game. It's got a few minor cosmetic issues I may have to sort out but seems quite stable so far. It has a relatively simple interface with 3 icons. I made it extra-big so it can be played on phones. It's a medium-length game.

Let me know what you think, please!

The thing with excersize is that you actually need to keep it up for the rest of your life pretty much: If I lose weight going to the gym daily, then stopping would get me back to being fat! No?

If you don't excercise and stop watching your diet, it's chubby time again, as well. Going to the gym daily would be a bit overkill. 3 times a week usually is enough (depends on your training).

Muscular man boobs are pretty rad!

I used to have about 20kg / 44lbs too much, but a mixture of a healthy diet and regular excercise has kept me around my ideal weight for 8 years now. As far as I understand it, the advantage to add excercise into the mix is basically that more muscles consume more calories/energy, even if you just sit around. Thatt's also why bodybuilders have to eat so unbelievably much to keep their mass.

My main diet change was less calories in the evenings. Along with regular excercise, my weight steadily decreased to 72 kg / 159 lbs.

As for excercise - do it regularly until it becomes a part of your life. It's rough in the beginning, but it'll pay off.

Good luck, everybody~

Welcome back, GG! I also haven't been around for a long time, but it's good to be back. Hi again, everybody!

I like it so far, well done. Personally, I liked the Kyrandia interface. Two things - will thrown items stop at walls / non-walkables (looks like it from testing)? Can they ever go behind the GUI and become unclickable? Looks like it may depend on your room setup and placement of walkables.

Minor nitpicks: Took me a while to notice that the symbol in the middle of the combine menu is a button. The up button for the combine menu could be a bit bigger. The load arrow on the save menu was a bit hard to recognize.

Will I be able to use items on the character? I suppose he could become clickable when an item is selected.

Anyway! Well done! Love it.

Thanks! Adventure games are awesome and I will keep making them.

The color settings are a bit of a nightmare to deal with. I can't quite get the range of colors photoshop offers at runtime. I'm planning to include a few color modes with different contrasts, maybe even RGB and contrast sliders, if I can get that to work. It would make fiddling with colors so much easier!

Joseph: Spending $50 once for a commercial release isn't so bad. It's still cheaper than most other commercial options out there.

As for adventure games in GameMaker:Studio: It works really well. You can make a fully functional classic adventure game 'engine' in it. You can use the GM room editor to set up your rooms, place hotspots and obstacles the pathfinding takes into account, and more. All you need is some general programming experience.

Here's what you'd need to do by yourself in GM:S:

-A queue system for blocking functions, very much like in AGS (kind of a requirement in adventures to run sequences)
-Write a saving function to save room and character states (basically remembering object positions and visiblity, using ini_* functions works on all platforms)
-Dialog system (display & maybe dialog options)
-Inventory system (easy when using a ds_list variable)

A two-room demo made in GM:S (win exe, is a bit big due to bgm and lots of unused gfx): http://www.origamihero.com/boney.zip

If you need more info about GM:S, feel free to PM me. I'm afraid this may be a bit too off-topic for this thread.

Right you are! Thanks to everyone who's been supporting and working on AGS!

I've tested the Android build with a bunch of games, it's fast and solid. The only problem for a normal AGS user would be making a stand-alone release.

An easy way to bundle AGS games for Android as stand-alones would be the best thing ever. Thanks for all the work you're putting into this, Joseph.

DD, a relatively cheap commercial alternative would be GameMaker:Studio. It has built-in pathfinding, easy scripting and supports many platforms, including iOS and Android.

If you need straight geometry with proper perspective you could draw the lines with the mouse (tends to be easier), fill the areas with a solid color and add details and texturing with the tablet. Using a pressure-sensitive brush also helps.

To get used to your tablet you can try drawing all sorts of stuff, every day if you can. Characters, objects, plants... maybe even write something.

Excellent idea, thanks! I've played around with the colors a bit. Here's ther result:



I'm thinking of making an option in the menu to cylce through two or three color modes like that.

What I'm not sure about is how to implement the color reduction. I could do this for backgrounds only, but I can't do it for the sprites.

Thanks for the comments so far! I'm using the grey to make certain scenes cleaner, so some elements can be focused on or be 'backgrounded'.

The anti-aliasing is not real, that's me drawing the sprites at an offset with transparency to get that effect. The original sprites are actually pixelled without any anti aliasing, but they clash quite a bit with the backgrounds. My, er, anti-aliasing 'algorithm' can be made sharper by fiddling with the transparency levels. I'll play with that some more.

The dialog portraits alternate from left to right, that's why the face is flipped. I need to think of a solution here - maybe no left/right flipping or a second portrait drawn right. My left/right animations are basically always flipped, too. Might have to make seperate left/right views.

The reason this game has a big GUI is because it's meant to be playable on touch devices as well. I'm afraid it would get too fiddly with smaller icons. I'm also using my own adventure engine. That limits me a bit in some spots, but means easier multi-platform releases. Do you think this GUI can be made 'slimmer' but still have it work well enough on mobiles?

Hi! I think a bit of a perspective change could help the scene. Have you considered making the tree look more organic? You could also play around with the architecture of the balcony and the little walkway. I like the concept of the scene so far.

I can't comment on the watercoloring because I usually only do digital drawing.

I did a quick sketch of your scene with a lower horizon: