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So I lost my game to a weird "root element missing" error. The game won't open. I have a backup but it's missing a complex dialog I was just working on. I can see where the room scripts and such are in the the corrupted game's file folders, but I haven't uncovered where the dialogs are hiding yet.

I can redo the dialog but I'd like save a few hours if possible and just copy and paste the dialog into my backup.

I've been trying out your game, though I keep getting stuck fairly early. Also I'm having a hard time switching between objects in use mode. It keeps getting stuck on the first object I pick to use.

I do have to say, the aesthetics of the game are amazing.

Right, not all people want installers for a simple AGS game, easier to just zip and extract, but you can provide both.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=54920.new#new

I started a hint thread. Can you help me out? I don't get it.

OK, I posted in the hint thread. I did make that part of the game a little too confusing. I hopefully fixed it with a quick update.

Spoiler

The perspective of the directions is from when you're facing and talking to the purple flower. I made a quick update to the game to make that much more clear.
The actual directions are left, right, right (the purple was right in consistently remembering this), down, up, right, right. That should take you where you need to go. Sorry about that. I didn't have hardly any beta testers, so it's possible I developed a few blind spots in how the game works. The maze in particular has been a problem.

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The install file is in a .zip now. Were you worried I was distributing a virus?

Who... me?

Greetings, AGS!

I finally finished Sea Monster X, an old school adventure game and my second stab at a video game: DOWNLOAD HERE

It's free, at least. I'm not sure if it's a ton of fun to play, but it's not something I'm embarrassed of having made. I think it was a respectable effort for a single person. Hopefully it'll feel like more than one person worked on it.

A little advertising spiel from the game page:

But why... why did we care so much about Sea Monster X? Anybody that played the demo that was released in select Regina, Saskatchewan bars back in the 1980s can tell you why: It's a funny, one-of-a-kind game with an endearing story. The graphics were truly unparalleled for the time period, a forerunner to the popular pixel art style employed in many modern games. And the soundtrack - now remastered in glorious HD -  is a real toe-tapper.

What are you waiting for? It's free... unless you want to pay for it. Experience a supernatural beach town and find out what you're made of. Interact with dolphins and discover buried treasure.

I love strong Americana themes in video games. You've got my vote on Steam! There's something about a protagonist in a varsity jacket. You know it's gonna be interesting.

Stoked to hear the work of the band you got to do the soundtrack. I'm a big soundtrack guy, and I really enjoy when traditional songwriters tackle video game soundtracks. I was huge, HUGE fan of Jim Guthrie's work on Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. And to see that evolve into his work on Planet Coaster was something else, though I guess that soundtrack was actually a collaboration with somebody named JJ Ipsen.

Wow. The talent on his forum is incredible. This looks like it's right out of the golden age of late '90s adventure games, the spiritual successor to games like Grim Fandango and Curse of Monkey Island. It's even got that great sense of humor that made such games so endearing.

I'm excited for this one!

Thanks again for the comments everybody. I actually liked the "Critics' Lounge" vibe. I need all the help I can get.

Anyway, now for a small update... I made a web site for the game. The game is essentially in the "release candidate" stage now, and I added an installer, did bug/typo fixes and all that fun jazz. I also made some changes to the fog - such as adding motion - but it's still a bunch of rectangles. It's an essential part of the game's Atari aesthetic for me. I could be making a mistake, but I'll live with that.

The site still needs a Youtube video. Hopefully I can knock that out this weekend.

Off topic, but the walk speed shown in the video isn't really realistic, because your character is taking tiny steps. A man's stride length is typically almost 90% of his height. Admittedly that's on flat, solid ground â€" it might be less in desert sand.

OK... you got me. My character's animations are far from realistic, hehe. I just wanted to capture that walking is a really slow way to travel. I always enjoyed waiting for Guybrush Threepwood to amble his way across the screen. It always felt right.

I'm not trying to be defensive here. Just kinda stating my view. I definitely appreciate the feedback.

Mandle: Thanks for the compliment. When you say draw the fog, what do you mean? Like more detailed?

I had a quick play of the first bit..

* Mouse image cursors could do with being bigger and look more like they are supposed to be.
* The player walks to slow.
* The fog could be well improved.

But it's in production...so just keep working on it..

Thanks for the feedback slasher and many thanks for the screenshots Gurok!

Looks like I'll have to increase the walking speed. That's a common complaint already. I like the idea of having a character have a realistic  walk speed (after all walking sucks for getting around in real life, hence cars), but it annoys players. You're basically running or speed walking in most games. At least it keeps our protagonists fit!

I'm sorry. I messed up. I'm not going to have access to an actual PC for a few days so I won't be able to add screen shots until then. You can delete this topic. I shouldn't have wasted anyone's time.

So I've been working on Sea Monster X by myself for quite awhile. Only a few people have played it. I'm not really sure if it's any good. The idea behind the game was for it to be like a long episode of a show like Gravity Falls that you could actually play. The puzzles are supposed to be fairly simple and intuitive, though one near the end might be a bit too convoluted. We'll find out if you play the game, I guess.

Sea Monster X is basically finished, except for any bugs/mistakes/typos I might've missed (and I'm sure those exist). I would like to add a little more content, but first I want to see if I even have something enjoyable on my hands. Otherwise maybe I'll cut my losses and stick with what I already made, which again... is essentially a complete game.

OK, I'd say it's 90% complete in all aspects.

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/LzfXE6P.png[/imgzoom]
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/FGJMSh9.png[/imgzoom]

DOWNLOAD: https://ufile.io/8bc48

The only reason it's probably bothering you that much, is because you're used to no borders at all (or at least next to no borders) thanks to your 8:5 aspect ratio.

That being said, I think Khris's suggestion of cutting it down to 320x180 would solve your problem.

Hmm... maybe you should all join the 8:5 revolution! I'm telling you, there's a lot more room on the screens out here!

Ok, well... I tried 320X180 and the results were MUCH better. The borders are a tad bigger than I'd like at 8:5, but still within reason. And 16:9 looks pretty good, though I'm not getting an exact fit at 1366x768, which believe it or not is the most common resolution today thanks to cheapo laptops (I've seen it's usage estimated at anywhere from 15-35% of the market). My goal was just to get the game to display as well as LISA (an RPG on Steam made with RPG Maker), which wasn't even a great goal to have. Now I'm satisfied. Next time I'll know better, but this salvages all the work I put in.

The standard resolution nowadays is 1920x1080, which means your game would run at 1600x1000. That's a subtle border at the top and bottom, and a big one on the sides (I wouldn't mind at all, I usually play 320 games in a window, at x3 or x4).

However, if you decreased your vertical res to 180, you could keep all your assets and the game would exactly fit into 1080p at x6.

Thanks. I'll try out 320x180 and see how it goes. I don't have a 1920x1080 monitor to test it on, sadly, but I'll take your word for it. Good thing there's a big sky in a lot of the rooms. It gives me something to cut.

So yep, I've got those aspect ratio blues, my friends.

So for some reason I made my game's resolution 320 X 200, which I'm now fearing was a big mistake. See, I'm making a "retro" game and it actually looks great when I run it on my desktop at full screen with max round multiplier. The borders are minimal and the graphics are sharp. The trouble, however, is that my desktop has a weird 8:5 aspect ratio (1440 X 900). When I run my game at full screen on a monitor with a 16:9 ratio using the max round multiplier and the nearest-neighbor filter, the border around the game is HUGE, to the extant that it'd probably annoy your typical gamer (though it's still readable and playable, at least on the 15.6" monitor I tested it on).

I mean, I can easily make the original The Binding of Isaac take up more screen real estate on 16:9 monitor than what I'm getting with max round multiplier - and that's not a good sign for me. I've tried every possible setting and haven't come up with a good solution. DirectDraw is too buggy on modern computers for me to want to use the Hqx filter (plus my game's aesthetic is highly reliant on sharp pixel graphics). Stretch to fit screen stretches and squeezes pixels in weird ways. Native resolution is blurry.

Oddly enough, I've had the most success running the game full screen at 1024 X 768. It takes up a decent amount of screen space on both my 8:5 and 16:9 monitors. And the blurriness - while still present - is at least minimized.

I'm starting to think that 1024 X 768 is the poison I'll have to drink at this point, sans completely redoing the graphics. And I wouldn't even know what resolution is better anyway. It's all really bummed me out, because I've put a ton of work into this game (art, story, original music, etc.), and I honestly think it's shaping up OK outside of this resolution issue.

So I guess what I'm wondering is... ("FINALLY!" you scream) is there maybe an alternative solution? When I ran the game at full screen at the native resolution in AGS Draconion for example, I was able to use that engine's scanline filter to make the blurriness less of an issue while also adding a nice retro touch. But that was a DirectDraw filter, which rules it out for me. Plus, I would've liked to change the appearance of the scanlines a bit, but I'm just a glorified script kiddie/monkey. I can do things that are explained well in the manual or in the demo of a module, but that's about it.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. Hoping for a miracle, I guess.

I'd tried that. It didn't work for me. So something funky must be going on over on my end. I noticed that I don't get yellow highlights by default anymore, either. It seems to be that pink gamma color (this was before I moved it over to the beta). I'm not really sure why. Who knows what I did to cause that .

Well anyway, I don't mean to turn this into a help thread. I appreciate it. I'll figure it out one way or another.

First of all, I'd like to thank you and everyone else for their hard work. I've been really impressed with what I've been able to get done with Adventure Game Studio, especially considering I'm a rube with only HTML/CSS and rudimentary JavaScript experience (i.e., I don't really have a clue about actual coding). By searching this forum, I've been able to implement all sorts of stuff quickly. Without this place, I'd have been constantly  banging my head on the wall out of frustration, desperately trying to figure out this wonderful beast we call AGS.

Instead, I've got a decent hipster 8 bit adventure game coming along quite nicely.

This update has addressed two small issues I was having with 3.3.5, which was: #1) Very slight fuzziness when the game was stretched to run at full screen (barely noticeable, and the new resolution options have fixed that), and #2) Getting the dialog options to have the highlight color I wanted without changing how the default text looked in the display and Sierra-style speech GUIs.

Well, almost on #2: In my infinite idiocy, I can't figure out where to put game.dialog_options_highlight_color. As always, I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. So if you do have spare time to help this "helpessfool," I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

Wow. It works now. Thanks! You're the best.

My user name really checked out this time. A "helpless fool." I guess I dove in too fast. I thought if you knew what script to write, the game would just process it. Good to know. I assumed the properties pane was just there to help.

Boy, with a careless attitude like mine, how will I ever create a complete game with this program? I'd better get it together!