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Oh, I only now noticed that the demo has been released to the public
But dang... Really sad to hear it never took flight in the end. I really enjoyed working with all of you and was so disappointed when I had to leave the project, as this game was definitely one of my favorite projects to work on to date (great team, great game, good vibes all around). I would still love to see the game being made one way or another and take part in that, but I guess there's quite slim chances for that anymore

All the best to you guys for the future! I'm sure we'll see a lot of other great stuff in the years to come from the people involved

And now for one last run through the streets of Glassrock Bay...
Wish me luck!

- Santtu

One last bump by announcing that I decided to take a second look at the graphics and pretty much remade all of it. I also officially put the game up, so feel free to download it from my site @ http://www.evergrim.com/ and drop a line if you feel like commenting (please do).

This is what the game looks like after the revisit:

Hm, those redist links aren't working for me...

Sorry,  I don't know why I hadn't tested them. Should work now.


Edit: I also uploaded a new version with 20 levels and a few minor changes. Available here.

...what are you making a portfolio for?

My school is ending soonish, so I'm putting together a portfolio of games focusing on programming. The grand scheme involves getting into game development on a professional level at some point.

I put the redistributables up here:
x32: www.evergrim.com/vcredist/vcredist_x86.exe
x64: www.evergrim.com/vcredist/vcredist_x64.exe


About the static linking... There are some legal limitations when static linking SDL, which is the main library I'm using with the game, so I'll have to look into that a bit more.


Edit: links fixed

Does this happen with the game and the editor?

A quick solution might be to install the VC++ Runtime Redistributable
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=5555

But I'll look into this and try to find a more robust solution asap.


Edit: here's the x64 version of the redistributable: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=14632

Also thanks for the interest guys

[Mr. Bouncemore]

Hey guys!

This post isn't really about AGS or adventure games in general, but as I know the community here works great, I'll just post this here. I have pretty much finished the latest piece for my portfolio and I'd like to hear a few comments and let you maybe even create a few levels of your own that I could include in the actual release that's coming up in a few days or so, if someone is interested.

So what is it? It's a game called Mr. Bouncemore! (yes, that's programmer art, sry...) [Download ~6mb]




The goal of the game is to throw Mr. Bouncemore around and collect all those colored targets. When he hits a wall he will change color and you will have to try to match the color of our hero and the target to get the maximum amount of points. You can collect targets with the wrong color, but matching the colors gets you far more points. Also every throw costs points, so you need to think them through. Get enough points to beat the minimum score of the level to advance to the next one.

In it's current state the game is a bit... limited and I have a lot of ideas to make it more interesting, but at the moment I just need to get it in my portfolio. I'll see later if I add some extra stuff to it.

Here's a quick guide to the keys:
Hold left mouse button: Drag Mr. Bouncemore around and release to throw him.*
Right mouse button: Reset level
Key M: Toggle music on/off
Key S: Toggle sound effects on/off
ESC: Quit to menu (level select)

*When you drag him he will turn gray and needs to hit a wall before he can collect targets.


Make some levels?


There's a level editor included and a instruction text file to go with it and I'd very much like to see what any of you might come up with it. I know the pieces you have to work with here are a bit limited, but that just adds to the challange, eh? Post your levels here or mail them to me at wersuus@hotmail.com (you need to send the "levels.lvl" file). I'll add you to the credits if I end up using some levels from you.


So thanks for trying the game and commenting (and making levels)!


Download the game and level editor here! ~6mb

Thanks Cuiki

I have now uploaded a v1.1 of the first chapter. It basically just makes some of the harder puzzles a bit more humane and fixes some small things with the animations. It's available here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1346

Also, just to let you know, I'm now working on the seconds chapter and it's looking pretty good, but it will still be a while before I'll be making a in-production thread for it.

Ouch, that's pretty rough! But seriously, you should've seen this coming. Never let a woman control a motor vehicle, that's just common sense 


Anyway, hope you guys get well soon. Tell Tamara my best wishes

I don't think there's a clean solution for that. One thing you could do is make a variable for it and check it in repeatedly_execute_always().

...a function for running a dialogue option...

Sorry, no help from here, but I would also be interested in this.

Not much actual feedback to give at the moment (getting kind of late...), but just wanted to say good luck with this. I'm sure JD has the potential to go commercial and seeing the game made in "HD" will be interesting.

Give it a go...

Yeah, seems to be working nicely. Thanks 

Are you still working on this? I'm using a custom say function, so this seems like something that I should be using, but I do have a few suggestions:

- Add settings so that the defaul option-off after every line can be turned off (I want to turn off options quite rarely, so it kinda sucks)
- Add an option to include the dialog option texts on to the script side. For example I want the character to say the options, but as I'm using a custom Say() function, I have to copy-paste these by hand.

Otherwise seems like a really neat program, so thanks

Yeah, me four (?). I don't think time limits are good for puzzle games. I prefer taking the time to think things through.

Congrats! 2 years is a long time on internet standards, so you can be proud 

I have to say those reviews were quite enjoyable. Though I did have some trouble understanding the Creg (?) parts, but that might be just my incompetence with english. Also, it seems like you are doing these at a pretty fast pace (or at least the uploads are just couple of days apart). That's nice, but there's a high risk of you getting bored with the project and quitting altogether, so you might wanna think of setting up an actual release schedule if you are making this a long term project.

Anyway, I did subscribe to you, so keep 'em coming 



Also, feel free to review the first chapter of Warning: Fragile!

There's actually a tutorial on doing a particle engine in AGS, but unfortunately it seems a bit outdated. Pretty much the whole part about drawing on the screen is obsolete, but a lot of the basic structure should be fine.
http://www.barnettcollege.com/dkhtut.htm

But on general programming I can recommend the Stanford programming courses that can be found on youtube. There's three courses, each around 20h of video, and they start from the very basics (in java) and get quite far to memory management in C, some assembly etc. If you are still learning basic things like functions and loops, it doesn't really matter which of the major programming language you use to learn those, as they are pretty much the same in all of them.

So try this (Programming Methodology, 27 videos): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8
It's the basics of java, but it doesn't really go much outside the very basics of programming in general, so by watching this you won't learn much you couldn't use in any other language. Also if you just pick up a 1000 page book on C and start reading without any prior knowledge of programming, you will most likely be very confused. I did this with C++ when I was like 10 and I had no idea what was going on  :

The other two courses are...
Programming Abstractions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMzH3tfP6f8
Programming Paradigms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8jOj7diA0

I'd say this is very interesting. Although AGS dodges one bullet by not forcing people to install the game, it still needs to be downloaded and for some that is too much. Especially to try a game of such niche market.

It would be great to see this kind of thing truly coming to life.

I think framesets, while maybe "out of fashion" as it were, still are very valid if used right.  In this case they are used right.

They aren't out of fashion, they are outdated. For example this site is not accessible with my phone (Nokia XpressMusic, which has a pretty good browser) just because it uses frames. If you just think "well, use a real computer", how about people who use aided browsers. For example people who have problems with their eyesight and use a special browser that reads the text on the screen won't be able to use this site.

Also if I want to send the link to the food menus to a friend, I can't. I have to send the main link and tell him where to click. But hey, I can just print the menu page and give it to my friend when I see him, right? Nope. Okay, well I'll just bookmark that page and show it to my friend when he comes over. No sorry, frames prevent that too. Frames are also unfriendly to search engines, which isn't a good thing for businesses.

In very rare cases frames can provide something that other ways would struggle with, but in these cases it should be accepted that you are damaging the usability of the site. Btw, these special cases are not public websites. In this case (http://www.theholliesfarmshop.co.uk) we are talking about something that is very simple to do in other ways, so there is no real need for frames and thus they shouldn't be used.