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[Trailer]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J3ov5TUfxY
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/
itch.io: https://oharock.itch.io/the-beard-in-the-mirror

Description

"Don't you remember me? After all we've been through..."

What do you want to be when you grow up? Paul thought his life would be set after college, but at 22 he's toiling away in a job he doesn't like and coming home to an empty apartment every night. He doesn't know who he is, where he's going, or how he fits into his world.

But then on one dark and stormy night, a mysterious woman appears to him, and everything changes...

The Beard in the Mirror is a throwback to when adventure games came in giant cardboard boxes and if you didn't have the hintbook, that was it; you were stuck on that puzzle for the rest of your life. It's a labor of love from a husband-and-wife team from two different worlds (she's a Sierra fangirl, and he's a LucasArts diehard) who have been working on it together since before they even started dating.

KEY FEATURES
- A classic point-and-click adventure for the modern age!
- Sincere yet lighthearted story with magic, danger, romance, and adventure
- Death lurking around every corner! (Although you'll never lose any progress.)
- Retro points system to help you track your progress, and see if you've missed any secrets...
- Just like the games you used to play on your dad's weird friend's computer



Thanks again to all the patient AGSers who've answered our questions and provided support over the decade-plus we've been working on this one!

Okay, so here's the situation:

- In this part of the game, you're in a dungeon. If you walk in front of one of the cells, someone reaches out and kills you.
- Concurrently, you have an NPC following you around (using the Character.FollowCharacter function).
- If she walks in front of the jail cell, nobody kills her. This is good! I don't want anybody to kill her!
- However, this feels weird, story-wise. Either she should get killed, or she should be smart enough not to walk in front of the cell. It doesn't make sense that she's able to wander in front of the cell unscathed.

...So what I'd like to do is prevent her from wandering in front of the cell. My gut instinct was to define a new walkable area in front of the cell, one that she can't walk through. But there doesn't seem to be a way to define a walkable area that only specific characters can access.

My next attempt was to make an invisible object that, if the NPC randomly collides with it, she immediately walks away. Like so:

Code: ags

function room_RepExec(){
    if (cLily.IsCollidingWithObject(oLilyBarrier)){ // 
        cLilyWalk((cLily.x), ((cLily.y)+10), eNoBlock);
     }
}

....Unfortunately, this just causes her to get stuck on the object. She touches it, and she tries to walk away, but because she's still touching it, the game just runs the Walk command over and over again. So it's a no-go. (I tried the same idea with a regionâ€"she walks into the region, she's supposed to immediately walk awayâ€"with the same non-result.)

tl;dr Is there a simple way to define a walkable area that only the player character can access? Or otherwise, a way to define which specific characters can access a specific walkable?

This feels like the dumbest question in the world, but I've searched every permutation of "click X" and "exit game confirmation" that I can think of, and still, no dice.

Right now, if you click the exit button on my game's main menu, or on the in-game navigational bar, a GUI pops up asking "Are you sure you want to quit?". Is there any way to achieve a similar effect, when the user clicks the X button on the upper-right corner of the window?

Or, in other words: Is there a way to define what happens when the user clicks X, so that I can bring up the confirmation GUI, instead of having the game close automatically?

This is an issue coming up with one of our playtesters; I haven't seen it myself yet and haven't been able to replicate it.



There's something very strange happening with the top part of this image. As you can see, part of the action bar (/GUI) is disappearing--along with the cursor, too. (You can see part of the cover hovering on the eyeball icon; the rest has disappeared.)

My tester is saying it happens sometimes when she loads a save file. She said specifically that when she loads the game from our title screen, "the top third of the window flickers." The GUI and the cursor are still functional; she can still click on things, but she can't see them properly. She's tried restarting the game/deleting and reloading save files, but it hasn't made a difference.

She's running Windows 7, 64-bit edition (which is the same exact OS I have, so no dice on it being specific to her OS).

Has anyone seen this before in their games?

I'm having trouble explaining this in my head, but hopefully it makes sense to someone!

In the game I'm working on, we have four primary cursors: LOOK, TALK, WALK, and HAND. They look like this:

We recently added the black pointers to each of the cursors to make clicking more precise, since some of our testers were having trouble clicking on things. This is messing with the way the cursors line up with each other. You right-click to change cursors, and as you scroll through the cursors it ends up looking like this:

i.e., the WALK cursor ends up sticking out from all the others. Not exactly a game-breaker, but IMO it looks weird.

Is there a way to tell AGS to align cursors by the top row of pixels (as in the first image), instead of by the pointer/hotspot? I tried looking through cursor functions to see if there was something like a SetCursorAlignment, but no dice. The other obvious answer would be to switch the WALK pointer to the upper-left, so it matches the others, but I'm reluctant to do that because it might make walking on the bottom of the screen unreasonably awkward. (Pretty sure the walk cursor would go off-screen.)

Hey all, just a quick question about the MP3-less edition of 3.2.1 listed here, the one you're supposed to use if you want to ensure against MP3 licensing issues.

I copied and pasted the acwin.exe file into my AGS 3.2.1 folder, replacing the file that was already there. Is that...all I have to do? (Besides replacing any and all MP3 files with other formats, anyway.) Am I missing something really obvious?

I gotta think there's some people here with some experience presenting at conventions--especially since, you know, AdventureX is a thing. There's one coming to the New England area this fall I was thinking about attending to show off The Beard in the Mirror, but before I dot any i's I was hoping I could hear of some of you guys.

Specifically--how does demoing a point-and-click adventure game work? With a side-scroller or a shooting game, it's pretty easy for someone to get a handle on the game right away; but adventure games are so much more story-driven than they are mechanic-driven, and I'm wondering how well that plays when you're just spending a few minutes with one at a noisy convention. Anyone with first-hand experience?

EDIT: Actually, it looks like there's at least someone here with experience at the exact con I'm looking at:

I'm tearing my hair out here. From what I understand, having a sound play during an animation is pretty straightforward; you just have to:

1) Go to the animation's view, and
2) Set the "Sound" parameter to the sound effect in question.

That's it. So...WHY WON'T IT WORK?! Does it have to be a specific type of file? Does it require some extra coding when I run the animation? I've tried this with two animations, two different sound effects...no go. Help me, AGS forums!

Does anyone know if there's a way to keep a static image on-screen between rooms? (i.e., when you change rooms, everything fades out but this one image; the image stays visible during the fade out/in.)

I have a workaround in place right now--instead of changing rooms, I made one room with several different backgrounds, and I'm fading them in and out as needed to simulate changing rooms. That way, the image (an object, in this case, although it doesn't have to be) stays visible even during the fades. It works, but it's not very clean.

[Steam page:]

Long-time AGSers might remember this post by my wife Lizo back in...holy crap, was it really 2006?? Here's where we are now.

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/
Release trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J3ov5TUfxY
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oharock
Twitter:: https://twitter.com/oharockstudios

Release date:: October 25, 2016

Conception

TestGame was (and is) a game Lizo and I have been working on since we were in undergrad (she's wrapping up her doctoral degree now); it was based on games we used to play over AOL Instant Messenger, wherein one of us would start off by saying something like "You wake up lost in a forest. To the north you see a sparkling stream surrounded by long vines; to the east is a foreboding cave. What do you do?", and the other would respond as though playing a text adventure game--although instead of playing against a bunch of static computer programming, you were playing against a real-life person who could tailor the experience to your exact reactions. The story for TestGame was born from this.

Story

It's about a college-aged boy not-so-coincidentally named Paul, opening his bedroom door one day to discover, instead of the hallway leading to his bathroom, an all-new world of magic, monsters and maidens. I like to think of the tone as a marriage between Sierra and LucasArts, as my wife was raised on the former and myself on the latter, and we take a great deal of inspiration from each. Ultimately the game is about Paul growing up and figuring out his place in the world, all the while solving fun inventory-based puzzles and making dumb jokes about everything. I think it's roughly in the range of 10 (update: more like 6-8) hours long, although it's hard to judge, seeing as I know the answers to all the puzzles.

Development

For years my wife (Lizo) was coding and writing everything herself, with me offering input when I could; but as time went on she had less and less time she could devote to the game, so I started taking over things like proofing text, and then writing text, and then designing puzzles and finally, now, actually programming the game. Our roles have essentially reversed. As part of this transition we decided to finally give the game a more proper title: The Beard in the Mirror.

Now seven years after she created her first screen, here's what we're looking like:

- Story: 100%
- Puzzles: 100%
- Backgrounds: 100%
- Character art: 100%
- Animation: 100%
- Coding: 100%
- Music/Sound: 100%

If ever there was a "blood, sweat and tears" kind of project, this has been it. But it's still moving forward, now more than ever, and I do harbor a small fantasy of going commercial with it on Desura, or another indie-friendly platform.

...Although that said we're still two very slow-paced developers, both having a full-time schedule in addition to our work in Mirror. Look for it to be released sometime (hopefully) in the next seven years.

-------------------------------------------

Update: 12/21/12

Lizo just drew the cook character in Mirror, and he's everything I aspire to be in my life:

Update: 3/19/13

Just hit a big milestone the other day--the game is now fully playable, from opening to epilogue! There's still a lot of placeholder art in there (and it's only now that I'm starting to contact musicians about working on the game's soundtrack), but still. Considering the length of our development process, I'm pretty proud we've made it this far.

5/29/13

Some quick updates to the numbers! Lizo's made a lot of progress in the game's art over the last month, spurred by our new arrangement whereby for every piece of art she completes, I will watch one (1) episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender with her. The first half of the game is now essentially complete, with the second still missing a whole bunch of art assets (and the coding to make them all work).

Meanwhile, I've been playing through the game as it is--which has been a real treat, since in eight years I've never been able to play through the entire game from beginning-to-end before. I'm testing and re-testing, tweaking dialogue, replacing emotes like "*hands over item*" with actual animations of handing items over, and--most noticeably--introducing sound effects and music, mostly from freesound.org and incompetech.com, respectively. (Until now, we only had a couple of original songs, plus some sound effects I recorded in 2006 with a cassette tape recorder. Now, it's not only looking like a videogame, but actually sounding like one, too. It's amazing how much fuller a few well-utilized sounds can make a game feel.

I'm tentatively hoping to release The Beard in the Mirror* by the end of the year, and if we can maintain this pace, there's a real chance that'll actually happen. (I have a lot more free time for game development now that I've left my post at GameCola.) Fingers crossed.

* Oh, and by the way: We did FINALLY settle on The Beard in the Mirror as the final name for the game, after brainstorming through several pages worth of alternative titles (actual examples: "A Grizzled Fate," "2 Mirrors, 1 Fate", and my personal favorite, "King's Quest," but that one was apparently already taken).

Update: 3/4/15

Hah-hah, did I really say we'd release in 2013? Good one, Paul! OP has been updated with updated completion-percentages, and below I announced that we just got Greenlit for Steam! Happy times!

Update: 10/10/16

THE GAME IS FINISHED AND WE HAVE A RELEASE DATE AND IT'S GOING ON STEAM AND I'M FREAKING OUT.

Does anyone know how to code a character.SayAtBackground function? I have a creature who's being carried around by the player character in his inventory. There's one screen in particular where, if the player is carrying the creature, the creature starts making little noises (to signify that there's something on this screen he's interested in) from the player's inventory.

Here's what the code looks like:

function room_RepExec()
{
if(cPaul.HasInventory(iInventory46)){ // Paul has Merlin
   int haphap=Random(250);
   if (haphap==3){
    DisplaySpeechAt((character[PAUL].x)-75, (character[PAUL].y)-50, 125, MERLIN, "hap hap!");
   
   }
}
}

(Please excuse the combination of old- and new-style code; this game has a few different people working on it, and it's gone through a few different AGS versions.)

This means that the character "randomly" (i.e., every time the counter hits 3) says "hap hap!" from Paul's torso when he's on this screen. The problem is that, since it's not a SayBackground command, Blocking is turned on, so the game has to stop each time he says "hap hap." Is there a way to turn off Blocking for a SayAt command? (It's not the end of the world if there's no simple way to do it, but I figured I'd ask, since people here Know Things, and I don't always Know Things.)

Thanks in advance!

I feel like this should probably be pretty obvious, but I haven't been able to find the answer anywhere on the forums/Google.

Is there a way to tell the game to 1) turn off an object and 2) play a sound file during a specific frame of animation? e.g., I have a continuous animation of someone picking up a spray bottle (bottle turns off), spraying himself (spraying sfx), and putting it back down (bottle turns on).

Many thanks to anyone who can offer their sagely advice!

I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here. Is there a way to set a Text Window GUI to a standard size, rather than have it conform to the length of the text?

Thanks.

Hey, here's a quandary: Does anyone know if there's a way to display score as a series of tick marks? (i.e., 1 is one vertical slash; 3 is three vertical slashes; 5 is four vertical slashes and one horizontal slash?; etc.)

I set up a GUI to display score on what sort-of looks like a chalkboard, and I was thinking that using tick marks to display the score itself would really help sell the image. But...I can't think of a way to actually do that, unless there's a font that could display numbers that way (and even if there was, it probably wouldn't work when you got to two-digit numbers, since they don't have their own unique symbols.)

Thoughts, anyone?