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Topics - Jabbage

#1
Hi all!  :grin:

I'm looking to create a Mac port for my game The Beekeeper's Picnic, but find I've come to the end of my own capabilities.

I know there are various tricks and guides on porting AGS games for Mac, but I'm afraid either because they're a little out of date or because I'm not a Mac native, I haven't been able to get any of them to actually work for me. 

I'm hoping I can find someone who can port the game to Mac for me and check that it's working on their own machine. I'm happy to offer monetary compensation for the service.

Let me know if you can help!
- Jabbage
#2
The Beekeeper's Picnic

It is the 1920s, and in a sleepy Sussex village, beekeeper and former world's greatest detective Sherlock Holmes is trying to arrange a pleasant clifftop picnic for his lifelong companion Dr Watson. The only problem is that a series of mysteries keep getting in the way!.


A retro-inspired cosy point and click adventure and mystery(ish) game lovingly inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  • Explore a seaside town It's the day of the village fete, a suspicious new neighbour has taken a lease on  a long-abandoned cottage and something strange is happening down on the  beach...
  • Interrogate and befriend a fully professionally voice-acted cast of eccentric characters including a clown with a tragic past, a budding young naturalist, a wannabe showman and a prickly police officer.
  • Make deductions and decisions. Puzzles have multiple solutions, some of which may please your neighbours more than others.  What path will you choose? Who will you enlist to help you?
  • Phone for help of you get stuck! Your older brother Mycroft is always ready to act as your consultant, just give him a call at his club if you need a hint. 
  • A relaxing bespoke soundtrack
  • 4-6 hours of gameplay


Screenshots:




After 2.5 years of work, the game is finally released on Steam and Itch.io!

I'd like to give a huge thank-you to everyone in the AGS community for your help and support throughout the creation of this game - I came into it as someone with a very limited knowledge of AGS and coding in general, and even though I think I've been a little bit shy in these parts, the forums here and the Discord were absolutely key in seeing me through to the end!
#3
I've been following the instructions here for adding voice acting to my game, and I get that speech files must be formatted with the first four letters of the character's script name, followed by the dialog script number. 

Unfortunately I have several characters whose script names share the first four letters. Is my only option to change their script names?
I guess it's not a big deal and I can just do a series of find/replaces on the project, but I thought I'd check before going ahead!

Thanks!
#4
I've been playing around with how speech and voice files and voice acting scripts work in AGS.

What I've discovered is that option text within dialogues is always assigned to the character which was marked as the 'player character' for the beginning of the game (or perhaps more specifically the character marked as the 'player character' when the voice acting script is compiled?)

So, if a game changes player (either as a genuine part of the story or because I've used a placeholder character for menu screens/cutscenes etc) then the correct voice file will never play when a dialogue option is selected.

The way round this I can think of is to untick all the 'say' boxes and just manually code at the beginning of each dialogue option which character should say it.

But I thought I'd check before starting to do that - is there something I'm missing here?
#5
I'm really hoping someone can help me, I've apparently really screwed up my game! ???

I had a room and some characters which were placeholders from an earlier phase of development for my game, and I figured I'd delete them since they were no longer being used.
(In future I'll always back up BEFORE doing this kind of thing, if I do it at all but... too late now I guess, argh.) 

I deleted the room and one of the characters, at which point AGS froze and then crashed.

Now whenever I try to open the game I was working on in AGS (the .agf file), it won't open and I get this message:


I have a backup from yesterday which is working fine so it's not the end of the world, but I'd really really love to not have to redo all the work I did today!
Unless I can open the file in AGS I'm not sure what I can do.

Does anyone have any ideas? Is there more information I can provide that would be helpful?

Thanks so much!
#6
Hi all,

I've been using the VerbCoin template which comes with AGS for a game, and I've got to hold my hands up and say that I don't really understand how it works, at least not in enough depth to troubleshoot it! I've generally tried to leave the verb coin scripting well alone beyond cosmetic changes and hoped for the best.

Some friends who have play tested my game have had this popup:




I haven't been able to get this message to occur myself which makes it difficult to know exactly what circumstances it's been happening, and it seems to have happened at different points of the games for different people.

Here is the line of the VerbCoin code it's refering to



If anyone has any pointers for what might be the issue here, or things I could try to look into for more clues about the issue, that would be so helpful!  :-D
Thank you!
#7
Hi all! I've been making my game at 320 x 180, which has been great for having a retro look and enabling me to produce backgrounds and animations fairly quickly. I spent a while finding pixel fonts that I think are comparatively easy to read.

I've run into an issue when sharing my game with play testers, though, where folks with dyslexia are finding it really tough going. Ideally they would need much higher resolution fonts with antialiasing.

Has anyone else run into this problem, and do you have a solution?
Would I have to increase the resolution of the game and then manually resize all the artwork?  ???

#8
Hi all! This is my first time asking a question here, so I'm really hoping it's not TOO dumb!  :-D

My game has a beginning room which is a menu screen. I'm using the VerbCoin template, so the inventory appears when the users right clicks. I have also created a custom GUI which contains save, return, quit buttons which appears when the user presses Escape.

I've been trying to find ways to disable the inventory screen and my custom GUI on the title so that this kind of thing doesn't happen!



I found this advice from 2017 but it was for a menu which appears when the user hovers their mouse near the top of the screen.

Any advice is really appreciated, thanks!


#9
The Beekeeper's Picnic

It is the 1920s, and in the sleepy Sussex village of Fulworth, an elderly beekeeper (who is definitely NOT the world's greatest detective... any more) is trying to arrange a pleasant clifftop picnic for his friend Dr Watson. The only problem is that a series of pesky murderous mysteries keep getting in the way.

A retro-inspired cosy point and click adventure and mystery(ish) game lovingly inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.


Screenshots:







Current Progress:
Story--  100%
Puzzles-- 100%
Graphics--  100%
Scripting -- 100%
Music/Sound-- 100%
Voice Acting - 10%


Updates

23/10/22 - I've unleased my 'proof of concept' demo on the world! A few rooms, a few characters, and me trying out a few game mechanisms and teaching myself how to use AGS.
I put it up on itch.io since a few people were interested in seeing it.
https://jabbage.itch.io/the-beekeepers-picnic-poc
I've also mapped out the story and created some puzzle dependency charts. I'm sure there will be lots of tweaks along the way, but it's nice to have a road map to follow! 

24/11/22 - I've taken what I learned from the demo and now I'm in the process of blocking out the prologue of the game.
I'm leaving the artwork for now since for me that's the pleasant, easy bit which I could happily sink a lot of time into (only to find myself with lots of nice artwork and no game!)

21/01/23 - Prologue complete, and I'm in the process of roughly scripting the whole game, mostly with placeholder graphics. I want to get it into a position where I can show it to some trusted folks to see if the puzzles and pacing work for them, before I start adding any fancy extras.
I've also made a Steam page, which was a wild ride - so. many. graphics!

01/05/23 - The game is now vaguely play-able from start to finish, with lots of placeholder graphics and text.
I'm finally letting myself have fun making backgrounds and character art!

20/10/23 - Run a successful kickstarter game for  the project.

1/06/24 - The game is now complete and playable, minus sounds and voice acting (which wasn't part of the plan, but a combo of the kickstarter doing better than I expected and getting some wonderful expert help means it's achievable, so I'm going to go for it!

26/03/25 - The PC/Linux version of the game is released and out there in the world!!!
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