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Is there anything like an "AGS Best Practices" document for coding novices that suggests ways to avoid shooting oneself in the foot? I've just run into an issue.

When I edit the interactions for a region in AGS 2.72, and I want a response to an attempt to use an inventory item on an object, I can either use "Conditional - If Inventory Item Was Used" and pick an Inventory ID number, or manually script in something like this:

Code: ags

String nameofused = player.ActiveInventory.Name;
if ((nameofused == "Flint") || (nameofused == "Torch")) {
	Display("Sliding down a flaming railing would be a neat trick, but the thing just won't light.");

(.. etc...)

The problem is, neither solution seems ideal. The use of ID numbers means that any renumbering of the inventory will turn my code into a huge mess, but using a script means that I have do dive into the scripts to edit messages. Is there a smarter solution that I'm missing?

Suppose you were given the following challenge:

You must create an adventure game with a budget of $300 or so - $600 if you're ambitious, but bear in mind you aren't getting paid for this. It must be a multiplayer game, it must have intriguing challenges and puzzles, it must stimulate (and require) imagination, and it must run from 8 AM to 5 PM on a weekday. Of course, it should also be fun.

Action sequences are allowed and even encouraged, but they may be difficult to do. Because, you see, the game has to be, on some level, real. It can't be on a computer screen.

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Every year, seniors at the California Institute of Technology try their hand at this challenge. The exact day is always kept secret to outsiders - when asked, seniors simply reply, "It's Tomorrow." But when the time comes, it's pretty obvious. Fourth-years hammer on dorm doors, screeching "IT'S DITCH DAY! WAKE UP!", then flee the campus. Classes are cancelled, and the underclassmen are left to deal with the adventures set up by the seniors.

The groggy undergrads stumble out of bed and sign up on painted boards, jostling for cool-looking stacks (the term for the games in question.) Brute force stacks may just involve a single challenge: breaking into a room with power tools, sledgehammers, and whatever else is handy. Finesse stacks may require code cracking or other ingenuity. Honor stacks may demand role playing and weird stunts; accepting the Bribe (the prize) at the end of the stack without performing these stunts would be a violation of the Caltech Honor Code. Most stacks combine all these elements into some kind of story or theme - like an adventure game, but sillier.

EXAMPLES:

In a Harry Potter stack last year, six or so students were first assigned houses and wands. These wands had various properties; some contained infrared LEDs to activate switches, some had black lights to read hidden writing, and so on. They then played through the plot of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, concluding the stack with an astounding series of challenges meant to mirror those in the book. They untangled themselves from green cargo netting (the Devil's Snare), solved a chess puzzle by moving chess pieces on a board with weight switches, solved a logic puzzle centered around potions, retrieved a key dangling from the ceiling, and so on. This was a particularly ambitious stack.

In an Ocean's Eleven-themed stack, players followed photographic clues around campus to locate block-shaped keys to open up a homemade electronic lock and break into a student's room... after another team had used a sledgehammer to smash through a concrete barrier to GET to the lock.

So... my question is, what would you do for YOUR Ditch Day stack? What would your stack theme be? How would you implement puzzles in the real world without risking severe injury to the players? Be careful, though... if your Ditch Day stack sucks, you get counterstacked, which could mean anything from being thrown in the pond to having the door of your room replaced with a giant block of ice. Take care.

Note: Ideas suggested here may be shamelessly stolen by Caltech students. They would be appreciative... because Ditch Day is Tomorrow.

Note: (SPOILERS FOR LOTS OF GAMES!!!)



(REALLY! LOTS OF SPOILERS! NO KIDDING!)

(RANT ON.)

In some games, the player is forced to fail at some point, often as a key part of the protagonist's character development. This much is fine. It's a classic storytelling device.

But is it a good idea to have forced failures that cause the death of a likeable character? Is this genuinely involving, or just manipulative? If we wanted to hear a story where our best efforts had no effect, well, wouldn't we just _hear a story_, rather than play a game? When this device works, players try over and over to get around it, and fail, saving and restoring. This probably isn't good for the suspension of disbelief, really...

Often, the True Love or Best Friend is the one to go. I've seen scenes like this praised, but I have to wonder if they're good storytelling, or just apathetic. It's easy to write a Tragic Dead Love, but hard to write a convincing living one.

And the "Lover Girl's Going To Die At the Villain's Hands, RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU" device is overused for another reason.

It slaps the player across the face, because a game, being the least passive form of entertainment short of actually living an adventure, forces involvement in a character. Making a character you've developed happy might give a bit of brief joy, but killing them? Emotional chainsaw! This is great if the game does something with it, but it too often just becomes an opportunity to extract emotion without developing it, without getting the player to think about the implications of what's going on.

(Note that most action games have a lot of forced deaths, but we don't think about those. First-person shooters are filled with forced deaths, unless nonviolence is really a practical way to win.)


SPOILERS AHEAD!!!





That's not to say it always fails. Here are a few uses of the forced failure death that have actually worked to some degree, maybe:

Final Fantasy VII: Let's get this one out of the way. BIG, MANIPULATIVE FORCED DEATH HERE. Good thing or bad thing? You could argue that for some time.

Wing Commander III (or II? I forget which. Maybe both.): A character lives up to her name.

Baldur's Gate II: Best damned thief in the game. And he dies, a traitor all along!

Chrono Trigger: Crono. And the best use of the forced death ever, because it's a fake forced death.

Trinity: A text adventure where you have to be the instrument of an innocent creature's death, for reasons that are unclear at the time. You crush it in your bare hands.

Jigsaw: Another text adventure. You have to shoot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and start World War I, or else the game ends quickly. Whether this is better or worse than causing a world war is an open question, but you need to do this to win. Chrono Trigger's forced death may be more obviously heartwrenching; in this case, you don't SEE the consequences of your actions. FFVII's is a lot more famous. But this has got to the biggest player-caused forced death ever written, unless somebody's written a game where actually you destroy the world.

Oh, wait... I forgot:

Loom: Wow. What a downer. The innocent guy whose appearance you stole for your own purposes just got eaten by a dragon you released, and now his ghost is really angry, with good reason. And it just gets worse, and worse, even after you resurrect they guy, and you end up involved very closely with the destruction of civilization. But hey, there's hope. For you, anyway. Not for the people ravaged by the undead armies you released.


A few games where forced death fails:

Shannara: Wow. What a flat scene. Wow.

Any game where you run into the Big Bad, and he's TOO POWERFUL FOR YOU, RUN BOY RUN! And there goes your loyal mentor. This kinda worked in Star Wars, but I haven't seen it done well in a video game. I think Gabriel Knight stumbled on a scene like this, badly, though it delayed the death until after the obvious danger had passed.

Forced parental death usually doesn't work.

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Is forced failure a design risk worth taking?