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I'm here today. Anyone else?

What have people bought, what's good

"There are infinite paintings, but also a more finite sense of what is a great painting versus not. Similarly there are infinite games, but also a sense of what works and what doesn't. The boundless space of video games is bounded and their limitless possibilities have limits. There are, it seems, rules to game design."

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/20/constants-of-game-design-1/

I enjoyed the 5 minute read. Nothing revelatory, but worth a read.

Via Hand-Eye Supply http://www.handeyesupply.com/blogs/curiosityclub/13013453-jelly-helm-studio-jelly-5-13-14

I'm hoping the video for the Curiosity Club will be put up shortly, they seem to be a week or so behind. Anyway, Joseph Campbell is an interesting guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

You can also see his his 7 part series (each about an hour) on the Power of Myth. I can recommend the Hero's Adventure (it's about an hour) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBbt_bIDEg0

[Case Study: Indiana Jones]

I had great difficulty deciding whether I wanted to talk about story, narrative, characters, puzzles or some other segued conversation on the state of adventure games. I even started to write about narrative but quickly gave up when I ran into dependencies on character for emotion; locations have a dependency on characters e.g. Buckingham Palace means something different to a retired, British naval commander receiving an honorary award from the Queen as it would for a Chinese shepard living in the Guangdong Province of China. Characters give context.

So without further ado, I thought I'd talk about characters and characterisation. I'd rather not re-tread the beaten path so I'll point you to a lot of other articles and notes as I go. There's a nice podcast of a talk with Tim Schaefer on designing memorable characters, if you can find it good luck (it's from 2004 GDC) but here's an excerpt:

"To create a truly immersive game experience with a compelling fantasy world, you have to populate that world with real characters. Not just characters that behave realistically on the screen, but characters that ARE real to you, the game's creator. The more you know your own characters, the more real they will become, and the more they will help draw the player into your game's imaginary word. It's not enough for your characters to have distinctive speech patterns and tics. They need actual histories, motives, dreams, and secrets. Then they will have real depth with which pull the player in, and your fantasy world will be come a real place that the player loves to visit, and can't wait to get back to when they leave."

There's also a nice interview here: http://generator.acmi.net.au/gallery/media/game-masters-interview-tim-schafer (2m:31s)

Tim Schafer's Character Design Insight - things to think about when designing a character

- Make sure the characters are identifiable
- Blank player characters don't necessarily mean that the player will enjoy them more.
- Not everyone wants the same fantasy character.
- Give the star (Player character) the coolest dialogue
- In a game, you're asking the player to play the main role, as if you were asking an actor to star in your movie.
- Simple, deeply felt emotions allow for players to better relate to the character.
- Characters should develop and grow emotionally.
- Invest time in your characters, don't get sloppy!
- Question your characters, "Am I sure that this is right for the character?"
- Make sure that as the author of the characters, you truly care about them.
- Check to see if the player wants to impress the other characters, that means he or she is interested in your characters.
- Make sure the supporting characters react to the player's actions and choices, this creates an
additional layer of immersion making the characters that much more believable.
- Create a back-story, know more than you show the player.
- What are the character's relationships with the other characters? Remember that even characters should have relationships, even if they are fabricated.
- Don't be afraid to make a personal statement with your game. Games will never become an art
form if you refrain from putting your own emotions, thoughts, or views into the game.

Ways to create your characters/define characters:
- Borrow from real people or people from your life
- Collaboration & research
- Giving full names to your characters can help you think of who the character is
- Character Age
- What would the character say about themselves?
- What are the the characters interests, hobbies?
- What are the character's social networks, who are their friends?
- Have imaginary conversations with your characters.
- Take a previously done character and extract their abstract essence, and apply it to your own character.

It's really worth thinking about who your character is and the beginning and what they are going to become by the time you finish telling your story. They might start off as a simple farm boy on some dessert planet but they're going to end up saving the galaxy from a tyranny of a galactic empire. Whenever I have an idea for a character they're usually inspired by someone, somewhere either in a book or on TV, I'll try to look at why this person inspired me and the traits that make them loveable or not. It's also worth noting how these characters are introduced, first impressions are important because you only get to make one.

Case Study: Indiana Jones
I think this is some of the greatest character design here, if you have access to a copy of the Last Crusade, watch the opening scene now and you'll see what I mean. He's a lawful good, typically macho hero. He's got the rugged good looks, quick wit and improvisational skills of MacGuyver that make him instantly loveable. His opinions and strong beliefs are his vice that lead him into conflict and that conflict leads to the development of the story and the decisions he makes throughout the game - he's not a character to choose inaction. He's made even more likeable by his humanity - he bleeds, he cries, and he has a crippling fear of snakes.

In the opening scene to Last Crusade we see him fighting for what's right despite the world against him. He adapts to his situations and stands up to fight rather than run away. But it's all well and good looking at characters in a movie where we're just some  observer, but in the realm of non-linear multi-choice game where the player is donning the protagonist as an avatar we need to have the character adapt over time. What if the player had decided to run instead of pick up the whip - we'd then find a more cowardly hero. What if rather than being brash and obnoxious to the crooks he took a more diplomatic response (as opposed to spitting in their face). We have two decisions here, either make the player adopt the core beliefs of the character (Indiana Jones, Grim Fandango etc...) or have the character adopt the core beliefs of the player (Mass Effect, Fable etc...). This can usually be achieved by some sleight against the character, and transitively the player. Andail wrote a nice blog on how character decisions affect character development.

"I simply had to accept that players expect to understand computer game characters and their personalities almost immediately. I attribute this phenomenon to the fact that a player has a more direct, intimate, relationship with the protagonist than the reader of a book. While a book reader is merely an observer, a player /becomes/ the protagonist to an extent, and if their motives don't match, the player will experience disbelief and disengagement. It's not a question of sharing moral views or values â€" there are plenty of games that feature “evil” protagonists that most players will likely accept to control â€" but the player must at least feel like they're striving towards the same goal."

So, to sum up with my opinions:
- Characters need strong opinions, so much so that they won't stand by passively
- They need to be empathic to the player i.e. they need to adopt or share core beliefs with the player. In this sense you can attempt to make a character flexible to player decisions.
- The player needs to identify with them immediately. Background can come later (in Indy we didn't really find out his backstory until the third film) We need to care who the player is and what they're doing.
- They need to become someone. I don't think a character should ever finish the story as the same person. Changes can be minor but they need to be better because of the journey they've gone through.

[WE]

I'm no guru on game design, no sage of story-telling or ninja of narration. I am but a humble adventure fan who wants to figure out the ins and outs of game design, what adventure games really are and where WE can take them to in the future. We are the Shackletons of our genre! And to top it all off here's a great advert from the great Ernest Shackleton himself when he was looking for men for his Antarctic expedition that I think is fitting to this post:

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."

I'm hoping this long winded and opinionated ramble might kickstart some thoughts about the genre, game design and what we can do to really think about our genre.

You Are Eaten by a Grue.
Like any typical story I'll start at the beginning. But not the ‘beginning-beginning' as I'm sure that would take too long. Adventure games have been a big part of my life from the original text adventures such as Zork, THHGTTG and Hugo House of Horrors through Monkey Island, Kings Quest and Broken Sword. These were the days before the first-person shooter took aim and dealt an almost fatal blow to the adventure genre.

I can highly recommend that you read this article if you want a good description on the history of graphical adventure games. It's well written and full of lots of dates, facts and figures that will certainly be better than me trying to write my own.

Give 'Explanation' to 'Reader'
I remember a recent conversation I had with my flatmate, Alex, about the Walking Dead games from Telltale (I highly recommend playing these, they might not be perfect or even class as a 'good' adventure game, but they are great storytelling with emotional characters). I suggested to Alex that he would thoroughly enjoy them, being a fan of the show and comics and a relatively casual gamer, but he flat-out rejected them on the grounds that he "doesn't really like RPGs". I persisted and, despite my testament that they were adventure games and more akin to interactive-fiction, he simply brushed it off with the statement "Well, you play a role in the game so it's a role-playing game - and I don't like those"; enough said and he was back to playing Fifa. I spent a few moments 'explaining' (read arguing) that every game you play you assume some kind of a role but that doesn't mean that every game is an RPG; in a similar way that a game that takes you on an adventure might not necessarily be an adventure game. So I went back to my computer and started doing some frustrated writing about what an adventure game is - or at least what it is to me.

So what is an adventure game? I guess you could take a similar stance that Alex did and state that any game where you have an adventure is an adventure game. Would Tomb Raider be an adventure because Lara is always off on adventures... adventuring? Well sort of, but it's more complicated than that. Let's dissolve what it means to be an adventure game.

I know it's a little cliché but the dictionary has some really good points, I'll ad-lib a quote together from the definitions. I really believe this sums things up beautifully.

An adventure is a risky, unusual or exciting enterprise of a hazardous nature with unknown outcome.

I think that in the heart of an adventure game beats the rhythm of exploration - this purpose to unravel the world and expose it's mysteries and to liberate the story the game is trying to tell. The first time I played The Longest Journey (below) I looked at the world and just wanted to explore.

The latest Tomb Raider game was very much an adventure through a magical island full of history and myth... yet I couldn't interact with any of it besides 'smash crate' or 'use arrow on island inhabitant'. I couldn't delve into the history of the island beyond what I was linearly guided through and told about... exploration was visual and not scientific.

Point-and-click adventures have, IMHO, always been a deeply flawed genre with broken mechanics (flame-wars ensue), but I remember and regard them with such esteem and love - but why. I remember laughing till I cried the first time I played Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island; getting lost in mystery, murder and the occult in Broken Sword; roaming the vast realm of the undead in Grim Fandango and almost crying at the end; and taking down countless numbers of apocalyptic megalomaniacs in FoA and FotAQ. But the one thing I don't have many memories of are the puzzles. Sure I remember "Using Red Herring on Troll"... but I have no sentiment of it. What I do remember are the characters, the dialogues, the worlds and the stories.

The key isn't intelligence necessarily, but in first hoovering up every object from the painted scenery into your bottomless pockets (better not miss any!), then inserting them into your situation like keys into opinionated locks (better have the right syntax!). A strange, dead-end evolution where success comes from intuition and common sense, yes, but more-so from clicking around, forever, like a blind man feeling their way down the designer's own gaping colon. Use Baked Potato with Subwoofer. Use Sitar with Cow.

Now, I'm not saying puzzles are bad, in fact I enjoy them and the reward of figuring them out - well, the logical ones anyway - and they provide a good way of providing an intelligent gameplay element to the exploration of the game world. It often involves looking for clues, piecing various objects together or conversing with people to unravel the story.

There have been a lot of criticisms about the genre of the ilk to "opening a door by balancing three biscuits on your head whilst playing a flute" (Ian Livingstone, Eidos). People saw a lot of these puzzles forced and ‘artificial' lending nothing but illogical hindrances that debilitated the flow of a game. It's only recently that we're seeing a shift in this paradigm, mainly in the Walking Dead series from Telltale Games, that has finally taken a sigh of resignation that being a kleptomaniac member of Mensa should not be a prerequisite and that it is sometimes most logical to just kick down a door or coerce some information out of someone through cleverly written dialogue - and Telltale pull this off masterfully. But I digress and this is a topic for a later date and with a lot more caffeine in my bloodstream.

That last quote, a few paragraphs up, was from a fantastic article, Nostalgia vs Narrative, if you haven't already read it then do. Go and read it now, I'll wait here. I'm not going anywhere. Go on.

Do you want to be told a good story? That's one of the purest pleasures of the adventure game â€" the embracing of the linear, pre-destined story that someone wants to tell you.

So if the puzzles and gameplay mechanics where so bad then why do so many people hold them in such high regard? Well I think that, on top of exploration, they championed story over all else - which in the 90s not many other genres were doing, or at least not as well; the point of these other games was always gameplay first; Duke Nukem was about the shooting and Sonic was about the speedily dashing through brightly coloured worlds in search of gold rings.

Adventure games were popular because of their narrative and storytelling and the detailed exploration into unknown worlds both terrestrial and extra. Subsequently, the death was mostly due to these other genres realising the need and popularity of a good, in-depth story. I remember playing and enjoying Doom as a kid, but I couldn't tell you even the remotest snippet of what any of that game was about I just wanted to shoot monsters and not die. Adventure games missed a trick because sadly it was a one way street and there is a limit to the amount of monster shooting and ring collecting you can introduce into these point and click games. And so the adventure game died.

Into the Future
So if adventure games died I find it quite ironic that they seem to be partially revived by a game about zombies. Telltale have been massively successful with The Walking Dead and other franchises over the past years bringing adventure gaming to a more casual, console focused market. Indies such as Wadget Eye Games have been releasing hit after hit of classic point and clicks and it seems like people really care for this genre.

Kickstarter has also proved the love for this quirky and fun genre with the success of the Double Fine Adventure securing a whopping $3.3 million in pledges from fans - after only asking for $400k - and inspiring other successful campaigns from the makers of Broken Sword, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory, Gabriel Knight, Space Quest and Tex Murphy as well as many indie campaigns such as Resonance and Quest for Infamy and Nelly Cootalot 2 - adventure games certainly aren't as dead as the critics said they were.

I guess this is also where you and I come in. To try our best to potentially redefine the genre or, who knows, you could be building for nostalgia and want to preserve the ways of old as our forebears intended - that choice is yours.

A Recipe for Adventure
With all my waffling it still doesn't look like I've arrived at any conclusion over anything and only opened up more questions. But I've enjoyed these ramblings.

So here is my recipe list for the perfect adventure storm:

• story - a generous helping; the key component not to be skimped on;
• characters - sour, salty and sweet;
• dialogues - The intangible richness to the characters;
• locations - exotic and native;
• interactions - to explore and dissect the environment through verbs.
• ... and for those die-hard advocates:
• puzzles - for better or worse these have traditionally been the driving force behind game progression;
• inventory - a player must have one of these so they can collect all the things;

Sorry if I've waffled.

So, we're naming the teams at work and I needs some ideas. The names have to be alphabetical A, B, C and D (4 teams).

Some suggestions have been cakes and animals. I thought it'd be fun and helpful to get some ideas from you guys.

An example in the theme of Only Fools and Horses:
- Albert
- Boycie
- Cassandra
- Del Boy

I think it'd be funny to tell the clients that Boycie and Del Boy are on the job, diligently working to resolve the problem.

What would you guys and gals name the teams?

[This sounds great, whatever it is, and I'm only about none percent sure what you're on about]

What's this I hear coming in from across the Internet, a school of adventure gamery? Well, hold your metaphorical horses and I'll answer your questions.

This sounds great, whatever it is, and I'm only about none percent sure what you're on about
I'm hoping to start a blog-esque style online course for learning to write good, wholesome adventure games - everything from how to architect puzzles and good story-telling as well as tips on writing enthralling dialogue. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be adventure games but I feel it's a good place to start.

That sounds like a lot of work, can't you just use what's already out there
There are currently plenty of tutorials out there for art and code but nothing on the fundamentals of a good game design document; which is something I've realised in my ongoing pursuit to create the Adventure Games Design Document Tool: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=45944.0. I wanted to learn a lot of this stuff myself and so I thought I'd formalise it in a structured way to share all my learnings. I also thought it'd be a great way to get some of the AGS seniors to share with everyone their tools of the trade whether it's someone talking about dialogue writing or even how to manage your time. I'll also try to incorporate the talks from last years and this years AdventureX into the mix. There'll even be tips on good code and artwork, but those will be more abstract and theoretical.

Why tell us now if there's nothing yet?
I'm gauging interest and waiting for feedback, which you can either leave on the website below or reply to this thread. If there isn't enough interest I'll abandon hope Hopefully the feedback will allow me to decide what should be in a lesson plan for the academic semester (the stuff you and I want to learn).

Now, if only you had a website
I do, and it's filled with all this information and more! http://bigwhoop.omgaz.co.uk/
Follow this link for all the information, submit ideas of what you would like to learn or offer your services as a lesson teacher. I whipped this up yesterday morning as a little web-design/coding experiment and to show you what this blog/site could look like if it gets the support.

[TL;DR]

Thanks to everyone who chimed in before. I think I've finalised my plans. hoping to book it all tomorrow afternoon.

Dates are in September.
Saturday 15th
Fly London to Helsinki. Afternoon in Helsinki.
Sunday 16th
Whole day in Helsinki.
Monday 17th
Morning and afternoon in Helsinki. Ferry to Stockholm (leaves at 17:30) <- cheaper than flying and includes a nights accommodation.
Tuesday 18th
Arrive about 09:30. Whole day in Stockholm.
Wednesday 19th
Whole day in Stockholm.
Thursday 20th
Morning in Stockholm. Evening train to Oslo. Night out in Oslo (or straight to bed).
Friday 21st
Whole day in Oslo.
Saturday 22nd
Whole day in Oslo.
Sunday 23rd
Morning in Oslo. Fly home early afternoon.

TL;DR
Helsinki: About 2 days. Ferry to Stockholm.
Stockholm: About 2.5 days. Train to Oslo.
Oslo: About 2.5 Days.

So whadda'ya think?

I know I'm not going to be able to see everything, but with work and money I only have the 9 days. I could probably spend a lifetime in each city alone but thought this would give me a nice Scandinavian taster.

Hoping the ferry won't be too bad but it's looking the most economical way to travel and with me *hopefully* sleeping through the night it'll save on having to pay for a nights sleep. If I fly I'll still lost out on that evening with getting to and from the airport and the flight itself.

If anyone has anything to add in I'd really appreciate it before I book it.

p.s. If anyone can offer me a couch to sleep on for any of the nights of the trip, I'd love you forever XD

[Updates:]

Updates:
- May 13th - Update 1
- May 19th - Update 2
- Jun 16th - Update 3

For those of you with a short attention span here's the skinny
I'm building an online game design document tool. I need your ideas, suggestions and criticisms. Reply below.

For those with five minutes to spare
I've got an idea. An idea I've had for a while that I want to run past all you wonderful adventure game developers. I want to build a tool, a web application to be specific, for designing adventure games. I'm so used to just jotting down notes in Google Docs or Word with no structure, and I was thinking, about six months ago, why not formalise my game development process and procedures into an online tool that not only I can use but the AGS community can benefit from.

What I want this app to be doing
I initially want to build a web app that will allow me to create game projects. These game projects, or stories, will have:
- Characters
  - Characters will have bios, stats, likes, dislikes. Everything you may want to know about them.
- Locations
  - These will be the rooms and places in the game and how they join on to the other rooms.
- Inventory items
- Dialogues
  - I'm planning an interactive tool for creating branch like dialogues probabaly similar to AJA's Dialog Designer
- Puzzles
  - A formalised checklist of tasks and orders for things to be done to complete an objective
- To-do list
  - Create tasks, assign them to people and items to get done
- Polls
  - Vote or get feedback on a particular thought

Benefits
Well, apart from helping me to organise my thoughts and keep track of everything, I'm hoping this will help people and teams come together to design and build better games. It'll be structured, searchable and versioned. It'll also be a great reference point whenever you need a reminder over a character, place or item.

The benefit of it being online means that you can work from anywhere and with any one.

I plan on building story templates that will set out an outline for a story arc into acts, those acts into goals, those goals into puzzles which will involve inventory items, characters and dialogues in various locations.

For those of you who've read this far, an example:

Let's take an example, a really crude, brief example that will require a LOT of imagination for now!

Act 1 - Set sail:

Fade in to docks
Enter Hero from left
HERO: I need to find all the treasures.
HERO: Let's get me a crew!!1

- Goal - Gather a crew
-- Sub-Goal - Find a navigator
--- Task - Convince the navigator to join you
---- Dialogue (recruit navigator)
--- Puzzle - Find a compass
--- Task - Give compass to navigator

Characters:
Hero - Strapping wannabe pirate.
Navigator - The navigator of the Hero's ship. One eye, one leg. Goes by the name skippy.

Inventory Items:
Compass - Found in chest

Dialogues:
Recruit Navigator
HERO - Hey, join my crew
NAVIGATOR - Sure, find me a compass

Puzzles:
Find a compass
Look at chest
Open chest
Take compass

... and your minds are blown!

This is a long way from being completed but I'm really enthsiastic about it. I've got some ideas and have been reading a lot on design documents. I've had a look at the Grim Fandango DD as well as a few other methodologies for game design. I had a look at a few apps for movie script writing and am building up a picture but really need you guys to help plan what you want or think would be useful. I can use this thread to update you guys and collect more info.

For lack of a better name for the tool I'm going with the lazy codename of 'dossier'.

My background in case people are skeptical about my skillz
Well. I'm a professional web-developer. My diet consists of Javascript and a healthy sized portion of HTML, CSS and other web-related curios. My professional career consists of building global brand management systems and online digital libraries. I'm also one of the least organised people I know and need lists for almost everything.

So, my plan is to build this with help from you. Tell me what you want, what you think would be good or bad. What workflow processes you go through to build your game. How you divide up your work to get things done. 

-magintz

2 Weeks ago Jordan Mechner found the original source code for the first PoP game in a box at his dads home. He's recently put all the source code up on GitHub.

Read the full blog article here: http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/textfiles/
... or go straight to the code: https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

So I'm trying to get a GUI to fade in and fade out, to do this I have a while loop reducing the transparency bit by bit on each pass through the loop, see code:

Code: ags

function fade(this GUI*, String inOut, int speed) {
	int i = 100 - (100 - ((100/speed)*speed));
	
	while(i > 0) {
		if (inOut == "in") { this.Transparency = i; }
		else { this.Transparency = 100-i; }
		i-=speed;
		Wait(1);
	}
}

But as you can see I'm using a Wait(1) to make the fade out gradual rather than happening before you can see it.

I've tried to replicate this with a setTimer but I don't actually see the guifade in or out (I think it's happening too quickly). Here's the code I put inside the while loop:

Code: ags

SetTimer(5, 1);
while(IsTimerExpired(5) == false){
  // do nothing
}

When I up the SetTimer to 2 the game crashes saying that the while loop ran 150001 times or something ridiculous. I've even tried nesting several timeout, while loops in the hope that it will prevent a crash but with no luck

Thanks in advance,
Maggi

Hi peoples. Just trying to put in a message that says "game loaded" upon the restoration of a saved game, here's my code:

Code: ags

function on_event (EventType event, int data) 
{
	if(event == eEventRestoreGame) {
		Display("Game Loaded.");
	}
}

However I'm assuming the code is running before the fade in is complete as the screen remains black until I click the mouse and the game fades in, sans message.

Any idea if I'm doing something wrong or is there a way of getting it to work.

I've tried adding a fadeIn(3) before the display, which shows the room background but again no display message and there is no cursor or GUI until I click the mouse.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037990/

Hmm...?

For those of you who weren't aware Broken Sword 1 (Shadow of the Templars) is coming to the Nintendo DS and Wii this Friday. The announcement was made just before Christmas and is now the release date is finally upon us. For those of you who are interested here is the official press release snippet

"SAN FRANCISCO - DECEMBER 18, 2008 - Today Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game publishers, announced a publishing agreement to release the special edition of Broken Sword - Shadow of the Templars on Wiiâ,,¢ and Nintendo DSâ,,¢ systems.

Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars - The Director's Cut is scheduled for release on Wii and Nintendo DS in March 2009. "

Link to full article here

So I know what I'll be getting on Friday, 20th March! My DS is feeling very lonely since I completed Chrono Trigger and as it's a director's cut it features new story elements, settings and puzzles.

Edit: All you people who live in the states will have to wait for next Tuesday for this (24th March).

I'm trying to create a function that acts in a similar way that Character.Say(String msg) or Display(String msg) where the function will not end and continue on to the next line of code until a pre-determined amount of time or the user presses a mouse button.

For instance I have created a function called Speak which can be called to display player speech in a custom GUI, calling it for instance:

Code: ags

player.Speak("My name is Player 1");
player.Speak("I live on the moon.");

...

function Speak(this Character*,String msg) {
  lblSpeech.Text=msg;
}

However because the function terminates at the end and continues onto the next line the only message that is displayed is "I live on the moon".  I could really use some assistance in getting this working, I've tried to create a while loop that waits for a mouse click (when a mouse button is clicked flip a boolean value to true which signals the while loop to break) however this results in an infinite loop causing AGS to crash.

Thanks in advance,
Maggi :D

This is a new post, but wanted to save space, SSH's reply was to my old issue which is now fixed.
Original issue had DynamicSprite* sprite within the function rather than being global so was being lost immediately after calling.

I am trying to improve my game by replacing the RawDrawLine I have with an object as the line needs to be intractable.  I'm trying to use a DynamicSprite to stretch and skew the image and assign that new sprite to the object of my choosing.

I'm messing around in a test ags document using the default template at the moment and this is what I have.

Code: ags

DynamicSprite* sprite;

while(count < 359)
  {
    Wait(8);
    sprite = DynamicSprite.CreateFromExistingSprite(6);
    sprite.Resize(2, 350); // This makes the single red dot a thin line
    sprite.Rotate(1+count); // Incrementally rotate
    object[0].Graphic = sprite.Graphic;
    count+=2;
  }

The problem I'm having is getting the line to rotate properly through the angles like a clock hand going clockwise. I want the starting point (which is in the top right hand of the screen) to remain the same and the hand to rotate around that central point. It manages fine for the first 90 degrees but then starts bugging out. I'm pretty sure it's to do with the objects co-ordinates being the bottom left most pixel of the object which doesn't change, but the objects size is changing as the image rotates.

I could really use some further help here.

Cheers guys n gals,
Maggi

I've been thinking for a while about a project I'd like to start.  A simple one room game that involves an island, a small island big enough to walk across or around in a matter of minutes - think deserted island with a single palm tree.  How would you design this room to be a single room with continuous scrolling of walking around the island.  Objects you see on one side of the island will be in the distance on the other side.

For those adventurous few out there would anyone like to have a go at designing their own deserted island or tropical paradise? One room, one graphic file.

Remember this post is more about the how than the result. How will you make sure the perspective is right, how will items align as well as some inspirational ideas from everyone.

Here's a very quick and poor taster to get you going:



Have fun,
Magi

edit: something else to think about: how would you deal with an npc walking around the island? How do you program walking towards them as they walk towards you?

Hey guys.  I'm being taken into a D&D game in a week for my first time to make up the numbers, I think I'm going to enjoy it but have no idea about anything; I've played Baldur's Gate but that's as close as it comes:P

Does anyone have any good tips or web-links to make me understand what goes on so the first game runs smoothly.  Also does anyone have any character suggestions and how do I go about creating one.

It's not going to be really geeky like in the movies is it?

Ta,
Maggie

Within the Hotspot description field when I press the space bar it zooms in the background instead of inserting a space.

The DrawLine function fails to draw a complete line some of the time and seems broken and unfinished. My code uses the draw line and then waits 100 followed by releasing the surface. I'm using a function to draw this several times (Whenever the player presses a button. The first time it is done it works fine, after that it doesn't.

Here's an example and some code.

Code: ags

DrawingSurface *surface = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
DrawingSurface *backup = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground(1);
surface.DrawingColor = 45153;
surface.DrawLine(212, 22, endX, endY);
Wait(100);
surface.DrawSurface(backup);
Wait(1);
surface.Release();
backup.Release();

Using AGS 3.01 Stable

EDIT: I've overcome this bug by replacing my Wait(100) with a SetTimer() command with a IsTimerExpired() within the repeatedly execute of the page, it causes no problems in the game but seems a little long winded.