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All right, I'm working on a new project, and I'm at the point where I'm trying to hammer out a "look" for it. One of the goals that I have for this one is to improve the graphics over The Vacuum, and in order to give myself more room for detail, I'm bumping up the resolution to 640x480. That, of course, means that I need to get used to higher-resolution sprites, so I figure I'd probably better get some help with that, because the sprites I'm creating are all pretty plain-looking, and I could always use some advice, right?

I'll post more in this thread as I make them, but for now, I'll just start off with this:



So, what can you tell me? What works, what doesn't, and how could it be better? I like the front view more than the side view (although I realize that it's a bit of an unnatural pose in the front view), but I'm not totally sure why.

[939]

So, according to the full games list, there are, at the time of my writing, 939 AGS games available for download. Basically, there is no way to ever play them all. So why not have a thread where we post a short list of our all-time favorites that some of the newcomers to the community (such as this guy) may not have come across yet?

Just for shits and giggles, let's make it a rule that nobody can post their own game. If you made some peripheral contributions such as music or beta testing or whatever, the we'll say that it's not your own game and you're free to recommend it. If the core of the game or a substantial portion of it is your work, let's leave it alone.

Let's also all assume that everybody's already played the Trilby games, because... well, they have. I'm hoping that we'll get some older suggestions in here, but more recent games that you really, really love are welcome, too. And again, I know it's tempting to make a long list of every AGS game you've ever liked, but please try to keep it short.

I'd like to start out by recommending these two:

Charlie Foxtrot and the Galaxy of Tomorrow - this game is genuinely funny, and it proved to me once and for all that inventory puzzles can, in fact, be fun. If you're looking to get someone into adventure games, this game is probably the best gateway drug I've yet come across.

Reactor 09 - when I finished this game, I looked at the clock and realized that it was 3 in the morning; I played the whole thing in one sitting. It's not flawless, but it was very engaging.

Your turn.

I have no idea where this fits, since it's not a problem with AGS but a problem with the games page. If there's somewhere that's more appropriate for this to be, I hope someone will move it for me.

My problem is that I've managed to get my game to show up on the games page, but I can't get the game authors to go into the database. Whenever I try to edit the page, I get a message that says that the page has been successfully updated, followed by this line:

Data too long for column 'position' at row 1

Thusly, on my game's page, this is displayed:

The Vacuum was brought to you by:
(No additional author information available)

Obviously I'd like to be able to credit the people that helped make my game. Is this something I'm doing wrong? If not, how are the chances of getting this cleared up? (If we need a hand for some reason, I do have some knowledge of PHP.)

[The story:]

After three months of development, roughly eight years of testing, four months of battling with web hosts, two removed minigames, and one tragic beta tester death in the engine room (RIP DazJ), I present The Vacuum to the world!

DOWNLOAD IT HERE OR HERE IF YOU PREFER

NOTE: If you already downloaded the game and are playing using v1.2 or below, the current version will not be compatible with your old savegames! Use v1.2 instead. Otherwise, get the new version, it has a nifty new graphics filter and a French translation for all of your Francophone friends.

Web site
Production thread

The story: In The Vacuum, you play as Leo Wallace, a student at Aberdeen University who is headed back home to Whitefall for summer with his girlfriend, Averie Piper. As a pair of poor, starving college students, they decide to book a cheap room on a cargo ship that has extra room for passengers on this particular trip. It's a short jaunt - only a day and a half - and it seems as though it should be uneventful. But when a pair of explosions tear through the passenger compartment while the ship is still in the middle of deep space, Leo and Averie must determine exactly what happened, fix the problems, and discover what - or who - caused the explosions in the first place.

Leo must search high and low for information, pay attention to the clues that he finds, and carefully weigh every decision he makes. Based on his actions, his relationships will be altered, justice will be realized (or not), and lives will be saved or lost.

The screenshots:




















The features:
A simple, streamlined interface which allows the player to perform almost any action with just one click.
A focus on logic and storytelling rather than abstract puzzles, bizarre solutions, and progression through guesswork.
Branching storyline with heaps of endings! HEAPS! I won't give a single statistic for how many distinct endings there are, because all of the different possibilities in this game make it difficult to decide what is or isn't a distinct ending, but there are four main story paths, and each of them have 3-4 possible outcomes, and each of those outcomes have two basic possible branches, and then there are a bunch of other things that may or may not happen. (Basically, this game was a bitch to test.)

The Team:
Concept, art, programming, and so forth:
  David "Makeout Patrol" Proctor
Music:
  Sebastian "kaputtnik" Pfaller
Beta testing:
  Javier "Alarconte" Alarcon
  CosmoQueen
  dunnoson
  Darren "DazJ" Hall
  Jon
  Sebastian "kaputtnik" Pfaller
  Michael "neon" Stein
  Olaf Moriarty "olafmoriarty" Solstrand
German translation:
  Michael "neon" Stein
Italian translation:
  Paul "Paulo" Giaccone
French translation:
  Patrice "Flyingmandarine" Hermenault

...and a bunch of sound effect people that don't use these forums so nobody will be especially interested in. If you are interested, check out the manual, I guess.

Special thanks go to kaputtnik and neon, both of whom went well beyond what I ever could have even hoped for from anonymous strangers on the Internet. All of the beta testers were extremely helpful, but I want to single out these two people for extra-special thanks because they had such a powerful and incredible positive effect on the final product.

PLEASE ENJOY, AND PLEASE VOTE/COMMENT!

I have an issue with a GUI that has its visibility set to MouseYPos. It shows up and disappears like it's supposed to, but whenever the player hits a mouse button while it's showing, the mouse moves a few pixels down, making the GUI disappear. This wouldn't be a huge issue if it were only used for saving and loading, but it's also used for the inventory, and has a pair of scrolling arrows - whenever the player clicks on them, the window disappears, and though the window has scrolled properly when they move the mouse back, it's a pretty jarring effect and I'd really like to get rid of it. Any suggestions? There is nothing in the script that would be causing this - nothing changes the position of the mouse, and the GUI itself is only referenced once, when it is made visible after the user leaves the main menu.

[THIS GAME IS FINISHED, SO YOU ARE IN THE WRONG THREAD! FINISHED GAME THREAD IS HERE]

THIS GAME IS FINISHED, SO YOU ARE IN THE WRONG THREAD! FINISHED GAME THREAD IS HERE

In The Vacuum, you play as Leo Wallace, a student at Aberdeen University who is headed back home to Whitefall for summer with his girlfriend, Averie Piper. As a pair of poor, starving college students, they decide to book a cheap room on a cargo ship that has extra room for passengers on this particular trip. It’s a short jaunt - only a day and a half - and it seems as though it should be uneventful. But when a pair of explosions tear through the passenger compartment while the ship is still in the middle of deep space, Leo and Averie must determine exactly what happened, fix the problems, and discover what - or who - caused the explosions in the first place.
   
Leo must search high and low for information, pay attention to the clues that he finds, and carefully weigh every decision he makes. Based on his actions, his relationships will be altered, justice will be realized (or not), and lives will be saved or lost.

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Now, some of you may recall that I posted a thread about a game called "Escape From Aberdeen Station." After making it about a tenth of the way through that game's development, school started, and I came to two realizations:

1) The game just wasn't shaping up all that well.
2) Heading out to the pub with my friends was a lot more fun than making sprites.

Now that the school year is over and all of my friends have moved back to their respective hometowns for the summer, however, I decided to start that game over again from scratch, and ended up discarding almost everything that I'd made for it, including the storyline. This game is what I've come up with.

The gimmick for this game is that it's not just a simple inventory-based FedEx open-the-locked-door adventure game; it's designed so that the player will (hopefully) actually have to investigate the mystery and choose his actions carefully. Thusly, depending on how hard you look for clues, how much you explore, and what decisions you make, the player's relationships with other characters will change, justice will or will not be served, and the non-playable characters will live or die. (There will be no character death in this game, however. Depending on what the player does, his life might end up sucking considerably more than it does at the game's start, but it won't end.) I haven't actually calculated how many unique endings this game has, but there are at least 10 or 20. EDIT: Make that a grand total of 26!

RELEASE DATE: This time I deliberately waited until the game was almost finished to announce it, to prevent letting people down if I didn't end up finishing it. A side benefit of this is that if you want to play the game, you're not going to have to wait for very long! The Vacuum will be released (edit:) SOON!

Progress Meter:
GRAPHICS - 99.9%
STORY - 100%
SCRIPTING - 99%
TESTING - 95%

OTHER FEATURES:
-Simple, one-click interface
-Several enhanced usability features
-29 playable rooms, with 90 distinct areas crammed into them
-Branching storyline with I don't even know how many distinct endings

This is my first finished game, and I'll be frank - I'm pretty excited about it. I think it will be a good time. Enjoy some screenshots, and ask any questions you like!


It's a bedroom - IN SPACE!

You can't have a spaceship without circuit boards!

In the future, VCRs with bunny ears will be left on the floor!

Experience a dystopian future where this stupid poker fad still hasn't ended! (NOTE: THERE IS NO POKER IN THIS GAME, I WOULDN'T DO THAT TO YOU)

Horizontal stripes still haven't gone out of style in THE FUTURE!

This is the corner of a cargo bay, I hope you like it

You can't have a game set on a spaceship if the player character doesn't put on a space suit at some point

NEW SCREENIES! (7/24)

All right, this one is driving me nuts.

I have an object in a room. It's not clickable, because it's just for a graphic effect; it's hiding another object that floats across the screen at one point (the effect is that the other object goes flying past the window).

However, no matter what I do, the characters always walk behind the object when their y-coordinate is less than 150:



It's worth noting that the bottom of this object is located at y = 135, but the characters walk behind it at y = 150. There are no pixels lower than y=135 in this object.

I have tried the following:

-setting the BaselineOverridden property in the editor to False
-setting the BaselineOverridden property in the editor to True and the Baseline property to 135
-setting the BaselineOverridden property in the editor to True and the Baseline property to 1
-setting the object.Baseline property to 1 in the room_Load() function
-setting the object.Baseline property to 0 in the room_Load() function
-setting the object.Baseline property to 135 in the room_Load() function
-deleting the object and placing it again

What is the deal? Can anybody help a brother out with this?

I'm having trouble importing sprites all of a sudden. I've tried versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, and 3.0.2.43 with the same sprite, and the problem only exists in 3.0.2 and 3.0.43. The problem is that colours are distorted when imported.

Here is a picture of the importing window, in which one sprite is displayed correctly:



Once I click on "import whole image, however, the sprite appears like so in the editor:



Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong? Is there a workaround?

[PROGRESS SO FAR]

Aberdeen is not going to be a dead world for much longer. The surface of the planet may be completely devoid of life for now, but the gargantuan metallic buildings belching gases into the atmosphere will, within a few short decades, bring about the conditions that will allow plants, wildlife, and humans to thrive as if they'd never left Earth in the first place. The vast resources available for mining mean that one day, Aberdeen will be a thriving galactic metropolis, but that is still well in the future - for now, Aberdeen Station, the massive metal city-sattelite orbiting with a population of 300 000 along for the ride is the only harbor for humanity within several days' worth of travel. Some come here for the high wages, some for the promise of a good education, and some come simply to escape the rest of humanity. Very few who travel here consider that they are very much alone, and that should anything ever go wrong, even the fastest help is a long way away.

Paul, Leo and Katie are three students at Aberdeen University, the educational institution tacked onto the end of the station. They are going about their lives peacefully when one night, transportation between areas of the station is cut off, and massive numbers of people disappear seemingly at once. Forced to commit to a hasty decision, and without any knowledge of who they're facing or what they can expect, the three set out to escape from Aberdeen Station, and to bring back help before it's too late.


-------


"Escape from Aberdeen Station" will be my first game ever, but work is coming along splendidly and I'm pretty proud of what I've managed to achieve so far. In my brain, it is the first of a trilogy; if this game is well-received, and I feel good about them, the next two games will be made later on. I expect this game to take between 30 and 90 minutes to complete.

PROGRESS SO FAR

Graphics: 30%
Scripting: 25%
Writing: 65%
Sound: 40%

I'm going to give a rough estimate and say that it will be done and released in mid-October 2007 (THAT IS THIS YEAR YOU GUYS).