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Hi all! 

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know there are various tricks and guides on porting AGS games for Mac, but I'm afraid either because they're a little out of date or because I'm not a Mac native, I haven't been able to get any of them to actually work for me.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

Thank you! It's been so nice to see all the reactions and reviews for the game.

[The Beekeeper's Picnic]

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!

Catnapped!? That simply won't do.

Looking marvellous and that 'deductions' GUI looks like a very nice touch of gameplay.

Thank you!

I hope so - the 'deductions' idea is perhaps the aspect of the game I'm least sure about! I think a lot of the humour from the game comes from the idea of Sherlock Holmes using the same approach he might have done to solve a murder to tackle silly small-scale "mysteries" and interpersonal problems, and I reflected that in having this deductions system which feels like it's come from perhaps a more serious and more difficult kind of mystery game.

I'm hoping that most people will get the joke and find it fun, but I'm prepared for some people to think it's a tiny bit tedious!

The game has a launch trailer now! And our intention is to release on March 26th

You can wishlist it in Steam!

Everything is pretty much done, play testing is just occasionally finding wobbles in the audio, because there are 3000+ voice lines and it's tricky to not make mistakes! I'm hoping they'll all get ironed out in the next few weeks.
I'm also tearing my hair out a little about trying to get Steam achievements working, I keep being on the brink of saying "stuff it" and not bothering, but I know a lot of people really like them.

This looks absolutely fascinating!

Thanks for the confirmation - guess I'll know another time!

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!

Front and back walk cycles I really loathe because they always looks weird to me, I designed my whole game to limit how much you actually end up seeing them (which turns out has its own issues...) But I think that working in a low resolution helps hide some of the limitations in my abilities.

One thing which helped me is that I ended up using an animation application which lets me use layers so I don't have to animate everything perfectly at once. First I focus on getting the correct up-down motion of the torso, then I worry about the legs, and then I worry about the arms. Somehow that method seemed to click for me, and I ended up quite enjoying doing the side profile animations.

[The big headlines]

Hello everyone!

I'm aware it's been absolutely ages since I posted here, so I thought I'd let you all know that this project isn't dead, and I've been furiously working at it since I wrote last!

The big headlines

The game is functionally complete and playable! - I opened the game up for beta testing earlier this year and I'm really satisfied that it's now able to be played all the way through. It seems to take people about 3-4 hours, although if someone gets really into exploring every possible interaction it can take them 6+, and there is some replayability to the truly dedicated due to a few moments that you can handle in different ways. 

The game now has music! - The lovely composer for the project, Sandy Garnelle, is well underway composing a lovely soft and impressionistic soundtrack for the game. It's exactly the kind of thing I imagined a couple of years ago when this was all just a pipe dream. As soon as I began adding the music and ambient sounds it was like all of the settings and scenery felt really fresh again!

Voice acting: it's happening - This is a big one. I didn't really even consider adding voice acting to the game even when the kickstarter raised enough money to possibly cover it, as casting and directing voice actors is something so utterly out of my wheelhouse and I feel like a badly voiced game is worse than one that isn't voiced at all. I'm also aware that I didn't really write the game in an economical way, where voice acting is concerned!

BUT I've had a really wonderful opportunity to work with a fabulous voice director who I've admired for ages and is a Professional with a capital P where audio is concerned. I'm not ready to announce names, but I'm delighted to find my little game has the possibility of being a vector for some of the amazing talents in the thriving British audiodrama scene leaping into the world of games. It's this weird phenomenon where the voices i was listening to while completing the animation and artwork on the game may end up being IN the game, which doesn't quite feel real.

This is going to delay wider release of the game for a while, but I'm so sure it's going to be worth it.

So I'm tentatively looking around for anyone who might be willing to publish this oddball little game of mine!  Any suggestions would be super appreciated.

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?

Just as an update - I figured it was easier to just redo the work than figure out this mess. It took my Saturday morning, but I think I'm back where I was before this happened! I'm still interested to know what the heck I did to cause this, but it's no longer a pressing thing.

An excellent reminder to backup before making big changes, and that keeping daily backups can save your bacon!

I was also really pleased that I log all the changes I make on a spreadsheet, which let me know exactly what work I'd done before this happened which had been lost.

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!

Exciting news!
I launched a kickstarter for the project today... and it's already fully funded!

I kept the goal quite modest because I had a couple of very specific goals in mind, but I have to admit I'm really surprised that it's funded quite so quickly!

Amazing, thank you so much! I really appreciate it!

Ahhhhhh yeah, I have a gui with some clickable buttons at the corner of the screen which is visible in most rooms.

Thank you for your work on it, I really like it! 

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! 
Thank you!

Thanks! I hope so, the gameplay is the bit I'm most nervous about! 

Thank you for all the lovely comments and support, everyone!

It's been a busy few months for this project since my last post, although I can't say much development actually got done!

I was invited to a conference at the British Library to talk about my game and Sherlock Holmes games in general, and the problems of adaptation in interactive narratives.
This was more than a little intimidating because I feel like I don't know a lot about game design (especially the lingo!), and a lot of the audience did. It was a great few days though.
I got a free sneak peek at their current exhibition on digital storytelling, which I definitely recommend checking out if you're in London this Summer!

I've been scrambling over the past month because I'm planning a Kickstarter campaign for late September and really like to take part in Steam NextFest in October, which means pulling together a "proper" demo, and wrangling Steam's convoluted back end to get all the files working. Just as everything was going great my computer died and I wasted a few weeks trying to get it repaired, before realising I was going to give in and buy a replacement.

One of the best decisions I feel I made was commissioning an excellent artist to create some gorgeous cover art for me which I could use for all the graphics I need across Steam, Itch and Kickstarter.
I've been doing all the artwork in the game myself and I feel like I could have whipped something up, but being able to outsource it so I could think about other things was such a load off my mind, and I'm so much happier with the final product than I think I would have been if I'd done the artwork myself.

I've also got a brand new trailer, woo!

You can follow the Kickstarter here!

These are amazing! Its not something I've ever thought to do before, but Ill definitely think about it now!

I'm interested in fan bookbinding and this has the same kind of appeal - I love things that are carefully crafted by fans to make digital objects exist physically!