Topics

["Plot"]

Due to popular request, the next installation in the Me Go Store series (of which I still don't understand why they're so well-received.  ): ME GO NEW GAME!*

"Plot": Well, you know the drill: Evilguy does something bad, and you have to fix it again... but this time, it's different. By swallowing a magical potion, he alters reality in unpredictable ways**, and suddenly random encounters are popping up everywhere just as his absence of an evil lair*** turns into a Doom Fortress!

Yeah, it's an Adventure/RPG crossover this time.

Without further ado what you're all yearning for: Screenshots!


From the starting cutscene. Yes, that's shading.


The combat system in action.


One of the many "puzzles".

Finishing date: No goddamn idea. Depends on the AGS forum users' pressure.

* Working title. Perhaps.
** "Unpredictable" because magical potions normally don't effect the whole reality.
*** As seen in Me Go 2008.

My planned mAGS game sadly fell victim to a computer crash and a resulting lack of motivation, but I've managed to save some graphics. I think it looks pretty good (thanks to the help of #AGS and most notably Babar  ), but I'd still like to hear if you think there's anything that could be improved. Without further ado:

A sickeningly colorful (and cheaply furnished) office:


A grim noir-esque detective:


The matching dame (no, I still can't draw boobs):


Aaand the scene in action:


So... what do you think?

Best contest ever. 'Nuff said.

I can't decide between "Killer Blimp Basketball", "Communist Cheese Onslaught", "Robot Stick Returns", "Presidential Hovercraft Freak" or possibly even "Emo Arcade EX", though. "Naughty Makeout Batallion" kind-of runs out of competition. 

[Background Blitz]

Yes, ladies, gentlemen and hermaphrodites, because of the dwindling activity of the Mockup Blitz (which I "won" last time because my entry was the only one), it's possible time to bring back the original Background Blitz.

To celebrate this event (which also means there now is no regular contest apart from mAGS I could ever win  ) and to ensure a higher activity, the theme shall be pretty simple:

Cliché villain lair.

That's it. You can draw it from the outside, from the inside, from the top, from the bottom, in sinister blackscale colors, in sickeningly bright retro graphics... it's completely up to you! No technical restrictions, but please don't make your scene bigger than, let's say, 640x480 pixels (and not smaller than 320x200).

In case you don't remember the voting categories, they are:

Idea - The underlying idea to the background. Doesn't
necessarily have to coincide perfectly with the theme of the
week, just strike you as interesting/amusing/inspiring; a place
you'd really enjoy visiting within a game.

Atmosphere - How well the image manages to evoke a certain feeling or mood.

Design - How well the elements in the image are designed,
such as landscapes, buildings, decorations, clouds, doorknobs,
etc.

Composition - How well the elements in the image work
together/are positioned in relation to each other.

Functionality - How well it would work when adding sprites, i
ncluding appropriate walking distances, a good angle for
character sprites, clever walkway solutions, easily understood
exits, etc.

Technique - How well the ideas are executed in form of
rendering.

Now, get backgroundin'! Ending date's two weeks from now.

/EDIT: Or, y'know, the 25th. Either thing's fine by me.

(Taken from the extremly confusing intro that's using a different color scheme than the rest of the game)

Most likely one of the last games to be released in 2007, the third and currently latest installement in the progressing Me Go Store series... bah, screw that, Evilguy has a poorly conceived but nevertheless EVIL plan again and you have to stop him! Same background music as Me Go Store II, but less annoying and painful. EPIC SNEAKING TUNE in the intro by FSi, special thanks for beta-testing go to space_boy and the person who initially sparked the idea to do a special New Year MGS... I think it was bicilotti, but I might be wrong.

Downloadery!

Mirror by Inkoddi!

Happy new year, everyone!

[Mental Trouble!]

There we go again, people; seems like the Mockup Blitz is becoming a little of a more permanent installation! Anyway...

For those who don't know Mockup Blitz yet:

"Your objective is to create an adventure game mockup. This means that you must create a scene exactly as it would look as if you were playing a game. You must design the interface, the main character (if 3rd person view) or any other characters, and the background."

And the topic this time: Mental Trouble!. Since quite a few of the suggestions in our newish game ideas thread deal with this topic, I thought it might be nice to see how the artist people in the forums interpret this  . In more detail, this means:

* Your main character has to have to be dealing with some sort of 'mental trouble', obsession or something like this, and it should be visible from his looks. You can be more subtle here, e.g. have him carry a big bag and baggy clothes if he has kleptomania, or extremely obvious, as with two different haircuts at the same time if he's schizophrenic or something.

* The view of the world the character has should be subjective in some way, and his madness should be reflected in his surroundings somehow - for example, if we take our example of the kleptomaniac, you could have certain objects in the room being brighter than usual and twinkling slightly... or maybe have the letters "TAKE ME" floating above them or something, you make the call 

* [OPTIONAL] Have a GUI (control) that deals with the character's madness somehow, like a bar showing how long the character has before he just grabs a random object, not caring whether somebody looks or not, if he doesn't pick up something in between or something like that.

That's it. No size and/or palette restrictions.

I thought I'd leave the topic more open on this one, regarding the variety and rather fuzzy definition of [in-]sanity. Voting is as usual, you have until the 5th January to make your entries since there's New Year in between and what's a January 1st without a huge hangover and massive lack of sleep preventing you from working?

So now, have fun and... don't snap! 

Is it a plane?
Is it a bird?
Is it an experimental alcohol-fueled missile from the military base next door?

No, it's... SUPERBUUUUM!


"Thisch bottle ish almust empty, but I'm shure I didnut drink from it! There ish sumthin fishy goin' un..."

Just a little something I did for fun, but it went out pretty "awesome" and I thought I might adopt the style. What do you think?

Yeah, I went there.



Features a funny-at-first-listen-but-really-annoying-afterwards background tune, an EPIC BATTLE TUNE and some plot help by FSi and, um, ... everything Me Go Store! had, only worse. The plot doesn't make much sense... as the game... and the puzzles... and pretty much everything else... but hey.

Get Me Go Away!

Against better knowledge, I've decided to go out and try giving (very) low-res pixel art a shot again, and thus created edit one of these free walkcycle images Eric was friendly enough to provide. Now I'd like to hear some crit about it, so I can improve and finally be able to do a game with at least semi-decent, not "Me Go Store!"-paintover graphics.

Anyway, meet... El Presidente! He lacks most shading right now because I couldn't leave that in Eric included (because it looked like El Presidente was wearing spandex) and I proved completly unable to do it myself.

1x


2x


4x


Soo... whaddya think? I know it's not too good, but at least it's not AS bad as my last attempts 

You play as the german Zeppelin commander Wilhelm von Hadenberg, and... damn, see for yourself, the game is too short to give away that much information. Now with 500% more clichés about Imperial Germany than the next leading brand.

You might have already seen some instance of this game (like the original mAGS version, which is still floating about, or the original deluxe version, which has been deleted and purged). In that case, you might still want to give this a try since some additional bits of content have been added, like music (by Scott Joplin), sound effects (by myself) and better character sprites (also by myself).

Game is around 5MB in size now. It's played like every other adventure these days, with some exceptions, but these are answered in a text document that's supplied with the download.

So what are you waiting for? Get downloading!

A game for this month's mAGS, and I'm still a comfortable 3.5 hours away from the dealine! Go me! 



You play as the german Zeppelin commander Wilhelm von Hadenberg, and... damn, play for yourself! Now with 500% more clichés about Imperial Germany than the next leading brand.

Game is around 1.1 MB of size. It's played like every other adventure these days, with some exceptions, but these are answered in a text document that's supplied with the download.

Downloady!

/EDIT:

Now with extra much contest winning! Accept no substitutes!

I've spent several hours trying to get the most important city of my current game looking... well... "fitting". I'd like some comments and critics now. You can see the background here; beware, it's rather big. I like the hard difference between the crafted marmor bank and the cracked run-down bunkhouse (hope it's recognisable), as well as the propaganda advertisement, but I'd like to hear your opinion on this, too.

The result of boredom, writer's block and boredom... so I've drawn a bit DeFoe Quadrology (or whatever it's officially called) parody stuff: A background [= background edit] here, a few characters there. You can see them all in the title screen above. So, what do you think of them?

Yesterday, I discovered an online shop where you can customize yourself a T-Shirt together. Of course, I started creating an AGS T-Shirt right away. After fiddling around with their idiotic editor for over an hour, I ended up with this:


Which doesn't look too good, in my opinion  . Still, I want some kind of AGS merchandise, so here is my suggestion: PLEASE register an official AGS CafePress merchandise store and make up for my lack of T-Shirt creation talent.

Seriously. It's really easy to register a store at CafePress.com, and AGS needs one. How will we be able to survive without official blue cups?

Sooo...

as you may or may not know, I'm planning to include a strategy part in my latest game. But, to get it all working first without having to mess around with a halfways finished game, I'm creating another, seperated kinda-sort of strategy game first. Nothing quite refined, just the raw skeleton of the engine - with a war in space between the Red and the Blue Cups. So my question is: Would there be any interest in this? Should I make it in a real game with a story and all that stuff? Or release the source code? Or just the game? Or shall I just keep it all to myself?

Sorry for not giving you any screenshots, but my connection is currently b0rken - I'm typing this at my grandparent's. Probably tomorrow, or the day after.

/EDIT: Oh, and in the unlikely case people want this to be a real game, with story and stuff, I'll need someone who can draw good looking graphics at the size of 40x40. I suck at drawing graphics.

[Screenshots]

Like Cascade Failure, this is going to be a mAGS entry. Unlike Cascade Failure, I'm going to finish it in time (I hope). Also unlike Cascade Failure, it's not on hold.

Yeah, well, screw that.

Screenshots

Story Outline


Setting


Bet you've always wanted to play as the, ahem, "democratically elected and loved" Presidente of a small tropical island.

/EDIT:
There is a new screenshot available.



/EDIT EDIT:

Look, it's News With El Presidente!


/EDIT EDIT EDIT:
You can watch the UPDATED trailer here.
Let it run for a few ten seconds before clicking play. Theme tune is BBC's world news theme tune.

After tinkering around with MSPaint and the Me Go Store sprites, I ended up with this character, which is supposed to be the protagonist in my next game.


(the cap was the hell of a lot of work)

I'm quite satisfied with it, but I'd like to hear your C&C, too.

This is a mixture of a stylistic experiment, a bad joke game and a "I couldn't finish the real thing in time" mags entry. It's yet to decide whether it'll go in Joke Games or mags games.

Yay, FSi mirror.

[must]

So I thought: if you script a dialog system for someone, you can copy it over to the Tech Forum, too.

Can I make a topic list that can be added to and removed from throughout the game, where only those key-words bring up conversation topics?

My workaround would be:

* Put above game_start:

Code: ags

Character *cOtherguy;
//this creates a pointer we'll use later.

* Create the dialog dDialog with completly all options

* Put this in the dialog script:

Code: ags

@S
return
@1
run-script(1);
//if you want, you can put additional stuff here, e.g. stop (remove return then)
return 
@2
run-script(2);
//same here
return
//and so on, do this for every dialog topic.
//NOTE: create the options first, it will make the @S, @1, @2 and so on appear!
//also, remove the text behind //.

* Now create properties, as many as you have topics. They must be named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. Create them as strings and set their respective properties to what you want that character to say about topic 1, 2, 3...

* Put this into dialog request:

Code: ags

String prop=String.Format("%d",parameter);
cOtherguy.Say(cOtherguy.GetProperty(prop));

//after that you can still use what dialog_request was intended for. for example, if option 6 gives you an item:

Code: ags

if (parameter==6) player.AddInventory(inventory[2]);

* Put the following interaction in "talk to character":

Code: ags

cOtherguy=Character.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y);
dDialog.Start();

* If you want to turn options of that dialog on and off, just use the Dialog.SetOptionState command. It's described in the manual.

---

So, if you use it in your game, please give me credit 

[Gun Turret]

I'm going to need two kinds of security turrets for my MAGS game - "Shock" and "Gun" turrets, both with a fire animation. This is what I have done:

Gun Turret


Shock Turret


The shock looks fine to me, but the Gun Turret animation seems a little... weird to me. Any suggestions on how to improve it?