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The walkbehind allows you to draw over an area of the background and set a baseline. Sprites will appear either in front of or behind that area depending on their Y position in relation to the baseline. That area can be whatever shape you draw.

Objects, like characters are sprites with their own baseline (the bottom of the sprite, by default). You can't draw walkbehinds on sprites. So as long as the baseline of the desk object or desk walkbehind is below the character sprite, we shouldn't see their legs.when they're behind it.

If you want a sprite that is partly in front of and partly behind the same object, or walkbehind - that's more of a challenge. There are a few solutions, discussed recently in this thread: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=57953.0

So i thought, maybe i can use the desk exactly like i've done with "normal" walkbehinds for bakgrounds?. In otherwords i draw only the parts of the desk that is "hiding" the animation from showing up? Well to my surprise AGS bugs out completely. I'm sorry if it's not considered a bug, but if a object get's almost invisible in the actual game you see random parts of it, even tho you have drawn the walkbehind for it. I consider that a bug or it should say something "you can't do a walkbehind draw for an object", or something like that.

I might be misreading this, but AGS makes objects disappear when you draw walkbehinds, so I think it's pretty clear that walkbehinds only apply to the background.

I completely agree. And if I can be somewhat reductionist, it kind of leaves us with a two-handed answer to the question "Why didn't adventure games evolve?". Hand one: Because there was nothing to evolve. Developers simply found new ways to present their narratives. Hand two: The audience didn't want them to evolve. Adventure fans are nothing if not nostalgic.

If you're going off my argument here, I'm not sure where fans/the audience come into it.

I guess that was a reflection on my gripe about us fans? Just to be clear, I don't think the fans are actually influencing developers to make bad adventure games (except possibly, in some small way, via Kickstarters). I mean that as long as our definitions are narrow and deliberately skewed in favour of the 90s, we're stuck. In reality, I think the genre has evolved - loads - but that isn't always acknowledged.

That's an excellent point. Insult Sword fighting is a brilliant, funny, mini-game-cum-puzzle (not happy with that phrase, but here we are) that players can approach in an almost RPG-ish fashion. Whatever 'gameplay' is, it's a solid example and a large portion of MI's story is built around it.

On the other hand, I'm playing the Riddle of Master Lu for the first time now. And it's got lovingly produced artwork, surprisingly intelligent writing and actually good acting. I've heard the puzzles described as "very hard". The reality is, they're incredibly stupid.  They're exactly the arbitrary and meaningless obstacles you're talking about. Fly back to New York to steal your employees turtle, then fly to Danzig to make the turtle ring a bell in a tomb. Don't they have Turtles in Germany? Don't they have other things that could ring bells? They're trying to do Tintin, but Tintin is smart and resourceful, not a freewheeling maniac. The gameplay is bad because undermines the character and the story that the devs cared about.

I agree about the fact that there was never a coherent mechanic across all adventure games. I think that's what I object to - the idea that there ever was a definable golden age. (It should be obvious from my signature that I'm not against conventional adventure games that don't push the genre forwards at all.)

But I'm a member of a few facebook groups dedicated to point and clicks, and whenever people ask for recommendations, the responses are always 30 year-old games. When a newer game is mentioned, someone complains that it's 3D and 3D games are ugly, or it's not REALLY a point and click. I find it disheartening, because those were the conversations we were having here in 2003 when I joined - and there really weren't tons of good adventure games getting published.

We should also remember that the now ubiquitous dual analogue stick control system wasn't immediately welcomed by critics or players. A review of Alien Resurrection from 2000 complains:

The game's control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down. Too often, you'll turn to face a foe and find that your weapon is aimed at the floor or ceiling while the alien gleefully hacks away at your midsection.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/alien-resurrection-review/1900-2637344/

I'm not saying Grim Fandango's controls worked. They were pretty clunky, and involved a lot of sliding along the edges of walls. But direct control of a character is a huge boon for a sense of exploration, and I loved moving around the spaces looking for interactive things. It's more fun than sweeping a mouse across the screen. I think new players are a little baffled by the central point & click idea that you are giving instructions to a semi-independent character, rather than playing AS that character. Perhaps that divide helped adventure games develop characters that were more than just idealised, power-tripping player avatars?

Unavowed was widely, and I think rightly, praised as a step forward for point and clicks in a number of ways. It dispensed with almost all the much-loved but mostly terrible features of the traditional point and click - obtuse solutions, inventory combinations, cumbersome interfaces, excessive back-tracking etc. And unlike many non-linear narrative games, the Bioware-style mission structure meant players were able to meaningful choices that impacted on the ending.

I think Lucas Arts adventure games aren't the best examples of pixel art as an aesthetic. Especially not Monkey Island 2, because they were scanned drawings/paintings. So they could easily have looked the same but better in high resolution.

But I also don't think the comparison is very helpful. Mosaics, cross stitching and weaving have been making images out of discrete regions of colour for a long, long time. Pixel art is a medium in its own right. It's retro, but not dated in the same way that the SCUMM interface is dated.

I blame the fans, who endured a decade years of mostly horrible point and click games in the 2000s, and cleave to the mechanics of the 90s "classics" rather than the things that actually made them enjoyable. I recently made a similar observation to your point about tank controls - no one would say that Doom Eternal wasn't really an FPS because it uses analogue sticks. But adventure game devotees are ready to insist that Firewatch, Life is Strange, Dear Esther and Telltale games DO NOT count as adventure games because they lack an incredibly outdated 1990s interface. It's particularly absurd, because it's not like interfaces have ever been consistent across adventure games.

Narrative is huge in games now, it's given much more thought in mainstream games than it was in the 90s. Even if you do want a traditional point and clicks, loads of really good ones are getting made by indie teams. But the die-hard point-and-clickers don't like them either, because they lack the AAA production values that about 5 Lucas Arts games had.

I love traditional adventure games as much as anyone - I've written for three of them in the last few months - but I hate this corrosive nostalgia. Adventure games are dead, as long as we insist on them having both million dollar budgets and a 30 year old UI which was quite rubbish in the first place.

It was all FAKE! All the backgrounds are free stock images. My desk is much more boring. And tiny.

I really did have to spill black paint and drop an envelope into it, though. For some reason I couldn't make that convincing digitally.

I don't think Wirral's testimony is contradicted, he says he came into the drawing room (admittedly, implausible!) and Primm told him to "call the police... said there'd been a murder". Which is the same thing as what Primm says. And yes, it is a bit Knives Out-y. I'm plagiarising that, and whatever Christie novels it borrowed from.

Spoiler

The lack of ink on the fingers was deliberate, but you're right. Producing it under lockdown meant there were lots of other small details in the photographs people identified as potential clues, which were purely incidental/accidental.

What should contradict Fanny & Croup's alibi is that she claims to have met him at 4.50, when he was washing. But, it's a leap, because the player has to speculate that he was the one washing. It's not a cast-iron, gotcha contradiction.

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Really good point about the 'Rules'. And the line about lies was misleading, since two of the characters told the complete truth.

It's been very hard to judge, because I was writing it as I went (with a plan). But I could only test it on my partner. So there are a few things I would have changed, if I'd had a chance to playtest:

Spoiler

Originally, Fanny was going to say how much money she receives from ABK, and Primm would have mentioned the mine work costing the same amount. I was convinced that would be totally obvious. I wanted some ambiguity, but only one or two people made that exact connection. So it was obviously too vague.

I would have made it more clear that ABK was killed after Fanny claimed to meet Croup in the library. Croup washing up was his alibi for the murder, and as soon as his fake alibi was broken, Fanny was the only plausible suspect left. It was further confused by Sooty lying about when she arrived in the drawing room, but only by a few minutes. It's a pointless lie, designed to distract from her having been in the murder room. It's too small a lie for people to notice it, but big enough to confuse the timeline.

But it was a bit fuzzier than I intended it to be, and most people had Croup washing up after the killing. Which wouldn't have made sense, because if the ink was spilled during the murder, it would have been on ABK's hands. However, it's a bit of a stretch to imagine it drying completely in 20ish minutes...

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But over all, people seem very happy with the result. It was somewhat less fair than the average detective game, but about as guessable as the average Christie-knock off.

Snarky's analysis is impressive!

All I'd question is some of the timings. Fanny says she saw ABK at 4.40, but Wirral reports them arguing for 5-10 minutes. She could be reporting the start, rather then the end time of their conversation.

I wasn't sure about posting this, because self-promotion is so gauche. But since it's the last day for people to get involved...



It's all on twitter, and you can vote for who you think did the murder until midday tomorrow:

https://twitter.com/MisterABK/status/1253625098256465920

- Alasdair

Do you accept international game devs? Because I could tell you some weird stories about Florida, and not just the Skunk Ape!

Apologies for resurrecting this ancient thread. But... it happened. We finally got AGS's own Grundislav on the podcast:

http://www.loremenpodcast.com/episode-18-s3

Learn the "truth" that inspired Ben Jordan's first adventure. And be creeped out by Robert the Doll.

Congratulations on the anniversary! I just bought it, having had it on my wishlist for a while.

This is a great mini post-mortem, with tips that would be applicable to lots of game writers. I'd love to know what other devs end up regretting (in a positive way).

Yeah, hopefully lockdown will be a distant memory... but it seems likely that social distancing will still be advisable. And, with the venue being a public building, the decision would probably be out of our hands.

Hello! This might be the last thing on everyone's mind, but we've decided to cancel AdventureX 2020 because of the Covid-19 crisis. There's more info here:

http://adventurexpo.org/adventurex-2020-cancelled/

As AGSers, you might be particularly interested in the fact that we're going to run an AdventureX Game Jam in November instead.

The genetic variation between populations is an explanation people love to reach for, but I think we imagine much bigger genetic differences between nations/ethnicites/races than there actually are. Inherited predispositions to diseases do exist, but it takes us down a very dodgy road to start speculating that Italy and New York might suffering particularly badly because of "Italian genes".  Especially when there are much simpler, less eugenic, explanations.

If the character needed to punch many different spots on a wobbly-edged table (in a cruel revival of the Full Throttle wall-kick puzzle) then a separate sprite would be the only sensible option.

But for normal purposes, that's overkill. The cut-out region doesn't need to be flat or regular. It would follow the outline of whatever is on the table.