Topics

And then I leave them till the end, then I'm stressed about deadlines, and then have to worry about all the bugs the walkcycles introduced, it's all such a big hassle.

There are a couple of wireframe guides for walkcycles that I've tried painting over, but especially for front and back views, they never look right. The character walking towards the screen either widens their legs (as if the vanishing point was just behind them, or you can see the soles of their feet, which usually doesn't make sense.

How do you deal with this? I remember there were a couple of walkcycle generators, but trying them now, either the sites are dead, or they don't work any longer.

Also, how do you plan the rest of the game around your walkcycles? Are all your BG horizons approximately in the same place? Do you limit vertical movement?

The AGS wiki is woefully out of date, and kinda...all over the place.

I am not making a call to action for members here to work on it, I figured I'd do it myself. If you want to work on it, that'd be cool, but you'd probably also benefit from discussion (that will hopefully happen) here.

Browsing through it, however, I found that the content seems to be very mixed.
There are scripting resources - woefully out of date
External Resources - also out of date (none of the links work)
Attempts at comprehensively documenting AGS in a bizarre and incomprehensible way - Surprise surprise, also out of date
Walkthroughs - that I assume are not out of date, but I had no knowledge of this game
Pages of users - Some more detailed, many less, most of people who haven't been here in over a decade
Jokey Historical in-jokes - Full of bygone members who we miss
Less Jokey Explanations of various Forum things - Not out of date for the most part
Archives of Forum discussions - Unfortunately, while interesting, very much off-colour and inappropriately languaged in parts
Records of our awards - Also out of date, but thankfully this is something easily remedied
Pages about games - Mostly not out of date, except where a link is shared

So...what do we want to use the wiki for? I feel there's an argument for the case that we don't need it at all.
Should it be a storage of links to resources, or should that be in a resources section on the site?
Should it be a place to find tutorials on how to do stuff, or should that be searched on the forums?
Should we include AGS games? Or is that unnecessary with AGS games pages?
Should it be a museum of AGS history, about the members, activities, awards, etc? I feel this could be the best use-case, but I'd be curious how many people even access those pages on the wiki

Depending on these answers, I'd go about tidying up the wiki (maybe not deleting some pages, keeping them for posterity, but...archiving them in some way), and restructuring it. OR...if it seems a redundant thing, we could get rid of it all 

How do you do it?!

I'd like to call on the expertise of the more prolific among you, who regularly complete games, mostly on their own (browsing the MAGS wins, I see people like @4KbShort and @Ponch and @ddavey1983 and we miss you slasher!), and ask for your specific process, with actionable steps I can take to follow them and also complete a game, for MAGS or longer term, or shorter term.

My process usually goes like this:

• See a topic or theme or contest that interests me (man, I wish I could go back to my longer term personal projects at some point!), or often doesn't REALLY interest me, but I want to challenge myself and make a game, so I try anyway, often twisting the theme
• Coming up with a game idea that fits the theme- this is usually my first point of failure, or the thing that unreasonably takes up 50% of the time of the competition
• Trying to map out the puzzles/plot progression for the game- this is usually my 2nd point of failure, and probably the most common one, even happening if I progress to steps beyond this one. I guess there could be multiple reasons for this, mostly involving me not wanting to do a simple use tomato on cook->get sandwich->use sandwich on guard->get key->use key on gate->... type of puzzles for due to them being boring, and then as a consequence, often trying to innovate TOO much ("Maybe I can make a match-3 minigame!") or even getting caught up in side-issues ("maybe my interface can be a super accessible only spacebar and nothing else!" "maybe I can implement a state machine!" "maybe I can try an iMUSE type system!")
• While theoretically I'd like to have completed an entire progression of the story/puzzles before this step, that almost never happens, so I figure I'll come up with the basics of the previous step and try to move to this next step- actual implementation: usually involves setting up the game system (how the UI works, the intro and start menu and icons) or doing a couple of the BGs or main character (although I usually start with a placeholder character), while still working on the previous step. I haven't recently progressed far beyond this step.

Help? Please? Step by step, how do you fine people who do it, do it? Do you often feel like you're intentionally implementing or planning something substandard just to "get it done" (or just get deadlocked and not complete because you couldn't do the substandard thing, nor come up with the awesome thing)? How do you limit yourself and prevent your idea from ballooning out of control? Conversely, how do pyt in that one or two "cool", "different" things so that your game is not just another boring checkmark on the list?

The example is from this forum post:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=636655592


(Here I will try to do it now facebook.com)

Maybe it works without brackets facebook.com

Nope.

I'm not quite sure how it is SUPPOSED to be, but...I don't understand what is happening here.

So it may be a bit sneaky and cheeky to share adventure game resources for other engines here, but I just saw that Unreal has made the Point and Click Adventure Toolkit free for the month. So if you want, you can redeem it, check it out and have it with you forever.

From the description, it is "100% Blueprint Framework", so basically connecting flow nodes together to make stuff happen, not that I have too much experience with that (or with Unreal in general), and it seems to cover most of the basic adventure game framework stuff, and can be used for 2D as well as 3D.

Might be useful for a few traitors  , and if anyone has actually used it before, be interesting to hear what you have to say!

So through some randomness of internetting, I got some free skillshare, but aside from it constantly being mentioned in ads, I don't really know much about it.
As anyone used it, and do you have any recommendations about courses I should check out? I ask here especially since AGS would represent a nice confluence of creative interests that we all share, so you may even all know something very specific to adventure games!

World Poetry Day
Today we celebrate poems
And reminisce too
Of great times writing poems here
Have a great day, one and all!

Someone mentioned this in general, but I thought maybe post here as well for greater visibility (it is the same domain, after all), but the AGS IRC Server has been down the last couple days.

Hello friends!

So I did an entry for a recent BG Blitz, and in my usual way, I was deeply unsatisfied with it. So I worked some more on it, and am still deeply unsatisfied with it  .
[imgzoom]https://i.imgur.com/gyCXaYD.png[/imgzoom]

The idea was to use the rules to make something relating to one of the required screens in a game I've been working on for far too long. It would be one of the first screens in the game, an entrance to a "castle" the player would be spending most of the game in. My initial idea for the screen was to have a scrolling screen, where the player could walk along the side of the castle(shown in the lower left here), and come across a blank wall, a grating, and a decorative birdbath/bowl thing. I decided while working on the BG Blitz to separate that into a separate screen. The only really important part of this BG would be the pedestal with the writing, the door, and the fact that you'd have access to the roof that would overlook this BG from above, but I feel the ominous and oppressive atmosphere (harsh skyline, spooky tower in the distance) added to it.

But all that is design considerations for the BG to give you an idea where I was coming from, and not technical and artistic problems with my current implementation.

Some issues I had with my work that hopefully you can help me with:

• I wasn't the biggest fan of the original palette required by the Blitz, and I definitely utilised it badly. My final game might have the same "lineart", but probably not the same palette. Still any feedback on better implementations on this palette, or a general palette for a medievalish eastern european/turkic castle palette would be appreciated (just note, this would be one of the very few outdoor BGs in the game). You can see some changes I made from my original attempt (door was green, now it is purple), that I'm not sure worked well.
• Level of details in the BG- this is somewhat tied to the limited palette and how I'd deal with it, but I wouldn't mind a limited palette (and feel it would add to the game) if I could make it work. Between the entry for the Blitz and the update here, I had the idea to add more detail to the stonework, as well as maybe gargoyles or statues along the edges, and an archway over the door, but it just didn't seem to work so I settled for more minor changes. Also considered a foreground tree on the right, but I felt that would obscure the entrance to the BG the skyline, so I settled (unsuccessfully?) on a bush.

Spoiler

[imgzoom]https://i.imgur.com/njlRIYY.png[/imgzoom] [imgzoom]https://i.imgur.com/nqDrCl0.png[/imgzoom]

[close]

Also, any other help would also of course be appreciated!

[objectives]

Puzzles really seem to be the least investigated element of ags game development here, with the fewest resources!

I had decided yet again to attempt this month's MAGS, and yet again I was stumped at the very first(ish) step.

In my mind, the process of developing a game is:

• Come up with an idea
• Flesh out a series of objectives blocked by obstacles that when solved give certain results/rewards (access to new areas, plot progression, some sort of meaningful change in the game world)

- these could be kind of recursive, with major objectives/obstacles having a series of smaller objectives/obstacles

• Start doing the art/coding/dev for that sequence, adjusting stuff as you go as required

I always get stuck at the 2nd step. With MAGS it is especially frustrating, because I realise "I need to limit my scope, so as to be able to actually finish the game, and limited scope/size seems very often in my head to run contrary to having meaningful objectives/obstacles and results.

So for this month, the theme was "White Elephant". Not to give all the details, but I decided to make a game about a rogue-esque character who got a blessing (that turned out to be a kind of a curse) due to a gift/reward for acquiring some treasure for a sorcerer type person. Her solution is to break into the sorcerer's castle and steal it from him and thus hopefully "nullify" the conditions for the reward and get rid of it.
I came up with the premise, I came up with overall objective, I came up with the eventual ending. I even came up with (what I thought was) a limited scope adventure with obvious progression: breaking into a castle, getting the treasure/maybe confronting the sorcerer, getting out.

Except I'm stuck now. I can't figure out puzzles. I mean, I could do what in my mind would be a BAD adventure game with BAD puzzle design, i.e. just make a series of figurative locks and keys (maybe even randomly pulling from one of the many lists of puzzle types that people have been compiling here), culminating in "Yay, you won the game, here is the end scene!", but...I don't want to do that. That seems like a recipe for an uninteresting adventure game.


I can't remember having played any AGS game with particularly spectacular puzzle design, but I would be curious as to the process you fine people employ to come up with puzzles, and maybe help me out. I'm not looking for help on this specific MAGS (or I would've probably posted in CL), but more asking for process advice.

So this video brought back to my mind an old debate that's been going on for years, but had not happened here for a while now: "Why did adventure games die?" (the last response here being akin to 'they didn't'). I guess we can discuss that, and there may be some interesting points from that discussion, but what struck me was his reasoning: the genre (traditional graphical point and click adventures) fell out due to tired and old mechanics and unintuitive puzzles, and it seems a compelling argument: mechanically, an adventure game made 25 years ago could easily have been made today (and vice versa), while during that time, other genres developed, and keep on developing and improving and evolving.

On the surface of it, that argument makes sense, but then I started wondering- how did other genres evolve that adventure games didn't?
I can think of lots of quality of life improvements in other genres (mouse-look in FPSes, dumping tank controls in 3rd person games), but do those really count as "evolutions"?

And the next video in the series discusses some of the evolution in adventure games. So a roughly chronological list would be something like:

Interactive Fiction

Graphical Interactive Fiction

Graphical Point & Click Adventure Games

FMV Visual Novels Walking Simulators Branching Narrative QTE games Adventure Elements in non-adventures

(that last row probably has a lot more intermixing and hierarchy, but I was just keeping it simple)

So obviously adventure games are not dead. They just keep evolving. But then I come back to something- the traditional "Graphical Point & Click Adventure Games" do seem dead. Sure, we had a record breaking kickstarter a couple years ago (one that I participated in), but the results, while fun, were nothing groundbreaking or signifying any great return.
The same video series says "Much of the design problems that plagued the last wave of American adventure games, were still there in broken age: Nonsense, obtuse, trial-and-error puzzles, repetitive VO, dull, very slow gameplay". We have even a number of commercial releases of AGS games, and they're quality stuff for what they are, but does that count as a return, or just serving a very niche market?

What do you think?

I remember this coming up a bit in discussions about two-button and one-button interface systems, but I could do with a refresher.

In my perspective:
There are very few adventure game puzzles that make use of the exact location of the player on screen
Player characters moving about can block stuff in the background and cause complications when you want the player character to be clickable
It can make interfaces more complicated than the need be (as evidenced by those aforementioned interface system discussions

Unfortunately, all those cons are balanced out by a very important pro:
Being able to control the player character gives the player a greater amount of connection to the player character, and reduces the layers between the player and the character on screen (I feel direct control with arrow/WASD keys would actually increase that connection)

I can think of a few games where the character was not walkable on screen. I mean, aside from the obvious first person perspective games like Myst. They were very often investigative games, where the player character stood outside of the frame of the screen, and "shared" the world with the player/viewer.

Discussion popped up on IRC where one fellow insisted "I've never met anyone with colourblindness in my life!", and I told him "A colourblind person has most definitely played your game". So the results are probably going to be matching world statistics (unless there's something unique about Adventure gamers I don't know), but I thought some awareness would be cool.
I know at least one colourblind AGSer game developer who has very pretty games, but I'm sure there are more.
Also, including that last option is probably going to skew things 

Here's a helpful image I found (and a horrible colour palette I will now be using for my game ). If you have some form of colourblindness, I guess the first image will look like one of the others:

[Top Tier]

Top Tier (unsorted because that is too hard):

• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge- Graphics, music, humour, feeling of adventure
• Loom: puzzles, innovation, atmosphere, music-interlaced-with-story
• Grim Fandango: Story, writing, characters (are all those the same thing?), music (although I'm not THAT big a fan of the style, so I wouldn't say music myself), and unfortunately horrible controls at the time
• The Secret of Monkey Island: Possibly nostalgia speaking here, but I thought the graphics, music and insult swordfighting were great
• Day of the Tentacle: The time travel puzzles

Middle Tier (solid adventure games that just weren't the very best of LucasArts)
6- Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis: Possibly belonged in the Top Tier, but it was getting too big . Lots of interesting interplay between Indy & Sophia.
7- Sam & Max: Hit the Road: Awesome humour, fun interactions between the two main characters, zany setting.
8- Full Throttle: Interesting setting, Pretty graphics, Fitting music and voice acting
9- The Curse of Monkey Island: Pretty graphics (I'd rate this at the end of the middle tier, though, but that could just be my "This isn't what Monkey Island is!" fanboyism speaking).

Bottom Tier (some rated low for simply being too primitive design-wise, not their fault, maybe at their time they were at the top of the game)
10- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
11- Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
12- Maniac Mansion
13- The Dig
14- Escape from Monkey Island
- Labyrinth: was never able to finish this game, so perhaps it is unfair to rate it 15th, lets just say "unmarked rank"

So what do you say? Agree? Disagree? COME FIGHT ME BRO
**List excludes remakes and desktop adventures**

The description for this sub-forum mentioned not being technical, and I'm not sure this counts as non-technical, but it isn't as technical as something I'd put in the technical forum, and it isn't a problem that I'm looking for a solution for a specific project just now, either, so I figured it'd fit here. If it fits somewhere else better, I'm sure a mod will move it.

So, a lot of my recent projects are rush jobs for jams or MAGS, and as such, they end up with a lot of ad hoc checks which I know shouldn't be the way I did them if I had planned properly.
For example, if ((player.HasInventory(iThing) && (oPlant.Visible)) { dialog1.Start(); } else { dialog2.Start(); }

As you can imagine, things get messy, especially when considering conflicts and finding situations where something should or shouldn't work.
When there's no possibility of using a combination of such explicit conditions, I end up creating a global variable, so then my code is littered with numerous different bools or ints also included in these ifs. I don't feel this is a good solution either.

• I remember there used to be a state machine module or something similar by SSH from years ago- but I'm not sure how usable it'd be today.
  
• I also had a thought of creating a global array where each index would be a decision point, and the value at that index would represent what choice the player took- the problem here is that I'd have to remember or comment down what each index and each value at each index meant.
  
• Another thought I had was to use the score, perhaps even multiplying prime values to it, and then checking the mod of the total score to see what actions the player had taken- same problem as the last idea, I'd have to remember what each value meant.
  

How do you handle tracking the exact point of progress the player is at for your games? Is there some standard way of doing it that I'm missing?

[In Bloom]

In Bloom

The Infestation is blooming, and time is running out. Will you be able to save humanity?
In the far-flung future, the earth is in danger: A malicious bloom has spread through the galaxy and will soon engulf the earth. You will be tasked with saving it, but in the end, you must decide how!

A short game with only a couple puzzles, limited palette, and hopefully interesting world. You play as the Scout, on a mission to save humanity from the encroaching infestation bloom. This game has nothing to do with the Nirvana song.

So back in September, I decided to participate in the $102 Adventure Game Challenge. Being my usual procrastinating self, the vast majority of my work on my entry took place in the last week of the jam. Still, it is a completed and complete-able game, so I figured I should share it!
This version has some improvements over what I submitted to the jam, but the walkcycle is still as janky as ever. I'll try to fix it when I'm less prone to frustration, but aside from that, it should be mostly complete.

CHECK IT OUT HERE!

KNOWN ISSUES:
* There's an immediate room transition in the overworld screen, the moment you click the exit. I have no idea how to fix that.

So I created a palette of colours I want to use for my game, and that includes for the GUI items and speech colours as well.
Unfortunately, for all of my colours, they cannot be used in speech colours or GUIs.

For example, say I want to use a nice shade of blue at about 18, 111, 126 RGB for a character's speech colour. So I put that into their SpeechColor property, but it gets reset to 16, 108, 120.
The same with GUI elements.

This might just be a sad reality of working in AGS right now, but then the next part is a bug as well.
I tried plugging the colours I wanted into the Palette tab in the AGS Colours menu- I tried both using the pre-existing colours 1-15, as well as adding new ones to the end. Now if I choose the colour index to the colour I want in SpeechColour properties of characters or BackgroundColour properties of UI elements, the editor shows the correct colour with the correct RGB code, but in-game, the colours shown are the same hardcoded colours for that index- so for example, if I plugged in my blue shade at palette index 7, the editor shows the blue I want, but in-game, it shows the grey colour that is colour 7.

And yes, I'm using 32bit. 8bit would've been great, but the days of being able to smoothly 8 bit seem to be far behind AGS, and there was too much mucking about required to do that.

Hi!
So I'm using the default Y-axis pop-down GUI that AGS provides (I don't remember what it was called, the description now says "Visibility: When mouse moves to top of screen"), and the problem is that whenever I click a button in it, the GUI disappears, and I need to move my mouse up the screen again. Most cases I guess this would make sense, but I want to use it for inventory and scrolling through inventory.
Example:
[imgzoom]http://ags.pics/XFv5.gif[/imgzoom]
Is the only solution going to be "Code your own Y-axis pop-down GUI"?

Hey! I'm trying to come up with an optimal verbcoin (you can see the background in this thread here), but I've run into some hiccups, so I figured I'd get some help here. It's not exactly scripting help questions as much as procedure advice . Keep in mind, I'm trying to create a generalised solution that at most requires users need to add some of their own text or properties at a later time if they want to make changes to the verbs, but don't have to go into adjusting hardcoded numbers each time.

Code: ags

function bLook_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)
{
  gVerbCoin.Visible=false;
  if (button==eMouseLeft) Room.ProcessClick(verbCoinX, verbCoinY, eModeLookat);
  
}

That's the code for the OnClick of one of the buttons that pop up on my verbcoin UI. Every button's function is very similar, the only difference is the eMode... at the end. I could make a single function that just changed the last line of each, but I can't think of a generalised way to handle this. The function itself has the GUIControl as a parameter, so I can identify which verbcoin button was pressed, but there doesn't seem to be a useful way to use that. I had initially thought that everything (including UI elements) had Properties, so I would have used those, but apparently they do not.
As a related problem, I wanted to add action texts connected to each verb. So if the player moves the mouse over a blue cup, the text "Blue Cup" would appear at the bottom. When the player clicks the blue cup, this opens the verbcoin, and what I'd like is that when mousing over the LOOK button, "Look at" would be added to the text to change it to "Look at Blue Cup". I was assuming each text would be connected somehow to the verb.

So what I can think of right now for all this is to either use GUIControl.ID and/or create enums and strings for all the different possible verbs, but that really isn't a generalised solution, and would require a user in the future to add to it/remove from it themselves themselves if they ever wanted to make some changes. Is there a better, more generalised way?