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Rage of Mages

Correct! Your turn, Amayirot Akago.

Nice. At first I thought it might be Elvira, or some other Adventure/Horrorsoft game, but on second thought I didn't recall any location like that in the said games. I really need to power up my A1200 and replay some of the classics again...

Anyway:



It's one of Twarda's all time favourite games.

Is it Dungeon Quest?

[quick jump to other AGS constructs, than sprites/method and global variables definitions]

I love the AGS engine, I really do. I've been lurking around this forum since 2010, reading the beginner/advanced technical questions/scripting manual, and trying my best doing some crappy demos hopefully nobody will ever see, before finally tackling the my biggest project to date in 2014. I love the power of AGScript, the clean and effective IDE, and the fact a whole lot of community suggestions are already implemented in AGS (switch-case, a better resolution management in winsetup etc.)

During the 3,5+ years of ZA development, I've noticed some things I personally would improve in AGS, to make my work a little bit easier. These are not fatal flaws by any means, as I can go around them, easy or complex way, although they'd surely make a difference in my development time. If some of them can be resolved by using a custom plugin/module (or I just wasn't aware a solution already exists in AGS), then please ignore the point and excuse my ill-informed self.

- quick jump to other AGS constructs, than sprites/method and global variables definitions - currently if I right-click on a number/method/variable in AGS, I can choose to quickly jump to the sprite page and view the sprite with the given ID or jump directly the method/global variable definiton. It would be great if I could also use it to quickly jump to the appropriate preview, by right-clicking on a room/view number (inside an appropriate method) or InventoryItem/Character name (currently it only displays a prompt, explaining the internally defined variable)!

- ability to zoom-in/out on the sprite page - ZA is quite a sprite heavy game, and sometimes I'm not really sure if I'm using the right sprite for the view/object. The sprite page thumbnail is quite small, and I'm unable to see the details, which would tell me what kind of sprite I'm currently dealing with. It would be nice to have a zoom-in option directly on the sprite page, without having to open the sprite in the external program, just to see the bigger version.

- an additional flag, allowing the video file to play with both game audio and video file audio at the same time - ZA features several FMV cutscenes during the gameplay, which require both the game audio and video file audio to play at the same time. While this is doable in AGS, by exporting the video file audio track, it would be a tad easier if I had the option to do it directly in the PlayVideo method.

- optimize the GUI drawing routines for 32-bit games - GUIs in 32-bit games, especially transparent ones, or featuring some animations, ale slowing the game considerably on lower-end PCs, or in software rendering, even though the game alone is working just fine. Would love to see a bit of optimization in the GUI drawing routine in the near future!

- being able to translate text values of custom properties - Polish translation of ZA would be so much easier to do...

- scaling for objects - just like Jack mentioned

- fix some of the issues that are present in AGS for a long time, but aren't that noticeable - including special Windows key combinations (alt|ctrl+tab for example) locking the Escape key, the runtime engine failing to access the data files, if some non-ascii characters (cyryllic etc.) are in the game's path, strings with space at the end in the tra file not being translated and the font-drawing library issue in Linux ports.

These are the things I've noticed the most. But doesn't change the fact I love working with AGS.

Aaaand ZA hit the 10 000 sprites, friends!



Hopefully we won't exceed the 30K limit, since the most complex animations are still not polished (and imported) yet. Here's an example, still a work in progress animation, so excuse the weird framerate, doubled frames and others oddities:

Could that be Bad Dudes?

Whoops, hope it's not TOO obscure.



2nd hint: it's an Italian game, fairly popular back in the day on various shareware compilation CDs.

I actually backed up some of my most used shareware CDs, when the portable hard drives became an affordable good (remember the times, when "portable" hard drives were bulky, heavy, and required an external AC adapter?) Given how ridiculously expensive these things are nowadays in Poland (like most of the popular retro stuff from the past), I made a wise choice. But I wish I backed up more of my collection, as some were lost or became scratched to the point of being completely unreadable...


Anyway, no, it's not Clonk. A small hint - it's somewhat of a Bomberman clone, but played like a 2D platformer.

I was just really into shareware games as a kid and a lot of that is still rattling around in this old brain of mine

Oh man, I know what you mean. I still have most of the shareware CDs from my childhood, and like to fire them up on my retro PC from time to time...

Anyway:

That was fast, man. I really gotta try going deeper into my extremely obscure DOS games folder next time.

Anyway, PilotWings on SNES?

>Hit Self

Fantastic! Great little demo, really enjoyed it. Great work!

Thanks, we're really glad you enjoyed it!

And thanks CyberUncleCat as well! Really glad you liked what we did so far. And about the things you asked...

why not higher resolution? Cartoon style is not extremely detailed so there should be not really any extra work for Carol to make stuff in, say, 2x current game's native res. Just curious.

We were discussing the resolution way back in 2014, and finally settled on 640x480. Larger ones would be a bit time consuming to draw (especially considering we're already working in our free time only, and Twarda is a one (wo)man graphical army), and the large/FMV animations would be much harder to animate in larger resolutions, especially the more "action" ones (like the 'Pterosaur landing' scene, which can be seen on the trailer - that one alone took around a week of extensive anatomy studying and creating clay models of the creature's head, just to capture it correctly!)

You composed and did it Crash?

No, the soundtrack was composed by our fellow AGS user Denis 'Problem' Comtesse. And agreed, he did an excellent job with the soundtrack! I'd say he captured the mood of what we were trying to achieve perfectly.

Question here also - how about voice acting?

We also spoke about it early in the production, and decided to just stick with text only. If we had decided to do the VO for English language, we'd have to do the same for Polish as well (and maybe other languages, if there will be enough interest... somebody already asked me about Spanish and Portuguese translation), which would mean double the work, and sadly I wouldn't be able to afford it. (I'm not comfortable with people doing so much work (ZA features quite a lot of dialogue text) for free). Maybe in the sequel, or some post-release patch...

Its easy (well, demo ver. at least), but we have to take into consideratrion thay this game will also be played by children so as long as riddles are fair on logic level (and those in demos are)

Phew, really glad then! We were carefully designing each puzzle, having younger fellows/inexperienced gamers in mind. I'm glad we accomplished it so far.
These two locations are a bit early in the game, and have several puzzles cut for the sake of the demo version flow (like getting the Croc-away in Rivenn-na (you already start with it) or the entire ladder/boulders quest in the unknown cave), so things will pick up a bit in the full version (along with several extra objectives for shiny pebbles/encyclopedia pages), I promise.

Nevertheless, thank you everyone!

Good ol' Shadowgate.

Excellent news indeed! Well done Captain, great job! What an awesome end-of-the-year gift that is!

Handled that error, along with other minor/small fixes (mostly grammar ones, big thanks for everyone who tried the demo and sent me feedback!) I'm really glad OneDrive/DropBox doesn't break the IDs, while uploading small updates to the existing files. Makes such ninja commits rather easy to do.

We tried to make the error as non-threatening as possible.


Well, back to the full version and the remaining stuff...

Wish you all the best, everyone!

A good tester manages to break games. Yay me. Second game broken in as many days.

And nice little bug that is! There's a problem with playing AudioChannel* stuff, when the digital sound is set to none in winsetup.exe (I always thought it will just ignore all the musical stuff, but it seems the engine tries to play it on non-existent hardware anyway). Thank you again, ClickClickClick!

I'll get to it right away, but for now please try the demo with a configured audio device. You can always mute the game from the in-game options menu.

in "room998.asc", line 291

Error: Error running function 'oLangENG_Interact':
Error: Null pointer referenced

Hey, I sent you a PM. That's a weird issue, as 291th line is something that shouldn't make any problems (it deals with the menu music playback, it never occured for me, or our testers), I would be extra grateful for your feedback!

[the new and updated demo version of Zniw Adventure]

It feels wrong to criticise your great work, but...  I'd like it better if the backside of the character's head in "tactical espionage action" was yellow, not white.

No worries, mate! I told Twarda about it. You're not the only one who wondered about good ol' Zniw's eyes, though - I mean, how exactly do they work?

Anyway, it's Christmas time, and to stay in the mood, there will be no pictures or animations today. Oh no, today it's gonna be something better. Treat it as a little Christmas present from me and Twarda.

Well, here it is - the new and updated demo version of Zniw Adventure, now containing an additional location, never seen in the ZA demo before, as well as more encyclopedia pages to unlock, Problem's tracks to listen and animations to view! The old demo was really ...old, outdated and didn't really reflect any of the changes we made in the game in the last several months. But now here it is, along with the updated AGS page:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1925/
(and a OneDrive mirror, in case DropBox decides to go nuts: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ANUpBSOUAm7kmJo&id=B5EF89C27FA0CD7C%2188906&cid=B5EF89C27FA0CD7C


Oh, and all the cool people are posting trailers/teasers of their excellent games, so I figured we might post a fresh one as well... it may look familiar at first, but don't worry, it's packed with new content.

Well, enjoy. And thanks again for your support, people! Let's hope 2018 will bring only the best for all of us. (and the game will be finally finished... let's say we're on the last 4% now!)