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The game has now been released on both GameJolt and Itchio!
The compleated game thread can be found here.

It's taken me a long time to make this game. Way longer than I ever expected, but I think it was worth it. 

Next stop is the Steam release. I'm already about half-way there. I just need to finish off all of the artwork that Steam requires, add in the Steam achievements, and then get everything approved. Wish me luck.

This thread can now be locked. 

[Click here to buy.]

Click here to buy.

What started off as a normal day (for Rowen at least), quickly turns into him being forced to take a couple of vacation days. So join Rowen and his (supposedly evil) twin brother Roger, as they travel to a strange country known only as the United States of America. While there, Rowen will enter a cooking show, mess with the mafia, help finish a movie, and escape from a hotel. But Rowen's blundering eventually leads him into stumbling into an operation that deals with something that's worth more than ten times the price of gold.

During this adventure you will meet many colourful characters, such as a clown with globophobia, a cactus which says it can't talk, and even the Grim Reaper himself.

So join Rowen on this truly grand adventure.


A classic Point and Click Adventure with a low-stakes plot, and filled to the brim with British humour.

• Two-click interface: left-click to interact, right-click to examine.
• Double click and hold to run.
• Double click on exits to instantly transition to another area.
• Hold spacebar to pause and display interactable areas.
• F5 to open save menu, F7 to open load menu, F9 to restart, and ESC to open the main menu.
• Contains toilet humour, cartoon violence, infrequent strong language, and mild sexual innuendos.
• Game length up to 12 hours, depending on player skill.

OS: Windows XP or above

Processor: 2.7 GHz Dual Core (and above, can run on single core)

Memory: 512 MB RAM

Graphics: DirectDraw, OpenGL, or DirectX compatible card
DirectX: Version 9.0c or above

Monitor: 640x400 or above

Storage: 1 GB available space

Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card

Additional Notes: Mouse, keyboard

If you're unsure about the game, why not play the game's demo.
Don't worry about repeating the same puzzles in the main game, it's an interquel where you play as a cactus!

From my own understanding, generally when it comes down to optimization, memory being used by variables such as strings or ints should be pretty low on your priority list. You can optimize things a bit there, use shorts instead of ints when the value doesn't go above 30,000, that sort of stuff. But any benefit will mostly be negligible.

What you actually want to do, is optimize any functions that are repeatedly executed.
For example, let's say you have a function that checks if the cursor is on the left side of the screen, the right side of the screen, or the center.

Code: ags

if(cursor==left) do this;
else if(cursor==right) do this;
else do that;

Now let's say this function runs every time you click. You expect people to click a lot, and for some reason, you also expect the cursor to be in the center 90% of the time. You'd want to optimize the function because it's running a lot, and the best way to optimize it would be to check if the cursor is in the center first, so it can skip the other checks.

Code: ags

if(cursor==center) do this;
else if(cursor==left) do this;
else do that;

This is a vast over simplification. But that's one thing can do when optimizing your game.
Another would be to look over your code and see where things can be simplified and made more elegant. Once again, the benefits are usually negligible, but if it's a function that runs a lot, it could add up.

In general though, you usually don't have to do optimizations unless you encounter an issue.
Doing so will also help with testing. Since it's a bit hard to know if what you've changed has made things better or worse, when you literally can't see a difference (because there isn't a problem with which to see a difference in).

Thanks for sharing this. I really do mean that as well.
I always love to see someone who values their own art enough to want to archive it. 

It's been a while since my last update, but I've not been sitting on my laurels.
The game is nearing completion. All that's left to do, is to sort everything out ready for it to be submitted online. This includes making a thumbnail, writing down the summary, having a trailer made (which I've gotten my brother to edit for me, since he's better at that sort of stuff than me), and making sure I've not left any debugging code in the game (and making sure debug mode is disabled).
Then I'll have to figure out how to start the process of getting it onto Steam, since that's my ultimate goal. Wish me luck with that.

Overall, assuming everything goes ok. I should have the game finished either sometime this month or early next month. (Hopefully the former, but you never know. I might get sick. The flu IS currently going around my family.)

Lastly, here's a screenshot of a room that hasn't been revealed yet, enjoy.

Hello, I am 90sNick (or 90sNick_Pinesal in some places). I have created a couple of RPGmaker games, but there's the thing with those, I modeled the gameplay after a point and click adventure, no battles, just dialog and puzzles.

Welcome to the forums Nick. You made a good choice of engine for adventure games. It can seem intimidating at first, but you'll find that it's actually quite easy to use. This was the first game engine I used, and I had no coding expereience at all. As a matter of fact, AGS, is what started me off learning how to code.
I look forward to your future projects. 

I do have a quick request, if I may; I there a game that I can play and load into AGS for the purposes of dissecting the game and figuring out how it works? The build in templates are good but they don't represent a full working game.

I know exactly what you mean. I first learnt how to use AGS by dissecting the various templates.
If you like, I can give you the source code to one of my old games. Although in terms of coding, it'll probably be quite messy.

Ooh, this is cool! 
I probably could've used something like this about a month ago. 

https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-predicts-these-jobs-are-safe-from-ai-2000637340



I love the matter-of-fact tone from Microsoft, as though AI is a force of nature and not something actively being pushed by these hell-hounds.

To quote Bioshock: "They come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets."

It's much worse, apparently.

I can't wait until it bursts. 

I know that it's the normal people like us who will be forced to bare the brunt of the impact from such a huge bubble bursting.
But things can't improve until it does. And hey, when it does, we all get to say "I told you so!"

Since the game I am creating has a resolution of 640 x 480, is there a way to disable the higher resolution options so that a player cannot pick them?

Why would you want to do that?
There are some computer monitors that don't support 640x480. So those people would only be able to play your game in a tiny windowed view.

Perhaps you've misinterpreted what the resolution option does in the general settings. In which case, I think Crimson Wizard explains it better than I ever could.

What I am not happy about is consumer behaviour. I see many people moaning about subscription services, "always online" games and day-0 DLCs, but in the end they keep buying them.

I like to think that the disconnect between what people are saying, and what people are doing, is more of a result of the silent majority not caring.
While there are definitely hypocrites out there. I just think it makes more sense that most of the people who are complaining (like us), are just a vocal minority.

My justification for this way of thinking is that people like us are customers, and we want to be treated as such. We get games we actually want to play.
But the vast majority of people are simply consumers, and are happy to just consume. They'll buy all of the latest popular games on a Steam sale and never play any of them, choosing instead to scroll on TikTok for four hours straight.

I'm sure almost everyone here has heard about it by now, but I'll sum it up for those that don't.

It's basically a petition to the EU to pass a rule where players must be given the means to play a live-service after their permanent closure. Whether that's through an end-of-life update (like modern arcade games already do), the tools to run your own private server (saving people the task to reverse engineer the code to make their own tools), or some other way (I can't think of any other way though).

The petition has already met the threshold to be considered, but whether or not they reject it because of bots or something, has yet to be seen.


Personally, I think the initiative is a good thing and I hope it passes. 
I don't like live-services, and their temporariness is baked into their design, so anyone who does like them, should already understand and appreciate that those servers are going to be permanently closed one day.
But there's no reason for the vast majority of them to give you the message "Can't connect to server." After the servers close down. Especially when a lot of them are mostly single-player experiences anyway.

That's a pretty awesome tool you've made. 

I hope you do eventually disentangle it from your website, because it'd be brilliant to have an offline version.
Still, this is great. Thanks for sharing it. 

Very sad. But inevitable. 

I'm seeing this kind of stuff happen to more and more websites recently. At least now I know why they always become random gambling sites. It always did strike me as being particularly random.

As forum members may rightly be suspicious of strange links by unknown posters, I will say that it looks legit. If it hasn't been edited after this reply, the link is to a Google Form (using Google's own URL-shortener) survey about a real adventure game in development:

As someone who has already filled in the survey.
I feel really dumb for not being more wary, and not saying anything about it being safe. 

Then again, I do have an extension that blocks websites from running any scripts unless I say so. It makes it a pain to browse the web, but it does make it safer.

Still, thank you Snarky. 

Check the DateTime api: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/DateTime.html
You can compare if the current date/time is past a due date and quit to desktop.


- Alan

Of course if you do that, people will easily be able to circumvent your copy-protection by just changing their internal clock.

My best recommendation is to just make sure you give it to beta testers you trust. Maybe throw in a unique serial-number graphic of some kind on the main menu, so you can uniquely identify each beta tester's copy, so if there is a leak, you'll know who did it. (Nothing is a better deterrent than removing someone's anonymity.)
Maybe also throw in a keyword that has to be input whenever the game is booted, so if it is distributed, that has to be sent along with it (you'd be amazed at how often people neglect to include a simple text file to get around something like that).

Or you could just shrug it off, and see it as free advertising. After all, if they like your unfinished version, they might buy the completed version. And if they don't, then they probably never would have bought it in the first place.

Wait, what if you press the keyboard key corresponding to the empty dialog option?

I get the feeling it'd be possible to sequence skip with that. So perhaps that should also be disabled if the dialog option has no text.

I've encountered a similar issue whenever I use a colour with the following values: R:255 G:0 B:255 Alpha:0
I think it's a problem caused by the magic-pink being used to force transparency conflicting with the actual transparency.

I personally make sure all of the transparency in the sprite isn't magenta whenever I use actual alpha transparency. I usually use white, black, grey or something like that. To do that, I just put in a background layer with the follow values: R:128 G:128 B:128 Alpha:1 and then combine the layers, use the magic wand to select the transparent area, and delete it. (There's probably a better way though.)

Hello!

I'm planning out the introduction credits and cut-scene for my game. Before I go too far down Beginner Lane, I wondered if anyone had any guidance or tips on how to (or not to) code scenes like these?

(There will be other cut-scenes beyond these, so I'm hoping to avoid learning something useful later on and redoing everything!)

Thank you for any insight in advance!

In terms of coding, just make sure to use the StartCutscene and EndCutscene functions so players can skip them.
Other than that, there's nothing else you need to worry in the coding-realm. As long as it works, it should be fine. Just make sure everything is where you want it to be at the end of the cutscene.

In terms of "good habits", I'd recommend keeping them short. If they have to be really long, try to intersperse it with a set of dialog options every now and again to keep the player invested (I think Ron Gilbert had a rule of thumb where it was something like cutscenes couldn't go on for longer than a minute without giving some sort of gameplay, although don't quote me on that). Of course if it's an emotional scene, just let it breathe.
And always remember the golden rule. Never make into a cutscene what could instead be made into gameplay. It's more fun to do than to watch.

What I don't get: don't all traditional human artists train on existing art? I imagine that art teachers will show a bunch of Picasso paintings to their students and tell them "Now do something similar" and people will look at the pictures and copy parts of it or only concepts into new paintings. Heck, even the old masters learned by just copying other paintings.
Why is it different here?

Good question. And the answer will depend on who you ask.

Some people will say there isn't a difference.
Others will say the difference is that a human can never remember anything perfectly, let alone recreate it perfectly, so when a human trains from something, it introduces biological imperfections.

For me though, I say the difference is awareness. If you understand how GenAI works, you realize it's isn't learning anything. Now don't get me wrong, there's a chance that what they've developed could be used as a small part for a proper AI that is capable of learning from other artwork. But as of right now, it's just a glorified filter that takes a lot of input data. Just get it to generate "trailer screenshot", and look at the perfect "recreation" of actual screenshots from popular movies that came out at the time of the original training data.
I'm not kidding about it being a glorfied filter either. If GenAI is learning, and is comparable to the way humans learn to make art, then what is the difference between GenAI and the nearest-neighbour scaling algorithm, other than the quantity of data that's being input?

It's hard to explain, because as humans, we have a tendency to see something that's imitating life, and believe that life is imitating it. As an example, now that we've invented computers, there's a surprising amount of people who believe we live in a simulation, simply because they don't fully comprehend that we made computers to simulate life, not the other way around.

As a non-pixel artist (or a least a very rudimentary one), does supposedly "good" AI pixel art still look weird to pro pixel artists? I mean, apart from the usual extra fingers and melting hair, AI pixel art looks somewhat...off to me. Is it because of AI's weakness with shadows and contrast (that flat 50-50 light/dark style inherent to AI), or is it something else? Palette choices? Pixel placement?

I'm far from a pro, but it looks off to me too. For me it's usually the pixel placement. They always place pixels in spots that no one ever would, unless they just scaled down a picture using nearest-neighbour.