Messages

This reminds me. I need to floss more often. 

Reminds me of Populous.
Hmm... I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to recreate something akin to that game in AGS. 

I'm absolutely loving hearing all of these first encounters with AGS. 

I'm just enraged at parents letting their offspring act feral and then having the gall to judge people for calling them out on it.

In just one sentence, you perfectly described all of the kids near to where I live.
I feel your pain. 

[Bog's Adventures in the Underworld]

If I recall correctly, I think it was Bog's Adventures in the Underworld.
Although I never did manage to finish it. 
If I'm remembering correctly. I think I was searching for a full length game which had an artstyle and premise that I thought would be entertaining.

I think A Christmas Blunder was possibly the second. 

As for how I found AGS. Well that was the result of it being on a list of RPG game engines I found. What kind of idiot made that list, I have no idea. But hey, I found AGS through it. 

I feel like this is a reference to current events, and that it's flying over my head. 
Not that I'm complaining though. Living under a rock is rather lovely. 

Yes, it is. The escalation in Israel/Gaza should be all over the news for over a week now 

Oh yeah, I've heard about that. I still don't get it though. 
I thought Gaza was a city not a strip?
Like I said though, it's flying over my head. 

Anyhoo, is everybody ready to start paying to use TwiX?

Is it wrong of me to hope that he does it, just so I can watch Twitter close down, as everyone stops using it? 

Just wanted to share, as I think it's definitely one of the better in- and outputs I had with ChatGPT.

I feel like this is a reference to current events, and that it's flying over my head. 
Not that I'm complaining though. Living under a rock is rather lovely. 



Well, it's been nearly a year. So I wonder, did Musk ruin Twitter?

Let's see... he ruined the access to the API, he ruined the verified badge, and he ruined the actual name of Twitter. But other than that, everything seems to be functioning exactly the same. For now at least.

[Two Birds]

Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for rhymes, but my vote goes to Two Birds. 

Gives me Zak McKraken vibes! Looks fun! Nice clean look, easy to read the rooms.

That's good, because the bedroom has the same exact layout as Zak McKracken, and there's quite a few references to Zak McKracken throughout the game as well. 

Thanks. 

Since AI learns from texts and pictures and then again creates text and pictures, I wonder when the moment will happen when AIs train mostly on AI generated stuff. What will this result in?
I just have to think of the Habsburgs, interbreeding for generations with a questionable outcome...

I think we're all wondering that. Presumably it won't be as catastrophic as one might first think, because the text and pictures generated by AI that make their way online, tend to be curated by actual humans. For example, someone generates a hundred pictures using AI and then uploads the best one.

Still, what do you get if you keep feeding AI it's own output?
...
Ugh, I think I just answered my own question. That sounds like what they did to that two headed goat on Futurama. 

I just want to let you know that The Klaus Strikes Back is my favourite Maniac Mansion Mania episode, and I'm glad to see that even after all these years, you've still gone back and improved it.

I only know a bit of German, but I think I'll actually play it again now, just to hear it with the voice acting. Who knows, maybe I might pick up a word or two. 

I'm in the unique position where I have both problems next to where I live. A very quiet road where people slow down for you sometimes when you could easily just pass behind them. And a crossroad a little further down, where trying to cross is like playing a game of Frogger. 

Everyone in this town have been wanting traffic lights at that crossroads since forever.
And when they did put traffic lights down... they put them at a different crossroad where there were never any problems. And now no one waits to let you pass at that other crossroad thanks to those traffic lights, therefore making everything worse! 

[Rowen's Grand Adventure]

Rowen's Grand Adventure is a reboot of my very first AGS game.

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. 


Screenshots:







Current Progress:
Story--  100%
Puzzles-- 100%
Graphics--  100%
Scripting -- 99%
Music/Sound-- 99%
Voice Work-- 99%


Release Date:
[2025]


Development Diary:
25th September 2023
This is the biggie. The game I've been working on since *checks notes* 2014. Although that's when I started this iteration of it. The absolute first time I worked on this game was *checks notes* 2008. Because this was actually the first game I ever tried to make with AGS. I never finished that game though. Instead I turned it into a crappy comic, and I subsequently made a crappy game that served as a prequel to said crappy comic. That game was the first game I ever uploaded onto AGS. It was so bad, that I spent the next 8 years improving before I tried uploading another game onto AGS.

This game is also quite easily the largest game I've ever made to date. I'd easily say that the end product will be about four times larger than my current largest game (which I think is Crepe Fields). I've not announced this game until now, because I wanted to get it to a state where I could see the end goal in sight. And while I am still many months away from that finish line, I can finally see it. Although that's in no small part due to the sheer amount of time I've been spending on it this year.

I'm currently at 33 characters, 32 rooms, and 143 items. So that should give you some indication of the scale I'm going for with this game. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, I want to make one of those small demos that reuse assets from the game but has it's own set of unique puzzles, and I want to include another (much smaller) game as a completely optional easter egg. I'm really making sure to earn the "Grand" in the title.

Of course before doing that I still need to finish the game, improve all of the graphics (primarily the backgrounds), and do some thorough bug testing.
I don't know if I'll be giving an update every week like I usually do, but I'll definitely make sure to give an update at least once a month. 
If you've read this far, thank you. 

23rd February 2024
Today marks the day when the game officially became playable from start to finish. That's right, not only have I finally finished the last third of the game since my previous update, but I've also just finished implementing the credit sequence. 

Next up is a whole lot of testing and bug fixing, improving the artwork, and implementing the easter eggs, followed by even more testing of course.

9th September 2024
I can now proudly boast having made the only game with an infinite loop meta joke.

Things have been going smoothly with Rowen's Grand Adventure.
I'm nearly onto the beta testing phase.

2nd December 2024
Just a little update to say that the game is almost finished.

All's left is the voice acting and bug fixing.

The voice acting is likely to take a while.
There are over 10,000 lines of dialog in the game.

6th February 2025
A quick update letting you all know what the current progress is with my game.

I'm halfway done with the voice work, 5000 lines recorded, with only 5000 left.

5th April 2025
I've finally finished recording all of the voice lines!

I just need to listen to them, rerecord any lines I flubbed, play my game, and then send it to my beta testers.

If anybody wants a BlueSky invite code, I have some. Just send me a PM

What is BlueSky? And why is it invite only? 

This is less of a gear grinding thing, and more of a pet peeve.

There's been an influx of indie games with a retro 3D look, which I'm all for and I really like.
But they almost all insist or using nearest-neighbour for the texture filtering, with the argument that it both looks better and is more fitting with the retro aesthetic.

I suppose if you grew up with a PS1 or a Sega Saturn, then sure. But if you grew up with a N64, PC, or played a bunch of arcade games, then you'll probably have a preference for bilinear texture filtering. I grew up with a fairly powerful PC, so for me, I grew up with basically all of the options set to max (and typically played the games at a resolution of 1024x768, which technically counts as HD from a vertical pixel count).

Whether one looks better than the other is purely subjective. So at least give me a choice!
As an example I really like the low-res texture work on the System Shock Remake (it's not really going for the retro 3D look, but the textures are), but please give me a choice for bilinear texture filtering! Low-res textures with bilinear texture filtering look brilliant! 



On a related note, there's those people who insist on strong scanline filters on anything going for a retro aesthetic. Like seriously... how bad were your monitors? Because I literally still have mine, and I assure you, if you look really closely you can barely see the scanlines. I'd call it more of a soft blur. (I never ran Windows at the maximum resolution of 1280x1024 because you couldn't read anything due to that blur.)

So yeah, my pet peeve is that people consider the cheap crap they used as kids, as being the one-true depiction of retro.
(And for the record, my family is dirt poor, it's just my dad was really into games and computers. He made up for the cost of the decent hardware through the use of Warez CDs.)
I can't imagine anyone trying to play Tomb Raider 2, Thief the Dark Project, or the original Rainbow Six, at something like 640x480, or worse... 320x200.

(And before the Windows PC, we had an Amiga, and even that had a decent monitor with basically no sign of scanlines. Seriously, how cheap were the screens that people were using?)

my latest discovery was how amazing and pretty simple it actually can be to rotate a sprite almost to a 3d looking level using upscaling to keep the sprites from anti-aliasing (getting blurry). I'm talking about a wheel or fan rotation, then downscaling it inside of the AGS engine to your resolution of choice! No AI involved in that tho, probably could use one tho, if i knew how to work the AI, the only AI i use atm is for my voice acting, i love it alltho some friends help out too, lended their voices and replaces some lines that sounds ass!  So they don't have to work so hard, for no cash. 

You basically just described how RotSprite works.

You might want to rethink Unity, at least until they u-Turn this nonsense.

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten

This honestly reminds me of the time Steam started charging for mods. 
I bet just like Valve, they'll reverse their decision, but I wonder if there will be any lasting impact, or if people will just forget the stunt they pulled after a couple of years. 

On the other hand, if they decide to double down, this could be the end of Unity.
In that case, maybe I might edit that original post just to remove Unity from it. 

Wonderful answers, everyone! You've really helped me.

What do you think will help drive the genre forward? Make it more mainsteam? Maybe have an AAA adventure game?

Well the general way the genre has been moving forward in the past few years is to simplify it. Some developers have been removing the puzzles, and instead focusing on the story and exploration such as with Firewatch. Others have instead removed the story, instead focusing on the puzzles and exploration, such as The Witness.

These simplifications are a way to evolve the genre so it has more mainstream appeal. Which in turn makes publishers and developers more willing to work on projects in the genre, since it'll be more likely to sell. Since the mainstream audience is obviously much larger than the original niche audience that made up all PC gamers back when Adventure Games were at the height of their popularity.

So I think the genre will be driven forward by a need to continually simplify it.
Of course people like me though, won't play those games. And the genres will split, and Adventure Games will be back to where they are now. 
Because quite simply, we like the games as they are. We like the way the puzzles are interwoven into the story, facilitating a need to explore and learn how the world works in order to figure out the puzzles.



Here's an example of what I mean.
This is a forum about Adventure Games, so I don't think I need to put this in spoiler tags, but I'm going to anyway.

Spoiler

In The Secret of Monkey Island, you defeat LeChuck by spraying him with a can of root beer. This makes absolutely no sense when explained plainly like this. But in the context of the game, it's the only solution that makes any sense, and you would be a fool if you didn't come to that conclusion.
So how can something insane ever make sense?

Well it's the puzzles and story that lead up to it.
Early on you get a map to a treasure which turns out to be dancing instructions. Which if you follow them, take you to a treasure. Therefore teaching you that instructions are not always what they appear.
Later on you get a cooking recipe, which using what you learnt before about instructions as well as where the recipe came from, you figure out must be a map to Monkey Island. But you don't have the strange ingredients for it. In the end, you figure out that you can use substitutes, instead of a pressed skull you can use a pirate flag, which has a flat picture of a skull on it. So you learn that substitutes can be used from this puzzle which you only managed to solve because you learnt that instructions are not always what they appear.
Later you are told by some cannibals that you need to get a magic root to defeat the ghosts, which makes sense from a fantasy-setting point of view. The root is then turned into a liquid of some kind that you spray onto the ghosts to make them disappear.
But you lose the magic root juice when you fight against the ghost pirate LeChuck. But there is conveniently a vending machine full of root beer nearby. You've already learnt about substitutes in a previous puzzle, and you've also learnt that root-based liquids kill ghosts, so naturally you use the root beer. Which obviously works.

[close]

This act of learning about the world through the story and puzzles, is at the root of why fans of the genre love adventure games. After all, adventure games are at their very heart, about exploration. The genre is literally named after a game called Adventure, which is basically a game about exploring a colossal cave. (Funny how people complain about Metroidvanias being named after Metroid and Castlevania, or Roguelikes being named after Rogue, but no one complains about Adventure games being named after Adventure)

The problem is though. The majority of people don't enjoy exploring and learning, and as such can't understand how anyone could enjoy the genre as it is. They either want the story or the puzzles depending on their preference, but learning how this fictional world works is a foreign concept to them.
So the Adventure games as we know and love them, can't move forward as a genre, because the majority of people don't enjoy the genre.

I remember watching a video on Extra Punctuation where Yahtzee explained the problem with Adventure games. And while I was watching it, I couldn't believe how someone who used to make Adventure games on this very forum, was also so completely oblivious to what makes them fun to begin with. But at the same time I recognize that, most people simply don't find the thing that makes Adventure games fun, that fun. It's like trying to explain the concept of house insurance to a medieval peasant or nobleman. It just doesn't make sense to them.



To make somewhat of a bad comparison. It's like asking how Slasher movies can move forward as a genre. They can and did to an extent, going from silent killers, to killers who make quips. But the fundamentals at the heart, the reason people enjoy Slashers, is because at their core, every Slasher movie is the exact same. A bunch of teenagers do dumb teenage things, and get killed off in a brutally horrific fashion. That's what makes Slasher movies enjoyable. But admittedly most people got sick of it, which is why the genre isn't as popular as it was in the eighties. For the genre to move forward from that, it would have to abandon what makes the genre what it is, and what fans of it enjoy about it. In which case you end up with something that isn't a Slasher, but rather something else entirely different in the horror genre, like the Found Footage movies.
The genre did move on, exploring other ways of telling the same story, such as satire, and turning it on its head. But at the end of the day, there's only so far you can go before it a new thing entirely.

But that's just my two cents on the matter. Sorry for the wall of text. 

In my lecture, I will discuss the resurgence of the genre since the mid-90s and early 2000s, when it was annonced as "dead".

Ah, the time when budding indie developers began to take root until eventually forming into something much bigger.
We saw the rise of Telltale, Wadjet Eye, and Daedalic. And let's not forgot the creation of Hidden Object Games which have changed from mindlessly clicking random items in a list, to full blown Point and Click Adventure games (although they're still typically ignored by the hardcore fans for some reason, probably because of the stigma surrounding casual games).
We also saw Telltale move to more cinematic games and then failing completely due to expanding too quickly because they got lucky with one game (The Walking Dead). Daedalic also seems to be abandoning adventure games, which seems to be working for them somewhat.

with a focus on the last three years. So, what do you think were the most exciting events in adventure games in this time period?

Personally the only noteworthy thing I can think of from the past three years is Return to Monkey Island.
This isn't exactly a genre where something new and exciting happens every few months or so.

The genre has comfortably found its niche. It's glory days behind it (not unlike western and slasher movies). But it's hardly dead. Manic Miner Clones, now that's a dead genre. 

First thing to think of is: How many verbs do you need?

Walk - unless it's Sierra Template, you don't need a verb for this one. Just clicking anywhere on the screen will make you character walk there (if the spot isn't a character, object or hotspot).

Then you have Look and 2 hands. Do the 2 hands  do anything different?

Looking at the image, it looks like he wants something similar to a verb coin, where the feet are used for kicking rather than walking, and the hands are just two buttons for the same action for artistic symmetry. But that's just my interpretation.



My question to you Blano, do you want this GUI to always be visible, or do you want it to pop-up when you click something?