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With the help of artificial intelligence, it is indeed possible to create real masterpieces. You have to keep up with the times. And use everything to the maximum to achieve your goals.

With the help of genAI, then yes... it should indeed be possible to create a masterpiece.
The problem is, the people who are capable of making a masterpiece are the same people who would almost certainly never use genAI to aid their development process.

You ever notice how the best art, is always the stuff that's harder to make? A good example would be stop-motion vs CGI.
It's almost as though the more difficult it is to make something, the more effort people put into making it. 

Alice in Wonderland?

I've finally finished recording all of the voice lines! 

Now I just need to listen through all 10,000 of them, rerecord any lines I flubbed (or alter the ingame text to match the way I recorded the line), then quickly playthrough my game to make sure everything is working, and then send it over to my beta testers.



Not long now.

Looks great on light mode!  Any chance of a version with a transparent background for dark mode, please?  So the cup with white outline, but no blue background, just transparent instead.

How's this?

I gave it a try with convertio but the icon doesn't seem to fully work. It doesn't show up in list or details view in explorer but in the larger views. Here is the png, if anyone wants to give it a try:

Here you go:


It's got the sizes: 256, 128, 48, 32, and 16.
I made it using Gimp, although I did the resizing with IrfanView in order to use the Lanczos resampler, since I think it's the best resampler for retaining details.

Just a tiny cosmetic issue:

The favicon has a black background, as opposed to a transparent one:


Is this deliberate?

Presumably it's there to make the white outline visible.

Alternatively it'd have to look like this:


I'm not sure which looks better though. 

Might and Magic?

Congratulations to everyone who won.
And thank you for the incredible ceremony. 

Alice's Cottage?

I remember this being standard in the old 9-Verb template. You could literally just copy and paste it from there.

Don't forget this.
I find it funny how China is America's number 1 enemy, now that they're officially worse than China. 

And the proposed solution is pretty much just to give corporations exemption from following copyright laws... which if you think about it, is already the case (I mean honestly, how often does a little guy win a copyright case?). They clearly just want it in writing though, so everyone can get off their back about it.

Recently I've just been making my own fonts. It's a bit laborious, but it's quite easy to do. At least for the pixel-art fonts that I need.

But to better answer your question, I remember Zoo977 making quite a few fonts for AGS, which can be found here.

Shouldn't the theme be "LGBTQIA+"? 
It seem a bit wrong to leave out the Asexuals. (Especially since there's already a subsection of the LGBTQIA+ community who thinks that they shouldn't be included in the lineup.)

It kind of looks like Mr Game and Watch.

Thanks so much for all these thoughtful and detailed responses!   This is a really great discussion! 

@CaptainD I think the multi-layer hinting sounds really smart. In practice, though, that sounds really difficult to design without simply including a "hint system." Is this demonstrated in the newest Captain Disaster demo? Would love to see how you're implementing it.

Anyone else have thoughts about hints or hint systems and how to nudge struggling players without making it too easy for the pros? Do you have a favorite game that did this well?

I personally have three ways of doing hints.

• Firstly, if you try and combine two items that aren't supposed to be combined, you'll be given a hint as to what you should be combining those items with: "Nah, I'd rather cut up the pillow than draw on it."
• Secondly, if you look at the item, you'll get a hint as to what you should be doing with it: "Hmm, I've always wondered what was inside of a pillow."
• Thirdly, have characters basically be built-in hint systems, with their dialog options being literal hints: "Any idea of what I could do with this pillow?" "I don't know. Just don't destroy it like you did with your last one."

And of course, add more hints for more obscure or harder puzzles, and less hints for the easier and simpler puzzles. If it's a part of the game where the player has a choice to solve multiple puzzles (like the Three Pirate Trials), then you can usually get away with less hints, since if they get stuck, they can just go do something else until the hints they did find, finally clicks in their mind.
I like to think that the best part about this method, is that they won't be able to distinguish the hints from the red-herrings and meaningless blabber. So the hints are likely to just sit at the back of their mind, until they suddenly recall it, thinking that they've come to that conclusion on their own. (In other words, planting the idea of the solution in their head, so they think it's their solution and not yours.)

The oldest version I personally think you should even consider aiming for, is 3.4.3, since it's the last version to work on Windows XP. And there's still people out there that use Windows XP, so if you've got that version covered, you've pretty much made it compatible for the vast majority of people who refuse to upgrade their software.

Any older than that, and you're targeting an audience that either doesn't exist or doesn't care.

But that isn't to say that you SHOULD target 3.4.3. Because like Snarky said, that pretty much only covers a small niche audience.
Personally, I think Crimson Wizard is probably right about targeting 3.6.0.
Besides, it'll make it easier for you if you aren't having to keep support for old versions in mind when writing your code.

That all being said, if you can easily add support for an older version. Why not do it.

I have designed far more puzzles than I've been making actual games, I'm afraid... Very often, I would think like Danvzare describes and pretty much follow the same method. But not always.

I'm going to be stealing some of these methods from now on. 

Hmm, interesting.
I'll gladly share my process, which I hope helps. 

Firstly you need an idea. This part is easy, because ideas are like dust. They're f*cking everywhere.

Next you need the story. Keep it simple, and divide it into bullet points.

Then you figure out how the player character will reach each of those bullet points, by subdividing them.
Then you subdivide those new bullet points, again, and again, and again.

And there you go, you have your puzzles.
If you're worried that the puzzles might not make sense, just add signposting. Anything can make sense if you give it context.
Showing a beetle to a llama to get a newspaper might not make sense, but it does if you establish an aggressive llama sitting on a newspaper as being afraid of beetles.


Something a lot of creators mistakenly do, is separate the story from the puzzles, usually with the puzzles being roadblocks to proceed in the story. Which I believe is the wrong way to go about making an adventure game. A better way, is for the puzzles to BE the story, so that if you were to remove the puzzles you'd essentially be removing the story. Think of it as if the puzzles would be required to tell the story, even if it was adapted to another medium such as a movie or a book.


So here's a quick example of my process.
First, idea: Let's say it's something small and simple. A guy at an outdoor concert and he has a small challenge he has to overcome.
Second, story: Ok, how about he needs to use the toilet, but there's a huge queue. We're keeping the story simple, and that's pretty simple.
Third, expand: Alright, so there's a queue, so let's say there's three people in the queue, and he has to do something for each person.
Forth, expand more: First person is afraid of spiders so you need to get a spider, second person wants to be paid off so you need money, third person wants a signed autograph from the band so you need to get that.
Fifth, expand even more: You get the spider by finding some gloves in a trash can and pick up a black widow. You get the money by stealing a water pistol from a child and mugging someone. You get the signed autograph by getting a pen and writing on a piece of paper.
Sixth, expand even MORE: You find the gloves in the trash can by distracting the garbage man... ect, and so forth, and so on.

Simples. 

I hope this helps.

Thank you for the list. This will be a big help in the future. (Especially since I usually just ended using something akin to the short version before.)

My walk cycle works great. But I want to add more frames to the left and right loops to smooth them out. But I don't want the char's walk speed to change. I see there's an animationspeed setting, but I only want the left and right walk cycles to change. And I know I can adjust walkspeedx but that won't help unless I can also speed up her left and right loops.

I know could call a custom function every time I want to move her where I set animationspeed, call walk and then set animationspeed back again, but I'm way too far in to go back and do that, and the logistics of making it work with all the different ways a char might move is daunting.

A quick and dirty solution would be to set movementLinkedToAnimation to false, therefore unlinking your walking animation from the speed the character walks at.
Also, it looks better in my opinion (and to Ron Gilbert apparently, if Thimbleweed Park is anything to go by). Since it removes that jerky look. But that's just my personal preference. You may prefer it on. In which case, I'd suggest following Snarky's advice.