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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.

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.

Also, here's a quick screenshot showing off the recently implemented scrolling dialog options. (I got bored of constantly doing voice work.)
Besides, it's been a while since I last posted a screenie. 

I did all that but I think it needs more frames.  I am going to actually add frames to the animation.  The down looks ok because it's 640 x 360, so the frames don't stutter when the character walk looks right, but I can't get the left/right to not stutter when the walk looks right because it is moving too far, unless it's just the long size of the pixel, but I'm pretty sure I can make it look a little better if it has a few more frames in the sideways animation.  Anyway, I want to experiment so it looks the best.  Thanks for the comment.

Khris is absolutely right, adding additional frames is just going to mess things up. Especially since you can just mess with the animation delay not only for the entire view, but for the individual frames.

If you've done that and it's still not sorted it for you, and since you're complaining about stuttering, is it possible that the thing you're complaining about is actually the MovementLinkedToAnimation setting? (It's something that comes up as a problem constantly with newcomers. At least once a year judging by my post history, since I usually chime in whenever it comes up.)
Try setting it to false and then messing with the animation delays. With it set to true (which it is by default), you get a very jerky movement that you may be interpreting as "stuttering" but is actually an anti-gliding effect (to make the movement more like the classic point and click adventure games).

Here's a comparison with it set to True and False, so you can see what I'm talking about:

Ater watching many films gone bad

They've not gone bad. It's just that you've seen it all. Spread your wings and start looking for the weirder and poorly-made stuff. Look at stuff made in other countries, the indie stuff, the art house stuff, the old stuff. You've just gotten bored of the mainstream stuff is all. It's not changed, you have.
It's what I've had to do with games. There comes a point where you graduate from a movie-goer to a film-buff, a reader to a bookworm, a gamer to a gaming-enthusiast. Where everything looks like copy-pasted trash. Except for actual trash, which for some reason ends up holding a strange appeal for you.
Either that, or I've just become a cynical asshole... yeah... it's probably that.

I guess im really trying to figure out, and asking for input onto my thoughts about the game industry, is how to make the genre a full time thing and for it to be more acceptable, be you poor, wealthy, unable to program a game or just not sure, it could be very much like a puzzle.

What do you mean exactly?
How to make money from making games? I have no idea.
How to make games more mainstream? They already are, that's why niche titles have been slowly dying out and getting replaced by indie titles.
What the game industry is about? It's a cesspit.

what makes a game these days really funny, interesting, exciting, the best art you will ever see of any description, old, wasted regarded and forgotton, and what are your thoughts?

That all depends on the person.
Although it seems that philosophical games that make you question everything from your own personal beliefs to reality itself, tend to be rated higher than your average game. But they're also very difficult to do right (they require a lot of skill to depict the nuance), which is why you don't see a lot of them.
People also seem to like games that are basically just movies pretending to be games. Usually giving you a bunch of choices and then making the plot about how choice is meaningless.
Oh and of course people absolutely love those simplistic platformers with an ambient soundtrack and a big black blob somewhere in it that represents anxiety. Those indie darlings always get a lot of praise.

Personally though, I like games that try to simulate everything or go into way to much detail simulating one tiny inconsequential aspect, especially when they really shouldn't be simulating something like that for the type of game it is. The Hobbit for the ZX Spectrum comes to mind for the simulation of the world, but so does the Creatures franchise with it's simulation of genetics.

Im also, planning on learning how to do this, any one with insight would be helpful.

Download AGS and go through the tutorial in the manual.

Thank you for your kind words!
But there were games I don't want to keep online any more, for various reasons

Not much of a preservationist are you? 

So how is it putting your games onto DeviantArt? 
Also, can I ask why you decided to abandon Itch.io in favour of DeviantArt? I always assumed it'd be better to put your games on a site dedicated to games. 

[🏆 AGS Awards 2024 - Nominate!Fireflies - Objects And Best Way to Turn Them Off or OnAGS 4.0 - Alpha 18 for public testENGINE PLUGIN: Clipboard v0.4]

I'm not sure if it's related to the new site, or if I just mis-clicked a bunch. But clicking the last post link on the forum, sometimes took me to the first post instead. It seemed to be completely random as well.

Just so you know, it's still happening, and now I'm certain it wasn't because I mis-clicked a bunch. This time I've recorded which threads it happened with as well.
🏆 AGS Awards 2024 - Nominate!
Fireflies - Objects And Best Way to Turn Them Off or On
AGS 4.0 - Alpha 18 for public test
ENGINE PLUGIN: Clipboard v0.4
I usually like to open up tabs for the latest replies of all of the threads, whenever I visit the forum. So it's very noticeable when I suddenly end up on the first page

I'm not sure if it's related to the new site, or if I just mis-clicked a bunch. But clicking the last post link on the forum, sometimes took me to the first post instead. It seemed to be completely random as well.

None the less, the new game site looks brilliant. Very fancy and modern looking. 
Thanks AGA and everyone else involved in the new site. 

That it doesn't process any input on a GUI during wait, is the first thing I noticed, since I tried something like this:

Code: ags

gMyGui.Visible = true;
while (gMyGui.Visible)
  Wait(1); 

But then I, unfortunately, couldn't use the GUI. So I guess I have to rethink my approach and develop another solution. But thank you anyway for your reply.

There are ways to work around it, or "fake" it. Although they are difficult to implement and quite error prone if you haven't considered every contingency.
As such, it usually is better to just rethink your approach.

But if you really wanted to keep to the same idea. The way I'd try and tackle it, would be to store the necessary variables just before showing the GUI and then essentially ending the interaction. Then when you press to close that GUI, it takes those variables and sends them to a function that essentially finishes off the interaction that had started. I think that would accomplish what you described.
I'm not sure how you'd generic-ify it though. So it'd probably quite a lot of bespoke programming. 

I have a huge backlog and wishlist, so I just play different games until something grabs me. I try not to force myself to continue playing a game I'm not enjoying just for the sake of completion. I started playing BioShock Remastered recently but had to stop. Objectively, it's an amazing game, but I wasn't enjoying my time with it, and I have no idea why because I should love it.

That's definitely happened to me before. For example, with Stardew Valley.
Sometimes a game doesn't click with you, and sometimes it's just not the right time for you to personally get into it. 

Characters have a setting called AnimationDelay; this number specifies how many frames each walk cycle frame is displayed on screen.
If MovementLinkedToAnimation is true, the character only moves when AGS switches to the next walk cycle frame, which means that an AnimationDelay of 4 causes the character to only move every 4th frame, as opposed to every frame. This means that walking is 4 times slower than movement.

A perfect solution to this discrepancy requires you to 1) have a distinct walk cycle frame for each game frame (i.e. four or five times as many frames for each direction), 2) reducing the AnimationDelay to 1 (or 0?), and reducing the MovementSpeed to 1 (i.e. the number of pixels the character moves per walk cycle frame).
This is only feasible for high-res games though, and obviously a lot of extra work, unless you let Blender render your walk cycle frames or something.

Another solution would be to multiply the MovementSpeed by the AnimationDelay and set that as the new MovementSpeed before using the Move command, then setting the MovementSpeed back to it's original value after the fact. It could even be easily made into it's own function to automate the process.

Or just set MovementLinkedToAnimation to false. But then you run into another set of problems.    (Boy I wish that the MovementSpeed was a floating-point number.)

Move's actual speed may be different from Walk if you have "movement linked to animation" setting. In which case the character's walking speed is restricted by animation speed during Walk, but not during Move.

You never mentioned if you have this setting on or not.

It's on by default and hidden away. So it's safe to say that yes it is.
Whenever anyone makes a post complaining about any problem involving moving characters in any shape or form, this setting is almost always the culprit, because people are unaware of it and its function.

What do you do when you're at home all the time, there are plenty of games to choose from, but you don't want to play anything?
You just don't want to do anything at all.
What do you do with yourself?  

What I usually do is either watch something (either a Youtube video or a TV series), or just pick a random game to put on and force myself to play it a little bit (perhaps getting bored after ten minutes and trying a different game until one finally clicks).

Thankfully I've piled so many things onto my schedule that I'm never bored. There's always something there for me to avoid working on. 

How are you getting along with nominations? The first votes have already arrived, but we need many more for a meaningful result.
Is the nomination page working alright or did someone have technical difficulties?

I'm personally waiting until closer to the deadline, so I can make a more informed vote. 
(Since I would've had more time to play through games and think things over.)