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[Rowen Goes To Work (2009)]

Honestly, I don't see why you're complaining. It's just a subjective review that's highly dependent on the reviewer.

I mean look at my games.
Rowen Goes To Work (2009): "The game is short, uses borrowed graphics and music, and most unfortunately, the puzzles tend to be completely illogical, like using soap in a microwave to make a key. "
2 cups
Crepe Fields: A Scare Among Crows (2021): "While the graphical presentation and voice acting is average, the mystery writing and investigative puzzles are strong points in this adventure."
2 cups

The first game is terrible (I mean it was my first) and the blurb showcases that. The second game is quite good and the blurb showcases that as well. But they have the same rating. Why? Who cares! Someone played my games and cared enough to review them, that's all that matters. The fact that they both got 2 cups is meaningless to me, since I didn't make the game to appease them specifically. Especially since something like a rating is so subjective that even two people who share the exact same opinion on a game can give it different ratings wholly dependent on what they consider each rating to mean.
I mean just look at normal game reviews, where anything under a 7.0 is typically considered to be equal to a 0.0. 

Your self-worth should not determined by the opinions of others. 

People who post "inspirational" memes on social media that all directly contradict each other.

What about those "inspirational" memes that tout the poster as being "different", despite them clearly doing the same thing as everyone else.

I mean, there's only so many times you can see something along the lines of:
"Some people don't like me because I'm unique. I say screw those people."
before you roll your eyes so much that they've done a full 360 movement.

You're not special. You're just an asshole.

By old school SCI style without the colour limitations, I assume you mean SCI 1.0 (the EGA version), which felt more like the old AGI games but at 320x200 instead of 160x200. Because to get the SCI 2.0 style, I'd highly recommend using watercolours (or an equivalent brush in Photoshop) to paint your backgrounds.

But assuming you mean the EGA SCI games but with an unbound colour palette, I think brushfe has given some good advice.

My advice would be to try and draw with the EGA palette, and then convert it to full colour. You'll probably find that with the initial limitations, you'll be forced to rely more on certain colours for shading and separating details. For example, your character is wearing a dress of varying shades of red. This would be impossible to illustrate in EGA, so they would've probably made the sleeves white. These choices born from limitation, in turn helped create the style that you're thinking of.

Another thing to remember about the early SCI games, is that much like the AGI games, the backgrounds were more or less stored in a way not unlike vector art. So try and keep that in mind when drawing your backgrounds. That means nice smooth blobs with few to no 90 degree angles. The left side of the dithered wave juts out a bit, and the left side of the top dithered grass patch, also juts out a bit. Those parts should probably be smoother. Unless the jutting out is an important detail that was included.

Overall though, I think what you've got is already pretty good. Like brushfe said, you should stay away from smooth gradients, so dither that sky. But I also think you might've gone a little overboard with the dithering on the grass. Then again, early SCI games did have a lot of checkerboard dithering.

How did those penguins end up on North Pole? 

Obviously they're on holiday. 

John Wick 3? 

Once again a belated happy holidays everyone, and have a happy a new year. 

(One of these days, I'm going to have to actually come online ON Christmas.  )

Could you elaborate please.
Do you mean stuff like concept art and/or screenshots? Or just random pieces of art that we've drawn?

E.T.?

What about adding a border to the top and bottom of the image. Maybe something like a row of cups.

But with that definition in my mind, I can safely say that The Witness seems similar on the surface, but is quite clearly distinct from "adventure games". Fulfilling only a small part of the definition. Having discovery and even some exploration, but missing the involvement of the player.

I'm usually a bit of a lurker in these conversations but I'd love to hear more detail about "missing the involvement of the player." As an amateur game designer I'm always looking to strengthen my understanding of what makes games fun or not fun (or whatever it is that makes "the witness" different), particularly when it comes to story and to puzzle solving.

By that, I meant that the player doesn't drive the plot or the gameplay in The Witness. You go from one puzzle to the next, not unlike Picross or perhaps even Tetris. Sure there's a bit of window dressing, not to the same extent as say Professor Layton. But the point I'm trying to make is that you could remove all of that window dressing and still have almost the exact same game. Now if you attempted to do that with for example, Day of the Tentacle, it'd be impossible. The characters, locations, and events, make the game what it is (and I don't mean in terms of story, I mean in terms of needing those things to solve the puzzles you're given). And the player exploring the world is what ends up making up the vast majority of that gameplay loop.

The best I can describe it, is that adventure games are like exploring a wiki. It's all there, easy to find, and nothing is hidden away. You simply have to pay attention. The fun comes from learning.
Meanwhile games like The Witness are closer to one of those puzzle books such as the Gravity Falls journals or that FNAF book The Freddy Files. Where the information is hidden away and has to be discovered. The fun comes from figuring things out.


A way I personally like to look at is (so now I'm firmly going into my own opinions here), is that the adventure game genre is built from three pillars. In order of importance these are: exploration, puzzles, and story. You remove one, and the whole thing collapses. You can emphasize one or two, and de-emphasize one or two, but do so too much and once again, it collapses. But it collapsing isn't a bad thing, as doing so allows you to craft it into a different genre. Perhaps something new.

I always like to think of an origin of a genre to get a better idea of its definition. Of course, such definitions change over time as the genre evolves, so you shouldn't let the origins dictate your thinking. But it's always a decent reference point. And the first Adventure game is the aptly named Adventure (funny how people complain about MetroidVanias being named as Metroid and Castlevania, but no one complains about Adventure games being named after Adventure). In Adventure you literally just explored a cave, solving an occasional puzzle in order to reach an endpoint. The entire game was about exploration with story being completely absent. So we can tell from that, that story not only became important to Adventure games after the fact, but that it's also the least important pillar.

Now let's compare Adventure to The Witness. At first glance, they might seem similar. You wander around a desolate environment solving puzzle until reaching an end goal. But look a little deeper and you'll see a fundamental difference. While The Witness is all about the puzzles, Adventure is all about the cave, namely the exploration of it. And how you go about exploring that cave, and the actions you take to explore it, is all down to you. Meanwhile with The Witness, how you solve those puzzles and the actions you take to solve those puzzles, are things you have to figure out or to put in other words, discover. It's the difference between solving one big puzzle (Adventure) vs a bunch of little small ones (The Witness).
...
Although I feel like I'm getting into meaningless semantics at this point. 
Perhaps I'm completely wrong, and the two are basically the same. Or perhaps I'm simply not smart enough to articulate the differences. I don't know. I can simply try my best to explain.



But yeah, I'm like you in the game design department. I love hearing about what makes a game fun or not fun for someone as well.
It's part of the reason why I love watching reviews of old games, and why I always gravitate to buying weird crappy games no one has ever heard of.
And for the record, The Witness is a really good game.    And although it's not what I would personally call an Adventure game, I can't argue that it's at least adjacent to to the genre (in much the same way as visual novels are).

I hope my rambling helped clear things up a bit.

There are two kinds of people. Those who backup religiously, and those who have never suffered a hard drive failure. 

I typically use PaintDotNET for most things, and occasionally Deluxe Paint II Enhanced for its dithering effects.

ProMotion NG has a lot of the same dithering effects as Deluxe Paint (plus some that Deluxe Paint doesn't have), but I really like the particular pattern Deluxe Paint has. I think it's the result of optimization making the dithering effect imperfect.

If you're looking for recommendations though, I'd suggest Aseprite. It's a really good tool for pixel artists. I'm just too stuck in my ways to make proper use of it.

When my game starts the user has to play through a very restricted part of the game that sets the premise off the rest of the game. This is not really a cutscene since you still play the game and have to move through a few rooms. However, I want the user to be able to skip this part of the game from the start screen if they so desire, especially if they've played the game before. I did this in an old game of mine, but that was 20 years ago and I can't remember the code I used.

If anyone understands what I'm talking about and can give some advice I surely would appreciate it,

I did something similar in Black Friday II. I just added a separate start button, that sets up the variables to what they would have been at the end of the prologue.
It's quite easy to move the characters to the correct rooms, give them the correct items, and even set some global variables that those rooms can read upon their first load, in order to make the correct objects visible or not visible.

The hard part is having the skip prologue button only show up, after you've already played through it. Since you need to effectively store a variable outside of the game, which is read when the game is first loaded.

however we define "adventure games" as a genre (when we figure it out),  I don't think it scratches that same itch at all.

Clara Fernández-Vara has written several articles about adventure games, including an entire dissertation. Mostly about point and click adventure games, but also about similar types of games such as hidden object games. And I think she comes closest to defining "adventure games" as a genre, and why people like us enjoy them.

I'll summarize it, but I just know that I won't be doing it justice. So take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt.
Basically, her definition to my understanding is that "adventure games" are about exploration of a world in order to effectively participate in a stage-play without a script. You learn about the world in order to figure out what you're supposed to do in said world. Think about the final puzzle in The Secret of Monkey Island. Spraying a can of root beer to defeat the dreaded ghost pirate LeChuck, makes absolutely no sense. But in the context of the game and everything that led up to it, from the "thing's aren't what they seem" with the treasure map, the "substitutes are ok when it comes to magic" from the recipe, to the special root that kills ghosts, all leads to the conclusion that root beer will defeat LeChuck. What is nonsensical becomes the most natural conclusion.
And this playing along, is why we also enjoy playing through adventure games again and again, despite already knowing all of the story beats and puzzles. Because now we know the script, and can enjoy it in much the same way someone might enjoy acting in a stage play.
At least, that was my take away from her work.

But with that definition in my mind, I can safely say that The Witness seems similar on the surface, but is quite clearly distinct from "adventure games". Fulfilling only a small part of the definition. Having discovery and even some exploration, but missing the involvement of the player. (In other words, the opposite problem of games such as Firewatch.)

How about you, are there any that you would recommend personally?

What type of adventure games are you the most fond of?
Do you want something that takes itself seriously, or do you prefer something with a more humorous tone?
What about scale? Do you want something huge and epic, or short and cozy?

Or are you just looking for games that we personally enjoyed? Because if that's what you want, then there's already the Picks of the Month list. Anything that I'd suggest, would already be on there. 

I had this exact conversation with someone who was urging me to use AI for coding help recently. A piece of code that works might seem nice, but if I do not understand the mechanics of it then it is useless to me the moment I want to adjust it or need to fix something with it. It's worth struggling to learn something as long as I understand how the logic works at the conclusion, I think.

While I'm in agreement. Doesn't this same logic apply to modules and templates?
I mean, I honestly have no idea how Tween functions. I just plop it in and it works. It's just a little too complicated for me to wrap my head around.

Although with that being said, I usually spend the time looking over any modules I use, figuring them out, and improving them where I see fit. (Just not Tween, because that thing is huge.)
But I think it's safe to say that most people (especially beginners) don't.
I suppose pointing a beginner to a module to help them out with their problem, isn't actually helping them in the long term.

Just a little update to say that the game is almost finished. (Almost being a very relative term here.)

All that needs to be done now is the voice acting, followed by some beta testing, then any required bug fixes, and it'll be done.
The bug fixes should be very quick. The beta testing will depend on my testers. But the voice acting is likely to take a while.
There are just over 10,000 lines of dialog in the game, 70% of which belong to the main character. It's taken me a few weeks just to do 1,000 lines.

Here's hoping the voice acting sounds good when it's all done. 

I'm looking for a way to use SayBackground but with the talking animation on. Is this the best module for the job?

I'd recommend a different module to achieve that, such as this: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-background-speech-with-animationsound!-v1-1-0-for-ags-3-2/
The last post by Snarky, is pretty much all you need, since all of the download links are now dead.

I literally thought ICQ was already dead. Nice to know it hung around a lot longer than I thought.

The scroll_rows setting seems to be bugged. If you set it to more than 1, it will sometimes skip dialog options if another dialog option takes more than one line to display.


For example, say you set CustomDialogGui.DialogGuiOptions[eDialogGui_scroll_rows] to 4, because there's only ever four options on screen at once, so why not have it scroll past an entire screen.

Then say you have 9 dialog options, the fifth dialog option being very long.

You start the dialog and see the first four dialog options, 1, 2, 3, and 4.
You scroll down and see the next three dialog options, 5, 6, and 7. Number 8 doesn't appear because number 5 takes two lines, that's fine.
You scroll down and see the last dialog option, number 9. What happened to 8? It skipped it entirely!