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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!

I miss when UI design was done by people who knew what they were doing. 

I agree with everything here and want to add that I also hate how modern games all seem to have decided that all UI need to be white Helvetica font on a darkened background.

Remember when mainstream game UI would be artworks in themselves; fun images with patterns and decorations?
A fantasy game could have text trying to emulate parchment scrolls, WW2 games had typewriter fonts, sci-fi games had text and numbers looking like futuristic tech, and game UIs in general had at least some attempt to stand out but also fit the rest of the game aesthetic.

I used to love it when games would put the ingame-lore on actual scrolls and books with a suitably fancy font, like on the Thief games for example. 

When I heard the news, the first thing that went through my head was how Americans really will vote for anyone except a woman.

I held off on my judgement the first time. But I think it's safe to say now that Trump is the second worst president America has ever had. (Number 1 still being Nixon in my opinion.)
I mean the guy clearly has a few too many screws loose. It's just a good thing that the president doesn't have nearly as much power as the conspiracy nutjobs will lead you to believe.

Ah well, I guess it's time to put up with another four years of American media complaining about "Trump's America" in the most on-the-nose way imaginable. Ugh. 

I don't know if this is the end of American democracy but it will be the end of many people's lives.

What democracy?
American's literally only have two choices. That is not a democracy. That is a thinly veiled dictatorship.
At least here in Britain, there's a chance that a party other than Labour or the Conservatives can get in power (it's unlikely, but it's possible). And even if your chosen party doesn't win, if they get enough votes, then they get a voice.
But America? Don't confuse that for a democracy.

As for this being the end of many people's lives though, that is definitely true. But nobody ever cares, even in these cases.
Sure, people sometimes pretend to care. But they don't really. 
But that's a discussion for another day.
In the meantime, I may as well say good luck to everyone. It looks like the rest of this decade is going to be pretty rough.

It grinds my gears that most AAA games now require you to hold a button in to perform simple contextual commands.

For example, you want to get into a car. You press the triangle button. Nothing happens. You press it a couple more times, still nothing happens. You realize a bar was partially filling up each time you pressed it. So you hold the triangle button in, now you enter the car.

You want to leave the car. You press the button. Nothing happens. You frantically press it a few more times, before you remember that you had to hold it in to go inside the car, so you probably have to hold it in to leave the car.

You see something you want to pick up. You walk towards it, the prompt appears and you press the X button. It doesn't work. You then sigh and hold the X button in to pick up the item.

This repeats for the next four hours.

You look in the options menu to see if there's a way to change this. You find an option to change combat from having to repeatedly press the attack button to just holding it in to repeatedly attack. You keep looking and find another option where instead of holding the button to climb over obsetacles while sprinting, you can just repeatedly tap it. You keep looking, but there's nothing for basic contextual prompts.


I completely understand using a hold button to distinguish from a press, when there are two possible actions that can occur. But that's never the case here. It's almost as though some idiot thought that it would be more "realistic" and "immersive" to hold the button in to do basic contextual actions, despite the obvious cost to usability! 
I miss when UI design was done by people who knew what they were doing. 

Now that you've made Baron's and Captain D's avatars, you need to add them to the sport's stand with Ponch and the Darlek, so they can all enjoy it together. 

This is so random, yet so entertaining.

Time for me to intentionally and annoyingly muddy the water by both agreeing with Khris and answering your questions from my point of view.  

But what is the objection to using a term in marketing when that term is accurate?

There is no objection. It's an accurate term, but it's also clearly being used as a marketing buzzword, the latter of which is annoying. So it sounds like we're in agreement. 

While I don't think ChatGPT has any plausible chance of meaningful awareness at the moment, I dislike this argument because we don't actually have a satisfactory explanation for what "consciousness" is or the mechanisms that produce it, so to firmly assert that it is "fundamentally impossible" strikes me as unwarranted dogmatism.

It's because of the way ChatGPT is implemented and functions that makes it fundamentally impossible to gain sentience (in much the same way as the creatures in Creatures are never going to gain sentience). It's not the concept of a machine gaining self-awareness that's fundamentally impossibly. So once again, it seems as though we're in agreement. 

Just because one word applies, that doesn't mean another one doesn't as well.

And just because two different words can mean similar (if not the same) things, doesn't mean that the concept of English being a living language, isn't a frustrating topic. "Literally" and "Figuratively" mean both the same AND the opposite thing. I can accept it. But it'll still always annoy me.
So once again, we're in agreement. 


Why have you brought up a bunch of Khris's points that you agree with, and then portrayed them as though you disagreed with them? 
Or have I completely misunderstood Khris? 

Hello.

What I'm suggesting here is a GetTimer() function, which simply returns the number of cycles left on a timer. My reason for this is twofold. Firstly, sometimes you'll want to be able to do something in the middle of a timer, without setting up another timer. Secondly, it would provide a way to see whether or not a timer is running, without incurring the IsTimerExpired()'s OFF state.

Basically with that second reason, what I'm suggesting, is a function similar to IsTimerExpired(), but where it never goes into an OFF state. It always returns true or false depending on whether it's counting down or not. In this case, it would be something along the lines of if(GetTimer(1) > 0).

This is because there have been numerous times that OFF state feature of IsTimerExpired() has caused me headaches, simply because I've either forgotten about it or it runs counter-productive to what I'm trying to accomplish. A quick look through the forums for problems that people have had with timers, and it seems as though I'm not the only one.

The thing is though, that OFF state is very useful. But it'd be nice if we had a function which didn't have it. And being able to get the exact time left on a timer, would do exactly that.
Alternatively, a IsTimerRunning() function, which returns true if the timer is above 0, or false if it's below 0, could also work. But that would be much more limiting.

I really hope this feature isn't something that's already in the editor. I've looked through the manual, and couldn't see any mention of it.
But none the less, thanks for hearing me out.


EDIT:
By the way, I know you can do this by simply implementing your own timers. But to me, it really seems like it's something that should be part of the editor itself.

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. 

I prefer the way the vast majority of 2D games handle walk cycles.
And you prefer the way old PC games handled walk cycles.

We're both biased in our preferences. And if you believe otherwise, try showing the goodnonlinked and goodlinked gifs to any non-adventure game fan and simply ask which they prefer (without explaining what the difference is).
Heck, just show them the part of the gifs before the room starts scrolling, for maximum objectivity. I think you'll find this so-called "gliding" to be preferable to choppy animation for most people. But then again, I could be wrong. I can only attest to the opinion of the few people I've shown those gifs to.
But it does seem to me as though the false consensus effect is strong with regards to this. 

If you turn off "Movement linked to animation" you get a gliding effect when walking

Only when you set things up wrong.
But why take my word for it, when I can just provide a series of gifs.

This is what you get with MovementLinkedToAnimation is set to true, and it's set correctly:


This is what you get with MovementLinkedToAnimation is set to true, and it's set wrong:


This is what you get with MovementLinkedToAnimation is set to false, and it's set correctly:


This is what you get with MovementLinkedToAnimation is set to false, and it's set wrong:



As you can clearly see, setting it to false not only gives a much smoother scrolling effect and less choppy character movement, but when the character animation delay and speed are set correctly, it even removes the gliding effect that people like Snarky think MovementLinkedToAnimation is required to fix.

• Select the player character in the editor, and look at the list of options to the side.
• There should be one option that says "MovementLinkedToAnimation", set it to "False".
• Enjoy your smooth scrolling screen.

It's an option that's set to true by default because it makes walking animations look decent with zero effort on the part of the artist or programmer.
But the cost can be jerky movement that is enough to give someone motion sickness in my opinion.

Following tutorials is a good way to familiarize yourself with a new tool, so you'll know where to find everything when needed. But they're not a good way to learn how to use said tool.

A good way to learn for me personally (each person is different), is to follow a tutorial as a guide.
If the guy is showing you how to make a character pick up a key and use it to unlock a door. You instead make a character pick up a gem to open a portal which take you to a room where you find another gem which changes the portal to yet another room. It's the same lesson that the tutorial taught you, but your own take on it, expanded to kind of repeat itself.

As for learning to code, I find inspecting other people's code to be a great help.
I remember being confused about how to do certain things, but remembering seeing them done in a template. So I'd open up that template, look at how they did it, and then attempt to copy it over.

Lastly, make sure to look at this forum. Any question you want to ask, has probably been asked a dozen times already. So all the help is here if you're willing to look for it.
That being said, if you can't find an answer, don't hesitate to ask for help. 

Of course you'll need to start a project yourself, so you actually encounter the problems that you need to learn to overcome. A nice little goal to work towards is always a good start in learning something new.