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Looks like this will be fun and a nice improvement on Skrex Banmarist and the Kasalowan Conspiracy (which was also pretty fun) - hope development goes well.

Thank you! I hope so too. And yes, Skrex was a major learning experience for me, I've improved a lot on probably all areas since starting it :-)

[Mastea]

Quick update for the start of April:

I've not been able to work on the game for most of March but Chapter 2 is fully done (barring bug fixes and minor animations); the new additions to Chapter 1 are almost done; I have made some more character animations for Magenta (of the type that can be used at multiple points); I have been in talks with a composer for the soundtrack; and I have started on the art for the remaining three planets, all of which will be a part of Chapter 3 (as noted above). Beyond that I have mainly been working on the script in order to create a more effective "skeleton" for the game, which should speed up the rest of development.

Since I want each of the planets to have a unique look, I asked fellow AGS creator Falsely
to do some concept art for the planet Mastea, a bit of which I will share below (plus the first (more or less) finished screen of that planet, based on one of the concept sketches):





As I am still experimenting with styles for the other two planets I won't share any screenshots yet of those, but a little bit of progress is being made across the board.


Development Progress:
Story: 99%
Puzzles: 60%
Scripting: 35%
Graphics: 40+% (Planet 1 and 2 fully complete)
Sound/Music: 6%

Expected completion date: TBA

Hello!
As the one who initially came up with the theme, I just want to say I am happy to see that people seem to have ideas and an interest in participating.
I anticipated that the theme might spark some discussions and that it might not be for everyone and that is absolutely fine.
Still, if anyone is uncertain or worried about making something that will offend people, I would encourage you to make something (as long as you're not coming at it in obvious bad faith). And I would encourage everyone to be understanding and forgiving of perceived missteps and not immediately jump to the conclusion that something is meant to offend.
Even if you want to make something challenging, I say go for it. Art is allowed to be messy.

I will have a very busy March but I intend to play all the entries and I look forward to seeing what people come up with.

Skrexeval's Quest has a few reported glitches: mainly a bug that lets you get infinite money and another one that crashes the game if you right click on your inventory items. Avoid doing those.

I'll patch/update after the vote has closed.

Okay, I think I've fixed the issue.  Please hard refresh and try again.  Fingers crossed it'll work!

It worked for me too!

I'm not sure what's happening here.  @EmmaGundersen following the steps you did in your video succeeds for me!  Could @Kara Jo Kalinowski and @EmmaGundersen please both try again, with the web developer console open?  Press F12 and click the Console tab.  Then click the delete icon immediately before trying to use the form.  This will give us feedback from JavaScript, which is the only remaining cause I can think of here.  Please paste any output from the console here.

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot use 'in' operator to search for 'title' in undefined
    at findFormDataDifferences (game-add-edit.min.js:1:15742)
    at validateSubmission (game-add-edit.min.js:1:15103)
    at HTMLFormElement.<anonymous> (game-add-edit.min.js:1:14956)

That's definitely still true since my post late last night?  Can you please tell me here or in a private message exactly what you're trying to change?

This was about an hour ago. I tried:

• Updating the link to the game's website
• Adding a link to the completed game announcement
• Removing a screenshot to add another one

I don't think it really matters what the changes are, the problem for me is that the Save Your Game button doesn't do anything.

Which game is this?  And can you please let me know exactly what it is you're trying to enter?  Including the actual image file, ideally.  Bear in mind this has been tested extensively during development, so apparently something unexpected is happening!

Here's a video. I'm just trying to replace one .png with another and it won't let me save, but the same goes for any other kind of changes, even editing the description.

That's definitely still true since my post late last night?  Can you please tell me here or in a private message exactly what you're trying to change?

This was about an hour ago. I tried:

• Updating the link to the game's website
• Adding a link to the completed game announcement
• Removing a screenshot to add another one

I don't think it really matters what the changes are, the problem for me is that the Save Your Game button doesn't do anything.

The Actions menu under the image gallery should give you an Edit Game link?

Doesn't save the changes though. 

Doesn't really matter at the moment, since I just wanted to tweak the title a bit.

I'm having the same issue! I can edit but I can't save the changes.

[Story:]

AGS Database entry
MAGS thread

Story: You are Skrexeval of Banmarist,  a yeoman of the (space) middle ages who dreams of the chance to become a knight and kiss a maiden fair. Luckily, the King has announced a tourney in which any one who can prove himself will have the chance to ascend to knighthood!



This game was made in ONE WEEK for MAGS January 2025, with the theme "Break Some Rules", AKA "Break one (or several) of the various rules/axioms/taboos of adventure gaming."

That means this game is designed according to what I personally think are bad adventure game design principles: there are several points where you can softlock yourself, while on the other end of the spectrum there are puzzles that don't feel like puzzles at all, you just go from point A to B and maybe carry item C. And, of course there are random deaths from seemingly innocuous sources.

But that's not all! The game is also designed to have unintuitive controls, mechanics and ui.

• Use the arrow keys to move, space to interact,  and the mouse to activate inventory items! Sometimes there's also a parser.
• There's no way to scroll through your inventory, so don't pick up too much random junk!
• You can use f5 to save the game (and f7) to restore it, but there is only ONE save slot, so if you lock yourself out of a puzzle you'll have to restart.
• ...and more!

Credits:

Programming, Art, Musical arrangement, Sound Design:
- Emma Gundersen

Playtesting (so far):
- Ted Gundersen
- VampireWombat

The song used in the intro is a Swedish medieval ballad called 'Varulven'. I got the notes for it from this source

[Story:]

Hello! Finished this one in just the last week. The whole game is designed with the theme in mind, from UI to puzzle design.

Story: You are Skrexeval of Banmarist,  a yeoman of the (space) middle ages who dreams of the chance to become a knight and kiss a maiden fair. Luckily, the King has announced a tourney in which any one who can prove himself will have the chance to ascend to knighthood!

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/2824/

(I'm still waiting for some final playtesting feedback but since I'm not sure if I'll have time to work more on it before the deadline I'm posting it now.)

[Story:]

Magenta IN SPACE!

Genre: Sci-fi

Story:
You are the test pilot for an experimental Faster-Than-Light space ship. You are stranded on an alien planet after the ship's power source malfunctions, and in order to return home, you are forced to steal a mystical orb from an ancient temple, as it is capable of generating more than enough power for your ship.
There's just one problem: when you remove the orb, a lovecraftian eyeball Star-Creature is released from the sun, where it was apparently being held captive! 
It is up to you to save the solar system by visiting each of its five planets and putting their temples back into alignment so that the Star-Creature can be sealed away again - before it consumes the planets and destroys your home!

Structure:
Chapter 1 - centers around being stranded on Planet 1 and stealing the orb.
Chapter 2 - Magenta returns to her home planet (Planet 2)

Spoiler

but is forced to steal her space ship and escape the planet when the Elder Council refuses to commit to stopping the Star Creature

[close]

Chapter 3 - Non-linear: Magenta travels around Planets 3-5 in order to restore the balance in those temples. Each planets puzzle chain is intended to intersect with the other two, similar to the Tri-Island area from MI2. After achieving a certain level of progress on a planet, however, you enter a planet "finale" state meaning you cannot leave until the temple is restored.
Chapter 4 -

Spoiler

Magenta returns to her home planet to knock some sense into the Elder Council after they have been corrupted by the Star Creature's influence / restoring the Planet 2 temple

[close]

Chapter 5 -

Spoiler

Magenta returns the orb to Planet 1. Some sort of climax occurs.

[close]

Background:
I collaborated with a friend of mine to create an early version of Chapter 1 for AdvJam2023. This version can be played here. For the completed game, Chapter 1 will be somewhat expanded with extra rooms + updated art and new animations.
I took a break from working on Magenta after the summer of 2023, but having completed my other game Skrex Banmarist and the Kasalowan Conspiracy
I have recently (winter 2024-25) returned to it, now working on it solo in my free time.

Screenshots:

Magenta on the jungle planet Teccailiv (Planet 1)

One of the new Teccailiv rooms

Nothing bad could come of removing the glowing green orb!

The sun is now an eyeball

The Temple on Armillaria (Planet 2)

Planet 2 Temple, Atrium

Elder Muscaria's cottage

Development Progress: (2025-01-21)
Story: 90%
Puzzles: 50%
Scripting: 30%
Graphics: 40% (Planet 1 and 2 almost fully complete)
Sound/Music: 5%

Expected completion date: TBA

Here's a zip of the game folder

For debug I usually just set the enemy skill to 10 or so so they're easy to beat. The controls are:
Q- High attack    E- High block
A- Middle attack  D- Middle Block
Z- Low Attack      C - Low block
It works similar to Sid Meier's Pirates! if you've played that.

I am aware that the code is a bit inefficiently written (I'm not even sure all the variables are currently even in use), this was mostly my way of figuring out how this type of combat system could be done. So I'm sorry in advance

Not sure what could be causing this. @EmmaGundersen If you are curious and don't mind putting the source code online, feel tree to do just that and link us to it.

What's the best way/place to that?

I think it was just an invalid room number

Non-player characters are allowed to be assigned a non existing room number, even negative ones. That's one of the ways to hide them, and should not cause any trouble.

Well that's what I thought too. However changing the room number to an existing room fixed the bug.

I don't think that marking this as "solved" is correct though. It was found that the issue is not caused by RestartGame, but the crashing or hanging is still a bug, and changing character room is a simple action that must not cause such issues, so there's nothing solved yet.

I think it was just an invalid room number

Maybe I'm doing breakpoints wrong but whenever I reach them the executable just crashes

Crashing is definitely not expected. Could you paste the error message you get? What does crashing mean here? This looks like a bug in the engine and it would be nice to be able to reproduce this so it could be fixed. Breakpoints should work and they are meant to be used in the day-to-day debugging of AGS games - though they are much more useful in ags4, where it's possible to also read the values of the variables.

By crashing in this case I mean the executable goes "Not Responding" after it hits the breakpoint. It's not the engine shutting it down so from AGS I just get "The game engine does not appear to have shut down properly"

Besides the breakpoints, something that you could try is to comment parts of the code and see if it starts working at some point.

It seems like the error is caused by the enemy character changing rooms! Don't know how I overlooked this when I went through the code before.
I'm not sure why it happens since all the code causing him to do stuff is set not to be called if combatOngoing is set to false. I'll have to hunt around for it. But it does seem my original issue is solved!

Thank you to everyone who replied.

Which AGS version?

3.6.1.29

I know at least in 3.6.2 that if no restart point exists it will simply display a message and log an error - this is, if you never called SetRestartPoint(). It should not just lock, so it has to be in something else afaict.

The Restart Point is set in game_start() and clearly it exists since the game restarts when you lose.

I assume you're seeing the "You won!" message and can click it away? What exactly happens next? Does the game freeze at that exact point? I.e. can you still see the current room? Or does it fade out then freeze?

Yeah you click it away and then it freezes without fading out the room. Just saw that it seems to do that even if I comment out RestartGame()...



As for the other stuff:

• I didn't include UnlockView because the game is just a proof of concept + is supposed to restart anyway and I thought it would look neater if the killed character didn't magically stand up in the last second
• Maybe I'm doing breakpoints wrong but whenever I reach them the executable just crashes

I made a prototype combat system, and after the combat is complete, the game is supposed to restart. There is a "win condition" and a "lose" condition in the restart function, and while the game restarts in the "lose" condition, if you win it plays out all the code except for RestartGame() and then just freezes, preventing any further player input (including using f9 to restart) and you manually have to close and relaunch it.

This is the code in the function:

Code: ags

function EndCombat(int winCondition)
{
  //1=win 2=lose
  combatOngoing=false;
  gCombat.Visible=false;
  character[enemyNum].UnlockView();
  player.UnlockView();
  
  if (winCondition==1){
    
    character[enemyNum].LockView(character[enemyNum].GetProperty("DeathView"));
    character[enemyNum].Animate(0, 10, eOnce, eBlock);
    character[enemyNum].LockViewFrame(character[enemyNum].GetProperty("AttackView"), 0, 0);
    
    Wait(20);
    character[enemyNum].ChangeRoom(0);
    
    player.LockView(TESTVICTORY);
    player.Animate(0, 5, eOnce, eBlock);
    Display("You won!");
    RestartGame();
  }else {
    Wait(10);
    aEnemy_Win.Play(eAudioPriorityHigh, eOnce);
    player.LockView(3);
    player.Animate(0, 10, eOnce, eBlock);
    Display("You died!");
    RestartGame();
  }
}

Now as far as I can tell, I'm not doing anything different between winCondition 1 and 2, but only one of them works. So if anyone can figure it out/knows what's happening inside the engine, please let me know. Potentially this is a bug with the engine rather than an error on my end?