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There's a bug in the dialogue editor. Any if statement used (indented, properly laid out and all) will give a "parse error at '-'", even if '-' doesn't even appear in the statement.

At first I thought it was just me doing something wrong, but once I'd tried everything I could think of to fix it, and failed, I became convinced it was a bug.

Of course, there's always a chance that it's just me, so yeah.

^If he did that, the Windows version would be smoother and more modern than the others, and that wouldn't be very equal.

Wow, I admire your determination. Rebuilding all that work on an inferior platform (AGS 3.1 > AGS2.7, not refering to OSes) so that you can cater to people of all OSes. Good luck.

=X Never mind...

The "where to sail to" puzzle in Indiana Jones and The Fate Of Atlantis. It's a bit foggy in my mind, but you had to try something like 12 different combinations of directions and distances, completely at random and go through the same long sequence every time before you got to the right place.

And after you eventually got it, you weren't able to use the same solution again if you replayed the game. Uurgh...

And the nightstick in Police Quest 1 (the original, EGA version). How was I supposed to know it was in the car the whole time?

(Being someone who's only been a gamer since 2003, I haven't played many golden age commercial titles.)

Well, I beat Cirque De Zale without a walkthrough, and Ben Jordan Case 1 (probably because it was so short). A few others, too.

I always try not to use walkthroughs, but usually end up doing so somewhere along the line. I used a walkthrough for many of the final puzzles in the new Same & Max episodes, the final puzzle of 5 Days A Stranger, too much of the rest of Chzo Mythos, a bit in the middle of Jessica Plunkenstein, practically all of Beneath A Steel Sky and Flight Of The Amazon Queen (I was a kid back then, with no sense of honour).

The problem is patience, really. Usually I'm too excited to find out what happens next to sit and figure out a puzzle, or, God forbid, come back to the game two weeks later (not a bad technique, actually). But I always try my hardest not to use a walkthrough, and I'm getting better in that regard. Slowly.

It's a good idea to play a game just as it's released if you want to stop yourself from cheating, seeing as no-one will have written a walkthrough yet. This is what I did for Ben Jordan Case 7 (but I still ended up looking for the solution to the FIRST puzzle).

As far as I can infer, the "Auto-number speechlines" wizard only numbers Say, Display, and the dialog(ue)s. Now, this is fine in most cases, but say you had a function that takes a string and uses Say or Display on it. That string would not be numbered.

I suggest that the wizard include a form in which you can specify additional functions - and which of their parameters - to number. That way, said additional functions would not need to be hand-numbered, and that would be nice.

Whoops, double post, sorry!

Oh yeah, forgot one very important example of how music affects me:

Whenever I hear Flo Rider's "Low", I get the urge to hurt people, break things, and ultimately stop that infernal trash that EVERYONE seems to like for some reason.

Sometimes, when I listen to music, I think about an activity I've often partaken in whilst listening to the music in question. For example, whenever I listen to The Offspring's Conspiracy Of One, I'll think of all the time I spent coding this over-ambitious noob-dream project while listening to it, my only music at the time.

I use Game Maker, more than I do AGS. It's what I created those games in my sig with. It's a great program, with enormous versatility, and a really huge number of capabilities. The coding language it uses, GML, is really simple, and is a great introduction to programming in general.

I mean, after a number of years of experience in GML, I was able to download AGS, start it up, and have a fully customized interface within an afternoon. No awful default Sierra shiz for me!

But... AGS is a really wonderful platform for adventure game development, muuuch more so than GM. I could create a fuller adventure game in an hour with AGS than I could in a week with GM. So, what I recommend is this: AGS for adventure games, GM for everything else.

Wow, this game is FUNNY. I love the adventure game references, the fourth wall breaking, and the pointing-out-the-obvious-for-humour stuff.

The graphics are funny, and the characters talk in such an entertainingly British way (sorry if that's offensive, or anything).

The only problem I have is the interface. You can bring up the top bar in the main menu, right-clicking all the time gets irritating, and there's something about the inventory... but I just can't put my finger on it. Oh, and there's no "name of what your mouse is hovering over" text. But I suppose that's not too terrible, and the action cursors DO indicate whether or not you can interact with whatever your mouse is over.

I haven't played very much of it, but what I have played is great. Oh yeah, love the walk cycle. If people really walked like that, the world would be a better place.

Um, hey. I'm F1ak3r (pronounced Flak-er; the leet speak is for Google unique-ness, and it was a given name). I signed up here a few months back but then forgot about it.

I've been developing amateur games for over three years now (started in February 2005). For this, I've always used Game Maker, because of its flexibility. I've made two complete (and release-able) games so far, Elements Of Escape and Nebraska Newton.

For three long years, I battled to make an adventure game. At first, I used Game Maker. Finding it too hard, I switched to Adventure Game Studio (version 2.7 at the time). All went well, until I realized how much I loathed the apparent icky feeling and lack of organization and logic in AGS, and switched back to Game Maker, for its logic and flexibility.

Ironically, the game (you can find an old WIP of it here) was eventually scrapped, not because of programming difficulty, but because of a lack of interest in continuing the awful thing. I just couldn't stand it anymore, with all its plot holes, ugly graphics, and cardboard characters.

Fast forward a bit. AGS 3.0 gets released, and I hear about it. Despite my hatred of it in the past, I decide to give the new version a spin.

To my delight, all the icky-ness is gone, and I am confronted with a beautiful modern interface, and a brilliantly powerful object-orientated coding language.

So what do I do? I start a new project, that's what I do! It's called The Traveller & The Shopkeeper, and here's a few screenshots:




It features a custom interface, reminiscient of the one used in Beneath A Steel Sky, unshaded and overly-simplistic graphics done by me, and not very much else (early stages of development).

So yeah, I'm here to make games and stuff, hope I can churn out something fun. Also, I no longer hate AGS, I love it now, so there's no need to send hatemail .

Keep it kept!
F1ak3r