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Yeah, everything looks so clean and bright now I don't mind the centered text (for now), but the AGS Games section being near the bottom of the page still looks weird. But what's really creepy is the influx of spammers. "Cause of Whitney Huston's death" in Completed Games? Really? We should have some adventure games related question in the registration form. I saw this idea implemented in a fun way on some math/science forum - they had the new users solve some equation and give the solution in the box. That sort of thing would maybe keep Russian marital services and things like that away from this board.

Some Deluxe Paint 4, some The Gimp....but mostly The Gimp.

THE Deluxe Paint? A.k.a. DPaint? My favorite pixel editor back in the 90's!

Aaanyway... A fun little clip - though I was hoping to see the background being drawn from start to finish. And the music - love the way it changes the mood as it goes.

Nimdok in "I have no mouth and I must scream" maybe? Quite evil and quite serious if you ask me.

Ha! He was the first one I thought of, too! Another that comes to mind is Tommy Vercetti of GTA: Vice City (not an adventure game, I know) - was there anything genuinely good about that guy? He worked with whoever he thought was useful at the time, even of rivaling gangs, like Cubans and Haitians, and all he ever cared for was money and power. Ok, so you could go on vigilante missions - but in order to do that, you had to steal a cop car, which in itself was a crime. And it WAS fun running around shooting and destroying everything, until you had SWAT and tanks chasing you. But of course, this was just pure, mindless fun without much psychology to it.

Back to adventure games, though, think of characters like Malcolm of The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three. I think silly evil is more fun than just plain good. Some minor flaw of character - be it evil inclinations or, say, clumsiness - makes a character more relatable, because it makes them more human. Because really, is everyone - or anyone - of us average folks crystal clear and perfect? This one time, I talked about Gray (the lovable alien in my game) with Sephiroth (my assistant coder, not the emanation mentioned in Kabbalah), and I said Gray is just me on a bad day, multiplied by ten He's a geek, a smartass, with all sorts of allergies, phobias and manias. He's short-tempered, opinionated and snide. It's all tongue in cheek, and half the time he's a walking cliche - but writing lines for this character is pure fun. Much more than writing a character who's all good, nice and kind.

Also, I think most games leave little space for introspection. Most of the time you just go places and talk to people, and the only chance the character has to redeem themselves in your eyes is through actions, not flashbacks or confessions. I think morally dubious characters are more common in movies/tv. Dexter - a serial killer. T-Bag (of Prison Break) - a paedophile, murderer, con-man, etc. Especially T-Bag is the kind of guy you just love to hate (so much so that actor received multiple letters from people who hated, scorned or even pitied him for what he is). But my favorite bad guy would have to be Cley - the main protagonist of "Physiognomy", by Jeffrey Ford. He's arrogant, self-centered, conceited, disrespectful, sadistic, prone to addictions, etc etc etc. Reading the story as told by him was a guilty pleasure - I felt for the people that had to deal with him, but at the same marvelled at just how twisted  he was. Through the course of the novel he gets the chance to repent and reflect on his life - and he changes. And you know what? He becomes so bland that the two subsequent novels, with him being more and more of a goodie-goodie grow boring. The second one is still quite fun, but the third one's just uhhh...

These backgrounds look awesome as they are. I actually like the yellow tinge. And a dialog-oriented story sounds like fun, too.

Reminds me a bit of a little flash game I played once. Can't remember the name, but it was about robots, too, and the characters also were just black silhouettes. Although that game more cartoonish in style, whereas yours looks more realistic. In any case, looks awesome, very stylish And that last screenshot with letter puzzles looks interesting, too, I wonder what the rules for that mini-game are. I LOVE letter/word puzzles! Used to be ADDICTED to Bespelled.

Dude, you're doing THIS in Paint? :o I'm doing *most* of my game in Paint - but it's fairly simple, with only four colors - and still, there are some things that I just couldn't possibly do without Gimp or xRes (an old, oooold, but very cool program). So basically... wow!

Yeah, he looks so nice and cuddly, doesn't he? I bet he'd make a great teddy bear! One who'd say cute things when you push his belly. Like, "Take me to your leader".

But, of course, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. First I need to figure out a way to start that one-person clay figurine factory AND not lose the girlfriend at the same time But the idea of me cracking that whip over her head, for a change, sounds really nice... 

Here's that little surprise I promised the other day! I know, it's not ingame material - but it's just so cute I couldn't help myself! Had to post it!





This is a little gray figurine of Clay! I mean... a clay figurine of Gray! Got it from my girlfriend - who's also the game's quality control department, alpha tester and the one that's been cracking that whip over my head for the past few months AND a talented abstract sculptor - for whom this little dude (at about three inches tall) is not the first alien-like creation.

I'm *hoping* to release it in March or April. I'd say coding is at 90% and animations are at 95% - and progressing nicely. But then there are some thing that have been a little neglected in favor of honing the visual and functional aspect of the game first.
I'm also putting an emphasis on dialogues - and monologues - which are going to be a very important part of the game. Like, you'll be able to use every inventory item on every object, hotspot and character you meet - and you'll get a different response from Gray every time. I'm having tons of fun doing that - but it takes time, too! Also, I'm planning to release it both in English and Polish simultaneously, so there's some extra work in that area, too.
So basically, there's a lot of little things. Fonts. Sounds. And then the beta-testing, of course So... yeah, let's hope it'll be March/April after all

Oh yes, he's amazing in every way. His awesomeness goes way beyond his nose-picking abilities. But my favorite is still Gray! He's all sorts of cute AND evil at the same time. Can't beat that!

Mr. Dream:

Yeah, sometimes it takes many, many words to maintain order. And a lot of patience to obey the rules

Darth Mandarb:

Yeah, I've kept terribly quiet all this time, haven't I? The reason is EXACTLY because I'm so busy with the game. All brain power goes into animating, coding, etc... Haven't even played any other AGS game in a WHILE! :o Or read a book in... a month or two? Waaay too focused on this one task.

So... here are a few sneak peeks!

Gray is a traditionalist. There's nothing like cold weapons.


It's too bad most people pick efficiency over tradition...

Wow, look, it's been three months since the last update! Yes, I'm still working on it whenever I can - and getting closer and closer to actually finishing it! I'm hoping to release it sometime in March I'll try to post some pics later today - and if I get my camera to work, a photo of... Shhh, that's a surprise

Oh and psssst! Please read the FORUM RULES. Big bad Darth Mandarb doesn't like people digging up old threads to ask about updates Game makers should do it themselves, only. As much as I'm thankful, because it did motivate me to crawl out from under a rock and say hi... rules are rules Let's stick to them to keep the forum neat and tidy!

Dude, you're on a roll! I'm still yet to play the original Visitor (only because when I'm not superbusy - I'm supertired... or super-brain-dead - but rest assured, it's on my MUST PLAY ASAP list) and here you are, making a sequel already! Looks awesome, too. And I just love the aliens' grim attitude! Sounds SO much like Gray, the main protagonist in my little game

Hmm the story reminds me of my job... which should make me hate it - but instead, I love it! Looks just gorgeous. And I can easily identify with the grumpy-faced main protagonist. Does he get a gun to fend off hi-jackers, btw?

Actually, the distinction between one of them being distance and the other being delay was clear to me - it's just that everything else was black magic Right now I'm testing how having MovementLinkedToAnimation on/off influences that particular animation and I think I've figured out the right balance. Oh well, it's all trial and error, trial and error Another cool thing I found is negative movement speed values working as fractions of a pixel. There's one place in the game that could really use that.

Anyway, thanks for enlightening me here, I was totally clueless about it.

Hmm... I'm pretty sure I do, always thought I did, and I never actually had a problem with gliding before. But I just set it to true way in the beginning, because it was "just one of those things to do" - and I never really learned what it actually does. So now I'm probably making all kinds of fool out myself Ohhh well Not arguing about the 4-7 / 7-4 combination, it just had this weird logic to it (multiply both and you get 28) - but I probably did something very stupid somewhere along the way and that is it. Or something switched back to default somehow when I got a new puter, new AGS... I don't know. I had Sephiroth look through the settings and point out all mistakes, and that one never came up. So... I don't know. Right now, I just feel very very stupid

Yeah, I tried tinkering with walking speeds and animation speeds simultaneously. It's just for a short, one-time animation for a secondary character, so it's no big deal - but I'm just crazy about details sometimes. So anyway... WSpeed 6 with ASpeed 5 look pretty close, but just a LITTLE off, as do WSpeed 5 with ASpeed 6. WSpeed 7 with ASpeed 4 look PERFECT, no gliding whatsoever - but it's way too fast. And Wspeed 4 with ASpeed 7 is perfect, too, but too slow. I think I'm going to try something like:

if [cCharacter.Moving == true] {
  Wait(some value)
  cCharacter.x++;}

//because he's moving left

Something like that worked one time before, but I have to check the exact code to be sure.

Thanks for the response, guys

Daniel Eakins: Thanks! That's actually the second thing I tried and it worked like a charm. Actually, I tried the player.x > thing before, a long time ago, but in my ignorance, I put it in the AfterFadeIn function. And then yesterday it dawned on me why that never worked. Oh well, you never stop learning

Monkey: Yeah, I love AGS for many, many things, it's insanely brilliant - but sometimes things seem a just a little too rigid for something to look perfect. One other thing that's been bugging me is the walking speeds - sometimes one speed looks just too slow compared to the walking animation and the next one looks too fast, and the right speed seems like something halfway between the two. Always managed to work around it in some more or less clumsy ways, but it'd be nice if the gaps between speeds weren't so big sometimes. Or maybe I'm just missing something very simple here?

Meanwhile, the main issue has been solved - the code that Daniel mentioned works perfectly

Yeah, I must've overlooked/forgotten the fact that it said "readonly". But that's not a problem. I had a bunch of ideas of how I can go about scripting the event, and that one seemed the easiest - but others should work just fine.

Thanks, anyway

Is there a way I can change the edges' coordinates inside the room script if/when I want to (say, after a specific event)? In the room's properties, the edge values are referred to as LeftEdgeX, RightEdgeX, etc - but I can't seem to find the right code for changing them.