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You can't prepare, that's the idea. You get the theme and start from scratch 

But I found it helpful to give myself
- one week for "toying with theme, trying things out",
- then one week of "making a functional playable game"
- and one week of "refining, testing, improving".
That way you have small goals and, most importantly, you have a safety net of seven days should you hit a roadblock.

If you are new to MAGS, you may want to try my approach: Small-scale, single puzzle idea. Then layer stuff on it as long as you have time. A month isn't much time to make a game but is is enough time to make a small, nice-looking game. You got some experience already, so you should know where your strengths lie, and make use of them.

I also tend to really try to get the game done first. No fancy animations and stuff before I can play through a puzzle sequence.

A calendar is useful to have- just mark your "milestone" days red, and cross days out as you make progress.

It's also very, very useful to have a good beta tester, probably one you have worked with before. I remember Chance Of The Dead, where fixing stuff actually took longer than writing the whole game and without a tester who gave detailed feedback and kept suggesting stuff it would've been a really lame game. So get in contact with a good tester. 

That cartoon Larry from Love For Sail was always my favourite, I must admit, and I may buy it just because of the nice looks and the promise that it is faithful to the orig...

wait!

ANGRY BIRDS CAMEO?

No. Just no.

And finished!

A really cute game, team Dropped Monocle! Especially for a MAGS the attention to detail is quite amazing; in fact, even outside of a MAGS the game would really stand out. Cute graphics, creative voice-over, quite a bit of gameplay... and was that a Captain Planet reference in them books? More power to you.

Stuff that struck me as very cool:
* full custom main interface (never mind the defaults)
* blurry foreground objects- nice way to add depth to a scene
* charming backgrounds, and nicely animated Woo
* interesting use of limited speech
* lots and lots of hotspots to look at

If anything, I was a bit sad that the game was so very short- no surprise given your deadline, but you really made a small world I would like to return to.

I got, wait for it,
"Jedi Hair Salon Mayham".

I need to draw that. And we need that game!

Ooooh, you made it! Congratulations, and downloading now. This looks sweet!

I really do not want to derail this (again  ), but I wanted to say I didn't want to make a "melodramatic" post up there.

It's just that to me, it now looks like:

a) Let's start a competion, for fun.
b) Let's announce it early and allow people to plan/brainstorm/form a team, so that they have more time to actually make their game once the event starts.
c) Then, shortly before the event starts, let's set a theme so that there is less cheating.

And that lsat bit just sounds wrong to me. We never HAD much cheating here. It's usually all for the fun and I really like that spirit. If I came over wrong, then that was unintentional.
I just wanted to put that right 

Yeah, why not a theme, really? That would probably reduce the risk of people using premade material, or starting prematurely.

Announcing this early and explicitely allowing to make plans was a great gesture; now paddling back and implying that there "will be cheating anyway" makes me a bit sad.
In fact, lots of sad.

Series about town full of geniuses!
Icey's favourite game series minus fantasy plus Rayman's female guardian spirit!
__
* Eureka! Final-ly!



That's the best of all the themes. Will try to come up with something!

[edit]
I hit the Story Generator and got this as the first result.


Setting: Inn Between The Worlds
Plot: God For A Day
Narrative Device: Final Exam Finale
Hero: The Atoner
Villain: The Fundamentalist
Character As Device: White Dwarf Starlet
Characterization Device: Mysterious Past

I like that. I will use that.

Congrats, everyone! That was a fun round!

Thanks for running the Maggies despite your busy shedule, Atelier. Just seeing the list of cool games makes me all nostalgic! Gotta get'em all.

[edit]
Played'em. All of them. Then voted

Bland presentation aside, I like these mini games. Fun, and prabably a nice exercise.

Small rule variation, maybe? Like this:
[imgzoom]http://cdn103.iofferphoto.com/img3/item/136/303/719/big-bang-theory-rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock-shirt-cbd7.jpg[/imgzoom]

This also means that 3rd condition (else) will succeed if player used an item on another item that does not have any event handlers - in which case he will select the latter.

That would trigger unhandled_event, though. If the user makes use of it, so there *is* potential for the code failing...
Your suggestion is lean and nicer to read anyway, so I see no reason not to use it.

I'll rewrite that thing. It's nice to throw away some old coding habits, and if the end result is useful, it's a win/win situation and they are nice because everyone wins 

Crimson, thanks for the extensive feedback. I think it is obvious that you're "deeper" into the actual coding stuff than I am I learned a good bit from your list, and will see to add these tricks to my toolbox. I see how it'll make the code more readable, too, many thanks for that.

But:

5. "if (mouse.Mode == eModeUseinv) " condition will never be true, because you never set mouse.Mode

I don't get that. The manual states that an interact click on an inventory item will be translated into an useinv action- basically, as soon as your cursor becomes the selected item you *are* in eModeUseInv. So I don't see why this test will fail? (And if it would fail, the template wouldn't work the way I want, but it... seems to do just that  )

Thanks for the feedback/discussion, guys. It helps to refine this in v1.2 

- Using "Interact" for everything is a sensible request, so yes, I'll do that.
- I like the idea of changing the mouse cursor to display an interaction. AFAIK this is not in the original BASS but it would give nice visual feedback. Thoughts?
- The original BASS changed to an "exit" signs when over places where the character would leave the room. Useful, in my opinion, will do that.
- I got PMs asking for a better "showcase room". Indeed.

Has anyone tried this out and really HATED the alternative fonts? That's something I'm curious about.

I really want to make this worthwile, so keep it coming!

Glad to be of service. The term comes, as far as I know, from the C programming language.

Another note: When you work with scripts, their actual order in the project tree is important. You can only access functions from a script when it is "above" the script that makes the call. This is not important for room scripts, but if you use many scripts in a large project, you may need to move them around (by right-clicking a file and then selecting "move up/down").
As a rule of thumb, keep the gloablscript at the bottom.

[ExtenderFunctions.asc]

For each script there are two files. One is the script file, one the script header file.

NAME.ash is the script header. This is where imports and definitions (and enums if you need them) go.
NAME.asc is the actual script; this is where you write your functions.

For example:

ExtenderFunctions.asc contains this function:

Code: AGS

function DoTheBaconDance()
{
  player.say("I don't know how to do the bacon dance.");
}

ExtenderFunctions.ash then needs:

Code: AGS

import function DoTheBaconDance();

From now on, you can call the function from anywhere in your game.

That's GOLD from my treasure, my friend, but clearly you never saw any!

--------

I drink a thousand shipwrecks!

Imports are placed in the script HEADER, are you putting them there?

It's just a habit for me. When I look at a function and see a nice friendly XYZ_Talk, then I know I wanted to script some talk there.
It is, of course, a subjective decision and settling for one interaction type would remove the need to distinguish between objects/hotspots and characters.

Way easy enough to change, though.

Has anyone heard/experienced EXE's not loading with Win 7, particularly large ones (up to 1gb)

I had that with the Fallout3 expansions. Their exe is huge (over 1 Gig actually) and the system "froze" when I ran them.
I chalked it up to the DVD Drive and copied the file to disk to run it from there- again, system froze: but after a good ten minutes the file WAS executed.
Win7 on a 2.4 Dualcore with 4Gig of RAM.