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For some reason I've been thinking of this game a lot lately.

Ok, got it Thanks! Love the short intro sequence by the way, very much in the spirit of the original games.

Spoiler

Didn't miss it, but interpreted “he's the one whose words I should follow” as “do what the scroll he's holding tells you”, not “only use the st John hint”. Maybe “he's the *only* one” would make it clearer? Or maybe I'm an idiot .

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Did both of those, no idea what it's trying to tell me .

Spoiler

Here's what I was thinking:

The window:
the verb has one: if the verb is the symbol on the right, then one of the skulls on the right has to be pressed? Which one?
the soul has one: so if the soul is the symbol on the left, then one of those skulls?
the other one has three: if the other one is the heart, then three of the middle skulls have to be pressed?

The book:
Add one to the heart: so not three, but four skulls in the middle? Which ones?
The soul has one more: Not one but two skulls on the left? Which ones? Trial and error I guess?
The verb needed one more: not one but two on the right then?

Tried all possible combinations of those numbers and nothing. Oh and by the way, does it generate different hints every time? My save crashes, so started a new game and some of the hints were different... cool feature if that's what it is

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Looks good! Already stuck though . Can't make any sense of that first skull puzzle.

Wow, that was fast! The workaround seems to be working fine so far, so no worries.

Thanks for checking! Sucks, seemed like exactly the function I need. Any idea for another (relatively) simple way to track walking destination? I thought I could use the mouse click coordinates instead, but I want to take advantage of the built-in system which finds the nearest reachable spot if you click outside a walking area, so it doesn't work for me.

EDIT: Thought of a clunky work-around: I send an invisible, super-fast dummy character to the mouse coordinates, then use its coordinates as destination ones. A cleaner solution would still be much appreciated though .

I need to keep track of the coordinates the player is walking to while they are walking. The DestinationX & DestinationY properties seem to be made for this, but while DestinationX works fine, DestinationY behaves weirdly. It seems to return the amount of pixels above 256, 512, 768 and 1024 if the actual destination y surpasses those values. Eg. if the player is walking to y 300, player.DestinationY would be "44", y 550 returns "38", 1000 is "232", etc. Only once the player stops, the DestinationY value changes to the player's current y value.

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, tried to google it and search the forums but couldn't find any explanation. I'm using AGS Build 3.4.1.12

Overlooked that one, tried it and everything works now! I'm in your debt sir

That's it, thanks once more, this makes it really easy to use. Not up to writing a custom dialog rendering script just yet, still a relative AGS beginner, but might get there eventually. Too bad the version of the plugin with tinting functionality isn't available anymore :/. This is a great plugin otherwise.

Works like a charm, but manually setting up the character widths is a pain. Any chance of also getting my hands on AGSSpriteFontGen.exe mentioned in the first post?

Also if I'm using a sprite font for dialogue options, they don't highlight on mouseover anymore. Any way around this? Maybe the version with tinting... ?

Perfect, thank you!

Another attempt to bump this up, a link to a compiled version would be great! Thanks.

@Limony: It sure looks better, we'll see how that works with animations. Originally I pictured a big oval acting as a shadow for the whole character, but small subtle circles just around the feet might work. Thanks!

@Anian: I draw it in Photoshop using only a mouse. There are no higher resolution originals, what you see in my posts is all I have.

Outlines of body parts are different layers (head, torso, arms, legs, feet) - it can look like this for example. A walkcycle has 12 frames, with 1 and 7 being the middle ones, 4 and 10 the extreme ones (torso most rotated, arms and legs most apart). I usually start with drawing the rotation of the torso, then move the torso & head up and down, then do the arms swing, then do the legs last (but it depends what I'm in the mood for, the order may vary). I usually start with frame 1, then 4, then the ones in between. I test the animation either with Photoshop's animate tool or by exporting to gifs if Photoshop gets too slow. After the outlines are done and look good, I color the whole thing (each color is a fill layer, I fill them using the lasso and brush). Then when I export the individual frames, I apply a filter to each to match the room's color scheme. The filter is a folder of layers (gradients, color overlays, curves and the sort) with a mask in the shape of the character in that frame.

Limony: Good idea, putting it on my "things to try" list. Although I'm afraid what you say works better for low-res animations - with this level of detail, the shadow could look awkward if it wasn't animated.

Renal: Thanks, your vote has been counted in... it's 1:0 for no shadows now

Just out of curiosity, what was the nice effect in Photoshop you ran your images through?

Thanks for the feedback everybody! I used the bigger head and it really does look better.

StillInThe90s: Yeah, I'm aware of that, didn't have time to do a more proper fabricish effect than the slight flap in the front view. I'd like to correct that, since the fabric moving adds a sense of fluidity, but there's no time for details like that at the moment :/

I have another question about an issue I can't decide on. While I can't afford to do lights and shadows on the character's body (it takes forever to animate them), it isn't a big deal to shade at least the head, since it isn't animated - it just moves up and down. Question is, isn't shading just the head worse than having no shadows at all? Not only is it inconsistent, but it might make the unshaded parts look flat and half-assed in comparison. Here's an example:

[imgzoom]http://hvavra.sweb.cz/PoisonGreen/Hafiz_shaded_unshaded.png[/imgzoom]

What do you think? Shaded head or no shadows at all? The more opinions the better, think of it as a poll . Thanks!

Creamy: Thanks! I believe speed is easily adjustable in AGS, so we'll see what testers prefer. And, um, what do you think about the head size ?

So here's one more animation. I'm posting it mostly to bump my previous question about the head size

Shane: Thanks for the thorough feedback! It appears I'll have to go back to the up and down walkcycles sooner or later - the more I look at them, the weirder the arm movement looks.

I have a question about the head size. Which of those two looks better to you?

[imgzoom]http://hvavra.sweb.cz/PoisonGreen/William_heads.png[/imgzoom]

The left one's head is probably too small, but I still like it much more for some reason. Don't mind the slight bluriness of the right one - will try to correct that when I settle on a size.

Thanks!

Looks awesome! Not only the backgrounds, the characters are great too. I'm impressed and a bit envious .

I was just wondering though, is the pixelated gimmick really necessary? It makes sense to me if you design it in low-res in the first place, but if you have big detailed artwork, why shrink it to a bunch of pixels just to be retro? I would much rather explore those glorious backgrounds in high-res. Or does it spare you work on animation? I felt the same about Primordia and The Journey Down (which went high-res for a commercial release later).