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I think the best AGS example I've seen is the manual from Charlie Foxtrot and the Galaxy of Tomorrow, which I'd consider gets everything right. It has a lot of pictures, nice layout, credits, backstory, sets the tone, and offers some additional facts about people and places in the game that aren't necessary to complete the game but add colour and detail to the world. It may also have a couple of hints in it, it's been a while since I read it. But essentially I think it had everything covered.

Ah, yes, I was kicking myself just when I was coming to check out this thread, realising it was probably a GUI setting. That can be my trouble - spent so much time screwing around with Java I forget that in AGS not everything's in the code.

I think it's fine as is - to the best of my recollection LA never used a narrator in their games (unless you're pedantic enough to go back to Labyrinth) so it only makes sense for a verbcoin mod to be designed for a player character response, just as Sierra interface is generally made with a narrator.

I've been using this template recently and it's wonderfully easy to use and straightforward - pretty much as efficient as the default SCI. I hate to get petty, though, but I wanted to use narrator messages in my game but the module seems to have overridden the Display() function to Character.Says() for the player character. I had a quick look through the Global scripts and couldn't see it anywhere.

Would there be a straightforward way to set Display back to its default function? Is there another function that does the same job as default Display()? If not I can re-write it without a narrator but I had been hoping to use one..

Well, yeah, but the think is I like all of my 'games' (Inverted commas because they exist mostly in potentia only at the moment) and am hoping to get them all out there.

Hmm, not that I can think of. I mean, I did meet Tim Schafer in a bar once and told him that his idea had already been done in Duke Nuken 3D and told him about my dream where the world was populated by mexican macrame skeletons and what an awesome game that was, shortly before he smashed my kneecaps with an iron bar and left me in an alley for dead, but I never thought much of it.

I know everyone says that you should make your first game as simple as possible, but of course you know rookies are going to ignore that advice - so my first idea for a game was essentially full-length, but I decided I'd make it easy by having a limited setting and 13 characters (which I consider a very small number). I've basically made the graphics but, during the course of that game I decided that I really should make sure my programming was good by taking on a simpler project first.

So then I tried to think of a one-room game to make that would actually have a fun idea behind it that I'd like to make. I came up with Secret Agent on Rollerskates (Because the main character's on remote-controlled rollerskates I don't need a walkcycle...) which would be set in one room... but then to compensate I decided to make the one room very large. And then added two more rooms anyway.

So then I've done almost all the graphics for that , started programming it with the LECScumm Interface, gotten to a third of the way through... and realised I'm dirt poor when Valentine's Day is coming up. Luckily it's a long-distance kind of thing so I thought I'd make a relatively simple game for my girlfriend with some stuff she'd like and give it to her as a late present...

Feels a bit weird to me because I've got two fully-planned and partially complete games on my computer that I have every intention of finishing and releasing in a few months' time, so I was wondering how many half-finished games there are on peoples' harddrives..

As a Doctor Who fan whose first-ever full adventure game was Space Quest III this appeals to me. A LOT.

Funny thing is I'm always looking for graphical shortcuts - the game I'm working on at the moment uses South Park characters for no reason other than they're easy. AGI graphics? Why the hell DIDN'T I think of that???

Speaking as somebody with industry experience in art, citing that something needs a polish pass isn't rude..

Well, this isn't the art industry, is it? This is a freeware games community.

I'm not meaning to argue, Jared, but professionally..I've had WAY worse said about my work.. and personally.. I would rather have people nit pick my work, and give me honest critique any time.

Yeah, but there's a forum for just that reason. Given that the OP lists Graphics as 91% and HASN'T posted this stuff in there I think it's logical to assume he isn't looking for somebody to tell him his graphics are short of the mark.

To say that there shouldn't be standards on free games or that the forum is overrun by "photoshop wizards" is a bit much, I think.

I'm not sure how so. Graphics seems to be a big topic on these boards and how can you apply standards to free games made with free software by amateur artists? All I can think of is commonsense stuff like not featuring any obscenities that break the law in Western countries. I don't think anyone's promised any sort of 'value-for-bandwidth' equation for people downloading games and these games don't come with any sort of guarantees..

Good to see that Ben gets why that annoyed me, especially considering that he's behind some of the best graphics I've seen on this forum.

(Anybody in this thread played a Captain Mostly game, for the record?)


EDIT: Oh, and mass apologies to Dervish for inadvertently hi-jacking this thread.

The graphics are nice but they need a LOT of polishing.

Speaking as somebody with limited technical skill when it comes to making graphics, I find comments like this quite offensive. These are projects people make in their spare time and there's a lot of programming and writing going into this as well - people make these for fun, there shouldn't be any standards on them. Need a lot of polishing? Do you mind? I work almost entirely out of MSPaint and I plan to keep that way, bar the odd effect in PaintShop Pro because it's easy and it gets the job done to my satisfaction and I don't expect to see ridiculous, spurious standards applied like this out of the blue. But I've noticed it's becoming very common in the AGS community...

Funny, it used to be almost all programmers, now the bulk seem to be photoshop wizards throwing their two bob around like Scrooge McDuck having a temper tantrum. It's almost enough to put you off the program altogether.


@Dervish: looks like a very interesting game and I'll be sure to play it when it comes out. Love the art style.

Hmm, it's all well and good to say 'I don't like puzzles so this is great' and I understand the argument becuase in detective games puzzles can feel VERY gratuitous. At the same time, has their place been taken by anything else? Do you have to think hard about what questions to ask, what to show people, does the player themself have to work it out and point the finger? I ask this because if your game is just like The Case of the Rose Tattoo in which the game's only real 'puzzle' was 'talk to every character and exhaust every dialogue option'. (At least in the 3 hours I played before it crashed completely) Of course, that one also had the flaw that everyone you met was trying to stop your investigation for petty reasons that made no real sense, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your game has more interesting obstacles..

So in short, if there's only 3 puzzles, fine. If there's only 3 obstacles in the player's way - THAT could be a problem.

Sorry for the confusion, I'm all for the new graphics being brought into RoN - when the series started all AGS games looked like that, but the community has come a long way and it has a certain 'stuck in a time warp' look to it - I was referring to the suggested policies for somehow improving authorial quality of the new games across the board such as 'core team of writers' and 'reboot' etcetera. RoN is open submission, so what it is is what the community makes it, and I don't think that should really be changed given the fact that the charm of the series is essentially due to those simple facts.

I think it comes down to two things:

Visibility - more people need to know about RoN

Accessibility - updated bios, searchable databases of characters and (especially) games. It was irritating that even when I knew what RoN game I was after I had to scroll through nine pages of games because I had no idea what the release number was. Okay, it accommodates playing them in order, but they should be sortable by name and rating at the very least.

I'm not sure anything can be done to 'improve the games' which seems to be the angle some people are looking at it from - they are what people make them, as simple as that. I think trying to change that would be against the spirit of RoN.

Nice thread for me, this - as I have to say I'm completely ashamed by my status as a walkthrough junkie. Even so... I completed Broken Sword 2, Discworld 2, Sam 'n Max Hit the Road, Discworld Noir and Day of the Tentacle without a walkthrough. I came very close to completing COMI without one, though, and I am quite proud of completing Runaway 2 by only using the walkthrough in Chapter 5 given how atrociously designed the game was. All the other games, though, ground me down until I just read the walkthrough through. Curse Discworld 1!

Surprised that the OPs proposal of the army filling in for schoolteachers during a crisis has been ignored. I guess that's what happens when somebody says 'politics' on this forum..

Erm, I guess I was influenced by all the publicity and endless reviews saying that CR was 'incredibly realistic'. I don't watch Bond films for Bourne style action and drama (thank god) when I watch them at all, but I think I have the right to be annoyed when I'm promised it and end up with something equally fantastical as Goldeneye. (But much less entertaining)

Also, on the weekend I saw The Adventures of Baron Munchaussen for the first time and I may have a new film for my top ten. So I don't think it'd be fair to lable me an anal realism-junkie.

I know for a fact that I'm going to be dragged along to this soon, just as I was to Casino Royale. Not quite dreading it, but it had better have some better action scenes than CR and not try to outdo Jackson for most overblown ending sequence again.

In defense of the improbably overrated CR, it did teach me how to make a 'realistic' Bond film: take the script for any Brosnan film but replace every mention of death lasers with a vague name dropping of terrorists and replace every speedboat chase with a bit where Bond goes emo. Remove every funny line and insert token lines to 'empower' the female character, whilst not actually changing her role in the story. Change nothing else.

I think it's fair to say that British agents will regularly chase disfigured arms dealers up 400-foot high cranes before hunting them down to an embassy and killing everyone there, along with (presumably) several civilians, and have no difficulty in keeping their job. Ahhh, sweet realism.

I'm also greatly impressed with this game, and would like to offer you my congratulations. It's a very fun ride, and it's interesting to play a game in which, effectively, the fourth wall never even exists. I had a lot of fun spotting familiar backdrops and characters, with the result being that this came across as a very fitting fan tribute to the genre at large, and there is something quite heartening about the idea of all our cancelled and forgotten game characters living on in that strange world.

Two things I thought was conspicuously absent: Thrall from Warcraft Adventures. As soon as I 'got' that the GCMS were all from cancelled adventures I thought it would have to be just a matter of time before he showed up, but no dice. (Possibly fair enough, since Thrall is a character in the new Warcraft games anyway...) The other thing I felt missing was a trip to Simon the Sorcerer, especially after it got referenced so many times.

The game did feel that little bit too linear on the whole (I think it would have helped to have put more convos in the unused KQ7 scenes, so have Ichabod as the trigger to move the story on but let you chat with all the characters around) and I thought that the way that the climax scene with Sidonius was set up to play felt a bit... too restrictive. I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game, though.

Two questions
1. Is Suzy-Anne and her recently un-cancelled game real, or just a fictional embellishment to make the ending more upbeat?
2. How did you get the graphics from Discworld 2 and the other games without resource viewers? Was it just screencaps at work?

I greatly enjoy writing and, in fact, would like to make a career out of it. At the moment, though, all I've got online is a couple of pieces of Doctor Who fanfic. If anyone's interested you can find my [incomplete] re-write of Attack of the Cybermen here... though looking at it again I'm not sure if it's any good.

Also, my first game with AGS is some way off being complete, so that may count as my only creative outlet... apart from misguided attempts at acting...

Yeah, WHY is it November? Is it purely for the alliteration? Because for anybody going through a tertiary course (Like I have been for the past three frigging years) November is the worst possible time of the year to be spending all your free time (such as it is) on somethink like this. This is bottleneck time, people!

*Sigh*

I'm of the [possibly deluded] opinion that my first attempt, Time Paradox with Extra Salt is an unfinished masterpiece. But I was in the middle of a crippling depression at the time, so I can't write with the same hate-fuelled authorial voice. But, hey, it could become an AGS game one day...

Wait... is this thread meant to be resurrected? Ah well, I don't think these have been done...

AGS: Even for monkey-shaggers
AGS: We build. You believe.
AGS: We knew Yahtzee BEFORE he was famous.
AGS: By Jizz Chrones
AGS: Astonishing right-click capability!
AGS: Make your dreams in MSPaint, make them dance in here