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Hahaha! Great game! Short, but very well crafted in all the details. Just finished it... Loved the ending

Downloading now!!! Been waiting for this one since I saw the screenies in GID XD Looks like a nice lazy Sunday afternoon delight!.....AND....It's Sunday!!!

[know]

Noticed a few things that slipped by. I only really looked at the first bit though as I have just finished a rather huge proofreading job myself and need a break before starting another

Uh, I don't now. You should ask George: he is the thinking head of the group.
Uh, I don't now. You should ask George: he is the thinker of the group.
Uh, I don't know. You should ask George: he is the thinker of the group.


I'll be agreably surpise to see you doing something usefull...
I'll be pleasantly surpised to see you doing something useful...
I'll be pleasantly surprised to see you doing something useful...

Aren't you suppose to cook the diner?
Aren't you suppose to cook dinner?
Aren't you supposed to cook dinner?

Thanks for the comments.

Yeah, it was a blast. During the week following the party I took a survey when the kids' came to their classes about which particular challenge was the most fun for each.

Every stage got its own votes, which was cool as we were striving for diversity, but the rope swing won out hands down

I mentioned above that it took four days for two of us to build the whole thing. Forgot to mention that it took only a single hour, after the party's were over, for 5 of us to rip it all apart and package up the throwaway materials for garbage day (a heartbreaking job every year we run these events)...

My business partner and I have already decided on next year's theme:

Time-Travel!

[INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN SPIDER]

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN SPIDER

Ahem...Now that I have everyone's attention...

This was the name of our Halloween Party this year at the kids' English School I co-own here in Japan with a fellow Aussie...

This year we decided on an Indiana Jones themed, adventure game style attraction for our "Ghost House" at the party...

Over the course of four days hard labor we managed to build a devious maze of physical and mental challenges to put our kids through what Indy himself would probably describe as: "Just another day at the office..." (For Indy)...

The kids were told only this hint before entering the Temple: "Follow the spiders...And you will find the treasure..."

The "Spider" in question was an image of the famous Nazca Lines Spider Glyph, and we had a trail of that image leading the kids from one challenge to the next, and on to the eventual treasure...

The Temple itself was very dark and the kids went through in teams of 2-3 people, with only the Leader holding a "Burning Torch"...The 30 or so kids ranged from 3 years old up to 12 years old.

Not one child failed to complete the adventure. (There were a few tears and moments of hesitation along the way but we managed a 100% survival rate, and everyone came out with big smiles and an even bigger swag of treasure.)

Here are some pictures which will hopefully take you through The Temple Of The Golden Spider in style:

****************************************************************************************************************

When our adventurers first enter the dark tunnels of the temple they are immediately confronted with:

THE SWINGING BLOCKS TRAP!

Three solid stone blocks swing from side to side for the adventurers to dodge lest they be crushed...

Although Tinkerbell seems to be performing a bit of faery magic to halt their monolithic momentum in this particular shot...



Just when they thought they were safely past the first trap, a mystical Indian temple guardian appears and threatens the adventurers with a sword, forcing them onwards and into:

THE TUNNEL OF INFINITE HANDS!

Here we see a Mummy entering the tunnel...Many hands hang down from the ceiling of the tunnel...Some are mere facsimiles...But one or two might actually come to life and grab unwary souls!!!

The tunnel snaked around a bit and then went up a few ledges to the top of a precipitous slide back down:



Here we see an intrepid adventurer (dressed as a large strawberry) approaching the top platform above the drop itself, her flaming torch in hand...



A brave adventuring brother and sister make their way to the top of the plunge into darkness. The sister (in the lead) fumbles for a hand-hold in the darkness (Their team "leader" with the torch unwisely chose to go last...In this shot they are illuminated by the camera flash but otherwise they were pretty much in the dark at this point.). They cannot see what awaits them at the bottom of their slide into the unknown...(Especially after the camera flash...)

It is:

THE PUZZLE OF THE GOLDEN SPIDER!

Our adventurers have now proved their physical worth...Can they prove their cleverness and solve this puzzle before they can continue any further?



The top of the puzzle dais is adorned with skulls staved onto poles!



Surrounded by flames, two adventurers place their first piece into the puzzle, attempting to replicate the image of the spider shown on the dais...

They figured it out quite quickly at 4 and 5 years old...



These later adventurers do not seem to be having the same kind of luck (despite being a few years older...)

They kind of got it...ummmmmm...eventually...

What can I say? The Temple was starting to back up, so close enough was good enough...

On to:

THE WALK OF THE S-P-I-D-E-R!

GAH! Don't you just hate it when a puzzle is immediately followed by another puzzle?

The adventurers now have to walk the letters to spell the word "S-P-I-D-E-R" in the correct order.

A false step spells not "SPIDER" but "INSTANT DEATH"!!!



Our brave adventurer is standing on the letter P and her comrade behind her is standing on the letter S...

Do they both know where to step next or will they plunge into the abyss?

You can see her gnawing over the problem...Will she make the right choice?



Once again, our younger adventurers just breezed straight through it...

THE BOX OF SLIME!

We didn't manage to get any good pictures of this challenge in action due to distributed manpower, but I'm sure the concept is familiar to anyone who attended a Halloween party as a kid:

Reach into the small hole and find the hidden lever buried in a sea of slime and bugs etc. ("WE...ARE...GOING...TO...DIE..!!!")...



Best shot we got of it. The hole was just under the ubiquitous Golden Spider and the ground under that was decorated with skulls. The "lever" was a big rubber spider the kids had to pull up to the hole to see and identify. The "slime" was "Konyaku" and "Shirataki" (Google if interested), two very slimy and fishy smelling Japanese foods, immersed in water in a bucket inside the box. The whole room stank of it, to add to the ambiance..

Oh, speaking of ambiance, I also forgot to mention that we had ambient jungle sounds of birds, insects, waterfalls, and drums etc. playing on a loop throughout the whole adventure...

Next up:

THE PIT SWING!

What Indiana Jones adventure would be complete without a perilous swing over a pit?

The adventurers now get to swing on a ragged rope over a pit of slime:



Back uuuuuuppppp...



And swwwwiiiiiiiiinnngggg!!!



Or just do it the easy way and fly over without a care like Tinkerbell...



BEST "SWINGING OVER THE BOTTOMLESS PIT" PIC EVER!!!

Oh, and don't forget to "Follow the spiders...To find the treasure"...

There was a final Nazca Spider Glyph on a wall just before the exit which led to the hidden treasure room...


Snow White finds gold coins more tempting than some Prince Whatever...



Yon chest be mostly empty YAAAARRR...But I still got me plunder!!!



The Spiderman brothers, and their offscreen Jack Sparrow brother...(Hand only)..., haul in their just rewards!

(I just hope they didn't forget to leave One-Eye'd-Willy's gold just for him...)

****************************************************************************************************************

And that was our Halloween party's Indy Jones adventure this year...

It was a total blast designing a real-life adventure game for the kids to figure out (some of the coding was pretty tough though)...

And yet...What is that I hear you ask:

"If it was all about Indy...Where was the big rolling stone ball?"



Well...We didn't forget it...

Here's a kid dodging it during our:

"Indiana Jones Big Rolling Stone Ball Dodgeball Knockout Game"

(Held just before the main adventure event)

Just finished now.

Brilliant game! Voice acting is spot on and the plot has a great story arc.

Didn't need any hints or walkthrough to finish. Total time probably about 8 hours, so a very nice match of difficulty and length.

Looking forward to more projects from this creator for sure!!!

Welcome zeek!

I highly recommend the "Sammy's Quest" Tutorial series, by densming, on youtube for a great way to get grounded in the way AGS works.

Search "How to use AGS" on youtube and it will pop up!

It has 50+ parts to it and goes through pretty much everything involved in creating a game!

[Mini-Update:]

Things are going a bit slow on this project right now as I am concentrating on proofreading/editing AprilSkies' English translation of "Donald Dowell and the Ghosts of Barker Manor". At 25,000+ words it's a big job but it's about 30% done so far after 3 days work.

And from what I have been reading during the editing process I must say the game looks amazingly in-depth. I'm going to need a Men In Black flashy thingy once I'm done though to remove all spoilers from my memory before I play it (aka. 2 bottle of scotch)

Anyways...."Unusual Suspects":

Working on the main character's look and walkcycles at the moment.

Hopefully I can get a few screenies up in the near future...

Mini-Update:

Found a bit of time to work on the horizontal walkcycles. The character is not complete yet. Just a rudimentary police uniform so far, to which I will be adding more details.

But anyways...

Here is a shot of our hero approaching one of his crime scene investigations:

I want to help out.

I find the game's look and the main character absolutely charming.

I happen to be an English teacher and a real stickler concerning grammar and the overall nuance of sentence structure.

Stephen King (in his instructional book for writers: "On Writing") had an excellent tip which I always remember when editing writing, be it my own or that of others:

"Take out all the signs that say 'Horse'."

By which he meant:

Let's say you walk into an art gallery and see a picture of a horse hanging on the wall, and then you look down and see a sign under it which says "Horse"...

This is an obvious redundancy which needs to be removed or this particular art gallery is going to get more guffaws than serious art appreciation from its viewers.

I consider myself pretty decent at removing the signs that say "Horse" from descriptions and dialog, and above average at finding inconsistencies in grammar.

If interested, please PM me the details of how I can get started on this project.

[can someone help us in proofreading and/or in testing english version??]

can someone help us in proofreading and/or in testing english version??
We need to check if there are grammatical errors, but most of all we need to understand how it sounds to an English native speaker.
If someone is interested, contact me here or via P.M.

I want to help out.

I find the game's look and the main character absolutely charming.

I happen to be an English teacher and a real stickler concerning grammar and the overall nuance of sentence structure.

Stephen King (in his instructional book for writers: "On Writing") had an excellent tip which I always remember when editing writing, be it my own or that of others:

"Take out all the signs that say 'Horse'."

By which he meant:

Let's say you walk into an art gallery and see a picture of a horse hanging on the wall, and then you look down and see a sign under it which says "Horse"...

This is an obvious redundancy which needs to be removed or this particular art gallery is going to get more guffaws than serious art appreciation from its viewers.

I consider myself pretty decent at removing the signs that say "Horse" from descriptions and dialog, and above average at finding inconsistencies in grammar.

If interested, please PM me the details of how I can get started on this project.

[int items;]

thank you for your answer
i've tried this but ags say "undefined token 'items'"

This means that either your:

int items;

is now missing from your code or is in a place that the function that references it cannot respond to.

For example it may be contained inside a different function by mistake, in which case it will only work inside that particular function and not the one you are referring to it from.

Here is why:

The "int items;" in Khris' code above defines a variable called "items" as a basic integer number (no decimal places).

If the variable is not defined then AGS tells you it is an "undefined token" which means any label describing a variable, object name, character name etc which the program has not been correctly told to recognize.

For a simple fix just add the int items; command at the top outside of all functions and then all functions can identify it and respond to it when it is referenced.

Hope this helped...

[Mini-Update:]

Well, I got a bit of work done today, in that I managed to kind of put the random case titles for each arrival of the detective on the crime scene in place...

Still cannot figure out how to get everything on the same line but working around it for now.

For now everything is "Case #20" but, as I know how to use that variable (I think), this will change very soon.

NEW SCREENIES







Mini-Update:

Yay! I got the "File #" variable worked out and figured out how to include multiple variables into the display text on one line (It's so simple once I knew how that I did a self-face-palm )

Are these actually "in game" screenshots (I see no GUIs, no PC/NPCs, no cursors, etc).

Yes sir, they certainly are.

There are no GUIs because this is not actually a traditional adventure game but rather a level by level challenge where you investigate crime scenes to find clues and (hopefully) arrest the perp. The time limit gets tighter and tighter with each following level to add to the challenge. Thus I will not be using the usual GUIs at all most likely.

There are no characters yet as I pushed the player character off the screen for now as I have not yet drawn or animated him.

I moved the cursor down to the bottom right corner in each screenie as I didn't like it in the middle of the shot. If you zoom in on the lower right corner you can probably find a few pixels evidence of it being there.

For now I just wanted to get some progress on the forums to motivate myself to keep working on the project, knowing that people were watching.

All it really is so far is an EXE that, when started, generates a completely different random house exterior each time you click on the sky.

My next step will be to create the houses' interiors (also different each time) that your police detective character will search for the clues he needs to nail the perp in the lineup.

I will be able to get some more work done on the coming weekend

[UNUSUAL SUSPECTS]

UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

The Story:

You play a police detective, straight out of training, investigating break-ins in suburban households.

You will enter each household and search it for clues. As you investigate the crime scene you might uncover traces of the perpetrator's hair, hand prints, foot prints, or threads from their clothes.

Unfortunately, police detectives are pressed for time, so you will have to work fast gathering said clues lest the perp escapes.

Once you are done with your search, or your time limit expires, you will return to the police station to participate in a lineup of the Unusual Suspects.

If you are able to identify the perp in the lineup in time you will receive a promotion and continue on to your next case.

Promotions result in perks that I will not discuss here so as not to spoil the fun

Of course, the time limits on crime scene investigation and lineup recognition will get tighter and tighter as you progress.

Failure to capture the perp will result in a black mark on your record.

Three such black marks and you are demoted to a desk position and the game is over.

The game will only be saveable at certain achievement points.

Development Progress:

Story: 100%
Scripting: 10%
Graphics: 30%
Sound/Music: 0%

Expected completion date: Early 2014.

Screenshots:









Developer's Blog:

October 4th, 2013

Well, still working on the graphics and scripting at the moment. Luckily I happen to be a teacher and managed to enslave about a dozen of my students to draw the actual Unusual Suspects characters so be prepared for a funky police lineup each time (said students ranged in age from about 5 years old to about 11 years old).

What I have to show right now is the basic exterior shot of the crime scene house where your detective character arrives each case.

And when I say basic I mean basic.

If you download the following file and run it then you will see an exterior shot of the crime scene house similar (but different) to the screenshots posted above.

At the moment the houses' color scene is a tad gaudy I'll admit. I will be playing with those parameters and hopefully tuning them properly before final release so players' eyes do not get burned out.

For now just imagine that this is the suburb from the movie Edward Scissorhands.

Backgrounds will also be implemented so it does not look every time like you arrive in the middle of nowhere.

So...If you download this you will see that it is only an EXE file. I did not see the need to zip it up as there are no sounds etc. so far.

Once you run it:

If you click on the sky with any other icon except the "walk" icon a new random house setup will appear.

Oh, and you must press Alt-X to exit.

That's about it for now but I am constantly working on this project, free time allowed...

(Hoping to get the gardens , kiddie pools, and pink lawn flamingos done soon)

DOWNLOAD HERE

Or just ZIP all the files and you'll only have a single file for your host to deal with anyway.

Thanks for the pointer!

The game is now uploaded as a ZIP file containing the whole Compiled Folder, including the setup. And it's 6MB download now instead of 20MB.

Sorry for the newbie issues with my first upload, and thanks to all with the help in getting them sorted!

Hey Mandle, why don't you just use the AGSer.me account I gave you? .

D'OH! Yup I will!

Sorry...I just couldn't figure it out at the time...Probably due to severe sleep deprivation over the last few days, meeting up with overseas visitors on the spur of the moment and work etc.

Off to bed now for about 15 hours hopefully so I will get it sorted tomorrow!

I've been able to play and finish the game, I don't mind the forced fullscreen on my laptop but as others mentioned it would be nice to have the setup file and the game in one Zip download.

The game was short and simple, I haven't encountered any bug and every interaction I tried had a proper answer. I just didn't like the default dialog box, transparent-over-the-head text would have been nice.
The graphics are pretty good considering Masahiro and Moeka, 11 and 5 years old, are the artists.
I liked the whole vision of the adventure, it reminded me of how I used to play when I was a kid, as a father I also enjoyed the 'twist'.

I was intrigued by your choice to involve kids in game making and wanted to say congratulations for the release!

Thank you so much for the kind feedback. I'm very pleased that the overall theme of the project was imparted to you despite it's faults.

This project was my first ever attempt at using the AGS game engine and I still do not know how to do a lot of stuff properly. I would be very embarrassed to actually show the code to anyone as it's basically built out of stop-gap solutions to get around all the stuff that I still do not know how to do

However, knowing myself, I knew that I just had to get it finished in some form or I would probably end up stalling on it completely.

For this outing I think I will just leave all the warts of amateur enthusiasm as they are and hopefully come back after some more polished releases and smile fondly, remembering my first excited fumbling arounds during this initial project.

From tomorrow I will start working through the Sammy's Quest tutorials on youtube to really learn some nuts and bolts structure of AGS scripting.

I'm sure I will have a great laugh every time I find how to actually do something that I stuck together with cellotape and plasticine in this release

I didn't quite get that .
Are you saying a 5 year old helped you make this?

The game is based on a story created in class, with backgrounds made out of construction paper and hand-drawn characters cut out painstakingly with scissors and pasted into the scenes.

The majority of the art was created by the students I mentioned. They also had influence over the story, especially the creation of the NPC characters and the ways to appease them.

A lot of the overall story arc was, of course, structured by me, their teacher. Case in point being the ending which obviously comes from an angle only grown-ups can appreciate (without giving too much away )

Importing the artwork and story into AGS and coding it was done solely by myself at home of course.

Both students will now receive their own copies of the game as well as the paper copies of the original story compiled into book-form to take home and hopefully enjoy and keep forever (hehe...the private wish of every teacher I'm sure)

Hello again.
When you have compiled your game and want to distribute it, please include setup and sound files in your download pack. Right now there's only an .exe file.

Sorry about that. At the moment my host does not allow multiple downloads. I will find another host that does.

Until then is it alright if I leave it as just the exe file? The game does not have sound in any case so all that is missing is the setup. It should still run fine. The default setting is fullscreen mode at 640x480.

Tomorrow I will host the full folder elsewhere

Sorry, just figured out the BB code...

Download link is now included at bottom of main post

[(Download is now the whole Compiled Folder in a zip file as normal)]

(Download is now the whole Compiled Folder in a zip file as normal)
(Sorry for the newbie issues with the first upload...)

Greetings!

First ever forums post so a little nervous here but bear with me please if possible

The title of this first project has a double meaning:

It's the first big adventure for my protagonist, and at the same time the first humble adventure that I have created myself.

Well...with a little help:

This is a project which was created with the artistic input of two very special students of mine: Masahiro and Moeka...

During the summer break of 2013 I had the honor to combine the talents of both an 11 year old and a 5 year old student to collaborate on this story.

Our theme in the class was once in a lifetime summer experiences and this is the project which grew from that theme.

You will probably not find an especially challenging game if you choose to download our project, but if you DO choose to take part then I hope you can rediscover a part of your childhood that you may have forgotten, or at least disregarded for a while.

I know I did...

If not, then probably my telling of the story needs a kick in the butt, or you are already in touch with your inner child.

In either case please post feedback in the positive or the negative.

Both are appreciated greatly!

CLICK HERE FOR DOWNLOAD

(Download is now the whole Compiled Folder in a zip file as normal)
(Sorry for the newbie issues with the first upload...)

Full Name:
[Ross Moffat]

Subdomain: (You will also get an @agser.me email with the same name)
[Mandle].agser.me

Hosting? * (Put an X into [] of the option wanted)
[X] Yes please, I want a slice of FREE hosting.
[] No thank you, I have my own hosting.

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