Messages

This is a rather good sprite, colors and contrast-wise.

Maybe just slightly increase the contrast: everything facing upwards should be slightly lighter (e.g. shoulders) and everything facing downwards should be slightly darker (e.g. the lower part of the beard) ?

But it's good enough to go as it is.

...But my script is sad and somber, with lots of tension. Should I lighten up the mood a bit, or continue the story as is? What is your opinion?

What you must do is not necessarily make an adventure game funny, but make it ADVENTUROUS. Or at least make the player feel like he's DOING something. Combining stuff. Finding clues. Make the story progress by the sheer force of his intellect.
Whimsical games achieve that by making the badly-designed puzzles feel less frustrating (precisely because of the overall silliness), and by putting gags here and there to keep the player's interest up, at an almost scientific pace (the pace of gags).
You must also keep that pace up. If your story is sad, then DON'T fall into the trap of most "sad" adventure games : no real progression, no real player interaction, no "pace", only a slow sliding down until the sad finale. Building the universe and mood around the player is not enough. Discovering a piece of paper or a personal journal revealing a new part of the backstory is NOT a "puzzle". He must PLAY. All the time. He must be entertained. All the time. He must be surprised. All the time.

Since this is a discussion:  Actually, never liked EGA palette. And this screenshot may not be teached in art schools. 

I don't think anyone likes the EGA palette.

Yeah that's my point: NO ONE like the EGA palette. And yet they managed to make something cool out of it. Even better than some poor VGA backgrounds. And that's why they should teach this bg in art schools: how do you maintain color warmth, contrast, and even saturation with a palette of 16 poorly-chosen colors? You don't. Unless you're the guy who drew this.

There's even motherfucking antialiasing on the books in the top-right corner.

How many colors at most ?

The kyrandia style has two characteristics:
- very tasteful and soft (yet colorful) color scheme
- perfect use of contrast

Your color scheme is very good BUT considering how flat the ground is, maybe you should reduce the contrast of the "horizontal" grassy surfaces, to make it look softer and less busy.

The benefit of doing so is that it will make the ground compete less with the character and other important visual elements, in the eye of the player.

The easy way of reducing the contrast would be to remove the darker green shades (from the foreground only!), and stick to two shades of green there (I counted 4 shades of green)

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EXAMPLE: Look at this part, and pretend that the shiny central part doesn't exist. Then all the surrounding grassy parts (in the foreground) have a low contrast. the rocks however have a high contrast.

Spoiler

[close]

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Reversely, you made the foreground bush too contrasted in comparison with the rest of the scene. I wouldn't use the black color there, unless you also use it on the trees/rocks.

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Finally, for your next background, always think of ways to make the ground NOT FLAT. See how they did in Kyrandia. It makes every scene more immersive.

I would like to share with you the quality of this EGA-style background.
Notice how they used the 16 colors to create :
- a brownish color scheme (the bear's fur)
- a cold light (blue tints -- that was the most used color scheme back then -- remember Melee Island in Monkey Island)
- a warm light (look at the f**ing corridor on the right!)
- a combination of warm and cold light (look at the reflections on the pilars/poles)

...and with all that, they managed to keep top-notch contrast and readability everywhere. And they didn't even overuse gradients.

Amazing.


Source : the book of unwritten tales 2

I didn't mean it as a resource, more like a file with a specific name and that must have a specific size, located in the .exe's folder. If it's there, then display the image. If it's not, then don't. Same thing for the custom hyperlink: if the correpsonding custom entry is in the configuration file, then display it. otherwise don't.

[Long things short: hide the things that the player needs to change only if he has technical issues or weird tastes. Make that screen as little confusing as possible.]

I've been waiting on this opportunity for a long time.
I think the setup screen should be divided into two main areas:
1) visible at all times ("basic")
2) "Advanced" : requires a click to be visible.
...Like Gurok suggested. But I also suggest something about 4:3 and 16:9.

Spoiler

In the "basic" area you could have "full screen" and choose the filter type. The hidden defaults could be "D3D9", "maximum zoom with letterbox", etc.
In the "advanced" area you could be able to revert to DX5, change the zoom level, all the weird things like vertical sync, etc.

On a side note: if you think "maximum zoom with letterbox" is not the best choice, then OK, fair enough, but maybe there should be an option on the "basic settings" panel to choose between 16:9 and 4:3 (and apply the corresponding recommanded settings).

[close]

Long things short: hide the things that the player needs to change only if he has technical issues or weird tastes. Make that screen as little confusing as possible.

Oh, and I'm all in favor to add a custom image AND a custom hyperlink to any troubleshooting board on the game maker's forums.

Baseline issue +1
Some object appears on top of the gum, hiding it.

But onto my question:
When designing the game is it practical to use 'rooms' to depict each movement view? For example, if you clicked on a direction arrow to turn 90 degrees that just requires a change of room?

Like Gilbert said: if you've already been explained how to make such game, as you said, the people who explained it probably also explained to you that it's best to draw each angle dynamically, and even the whole maze in just one room. HOWEVER if it's a very small maze (more like a 3D view of a small house, let's say, for an "escape room" game) and if you've never scripted before, then maybe one room per room and angle is better. But that's really the only exception.

Butlerian Jihad for everyone! Yey!

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

I'm maintaining my interest, especially now that the dates are known.

I use a plugin to allow me to fake a keypress when a GUI button is pressed.

I don't understand why that would be required.

I don't give a damn about the following game, I didn't even know that it existed.
But it's the first time ever that I see some people able to render the Day of the Tentacle style (bent, seemingly random, cartoony perspectives) in a photorealistic fashion. They're using CGI.

I find this interesting and thought I'd share. I still find it a bit shy though. There are still a lot of elements that are straight and make it look like they hesitate between cartoony style and just a fish-eye effect.

http://www.imaginarylab.it/willy-morgan/

Hi,
sorry for writing in this old topic, but I have a problem with this plugin.
I have installed it correctly and it works fine with simple lua scripts. But now, in order to write my real code, I need another lua module (luasql.sqlite, exactly).
In this case, what should I do? I am not expert about how Lua Works and I haven't found any dll for that module; and If I am not wrong the modules I got must be installed directly into lua.

Can you give me any hint?

Thanks.

You'd be probably better off asking on the Lua forums, but I'm sure Calin Leafshade will help if he sees your update (did you try PM'ing him?)

Obligatory post about football

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f27IqVo5-Oc

[F11]

DosBox is just the #1 choice for anything that doesn't run on ScummVM.

Now for something useful: In the Start menu (or its Windows 7 equivalent) there is a link to the Dosbox configuration file (dosbox.conf). It simply opens the file in Notepad.

You should learn how to use it, it's mainly useful for two things :

1) Add the mounting instructions at the very end of it. They'll be executed automatically at each startup so that you don't have to type them each time:

Code: ags

mount c "d:\Users\Documents and Settings\My Documents\myDOSgamesfolder"
c:
cd myfavoritegame
myfavoritegame.exe

2) I suggest adding a graphic filter from the few filters offered. It's gorgeous. (just look up the corresponding section in the file and pick a filter from the list, like mame2x or whatever)

3) Learn how to speed up and slow down the virtual CPU clock while you're playing a game. I think it's F11 and F12 or something -- Google it (when you press the right keys you'll see the corresponding message appear in the console window of DosBox AND you'll see the CPU speed change in your game's window title bar). For every new game you try, it's good to find out which speed gives the best results between FPS drop and refresh saturation. It's kind of trial and error, but once you got it for a game, it's just a matter of pressing these keys a few times each time you run it.

You could (and I honestly don't know if this could work) make a custom font, with the unused characters in one font replaced with the letters from another font. And then just use that font for whenever you need to have multiple fonts on a single line of text.

It's just an idea though. There's probably all sorts of problems I'm not considering here.

That would work, but why make things complicated when you can just use a module ten times more simple and powerful?

Here's an older module: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=25866
It most likely won't work as-is with current AGS versions though.

Older scripts actually work quite well with just a limited amount of change, provided that don't do incredible graphical stuff (it's usually the string/String conversion that requires a bit of rework)

I would definitely give it a try!