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That last screenshot sold me.  Always wanted to punch a giant hole in a plant.

Well hey, the storyline revolves around punching a giant hole through a planet!

[Get the demo (23.5MB):]

Get the demo (23.5MB):
AGS Database	Download
Official Hungry Planet Games Site	Download

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'Astroloco: Worst Contact' is my latest endeavour into the world of point & click adventure games. This time, a love letter to my favourite genre of all - science fiction. As with my previous games, which you may be familiar with (subAtomic and Plan M), I have my buddy Dave along to help me with development.
He's mostly been busy poking pixels into small spaces to make the character art. This time around, however, we're also bringing to bear the full force of our new development house 'Hungry Planet Games'.

Synopsis:
In the far future, humans explore and colonise space using ridiculously deadly, moon-sized trains - the titular 'Astro Locomotives'. They are operated by enormous, competing railroad companies and train vs. train combat is expensively common.

You play as two characters, both trying to uncover a galactic conspiracy and keep their jobs.
* Ronald, the dependable mechanic: Responsible for keeping Gilbert station running smoothly.
* Arianne, the roguish pilot: Driver of The Comet, and the best train driver in the company (if she could only stay out of trouble).

Lies Features:
* Trains. In space. That's worth the entry price, right there.
* More of my writing. That might be a positive or a negative, depending on how much you enjoy laughing until you dribble.
* Fully voiced! You'll also be able to turn the voice-over off, since I know some of you like to do that. Just know that every time someone ticks that particular box in the game settings, we'll execute one of our voice actors.
* Fully music-ed(?)! You won't be able to turn the music off. In fact, the volume slider starts at 100% and it only goes up from there.
* The 'unique' graphical style of subAtomic and Plan M!
* Interesting puzzles and minigames! I know a lot of you adventure gamers out there like to actually have some challenge in your games. For everyone else, just hold down your Escape key and hope it ends soon.
* An entirely reasonable retail price!

Pretty Pictures:
(Click 'em for full sized goodness)

The full game will be coming out this winter. We'll be appearing on Steam Greenlight shortly, and are also in talks with other online distribution platforms.

Keep updated by following me on Twitter @GameDevIdeas, Hungry Planet Games @HungryPlanetGS, and also liking our page on Facebook!

We're also going to be at Adventure X 2012 this year, so come and say "hi" if you're going to be there! We promise we aren't all insane.

Mainly because there's still a HUGE playerbase that's either running on 32bit processors (which IS dwindling, admittedly) and most of them still run a 32bit OS.

I'm not so sure about the first part. Looking at the Steam Hardware survey, you can see that 68.79% of all participants are running a 64-bit OS. That's only 31.21% using 32-bit OS. Still a large number, though - I'll admit.
But then look at the stats for CPU cores. Only 6.16% of people have fewer than 2 cores - and very few dual-core processors were released that aren't 64-bit capable.

Obviously the figures might be telling a different story, but as far as I can tell it shows that almost 95% of gamers (who use Steam) are 64-bit capable, they just don't use an OS that supports it.

Nothing we can do really. Perhaps submitting some winsetups to them for analysis might mean they recognise the format.

Yeah, I figured as much. Thanks anyway!

As I said, it only started happening today. Maybe an update they pushed or something? My concern was that people might be put off from playing an AGS game - especially a commercial one - if their antivirus starts telling them to 'use extreme caution' whenever they launch it. Avast! isn't exactly a minor player in the home user antivirus scene.

I'd love to be able to use Switch/Case statements instead of enormous blocks of if/else if/else if...

Awesome to hear it's definitely going ahead!

I'll be there with Astroloco: Worst Contact!

One of the guys I'm working with has just told me that all compiled AGS games (or, at least, all 3.2.1 games we've made recently) are now coming up with a flag from Avast! Antivirus. This was on his computer, and on another person's, so it may well be across all PCs with Avast! installed. It only started happening today.

First they get this message:

(The file prevalence/reputation is low)

Then it says it couldnt find enough evidence to class it as malware but that [the user] should use extreme caution. The same error occurs with the game exe and winsetup.exe.

As a precaution, I uploaded the game exe to VirusTotal, but all 43 tests returned negative.

Something we should be aware of? This might mean Avast! is flagging all current AGS games as suspicious for some reason.

[smells]

Look around the White house experience.

Yes, that smells like the right way to get ahead!

Glad you guys liked it!

More press: Plan M just got featured on RockPaperShotgun.com!

As an aside, is it strange that subAtomic has 1,004 downloads on the AGS database but no 'Public Opinion'?

Plan M just got featured on IndieGames.com!

[Plan M]

My buddy, Dave, and I finished a new game for the Ludum Dare (you may remember our previous release, subAtomic). It's in the same vein of comedy sci-fi adventuring, but bigger and better!

Plan M

The arbitrarily evil Dr. M uses a nefarious machine (The Simianthesiser) to devolve everyone into apes, so he and Señor Banana can become supreme masters!
Fortunately for the human race, he didn't count on Detectives Vandall and Hopkirk - two survivors who will stop at nothing to put things back the way they were.

Features:
* Full-length point & click adventure!
* A story so packed with comedy it's liable to explode at any minute, covering you and anyone watching in a disgusting-yet-amusing goo!
* Stephen Hawking gives a conference from the ceiling!
* Meet a monkey pretending to be the president!
* Electrocute a small child!
* A working save/load system! (well, subAtomic didn't have one)
* 17 music tracks and almost 50 sound FX!
* And much, much more!


The game is substantially longer than subAtomic, and will probably take an hour or so of your time. That is, of course, a complete guess - your mileage may vary.
Almost all content was created within 3 days, and the entire AGS project was put together in Day 3 (also known as 'Oh-god-why Day').

What you're looking at here is the 'Enhanced Edition' which features the soundtrack/SFX, new/revamped scenes and a laundry-list of bug-fixes and tweaks based on community feedback.

Download:
The AGS game page with download link can be found here.
Note: If you entered the Ludum Dare #24 Compo/Jam you can find our page here! We'd love to hear what you think, and other LD48 entrants can submit a rating.

Sorry Khris - I didn't mean to ignore the question! I only meant the limit seems arbitrary because it clearly isn't applied when using walkable area scaling in the editor properties panel.

At the moment I'm preventing the player from moving manually in the scene by disabling the walkable areas (and re-enabling them when they're needed).

Code: AGS

RestoreWalkableArea(1);
cPilot.Walk(260, 305, eBlock);
RemoveWalkableArea(1);

Is there a different way of preventing Walk To commands from working? I can't just disable the eModeWalkTo mouse mode, since it's the only cursor mode my game uses (it runs Look/Interact when over an object and Walk To otherwise).

I don't suppose we could have this limit removed in future versions of AGS? It seems entirely arbitrary!

I have a room in which there are no walkable areas, but I need to scale a character sprite. In other rooms, I've been able to use the built-in walkable area scaling property to set scaling factors of, for instance, 500%. Unfortunately, it seems that the Character.Scaling property is limited to a maximum of 200.

I was hoping someone could let me know if there's any reason for this limit, and if there's a way around it?

Thanks in advance!

Wwwhat?
Ofcourse it will return in same order. And what do you mean it is not intuitive? It's how file storage work since early days of computers

Sorry, I've updated my example to something a little more easily understandable (if you ignore the syntax errors and treat it as pseudocode)

I just meant its not as intuitive as using a key/value system like, for instance, the Unity engine. In Unity you can do the following:

Code: "JS"

playerHealth = 100;
enemyHealth = 75;

PlayerPrefs.SetInt("pHP",playerHealth);
PlayerPrefs.SetInt("eHP",enemyHealth);

And then retrieve the values later by using:

Code: "JS"

playerHealth = PlayerPrefs.GetInt("pHP");
...

So it reads linearly?

For example:

Code: AGS

var1 = 43;
var2 = 63;
var3 = 12;

WriteInt(var1);
WriteInt(var2);
WriteInt(var3);

This could be read back in with successive calls of ReadInt(), each one returning the next number in the sequence (43, 63, then, finally, 12)?

Code: AGS

var1 = ReadInt(); //43
var2 = ReadInt(); //63
var3 = ReadInt(); //12

If so then that will work for what I have in mind. It's not as intuitive as a key/value system (since it means I have to write the entire file again whenever I change a value), but it's workable.

Will saving custom file work for you?
Check File routines in the manual:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/?title=File_functions_and_properties

It certainly looks like it could work, but I'm a little unsure about its flexibility.

The example given for File.ReadInt is:

Code: AGS

int number;
File *input = File.Open("stats.dat", eFileRead);
number = input.ReadInt();
input.Close();

There doesn't appear to be any control at all over the organisation of the storage - from the example given, I'm not even sure that you can read back more than one int, let alone a specific one. 

I'm aiming to integrate some achievement-style unlocks in an AGS game, but they need to be separate from game save files. I read in a different topic that static variables in AGS are persistent between game saves, but I doubt they are also persistent between launches of the game itself.

Is there any easy way to have a set of static, globally accessible variables (int and bool would suffice) which can be made persistent between save files and game launches?

As an example, a boolean which stores whether or not the player has ever unlocked DoorX in the game. Once it has been unlocked once in a playthrough, the variable is set to true. Even if the player quit the application, opened it up again and started a new game, the boolean would still show that they, at some point in the past, unlocked DoorX.

Update: The game took #1 for humour in the Ludum Dare 48 #23  (plus some other stuff, like #7 fun (jam) and #8 overall (jam)).

If that doesn't give you reason to give it a play, nothing will!