Messages

I managed to find the puzzle chart for "In Our Midst" which was supposed to be an entry for MAGS September 2022 "Sometimes Evil Wins", so I'm working on that this month.

• There were two 'puzzle goes here' holes in the design which I've now filled in. One miiiight be a pain to program, and I don't know how fun or logical it will be for players. We'll see.
• A lot of art was already done - I've got 5 backgrounds and walking animations for the characters - but there's still a lot of random objects and animations to do.
• There's not a lot of code written. A couple of graphic-less objects to pick up and some bits of unfinished unconnected puzzles.
• I wanted it to be wordless but originally I didn't have time to make that work, so there's some sticking plaster text descriptions that pop up for some actions. I'm going to give this another go and see if I can make it work with as little text as possible. That probably means more animation and sound effects though.

I think if it was originally submitted in a state where it was obvious to players that it was very unfinished that's fine. Fixing a couple of bugs or adding a bit of polish to something that was already fully playable would go against the spirit of the theme though.

I should say the theme was outright stolen from inspired by the MAGS discussion thread where it seemed like something people would be interested in.

I've been looking through a couple of my old projects this morning. There's two obvious ones that had a fair bit of work put into them before I ran out of time, but I'm struggling to find the game designs for either of them. It's going to be a memory test to figure out which one is closest to being finished and how the game was supposed to work.

I'd also like to suggest a GUI since it's one of the only big decisions left before we could cobble together a prototype:

1) A small menu button in one corner of the screen. Click it to open a menu bar that contains save, load, and exit options, and an inventory window.
2) two-click interface with no need for scrolling through modes. Left click to walk, interact, or talk to (determind automatically depending on whatis under the cursor), or use inventory (if active). Right click to put away inventory or examine.
3) code this in a fairly simple way that does not require a separate two-click handler script, so as to keep the code accessible to newcomers.

Any thoughts, suggestions, changes?

IMO that sounds good. I know there are concerns about two button interfaces, but I don't think the demo should be embedded in a website or played on mobile. It's not a demo of "Here's what the engine can do, download it now", it's a "Here's how to make all the basic features of an adventure game work". Users should be downloading it alongside the editor (ideally installing as an option alongside the editor), opening and running from inside the editor, while also going through the scripts to figure out how that thing they just saw works. In that context it's being played on a computer and I think it's fairly safe to assume two buttons are available?

As a catch all you can add
4) Use an inventory item on itself to put it away.
5) Don't build puzzles that require examining items.

There were also conversations about using one of the existing interface templates as a starting point. My argument against that is a) they already have their own demos and documentation, b) the simplest template is probably BASS and that has some legacy bagage with its naming (TwoClickHandler, Lightweight BASS Stub) and extras we might not want (inventory pop-up), and c) it might be easier to comment code written for specifically for this project?

Feel free to disagree, I know I'm wading in here to something you've been kicking around for months.

Oh great, now I'll never be able to get Brian to shut up.

Seriously though thanks for your feedback and votes. It was tough competition, all great games this month.

I was reading through this thread since Crimson Wizard mentioned it elsewhere and wondering whether to bump it, but lapsking beat me to it. I'd like to help out on this project if I can. @cat @RootBound and @Danvzare seem to be the main contributors so far (also CW, but he seems to keep trying to leave and getting dragged back in ). I guess the question is are you still interested in working on this?

[The Second Secret of the Orbs]

Finally finished the other entries. A very strong month, congratulations all! My thoughts:

The Second Secret of the Orbs

Spoiler

I don't know RON very well, and I didn't play the prequel, so I find this entry hard to comment on as I don't know what's established canon and what's new ideas. It's a good premise of characters hopping through portals and finding themselves in different realities, and something I think you can have a lot of fun with. It's got some good moments of humour, and the puzzles are all fair and logical, though it does suffer a bit from seeing items you're obviously going to need, but not being allowed to take them until you know what they're for.

[close]

Dracula's Mid-Century-Modern House of Mystery

Spoiler

Amazing 16 (17?) colour artwork as always, and a ridiculous amount of it. The premise is great (and great title too!) and I really liked the characters as well. Sadly it seems it was too big a premise for MAGS and so has some bugs and a lot of rooms with no interactions or purpose other than looking nice. It was still worth playing though and I'm glad you posted it. If you choose to finish it I think you could have something really special.

[close]

Use It All (Or Forget Your Ball)

Spoiler

It felt like this was the longest and most complex puzzle chain of the lot. I like the setting and the humour, and some of the puzzle solutions were good, but there were a few that didn't make sense to me or seemed like a logic jump too far. You said you ran out of time to add missing interactions, so possibly these would have helped to give hints why something wasn't right. I got stuck for a while and eventually went looking for hints, but it turned out I had tried the flute on the ring, but the game wanted the ring to be used on the flute. The presentation is really good, the graphics are lovely and there's some nice touches of animation too.

[close]

The Green & Red

Spoiler

An interesting and consistent art style and great music give this a great atmosphere. I was a little confused with the penultimate puzzle, as I didn't realise what I was supposed to be making until I'd made it, but otherwise puzzles are logical and had a good level of difficulty for me. Overall this is a fun little game with hints of being part of a bigger story in a larger fantasy world.

[close]

Thanks everyone for your kind words, no doubt they will go straight to Brian's head. No word on the sponsorship yet. Brian was threatening to go down to his local McDonalds with a USB stick but I think I talked him out of it.

As @OneDollar participates in the MAGS contest this month, I was reminded that his homepage in addition to his games in the database (recommended play!), also has links to four older projects:

'Projects' maybe, I don't think any of them count as games. I just replayed Attack Game to remind myself what it was and immediately found a bug. It also contains the phrase "batters eyelids".

[Brian Eggs Is Lost In The Woods]

Brian Eggs Is Lost In The Woods



My acquaintance the (self-proclaimed) video game auteur Brian Eggs has asked me to upload this game on his behalf. I asked him how he wanted to describe it, and he said "it is a tale of adversity examining a persons resilience and resolve when separated from the rest of humanity and also theres a squirrel in it". Having played the game myself... well... there certainly is a squirrel.

I convinced him to let me fix some game-breaking bugs, but he wouldn't accept any of my other suggestions. So this is his unhindered artistic vision.

You have been warned.

Download the game!
Play the (test) web browser version here!

Brian Eggs Is Lost In The Woods is an entry for the February 2024 MAGS competition "Into the Woods" by noblonski. Check out the other entries and vote for your favourite in the MAGS thread.

Please also let me know if you have any comments, feedback or bug reports!

Links:
AGS database entry
Game's website
MAGS February 2024 "Into the Woods"

[Brian Eggs Is Lost In The Woods]

Brian Eggs Is Lost In The Woods


My occasional acquaintance Brian asked me to submit this game on his behalf. I think I fixed most of the game-breaking bugs for him. Unfortunately he wouldn't let me do anything about the rest of it because it would, and I quote, "ruin my artistic vision".

My apologies.

Download here

New "Remastered" version released!

The original version of A Flight To Remember was created in less than a month for a MAGS competition. I was very happy with how it came out, but due to the time constraints there were a number of things I had to cut. Schedule slippage also meant the game came out on the 29th of December which is... maybe not the best time to release a heavily Christmas-themed game

Anyway I thought it might be nice to revisit the game and add some of those missing features and release a Remastered version for December 2022. Over the last couple of months I've added in new special-case animations, rebuilt the save interface, fixed bugs, and generally added polish to make the game even better. I've also taken advantage of some of the features of the latest AGS builds and made a (test) web version of the game.

I hope you enjoy, and happy Christmas!

Also thanks Cat for Pick of the Month - that was a lovely surprise when I went to edit the game's database entry!

I can only hope you voted too. Goodness knows if just a few more people would leave a vote, it might earn a player rating.

Don't worry, I gave you votes too. I know all about not earning player ratings

Now I'm finally ready to take my Canadian history test.

Great game Ponch, I really enjoyed it! It deserves more than a MAGS win by default.

Before I could reliably crash the game on the first alt+tab. With this build it's much harder to trigger, but like eri0o I can still occasionally trigger it. I haven't been able to spot a pattern. I don't think it was speed, it just seemed like if I sat and alt+tabbed enough times eventually it would go not responding. One time took 40-ish attempts, another took 60-ish. I did also manage to recover the 'not responding' process a couple of times, again couldn't figure out a way of reliably doing that though. It might have happened after I alt+F4'd a couple of other open windows, or maybe just sometimes switching back to the process does recover it.

Had a quick test of the greyed out GUIs and that looks to be fixed in this build too.

Thanks for your hard work!

@OneDollar were you able to figure how to reproduce the grayed GUI thing you mentioned?

Edit: turns out I managed to reproduce it, opened an issue, thanks for reporting.

Thanks, I've been seeing it on some of my mini cutscenes and not on others so it was pretty odd. I had time for more testing today and I think it's caused by the Display() function being called as the last blocking function. I've added some examples to your issue.

Interesting that it's intermittent for you, it seems to happen immediately on first alt+tab for me. I'm on Windows 10, haven't tried on 11 yet.

Congrats!

Awesome work dev team, well done! I've been following development on and off for a while and there's a lot of cool things being added to AGS.

One thing I've spotted - if I run a game in fullscreen using the Direct3D 9 driver and switch applications (either by alt+tabbing or by clicking on my second monitor) the game goes not responding and has to be forcibly closed through task manager. This doesn't happen with OpenGL or the SDL 2D Software renderer. It's also fine in windowed mode or when I use the 'Fullscreen as borderless window' option, so it seems specific to how Direct3D 9 is doing dedicated fullscreen. AGS 3.5.1 also doesn't do this, so I guess it's something to do with the move to SDL2?

I'm also seeing another bug where greyed out GUI controls (disabled during a blocking event) aren't being drawn as ungreyed until the mouse hovers over them... but only in one particular scene of my game. They work fine in similar sections and I can't reproduce in a new game file. I'll let you know if I figure out how to reliably trigger that.

[The Stinker]

The Stinker by Slasher:

Spoiler

It's fun to play the bad guy and cause mayhem, and I liked the idea of spreading the game out over four scenarios to give you four different locations to destroy. It might have been nice to allow swapping between characters mid-game so if you get stuck in one area (which I briefly did) you could switch to another character and come back later. Maybe also giving the player a bit of info about where each character's mission is so they know what they're picking on the selection screen (at the moment we're just going on names). There's some nice touches in the destruction, like making dents where the player actually clicks. Puzzles were a bit mixed for me, some were fun but others felt a bit obscure or went on too long (like having to check every hotel room in case someone was inside it). Overall I enjoyed the game, and I think it was a fun way to interpret the topic.

[close]

Siren by GOC Games:

Spoiler

Strong on both graphics and atmosphere - in my opinion this has the best presentation of the three. It's well paced and a good length. The inventory style puzzles were decent, though with the limited number of items and single-screen locations none of them were particularly challenging. There's also the key in the keyhole puzzle which people were complaining was overdone when Broken Sword 3 came out. Still, a very strong contender and I liked your spin on the topic.

[close]

Unfair by ZapZap:

Spoiler

Making an Ace Attorney game in AGS in a month doesn't sound easy, but this is surprisingly good attempt. The basics of consulting evidence, cross examining witnesses, spotting contradictions and even pointing out inconsistencies in pictures are all there. The interface works, but it's a little bit clunky and awkward. These kind of games live or die on unravelling the central mystery and I think this is handled well. I had a general guess as to what happened after getting the temporary autopsy report, but there's a steady drip of extra information and clues as you progress through the witness statements. My one major complaint is that early on you get the opportunity to press a witness on something. I hadn't exhausted the rest of the options so decided to pass for the moment. This closes the conversation topic with no way to go back and press on it, but without pressing you miss a piece of evidence that's vital to moving forward. I also saved after having done this and was soft-locked without realising it. Knowing the topic also works against this one, as I guessed how it would end from the start. Looking past these things though I think the core of the game is solid.

[close]

My vote:

Spoiler

I gave it to Unfair. It was the game I enjoyed most of the three, and it also had a lot of ambition and mostly delivered on it.

[close]