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When I was doing the backgrounds for my game I used your games as one of the starting point for developing my own 'quick but still good looking' style. One of the changes I made was sticking shadows on everything - it keeps the cartoony look but adds more depth and interest to the scene. Other than that you could add more stuff in there to try and busy it up.

Anyway, here's the original:


And a quick edit: (paying very little attention to the light source etc)


And here's some shots from my game, if you're interested:
http://onedollarproductions.googlepages.com/Screen1.png
http://onedollarproductions.googlepages.com/Screen2.png
I used Flash for these (as InCreator suggested, I find this sort of thing a lot easier in vectors. You could checkout Inkscape -which is free-  if you don't want to download Flash.

You've already got a lot of good advice for characters, I'd suggest you consider how many are going to be in the game, and weigh up how much time it will take to draw them at that level and see if its worth it. You will get quicker though.

Hope some of that is worth considering.

There's two ways of doing ‘interactive dialogue', make one set of choices the correct one and use the rest for non-game-changing extras, or make the choice of dialogue actually affect the flow or outcome of the dialogue or the game itself.

The first one can be good â€" you could use it as a way of increasing depth. If you have a bunch of NPCs that you don't have to talk to (i.e. its obviously not a solution to a puzzle) you could build dialogue trees that give you some more of the backstory or are just humorous. I don't really like the “guess the correct response” puzzle though. Basically I'd say whether this works depends on the quality of the writing, and whether or not the ‘correct' dialogue is/becomes obvious, so that the player has the option of asking the extra questions, but never has to.

I do like the idea of being able to choose what I say in order to steer the dialogue, but only if its genuine. For instance if you can give angry/happy/polite/etc answers to something, and the NPC responds accordingly, changing the way the dialogue flows but not the outcome. Or a step further would be to build NPCs with personalities that change depending on what you do, but then we're entering RPG territory. Or change the puzzle depending on the response you give? The game starts to become non-linear and hence has greater replayability but is harder to make.

In short, yes it's a good idea but only if it significantly impacts the game or is optional.

I'm not meaning to just bump this thread but came across this thread and this post caught my attention. I downloaded a version that was supposed to have the demo game but it doesn't seem to.

The currently supported version of AGS (ie 3.0, available from the Download AGS page of http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ has the DemoQuest included, though you have to make sure you check the "Install the Demo Game" option in the installer. The more recent beta releases in this thread aren't official releases and as such don't have the DemoQuest included with them.

If you download version 3.0 and install the DemoQuest with it, you should be able to open it in the 3.1 beta versions. You can copy the DemoQuest files to your 3.1 beta directory then uninstall 3.0.

"Alan is irrelevant worker in the department of which to take care of all kinds of holidays, inter alia, Christmas. Everything is based on plans until the on the table a letter from Santa clause of the President, who, while polite, announces that with him this Christmas cannot count. So what now?"

That's better than the blurb I wrote...

Nice, you're pretty good! I think I figured out how you did the first one, though I didn't see anything to prove it. I'm clueless about the second though. Which is the way it should be

Alan Saves Christmas also found its way on there. Got a half decent score too... I'd love to know what it says - the english version is much shorter. Anyone able to translate Czech?

I notice nobody's saying "Oh good! I can spend that time working on my game"

Custom properties are a completely different thing, nothing to do with what you're trying to do. What you want to do is open up the global script, find the bit at the top that says #sectionstart game_start then in the game_start() function you want to add the line cEgo.Baseline=153; ie something like

Code: ags

#sectionstart game_start  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE
function game_start() // called when the game starts, before the first room is loaded
  {
    cEgo.Baseline=153;
  }
#sectionend game_start  // DO NOT EDIT OR REMOVE THIS LINE

(where cEgo is the character's script name, and without removing anything else already in there )

When the game starts this function is called before anything else, so you can use it to do some basic setup of the more advanced options that don't appear as regular properties in the editor. You can also change the baseline property at other points in the game if you want.

I think the baseline is set automatically from the bottom of the sprite, including transparent pixels, but I'm not completely sure on that.

[Edit:]

Some of the stuff from Beyond Good and Evil, especially the main theme (released for free on the internet and floating around somewhere) is very good. I also really like some of the Shenmue tracks especially Everlasting World and Waves of Morning Haze (at the bottom of the page. I've also got the Evil Genius soundtrack - I love the main theme to that game. I have to admit I've got some of the songs from Sonic Adventure DX and Sonic Heroes too If you blank out the awful lyrics the music is actually quite good. Sort of.

Edit: Oh, and Still Alive obviously.

Edit 2: Oh, and the themes from Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3, and the theme from Worms occasionally.

In MS Paint go to the Image menu and click Attributes. Set the units to pixels and check how big your background is with the width and height. Now check what game resolution you're using (e.g. 320x200, 320x240, 640x480 or whatever). Unless you want a scrolling background (in which case you make the background a bit bigger than the resolution), your background wants to match the game resolution.

Ok, so supposing you've found out that the background you drew is 10 times too big. Unfortunately in paint the only way to make it smaller is to use the select tool and manually resize it, then resize the canvas area to fit, checking in the attributes that the image is the right size. Its difficult to maintain the ratio when doing this, and you'll probably loose a lot of the details so it might be worth starting again. If you do, or when you want to make a new background go to the Attributes first and enter the game resolution into the height and width boxes (making sure you've got pixels chosen as the unit) and draw in that area.

Alternatively if your background isn't massive you could consider upping the game resolution to 800x600 (the highest AGS currently supports) and resizing your background accordingly.

I've never played D&D... to be perfectly honest, I don't even know what half of that stuff means... I just saw an opportunity to be tasteless, so I took it...
(got it from here

Now there's a surprise. I've never played D&D but I have played a lot of stuff that wouldn't have existed without it. He's left a huge legacy behind.

Have you checked the hotspot x and y positions on your mouse cursors (shown by a dot or a cross on the cursor preview)? This is the area that the game will treat as the 'clicking point' of the cursor, so if its in a different place than you thought it was, you might not actually be clicking on the room hotspots.

It's not the easiest thing to script, and I don't know exactly how to do it, but they way I'd start would be...

1) Decide that everything you can click on has four options (or whatever, some fixed number of interactions)
2) Each of these interactions is, say, interactionA, interactionB etc.
3) When you click on an object, before showing the GUI you send it the names of the four interactions, e.g. tell the button for interactionA to use sprite 24 which is a picture with the text 'Push' on it.
4) Remembering what interactionA represents for that particular object you write your code accordingly, e.g. when interactionA is run on the object the player says "I can't move it"

This would be made easier by writing a module with a bunch of global functions in it so you could do something like
function oObject_AnyClick(){
  setInteractions(ePush, ePull, eExamine, eTalk);
}
and set up all the interactions in one line of text.

You could expand the idea to have different numbers of interactions for different objects, but then that gets harder again.

Basically I'm pretty sure its possible, but you'd have to be fairly comfortable with scripting. I'd check out the code for the coin GUI template included with AGS 3.0 and make sure you understand how that works. Also make sure you can write your own global functions because it'll make coding the game much easier and quicker if you can make one module to handle all the "set this button to this sprite" bits.

The use of ID numbers means that any renumbering of the inventory will turn my code into a huge mess, but using a script means that I have do dive into the scripts to edit messages. Is there a smarter solution that I'm missing?

Are you likely to be changing the inventory ID numbers?

For the record, an alternative (and possibly neater?) script for checking the inventory item used is as follows:

Code: ags

function hRailing_UseInv()  //when player uses an item on the railing hotspot
{
  if((player.ActiveInventory==iFlint)||(player.ActiveInventory==iTorch)){  //check if the used item has certain script names
    Display("Sliding down a flaming railing would be a neat trick, but the thing just won't light.");  //run the interaction
  }else if(player.ActiveInventory==iSomethingElse){
    Display("You used something else");
  }else{
    Display("You can't use that here");
  }
}

This checks the objects script name (here prefixed by i so that you can easily recognise it as an inventory item), much in the same way that your script did but without needing to pass the name to a string first. Otherwise they're pretty much the same.

Is there anything like an "AGS Best Practices" document for coding novices that suggests ways to avoid shooting oneself in the foot?

I don't think there's a document, its more of a case of looking at other people's code and establishing a style. Perhaps go over the code in the DemoQuest and the manual tutorials and see how it was done there. Everyone has a different style and different ways of coding things.

However I would suggest that you never change the IDs of anything once you've started using them, and you try and avoid changing the script name of things because you'll end up breaking that bit of older code that uses it and you forgot about.

Oh yes, Band of Brothers is pretty hard hitting

Sarcasm is frequently referred to as the "lowest form of wit", recent repetitions of this phrase can include a further comment stating "but the highest form of humour"

says Wikipedia. So there you go, next time you need a comeback.

I can't believe I didn't feel it, I was awake and up and didn't notice a thing, then my housemate texted me from his room asking why the walls were shaking. I did feel the one about five years ago though.

Does anyone know where was it centred?

Ending to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid makes me go a little misty-eyed, and couple of other films. I can't remember getting particularly upset at any tv shows though.

Get some sleep then take a day off, or at least a couple of hours and go for a walk or a drive or something, just get away from everyone else for a bit and take your mind off everything. If your friends approach you wanting to do something and you don't want to, just explain you're a bit stressed and you'll do something some other time. Most people understand stress, there doesn't seem much sense in making up other excuses. Okay, so you've got a lot of things building up that are really annoying and being really tired isn't going to help, but when you calm down and look at them there's nothing really that bad, nothing you can't handle. Count your blessings too if that helps.

I don't exactly think it is the most useful thread to be honest. He's angry about the last few days. Woop de doo. I to be honest don't care much for it.

The thread is neither useful or funny.

Careful... you'll end up on Tuomas' next list...

There was a thread about sleeping a while back, I don't see how dealing with stress is any different.

You had to wait a couple of books though . What about...
"A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and forever, it was now all, finally, over"
That made me sad :'(