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[The Beard in the Mirror]

I hope I'm not too late!! Here's my game, for your consideration:

The Beard in the Mirror







"Don't you remember me? After all we've been through..."

What do you want to be when you grow up? Paul thought his life would be set after college, but at 22 he's toiling away in a job he doesn't like and coming home to an empty apartment every night. He doesn't know who he is, where he's going, or how he fits into his world.

But then on one dark and stormy night, a mysterious woman appears to him, and everything changes...

The Beard in the Mirror is a throwback to when adventure games came in giant cardboard boxes and if you didn't have the hintbook, that was it; you were stuck on that puzzle for the rest of your life. It's a labor of love from a husband-and-wife team from two different worlds (she's a Sierra fangirl, and he's a LucasArts diehard) who have been working on it together since before they even started dating.

AGS:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2102/

Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/

itch.io:
https://oharock.itch.io/the-beard-in-the-mirror

There aren't any walkthroughs yet!! We set up a hint line on Twitter (if you happen to use Twitter) as sort of a riff on the old 800-numbers you could call if you were stuck in a Sierra or LucasArts game. I'm also happy to answer right here, as long as any spoilers are kept hidden (and as Cassiebsg suggested, posting in the Hints forum would work, too; I'd be just as happy to help you out there).

Also thanks for checking it out and I'm glad you like it

@dactylopus This was a wonderful thing to wake up to this morning; thank you so much!! (*Quickly Googles "can you get a videogame review framed?*) Lizo was beaming as she left for work this morning

Thanks everyone!! It's equal parts exciting, relieving, and horrifying that the game's finished and other people (besides us and our testers) are getting to play it now. Onto the next project!!

This game has now been released! Clear out, everyone!!

Release thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=54087
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/
itch.io: https://oharock.itch.io/the-beard-in-the-mirror

[Trailer]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J3ov5TUfxY
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/385840/
itch.io: https://oharock.itch.io/the-beard-in-the-mirror

Description

"Don't you remember me? After all we've been through..."

What do you want to be when you grow up? Paul thought his life would be set after college, but at 22 he's toiling away in a job he doesn't like and coming home to an empty apartment every night. He doesn't know who he is, where he's going, or how he fits into his world.

But then on one dark and stormy night, a mysterious woman appears to him, and everything changes...

The Beard in the Mirror is a throwback to when adventure games came in giant cardboard boxes and if you didn't have the hintbook, that was it; you were stuck on that puzzle for the rest of your life. It's a labor of love from a husband-and-wife team from two different worlds (she's a Sierra fangirl, and he's a LucasArts diehard) who have been working on it together since before they even started dating.

KEY FEATURES
- A classic point-and-click adventure for the modern age!
- Sincere yet lighthearted story with magic, danger, romance, and adventure
- Death lurking around every corner! (Although you'll never lose any progress.)
- Retro points system to help you track your progress, and see if you've missed any secrets...
- Just like the games you used to play on your dad's weird friend's computer



Thanks again to all the patient AGSers who've answered our questions and provided support over the decade-plus we've been working on this one!

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!!

*blows away the dust on this post* *coughs* *coughs a LOT* *dies from inhaling too much dust*

I can't believe I'm even saying this, but testgame The Beard in the Mirror is Yours The Beard in the Mirror is finished. Actually FINISHED. And it's coming out (on Steam and itch.io) at the end of this month!! Like, I already sent out review codes and everything; there's no stopping it now.

As documented here, Lizo and I have been working on this off and on (and off and off) for around 11 years; that's a third of our lives and the ENTIRETY of our adult lives. We weren't even dating when we started on it; now we're married and looking at buying our first house. It's so, so weird to me that this project is actually complete, that it won't just exist in the background of our lives anymore--a constant point of contention and creativity, stress and excitement. Since starting Mirror, I've started and completed four other games (who knew visual novels were so much quicker to make); but this is the one we've put ourselves into more than any. it's the type of game I dreamed making since I was a little kid (likely a common sentiment around here), and now it's done; it's done and I can't keep poking at it and other people are gonna play it and BOY that's weird and maybe I should just test it twenty more times? Maybe just thirty?

...Anyway.

I figured I should post something official here, even though I've been basically the worst about keeping up with the forums; so here you go! testgame is finished, and it's coming out for real on the 25th! Thanks to everyone who's checked out our post(s) and given us advice over the years!!

I recall a person had a moat with crocodiles in it and wanted player to be able to get across the moat, but keep crocodiles in, or something like that.
Here is the old thread, I do not remember if they found solution, but possibly may contain some tips:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=46811.msg629893#msg629893

Hah! Funny thing is, I was just scouring that thread before I posted, so talking with you about it now feels a bit like reaching into the past.

if the npc is following the character (not real close) why not have a region in front of the cell that if the player walks onto the npc stops following and when the player walks off the npc begins again to follow.

That did it!! I tried placing the region in front of the cell, but it wasn't enough of a barrier; if I was standing just next to the region, but not on it, she could still walk past me. So I set it up about halfway across the room, and now it (mostly) keeps her from getting too close. Thanks everyone for your help!!

Okay, so here's the situation:

- In this part of the game, you're in a dungeon. If you walk in front of one of the cells, someone reaches out and kills you.
- Concurrently, you have an NPC following you around (using the Character.FollowCharacter function).
- If she walks in front of the jail cell, nobody kills her. This is good! I don't want anybody to kill her!
- However, this feels weird, story-wise. Either she should get killed, or she should be smart enough not to walk in front of the cell. It doesn't make sense that she's able to wander in front of the cell unscathed.

...So what I'd like to do is prevent her from wandering in front of the cell. My gut instinct was to define a new walkable area in front of the cell, one that she can't walk through. But there doesn't seem to be a way to define a walkable area that only specific characters can access.

My next attempt was to make an invisible object that, if the NPC randomly collides with it, she immediately walks away. Like so:

Code: ags

function room_RepExec(){
    if (cLily.IsCollidingWithObject(oLilyBarrier)){ // 
        cLilyWalk((cLily.x), ((cLily.y)+10), eNoBlock);
     }
}

....Unfortunately, this just causes her to get stuck on the object. She touches it, and she tries to walk away, but because she's still touching it, the game just runs the Walk command over and over again. So it's a no-go. (I tried the same idea with a regionâ€"she walks into the region, she's supposed to immediately walk awayâ€"with the same non-result.)

tl;dr Is there a simple way to define a walkable area that only the player character can access? Or otherwise, a way to define which specific characters can access a specific walkable?

Ah well, one less thing to code, at least. Thanks for the responses, everyone!

This feels like the dumbest question in the world, but I've searched every permutation of "click X" and "exit game confirmation" that I can think of, and still, no dice.

Right now, if you click the exit button on my game's main menu, or on the in-game navigational bar, a GUI pops up asking "Are you sure you want to quit?". Is there any way to achieve a similar effect, when the user clicks the X button on the upper-right corner of the window?

Or, in other words: Is there a way to define what happens when the user clicks X, so that I can bring up the confirmation GUI, instead of having the game close automatically?

HEY! Long time, no...make any appearances on the forums, whatsoever. I thought some of you all who've been following this game's progress for the past 37 years might find this interesting...

Our little-big adventure game is coming to Steam!! It's so weird to think that the weird little project my wife started in college is going to be an Actual Video Game, released on a Real Website. I'll take it!

We're not ready to announce a release date or anything, although if I had to guess, I'd say we have maybe 5% of the game left to build. (...And of course, it's that last 5% that's taking the longest.) We're still working on it a little bit each day; just yesterday I squashed a bug where the main character grew 18x his normal size when walking through a specific doorway.

This is an issue coming up with one of our playtesters; I haven't seen it myself yet and haven't been able to replicate it.



There's something very strange happening with the top part of this image. As you can see, part of the action bar (/GUI) is disappearing--along with the cursor, too. (You can see part of the cover hovering on the eyeball icon; the rest has disappeared.)

My tester is saying it happens sometimes when she loads a save file. She said specifically that when she loads the game from our title screen, "the top third of the window flickers." The GUI and the cursor are still functional; she can still click on things, but she can't see them properly. She's tried restarting the game/deleting and reloading save files, but it hasn't made a difference.

She's running Windows 7, 64-bit edition (which is the same exact OS I have, so no dice on it being specific to her OS).

Has anyone seen this before in their games?

I see these "trough toilets" at concerts and things sometimes:



Always have to wait for someone else to use it first to make sure I'm not peeing in the sink.

That did it! Thanks!

I'm having trouble explaining this in my head, but hopefully it makes sense to someone!

In the game I'm working on, we have four primary cursors: LOOK, TALK, WALK, and HAND. They look like this:

We recently added the black pointers to each of the cursors to make clicking more precise, since some of our testers were having trouble clicking on things. This is messing with the way the cursors line up with each other. You right-click to change cursors, and as you scroll through the cursors it ends up looking like this:

i.e., the WALK cursor ends up sticking out from all the others. Not exactly a game-breaker, but IMO it looks weird.

Is there a way to tell AGS to align cursors by the top row of pixels (as in the first image), instead of by the pointer/hotspot? I tried looking through cursor functions to see if there was something like a SetCursorAlignment, but no dice. The other obvious answer would be to switch the WALK pointer to the upper-left, so it matches the others, but I'm reluctant to do that because it might make walking on the bottom of the screen unreasonably awkward. (Pretty sure the walk cursor would go off-screen.)

Where the hell do you get these! I want one!

I got mine at a yardsale! ...That's probably not very helpful. (But if you want to be more jealous, I paid 50 cents for it. )

Ack, I have so many to choose from! But this one's a classic:



(I eat cereal out of it and it's like I'm eating his brains.)

Late to the party, but downloading this now! What a strange and wonderful concept.