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Search the maze for keys and treasure! John 'DRJ' Vanderaart is one of the first published game designers from the Netherlands, best known for "Eindeloos". Herby was his first game on the C64, which I played as a child. This is also my first game, as I did a remake in BASIC back then. Decades later I found out I still had the source code, so I decided to update it to more modern systems, aided by Elissa for the art. And dedicated to one of the people who (although we never met personally) inspired me to take up game design!

Featuring one maze by DRJ, one by myself, and a random maze generator; and the famous Popcorn as background music. Unlike the originals, this one has save points and an automap. Enjoy!

Download here.

I can't find the issue tracker any more, has something happened to that?

That's Microsoft Foundation Classes, isn't it? I'm pretty sure that's not something CJ invented, but the default look-and-feel for applications in Windows 95/98.

So I don't see any problems using this; perhaps under the help/about popup you could write something like 'Inspired by AGS'. Also, I'm heavily into retro gaming so best of luck with this project!

According to my French friends, the current French president has promised a number of important reforms BUT has decided to implement these by raising taxes and tariffs on lower- and middle-class people (but not on rich people and/or big companies). Predictably this has not made him popular with, well, most of the population.

He has since backed down somewhat, meaning that the more reasonably-minded protesters have returned home. Of cours, this means that the less reasonably-minded protesters are still protesting.

Here's two keys to start the new year,

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition

Spoiler

28PJZ-RF36X-I0N4X

[close]

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Spoiler

55JJM-E0GDT-DRFMX

[close]

I've got an extra copy of Sonic CD and Sonic Adventure 2. PM me if interested.

I find that as of last week, the forum doesn't work in Chrome any more; I'm getting random access denied errors when trying to log in or respond to a message. It seems to work ok in an old version of IE, for some reason.

"You do not have permission to access this server. Before trying again, close your browser, run anti-virus and anti-spyware software and remove any viruses and spyware from your computer. Your technical support key is: 57d5-f73e-b40c-8ddc"

Yes, I'm familiar with people like that. Somebody created a Russian fan translation of Heroine's Quest (which is the size of a pretty thick novel), including replacing the in-game bitmap such as graphical names as part of portrait pictures, and replacing the English bitmap fonts with Russian ones. He didn't contact me but one of the players did, and I decided to adopt this as official.

Of course, HQ was free in the first place; but if anyone wants to do this amount of work I'd welcome them and assist them as much as I can. YMMV.

Wasn't this reverse-engineerd years ago for AGI Studio and SCI Studio?

[Top Tier:]

Top Tier:

• Loom
  
• Monkey Island 1
  
• Fate of Atlantis
  
• Monkey Island 2
  
• Maniac Mansion
  

Middle Tier:

• Grim Fandango
  
• Zak Mckracken
  
• Indiana Jone Last Crusade
  
• Full Throttle
  
• Day of the tentacle
  

Lower Tier:

• The Dig
  
• Curse of Monkey Island
  
• Escape from Monkey Island
  
• Sam and Max
  

Animators, hands down.

So, a lot of my recent projects are rush jobs for jams or MAGS, and as such, they end up with a lot of ad hoc checks which I know shouldn't be the way I did them if I had planned properly.
For example, if ((player.HasInventory(iThing) && (oPlant.Visible)) { dialog1.Start(); } else { dialog2.Start(); }

This kind of checks does help in making your game less linear, which I consider a good thing (even if it's harder on the programmer).

Personally I use inventory a lot, including NPC inventory. For instance if you have given the McGuffin to Jack, then check if(Jack.HasInventory(iMcGuffin)) for his dialogue. For other things I use one state variable per character, which basically allows the player to solve each NPC's quest in the order he likes. Ideally you'd use enums for the values, like in Dave's example. Finally, I use a lot of disabled dialog options that get enabled in one place, e.g. when you talk to Jack it enables the options to ask other NPCs about Jack; this is manageable because this is all at the start of Jack's dialogue (or if you enter the fountain room, it enables the options to ask NPCs about the fountain).

HTH!

I just got a 50% coupon for Warpzone Drifter. Any takers?

That's the classic BASS interface and people are used to it.

Perhaps surprisingly, a lot of modern gameplayers have never played (or barely heard of) BASS.

As several AGS authors have discovered, numerous players will not realize that the right mouse button does anything, unless you make this abundantly clear in a tutorial (or perhas with a config switch like this one). It's not good design to assume that players will be intuitively familiar with the interface of one particular classic.

- Not on Steam
- Not a game
- Free

But does it involve keys?

Well, I do my storyboarding in MS Word, but for the bigger games I also use graphs (either on paper or in Word) to determine which puzzle has to be solved before which other puzzle. These can get pretty complicated but that does give the player more freedom and options.

Thank you for the information! I'll put on my to-do list to upgrade this to the newer AGS.

Yeah, this even made the newspaper. It feels like 1995 all over again

I would probaly join MAGS more often if it were allowed to use public domain graphic resources. Then again I don't have a lot of time for MAGS in general, so I'm not really representative here...

Chrome.