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Are adventure games and role playing games that similar, and I just never noticed?

From a technical perspective, yes: a large part of what AGS does for you is take care of graphics, walkbehinds, music, GUIs and related functionality in an orderly fashion. This works more-or-less the same in a 2D RPG, and AGS does a much better job at these tasks than most game design platforms (I'm not personally familiar with RPG maker, so no comment on that one). And, bear in mind that one of the most famous classic adventure games, Quest for Glory, is also an RPG.

People make adventures in RPGMaker. Fitz makes music videos in AGS. I once made a short boxing match animation in Powerpoint. People are weird.

Yes, they are. People make a functioning Gameboy emulator in Minecraft, of all places. AGS has also been used for platform games, shoot-em-ups, life simulation games, and probably a couple other genres too.

Thanks. The odd thing is that restoring a saved game normally works fine, but in one particular instance it crashes. I suspect there is something unusual about one particular room, and games saved in that room cannot be restored. I'll see if I can get more details from the player.

A second user reports the same problem. Is it possible to find out which function or room is causing the issue?

Yes, I have (a couple times). In my experience the most important part is quickly meeting people in the new city; websites like meetup.com are usually active in big cities and can make it pretty easy to attend social events with other people (several of which are also mostly new to the city).

Layers of Fear steam key,

Spoiler

8AVPP-5GAF7-YLMXL

[close]

You may be able to get around this by having two people work on the translation so they spread the work (and proofread one another to account for stylistic differences).

NO! JUST NO! this will never work, will end up being much more work and stress than having just one person work on it, and will result in a bad translation.

It has worked for me twice. But yes, this is something one should be cautious with.

Well I've had no problem finding translators for games with 3000 to 6000 words, but from the recruitment thread, your game has about 14000 words. That's pretty big, so it's possible that it simply took a lot more time than the translator envisioned. You may be able to get around this by having two people work on the translation so they spread the work (and proofread one another to account for stylistic differences).

Or you could pay for a professional translator. This may easily cost over $1000 though, so you have to ask yourself how strongly you want your translation.

Or it's possible that you simply had bad luck twice, and the third time will work out better.

I've got several of them. For instance, I tried making The Incredible Machine in AGS once, but didn't get very far...


And then there's this old isometric test to make a Cadaver-style adventure game.

Good to see you Ghost!

A player reports garbled sound on the Linux build, with the following system specs:

OS: Ubuntu 18.04
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 32 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
NVIDIA driver: 396.24.02
Sound: I'm using the HDMI port from the graphics card: GP 106 High Definition Audio Controller

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Can someone give me an idea what could fix this please?

guys, lrn how to stalk:
https://www.deviantart.com/tintengeist

Well spotted! Give him my regards, I enjoyed working with him in the past

This is slightly off-topic here, but I've always wondered: If objects essentially are dumbed-down characters that are inefficiently implemented,

They are efficiently implemented, in that they do not contain properties or actions that you generally don't need (for an object). LucasArts does the same thing (using the terms 'actor' and 'prop' for character and object, respectively).

[reason]

If, OTOH, players may only pick up something when they have a reason to do so, then they will have to LOOK AT things, TALK to NPCs etc. in order to acquire this reason. These steps aren't optional any longer, so any walkthrough must list them one by one. The reporters that blindly follow these walkthroughs will be forced to read or listen to what Ego has to say when examining the THINGUMMY and the BRASS BUTTON: “So the solution is hinted at here and here and here and here? Wow, seen in that light, the riddle is really fair.”

Oh, I'm sure reporters can also complain about that

Designing your game based on how a conceptual reporter might hypothetically react doesn't strike me as very productive. If a puzzle would look ridiculous in a walkthrough, then possibly it's not such a great puzzle?

Enter room. See a number of objects.

Should you be able to:

I would go with A usually, or C if you can find a good puzzle to limit the amount of objects.

B is harder to pull off, because for quite a lot of adventure game protagonists it's very much in character to pick up everything that isn't nailed down. It would be weird if in most rooms, the main character has no problem picking up random junk for no (apparent) reason, but in one room he arbitraily says "no" until he has found a reason. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but in several games that use B it comes across as jarring.

I never once used a keyboard shortcut while playing an adventure game (for interface, skipping text sure). Always one of those 'huh' moments for me when people mention them.

And that is fine. The point is that different players favor different control methods, and therefore a well-designed interface will have multiple different ways of giving a command, to facilitate a greater number of players. This goes for applications as well, e.g. there are four or five different ways of bold-ing text in MS Word.

Now that I remember this, I think the lack of shortcuts (of any kind) was what annoyed me in the verb coin most. You have to perfom same verb selection over and over again. I don't know if there's verb-coin game that lets you skip verb coin.

That's precisely the problem. Any interface needs shortcuts, because the point of an interface is not to look pretty, but to make it easy for the player to interact. For instance, Full Throttle's verbcoin does offer keyboard shortcuts.

It's the same as non-skippable cutscenes, really. If as a developer you find that you spent hard work on the cutscene therefore everybody must watch it, or you made the popup interface look really nice therefore everybody must use it, then you're just going to end up frustrating players.

But Danvzare has a point: we don't have any facts yet. Maybe we should collect what we have?

Regarding economicity, note that the click-to-open verbcoin requires click - precision movement - click again, which is not ergonomic. Conversely, the LucasArts GUI has right-click for the most common interaction AND has keyboard shortcuts, making it ergonomic. Sierra's is also ergonomic because its cursor type is persistent (most players select 'eye' and then start clicking it everywhere; this is different from having to select the verb for every action); it also uses right-click AND keyboard shortcuts to bypass the long mouse movement to the top of the screen. And Fitt's law also applies, as Babar points out.

Lucas GUI can handle up to fifteen interactions (e.g. Zak McKracken) whereas Sierra's goes up to about 10 in e.g. Quest for Glory.

Maybe I should look at the Steam reviews for the Day of the Tentacle remake,

DOTT allows the player to choose between three different interfaces, only one of which is verbcoin; plus controller support and keyboard shortcuts. Clearly nobody is going to complain about that.

We do have a thread about verbcoins every couple of months, and they generally show that using a verbcoin will prevent a substantial amount of people from playing your game. Bear in mind that AGS forum users are more knowledgeable (and more tolerant) of different GUIs than players on the internet in general. So as a game designer, ask yourself if you think it is worth it to use your personal favorite interface, if that keeps people from playing your game.

This applies to several other interfaces as well. As I recall, Dave Gilbert once adviced this forum to avoid the Sierra interface, because only people who grew up with Sierra games understand it (and that's probably not a large part of your audience). It is clearly NOT equally true for every interface ("all options have detractors so it doesn't matter which I pick" is not a great way of making decisions )

That's great news, Monkey! Thank you for doing that!