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I'm sorry if you think they sound Latin but belive me they are Greek.

You can google them if you want. Victor is a Latin word meaning winner (from the verb "vincere" meaning to win); it's an unlikely name since the Romans used only very few first names and this wasn't one of them. Sylim sounds Arabic or Turkish to me. Sipcellus sounds like you made it up, but "-us" is a Latin suffix rather than a Greek one.

One thing that might work is something like

Code: ags

If (player knows language) {
  DisplaySpeech ("Hello, it is nice to meet you!");
} else {
  DisplaySpeech ("DHjsk, vn anfj vah4jna.");
}

If you do it consistently, a good player can pick up the clues before the character learns the language somehow. That may or may not be a desirable alternative to randomness.

Seems to me it's something a fan put together. He should have made it a speedrun instead

If the game takes place in ancient Greece, it might help if you gave the characters Greek names instead of Latin ones. Just a thought.

I recommend UltraEdit.

Any editor that does C++ syntax highlighting has a fair chance of parsing AGS correctly.

CPU wins!

Fatality!

Can you post a bit of music? That'd be cool.

Ah, but it is for this that people ritually burn their copies of Roberta Williams games...

The less linear a game becomes, the harder it is to design. Thus, we get the four easiest steps of handling dead ends, in order of increasing goodness...

1) don't handle them at all, consider the increase in play time a feature. Examples abound.
2) negative enforcement: kill the player the instant he forgets something. For instance, the "you forgot to buy a saurus" death in QfG2.
3) positive enforcement: make the player automatically do certain actions (e.g. pick up criticals) or forbid him from leaving the area until he performs them. There are several games where the protagonist says "I don't think I'm done here yet" when you try to leave some area. Tends to give players the hint.
4) make sure every part of the game remains accessible at all times, so the player can go back and do things he forgot. For instance, KQ1 and QfG1 play on a map where you can basically go anywhere at any time, and thus have few dead ends; on the other hand, most space quest games and KQV play on a series of rooms to cross and backtracking is not always possible.

Good game design trumps them all, of course. A good example is Fate of Atlantis, which is linear but nevertheless not subject to dead ends without using obvious enforcement.

Ah yes. It's tricky, isn't it?

Do you recall the old game Pipeline? It works pretty much like that. The first thing to realize is that the grid is bigger than the screen; scrolling around a bit should make it clearer. You can place tiles (parts of pipe) by clicking on the grid. You must make a wide tube from the starting point (upper left) to the "intersection" tile (lower middle), and from there you must use narrow tubing to reach the exit points (upper right).

The best way to do it is planning a few straight lines and putting every single 'straight' piece you get on there, then using the curves when you get them. Throw useless pieces in the corner. Be prepared to reset it a few times if through random chance you don't get enough good pieces. HTH!

You know, I just finished KQ5 again the other day, and I never realized how god-awful the puzzles in that game were.

Hear hear!

Weren't all KQ games exercises in masochism?  I can't think of one where you didn't die constantly.

Not really. 6 is very good, 4 doesn't kill you in unexpected ways (but has a few dead ends) and the first has all sorts of tricks you can use to avoid being killed (the ring, the faerie, etc).

Zuma? How is that innovative? Fun, yes, but quite identical to several other Popcappies.

Thank you SSH! I haven't been around the forums much lately but I'm glad to hear that people appreciate my little game.

http://adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php

It's easy in retrospect, and largely a matter of experience. Pac-man is tricky until you have certain basic ideas down (such as arrays, blitting, and simple agent systems). If you try to take that on all at once, it may look bewildering. If you go step-by-step, it's less so:

1) code a checkerboard (or othello, four-in-a-row, whatever) using a two-dimensional array, in textmode; let two players enter coordinates for their moves
2) find a way to store this board to a text file and read it back
3) look up Conway's Game of Life and code that, again in text mode; don't worry about performance
4) find out how to initialize DirectX (not that hard, plenty of examples on the web; or use SDL if you prefer) and display some randomly colored boxes
5) do Conway's again but this time use blitted graphics instead
6) read about mouse control and let the user toggle life cells by clicking on them
7) read about keyboard control and let the user move a little box around, and toggle cells by pressing space bar
8) ditch the "Life" bits and instead read an array from a text file that represents a maze
9) replace the little box by a smily face and make sure it can't move through walls; mark all squares with a dot until the smily crosses them
10) place some frownies in the maze that move in the direction of the smily if possible, random otherwise.

Ta dah, we have a pacman.

Let's take a quick look at the languages you mention... BASIC is great for learning how to program, but it's not really suited for game programming. Neither is Fortran (which is rather outdated) or Delphi - and assembly used to be great for gaming but it's pretty much superseded since it's nearly impossible to do high complexity coding in assembly.

What you need is an object-oriented language, in particular C++, Java and/or C#. Note that AGS bears strong resemblance to C++. If you're serious about learning programming, you should probably stay away from klik-n-play kits.

Computer applications sounds like it's too low-level. I would advise taking a base course in C just to get the tricks down pat (e.g. pointers, basic memory stuff, call by value vs reference, etc). Not all languages use the fundamentals in a visible way, but it really helps to be familiar with them!

If you want to do any kind of 3-d graphics, taking a class in vector-based math is a must.

Take a class in artificial intelligence if available. It's pretty important to game design these days, and also covers such basics as pathfinding.

Do some class with a team-based lab, regardless of whether it's related to computers or not. Teamwork is trickier than most people realize.


However, most importantly, find a small project and complete it. Then another. This is the best way to hone your skills. I mean really small projects. Start with hangman in text mode (C is a good start, and compilers are free). Then see if you can do a checkers board in likewise text mode, to get the hang of arrays. Don't worry about the AI. Then pick some set of graphics routines you're comfortable with (I'd recommend OpenGL or SDL, they have wide internet support; or try it in AGS if you want) and see if you can code Tetris or Pacman. Add some nifty feature that no existing Tetris-clone has, and you're off to a good start. Just don't start with e.g. Castlevania or Sands of Time as your first game.

HTH!

Teh Dream Team!

Game design: Brian Moriarty
Puzzle design: Erno Rubik
Background art: Maurits Escher
Sprite art: Pixel
Music: Edward Elgar

Teh Nightmare Team!

Music: whoever wrote the Tetris tune
Sprite art: Dave Lebling
Background art: Drew Tucker
Puzzle design: Soleau
Game design: Roberta Williams

Seems to me the text file might be in Unicode (which uses two-byte characters) which is somehow treated as ASCII (which uses one-byte characters). That would explain the little boxes. It's not a Firefox problem, FF can handle Unicode just fine. And Junc is correct in that PHP runs on the server and is thus not affected by the browser used.

I've looked over the main games list once or twice and picked out a bunch (esp. if they have creative descriptions, like SnailQuest or ATZ), but generally since the list is so huge I only play games that people recommend to me. So far that has included Apprentice, Larry Vales, RLBAT, 5DAS/1DAM, Cirque du Zale, anything in a MAGS that I was involved in, and possibly some others that I forgot at the moment.

I've heard quite a bunch of suggestions over at Mittens (and have probably forgotten half of them already ) but haven't had the time to play those yet except for the Trilby game. Speaking of which -- Helm, where do I find DreamWeb again?

Louigi makes an interesting point... I know there are a few games with poor graphics that are still interesting to play (those would be tricky to find, except by word-of-mouth) - but are there any games with good graphics that are actually boring or badly designed?
In other words, how far can you judge a game by its cover?

There once was a poet in Hong Kong
Who thought limericks where too long...

Anyway, what do you think?

I think that if you're looking for games with graphics impressive by contemporary standards, with a GUI even simpler than the one in King's Quest (which, come to think of it, is one of the simpler ones in adventure land) then you won't find much of your liking over at AGS. It's a matter of taste; some of us like 'retro' graphics even if they're 160x200 in 16-color.