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[The slippery approach]

OK, I forgot about this several times over, but let's see if I can resurrect it since it's still before September 14th ( ).

The slippery approach Completely unedited.

Spoiler

You try a few things that don't work: Going to the bathroom and then slipping the HANGER inside your clothes before getting tied back up, in hopes of using it to somehow undo the belts of your straitjacket. Once you're tied up again, however, you can't access the hanger. Time for plan B.

Next time you go to the bathroom, you turn on the HAIR DRYER in hopes of starting a fire that would cause enough chaos to allow you to escape. But no matter how long you hold the hair dryer over the TOILET PAPER, it does not ignite.

Plan C: forget about mischief while the caretaker is outside the bathroom. You can get out of here even when restrained. Once alone, you peer through the HOLE IN THE WALL to see when the caretaker is with your neighboring resident, and not watching you through the camera.

You run to bathroom and knock the SOAP and the MAGAZINE onto the floor, and contort your until you can run one of your slippers under the FAUCET. You kick the soap and magazine out of the bathroom and in front of the door out of your room. You use the WET SLIPPER to push the SOAP around and slick up the floor just inside the door, using your WET SLIPPER to make sure is gets nice and slippery. Then you slide the MAGAZINE on top of the soap.

Finally, you return to the bathroom shimmy the MOP handle up the back of your straitjacket, and then sit down to push the mop head all the way up to your lower back. Now you have a big stick behind your head.

You call the attendant.

As planned, she opens the door, steps on the magazine (which starts sliding) and falls completely on her back--with the door still open. An ORDERLY hears the commotion and runs in, but you're ready and you bend over forward and charge him, knocking him over too with a lance made of mop handle right to the stomach. Ouch.

You jump over the soapy area and into the hallway. No telling what comes next.

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Well, there aren't any entries yet, so I'll go ahead and put in my MAGS background. (I saved it as an animated .gif, which reduced the number of colors, but it still looks OK).

Spoiler

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My entry is complete! If anyone wants to test it before I link to it here, just let me know. It's a one-room arcade game, "completable" in a couple minutes or less. Longer if you keep trying to beat your high score (which is the whole point).

7 days down and my one-room-one-week game is playable!!  It's a bit rough and has features missing, but I will definitely have something to submit. 

I'm trying out this version for my MAGS entry this month, and I think there's a bug in the editor - when I import over one of the default fonts, the new (imported) font does not display in the editor, and the default font remains. However, when I run the game, the new (imported) font displays correctly, so it has been imported.

Please clarify, what do you mean by "import over default font", which operations do you do?

I think editor may fail to refresh the font in memory on some occasions.

I click one of the default fonts from the blank template and select "import over this font" and then select a new font and import it.

It does seem that closing the AGS editor and reopening it updates the font in the display area.

Hey @Crimson Wizard

I'm trying out this version for my MAGS entry this month, and I think there's a bug in the editor - when I import over one of the default fonts, the new (imported) font does not display in the editor, and the default font remains. However, when I run the game, the new (imported) font displays correctly, so it has been imported.

On the plus side, the new GUI transparency slider in the GUI editor is nice and seems to work perfectly. I'm also trying out declaring arrays in global variables, so I'll keep you updated on anything else I find as I keep using this version. 

As a,gender-variant person, I saw after the 2016 election, a spike in hate crimes against many minorities. Legislatively, the floodwaters constantly rose around and eroded the island that is my right to exist. Those floodwaters didn't quite reach me, but they reached untold numbers of trans teenagers who now either must be outed to their parents, stripped of their medical care, or forced to hear people like them being called "groomers." This continued under Biden but at least there was no longer a threat at the federal level.

With the white house and senate now red, I see very little that can stop it if people decide to make my existence illegal, and step by step that is the direction of the party in power.

I don't know if this is the end of American democracy but it will be the end of many people's lives.

All I know is, we cannot let each other be alone through this.

What about a very large swimming pool? Or an incredibly long slip-n-slide? 

Sounds like a water park would do it.

I may attempt a one-room-one-week entry. Fingers crossed that I'll have the time and energy.

@Mandle

Spoiler

There's a lot to be said for limiting exposition and letting information reach the reader through only the unfolding of events. It takes a lot of skill to do that well, and much of this story does that. For me, unfortunately, there just wasn't enough information here to make sense of the overall story, and I couldn't really glean much about the characters either. If all of the story is there, it's a little too obscure. I wish I could piece together more, because it feels like there's something interesting here.

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@Stupot

Spoiler

I enjoyed this. There's definitely a hint of something ominous. I do wish I had a deeper emotional sense of what "allow myself be taken" meant. Maybe that would ruin the mystery, but it could make the "daydreaming" more impactful if we had a sense of just how different that is from the way everyone else feels. It would clarify the stakes.

If, on the other hand, the situation is only supposed to be low-to-medium stakes, then it works well as is.

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@Sinitrena

Spoiler

I'm a bit of a sucker for multiple POV stories where each successive POV reveals more of the truth. It's hard to do well, but this succeeds. This was my favorite of the entries. The prose feels like it could be tightened a little, but that's the only improvement I could suggest--on the whole, I feel like it accomplishes, enjoyably, what it sets out to do. Very good work.

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@lorenzo

Spoiler

I really liked the atmosphere of this one. Making me feel the humidity and stickiness of the forest added to the drama and unease very effectively, and was probably the strongest and most complex sensory experience I felt from any of the entries, which counts for a lot. I sort of wanted the ending to do something a little less heavily-tread than the human sacrifice trope, but it works well enough nonetheless. Definitely a VERY close second in terms of my enjoyment. 

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Votes:

Spoiler

Sinitrena: 3
lorenzo: 3
Stupot: 2
Mandle: 2

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Pretty sure you can do option #2 and use FOLLOW_EXACTLY as the distance parameter in Character.FollowCharacter. I don't think there should be stuttering.

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Character.html#characterfollowcharacter

EDIT: you should also set the game variable game.following_room_timer to 0, I think. Although that will make ALL following characters in the game change rooms at the exact same time as whoever they are following.

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Gamevariables.html#game-variables

I found some time and energy to write a thing for this one. As good poems should, I'm hoping it rewards repeated readings.

Nocturne

Spoiler

The dilated pupils of foxes, owls, coyotes scenting prey,
glow like shimmering green-yellow suns in the black,
their shine reflecting mere fractions
of what their eyes trap,
the ricocheted photons evincing night-
vision so sharp it can scoff at surplus light,
can spurn as needless the wasted bright
of day.

Meanwhile, we who love sun must
make our eyes sore
to see colors or movements amidst
the darkness, stretching out
hands to scout
hazards, our need for the shown
leaving us breathless as fish on the shore,
unarmored skin displayed
to the wide open mouth
of a realm not our own.

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What I can't figure it out is if the ergonomics of using particle definition is good or bad, I like it a lot but I don't know if people will have a bad time figuring it out, and I can't figure any helper functions to make it easier to generate them.

Do you mean reducing the number of code lines to generate each particle set? I'm wondering if the two height parameters could be called in one line, the two transparency in one differline, and so on, something like

Code: ags

FireworksParticleTransparencyGradient(0,100);
FireworksParticleHeightGradient(2,20);

Don't know if that's possible to implement, though.

I just meant something like this where the particles start in one place, spread out upwards, and then fall down. It would be similar to the sparkle option you have currently except they would fly up before falling, I guess. It sounds like the upward velocity plus gravity factors you mentioned would make this work.

Looks fantastic. Really great work! Would it be possible to add a splash effect where particles go up and then down, or would that need the tween module?

This all sounds good. I'll try this version with my current game and see what happens.

You could try using just the change to the height calculation and not the width change.

Huh! That seems to actually result in the best of both worlds. I would never have thought of that. Much appreciated!

@Snarky It compiles!

At first the jittering actually looked a little worse (though seemingly smoother?) but then I switched the + and - signs in the equation, as you suggested earlier. There seems to be some jitter still present, but I do think less? The image of each sprite also seems to visibly change more frequently.

Thanks for your code!

EDIT: Hmm, now that I test it more, the vertical jitter seems to have been replaced by a bit of a side-to-side shivering, especially when objects are far away and camera movement is slower. I suppose I'll do a little more comparing of both methods and decide which I like better.

Which kind of naming seems better:

- TextHorizontalPadding, TextVerticalPadding

or

- TextPaddingHorizontal, TextPaddingVertical

?

I'd prefer the second version, since that would make both properties show up together in the list if this is called from the script API.

@Snarky So this line throws a "cannot convert int to float" error when compiling.

Code: ags

    w = FloatToInt(IntToFloat((Game.SpriteWidth[slot]) * factor + _ox[in]) * f, eRoundNearest) - x2d;

I tried removing the FloatToInt like so

Code: ags

 w = IntToFloat(Game.SpriteWidth[slot]) * factor + _ox[in] * f, eRoundNearest - x2d; 

which of course gave a "cannot convert float to int" error. Not sure if it's being affected by a line somewhere else. There's also a lot of int/float conversions around generally, so I'm not sure which spot in the chain is throwing the error.  x2d is an int at this point, so I don't THINK that's the problem. It might be the _ox[in] piece, but I tried putting an IntToFloat around that too, and it didn't fix anything. Probably I'm just making a fool of myself.