Messages

Yeah I feel like Twiggy doesn't play a lot of games. But still a nice fella. I like how the caption writer struggles a bit with colloquial midlands English. Ah one of those fun weird things to happen. I think it's pretty remarkable that a journalist wants to cover a retro styled point and click adventure game. I respect that

Well I did my best. For reference Tom Cruise filmed part of the last mission impossible in a quarry near Stony Middleton in Derbyshire. Apparently he had a curry there.

It was early, I was mildly hungover and the breakfast show was at 7:45am.

 

I made a hopefully more 'snappy' trailer featuring a lot of the new stuff.

Pretty pleased with Act 1 (which will serve as a good lengthy demo) sort of leading the player into the world and setting the scene.

Made effort to make it very 'stand alone' as the experience and effort gone into this has been quite a few levels higher.

Another Sheffield lad (Jono Richards) got in touch and we're now working together. Some beautiful soundscapes and sound effects. Also
working together to try and implement some more ambitious sound design into our beloved AGS. Which doesn't always play nice.

Act 2 is mostly drawn and fleshed out. LOTS of music composed. I've even recorded my £14 home made banjo that is a tambourine bolted to a piece of Pine.
Recorded my 1 1/2 year old son saying his first words and remixed it into a pyschadelic overture. Also double track recorded some live guitar and irish bouzouki and layered on some orchestral arrangements. With us both being music/sound people we decided we'd go all in on the sound and music.

Did a playtest. Was immensely useful. Made a special animated credit outro for those brave intrepid souls. Demo (Act 1) is feeling almost entirely complete now. Just a few boring bits. Music mastering. My recording techniques are a little primitive.

Steam page is looking a bit more solid. I just pulled the game from Steam Nextfest as the release date is more realistically going to be Late autumn 2025 or maybe even around Christmas. It's a shame to miss some self imposed goals but it's more than worth it to polish and work on the game to make it the best it can be.

All good fun. This is going to be worth playing!

Stay tuned!

Still play this in it's original form. Incredible game. One of my all time favourites!

Good luck with the project!!

Thanks a lot. That's a really detailed explanation and example.

I'm still awaiting the actual layers from my partner in crime. I've reached the point where it kind of works but depends on the ambience. So this is another nice little avenue to explore. Also it'll help me learn so double thanks matey!

Have you tried with regions walk on/off? I think i did something similar with that. I have this guy that is using his drilltool and it's just going to sound when the player is close to him..

Hadn't looked into this idea. Rarely use regions. If my volume idea doesn't work I might investigate this. Thanks. I feel better knowing another angle to try if this doesn't pan out.

AGS has it's own audio location thing which you can use by setting the location of each audio in room coordinates and I think the volume changes regarding the player character position - you can set them using AudioClip.SetLocation.

Thanks so much. I've been stuck on this issue for 2 days. I actually went away and did exactly this (which is reassuring that you came to the same conclusion). Basically using volume like integers. I have something like this now:

Code: ags

  if (player.x > 599 && player.x < 900)
 {
   
   if (AMBIENCE_4.Volume == 10)
   {
     AMBIENCE_4.TweenFadeIn(1.0);
     AMBIENCE_4.Volume = 100;
     
   }
   
     AMBIENCE_1.Volume = 0;
     AMBIENCE_2.Volume = 0;
  AMBIENCE_3.Volume = 10;
  
   
   
 }

So a series of these with the different regions and I can manually alter the volume of the adjacent sounds.

Though I think the fading might be an issue. And it's not 'solved' until I get the actual layers from my sound man. I've been using 5 different notes on a keyboard for each region at the same volume to try and guage it (would not recommend for sanity lol). It 'works' but I don't know how abrupt the changes are going to be so I wouldn't consider the 'case closed' until then.

Could you explain this one for my simple brain: "Other drawing approach can be you use an extra float to store the volume for each audio and then you use regions for the sound volume but instead of setting the sound it approximates to it using a lerp or something else that smooths the volume setting (like a moving window or whatever)." I don't know what a lerp is.

Thanks again, I was REALLY stressing over this one.

First of all - thank you to the genius who invented the tween script module. It's incredible. It's opened up a lot of possibilities.

One I've been struggling with for a while is this:

I have a very long room - 1200 pixels across. My game is in 320x200 pixels. There are four distinct areas that require noise. I'm using global audio channels like AMBIENCE_1 and AMBIENCE_2 to try to play them. To make things more complicated (I designed the room BEFORE i adopted tween) There are three possible entrances/exist to this room. To play the correct sound as the player enters the room I'm using this:

Code: ags

if (player.x < 200)  // L E F T   E N T R Y
{
  AMBIENCE_1 = aForestandsqueak75bpm.Play(eAudioPriorityHigh, eRepeat);
  AMBIENCE_1.TweenRoomLocation(1.0, 2, 133, 300, 100);
}

if (player.x > 1100) // R I G H T  E N T R Y
{
  AMBIENCE_2 = aBeach_Gulls.Play(eAudioPriorityHigh);
  AMBIENCE_2.TweenRoomLocation(1.0, 766, 152, 150, 100, eEaseOutCircTween, eNoBlockTween);
}

I initially thought the fromx and fromy parts of the tweenRoomLocation served this purpose. I now realise that they don't. So my audio from the far left of the room is still audible when the player is very far away from it.

I've tried using hotspots to tween volume and stop/start and fade the audio but it doesn't seem to be working any way I try. I get audio coming back in somehow or abruptly stopping or in a lot of cases breaking the game due to too many tweens being triggered. I can set if statements to see if the channel is playing but that seems to be very hit and miss.

Anyone cracked this or know a simple workaround?

Help me obi wan AGS forums, you're my only hope

Rich

Each one seems to get longer so (that's a good thing right?) I guess it might take over 6 months for this one. Ambitions creep up. Monty Pratchet's flying circus maybe. But yeah I'm working with a local lad who got in touch. Really knows his stuff. This one is going to be a little different. :-) Thanks for having a look mate and hope you eventually get your do-over with Brownie's Adventure 2 when you get round to it. I think it's a healthy leap up from the first. Take care, Rich

[The final conclusion]

The final conclusion. It will be all hand drawn and made with the help of a talented audio engineer (Welcome Jono to the team). I'll be doing art/music/writing/design/programming/animation/bit of VA!


Steam Page (and demo)


Android/Browser Web version (untested)

Demo is almost complete (the entire first act)!

* 5-8 hour length over 3 distinct acts
* 6 verb GUI
* Kluberry hint system (Living trees that can predict the future if offered a kluberry).
* Full original OST this time featuring some live instrumentation (guitar/irish bouzouki) recorded in house.
* Much more depth to soundscapes and audio in general
* Light RPG elements affecting endings and choices.
* Interactive achievement room linked to steam achievements.
* A new and novel companion that will enhance and affect the way verbs are applied. These 'companions' can be interacted with. Like a small, mildly aggressive tamagotchi.










Art - 60%
Programming - 40%
Music - 60%
Audio - 40%
Writing - 50%

Honouring the mug!

I would say google one-point perspective and two-point perspective. You seem to go by feel and not by "rules". I know rules suck generally, yeah i get it, i dislike em' too but when it comes to drawing, getting those angles of objects in a room to a better state will improve your stuff immensely. Take it from one that used to draw "by feel", now i'm much more proud of the bakgrounds.  

Here's an example of a bakground drawing it is entirely from imagination no reference images were used. Just basic knowledge of vanishing points is used, and about 5 years now of pixelart-creation from time to time! *Shameless plug*. I've keept the vanishing lines so you can get a feel for how it's done.

https://imgur.com/1NV1E77

  What devilry is this!?

Brilliant - I think this will be very handy! Thank you!!

- In this cartoony style, I think the colors could be more vivid. Everything looks a bit "washed out" to me (except that some of the darker red-browns and blues appear over-saturated compared to the other colors).
- You should be more conscious of and bolder about contrasts. In the third image, it's hard to make out the details of the couch and shelf because you're using very close shades of red/brown (and the shelf also tends to blend in with the floor). Similarly, in the last image I didn't even see the table because it blends in almost entirely with the floor. Meanwhile, in the second image the crates and nearer poles of the pier "pop" out of the image: they contrast very strongly with the rest, in a way that doesn't seem intentional, while the far poles don't have enough contrast against the sea: different hue, but nearly the same value.)
- You're using basically no shadows or shading. It's as if there are no defined light sources. This creates a rather flat feeling and doesn't give any sense of mood or atmosphere.
- In the third and the last images, the angles are so high that most of the screen is taken up by the floor, which is boring. Lower the camera so that more of the screen is filled by things in the room and on the walls.
- You have some bad tangents, where the edges of different things line up so that they seem like part of the same shape. Most obviously on the right side of the first image, where two different struts of the walkway line up exactly so that one seems to continue the other. (I also question the engineering of this construction; it would make more sense if the same beams did continue down all the way to the floor.) But also the top of the building roof in picture four lining up with the image edge.

To spot some of these issues, it may be helpful to examine the images by hue, saturation and value. To examine the value, you can just desaturate the image (convert it to grayscale), while hue and saturation are a bit trickier: in Photoshop you can put a flat gray layer below the image layer and set the blend mode of the image layer to "Color" to see the Hue and Saturation together. These tend to be so closely linked that you don't need to examine them individually, but if you add another layer with a perfectly pure color (e.g. pure red) on top and set its blend mode to "Saturation" you can see just the hue contrast, while diffing the image with a desaturated version of itself gives just the saturation contrast.

Amazing - thank you! Lots of these I think I know how to fix. After doing some reading I'm sure it certainly will.

The spaces at the bottom are generally because of GUI - the player won't really see them in some rooms. Some rooms do have more detail there if I know a cutscene will happen etc.

I did find a handful of sprites from a Welsh time travel game I was working on - those were the ones you spotted as contrasting too much (crates). No idea how I wasn't blind to that. There's just so much isn't there? Really handy to have objective eyes. Like I said I've been so obsessed with the project, I probably need some time away   I'll keep working on it!

Ok first of all - thank you so much for taking the time to have a look. Especially brilliant being directed to some good reading. I am entirely guilty of making stuff up. I haven't read/watched anything yet. My wife has been an immense help, she can actually draw really well. That was a first day. I've been working on it pretty much every spare minute (I'm off work for summer) since. Though I've been sort of making more stuff up. Decided to have a go at a primative way of doing shadows by selecting shapes and using gradients to drag shadows and then blur. Slowly starting to figure out the questions, the links provided I'm sure will provide lots of answers (and questions I never knew to ask. I will peruse while on a bit of getaway to the mountains.

I've also animated some stuff.

I'll just leave it here because I'd be interested to see what you make of them.

Thanks again, incredibly helpful and supportive as ever.

I wanted to see if my lowly art/animation skills are getting a bit better. Did this today just forming ideas and practicing a bit. Would really appreciate more experienced eyes and brains. Thanks

Thanks for taking the time to play it.

I read a few detailed reviews of BA1 that also touched on some of the points you made. My plan was to finish BA2 and then do a big update to bring BA1 more in to line. I was hesitant because certain changes break saves. Sort of waiting for a quiet patch.

BA2 is out now anyway. Bits of feedback so far suggest there is a MAJOR improvement. I actually managed to wangle some friends (and one random lad who was a fan of BA1) to play test this time... so there feedback has also been stellar. That fed a lot into the plot and direction issues from the previous.

So now THAT game is done I am going to do a major overhaul of BA1. I've started collating every review/feedback I have got off the net and am going to revise the game and get it in a better state.

Luckily I don't think BA1 is essential to enjoy BA2, it just makes it maybe a little funnier!

Hope you find your way to playing the second one. I am sure you will REALLY enjoy it if this was your assessment.

Cheers!

Edit: Thank you for taking the time to give it a whirl and sharing those insights. I've hopefully addressed a few of the bigger ones this evening.
 

That is a damn good boat sprite. Just noticed the huge knockers on the figurehead as well haha. This looks really good.

Great work

I basically stopped playing games/doing music and just did this for 6 months after work, any free weekend time and school holidays (staff not student).

Tired but yeah. Done now. Just watched the drummer from a local rock band (who's band plays in the game, I drew/animated them and got permission for their tune) stream the game. Ah wow. So rewarding. Lot's of good laughs. Really happy :-)

Hope you are well and on/enjoying a good project!

[I have completed my second game!]

I have completed my second game!

Have a look at the steam page

It's a dark/absurd comedy (Think Red Dwarf/Monty Python/South Park) set partly in a fantasy world with a lot of bizarre lore and also er... South Yorkshire. yes that's right! Want to learn about knife crime or post-apocalyptic supermarkets? Got you covered. Explore magical islands, cruise the ocean, walk the dangerous streets of Sheffield and halt a plot to take over the world!

A classic 1990s style with a lot of unique and original twists. I grew up with these games and I never realised that they were even more fun to make than play!

- A 5~8 hour epic adventure
- Three acts with choices/decisions that affect the ending (no dying)
- A clue system based around collecting hard to spot 'Kluberries' to avoid the old 'wandering round frustrated or searching for walkthrough' experience
- 2300+ hand drawn sprites
- 260 views/animations
- 45+ characters to interact with
- 27 Steam achievements
- Focus on original puzzles (not just inventory items)
- Over 60 unique locations across two very seperate dimensions

Really proud of this one. Hope you give it a try!

Need help? https://discord.gg/X5wNqAv6sg

The map of Sheffield! Quite accurate actually. A few embellishments in the room graphics for practicality.



The BIG map for act 3 of the game - 'The spoon of power'!



My take on the 'entmoot'!



Needlessly complex seige battle mini game with lots of explosions!