Messages

In the end though, a truly serious game - one whose plot and characters really grabbed you - will probably leave a greater, longer-lasting imprint on your mind than a humourous game can ever do.

I wonder if that's borne out in practice? Looking at the titles tributed with fangames, it seems like humorous titles like Monkey Island, Space Quest and Maniac Mansion have seriously imprinted a huge number of minds.

Now that you mention it, it did add new things like many's head turning around looking at an instersting object or person (Later implemented in Zelda: The Wind Waker, where Link's eyes would look at interesting things to hint you. I wonder if they got the idea from Grim Fandango?)

Grim Fandango didn't invent that mechanic. It was used in some earlier game... Shadow of the Comet, I think.

I haven't played the game (downloading now), but didn't someone say that it's the job of the player to stop the burning? Does that mean that the kid is not in fact burned on the stake, and the game only shows the threat of it?

If that's right, I don't see how there's any call for a warning at all. I can understand why people would want a warning for something that is offensive, but not for the depiction of something that is offensive. If I created a story about a guy who swindles old grannies, refuses to pay child support, and smokes in public places, would it require a "WARNING: This game contains scenes of bastardry" label?

If you're sick of cute cartoon games, and you've played all the great serious AGS games that are out there, Just Adventure may have have some articles for you:

The 10 Scariest Games of All Time
The 10 Best Adventure Games That (Almost) No One Has Ever Played

Are you talking adventure games in general, or AGS games specifically? Recently or historically?

I think the main reason why it seems like most adventure games are humorous and cartoony is LucasArts. Many of the biggest hit games were LucasArts games, and pretty much all of them were cartoony. Sierra was split more like 50/50, and games from other publishers were serious more often than not, I'd say. For every 'Simon the Sorcerer' there was a 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' or 'Bad Day on the Midway'. For every 'Legend of Kyrandia' a 'Bad Mojo' or 'Dark Seed'.

Then there are a number of games that have a cartoony style but play it fairly seriously ('Fate of Atlantis', 'The Dig', 'Beneath a Steel Sky', 'Broken Sword'), or that bring both the funny and the scary ('The Pandora Directive').

If you're yearning for more dark adventure games, I'm sure you must be looking forward to 'Fahrenheit'. It is the most imminent major adventure game release that I'm aware of (Q4 2004), and has some kind of Memento/Dark City-style serial killer plot.

I don't know for sure, but I can imagine that resizing with "nearest neighbour" doesn't work well for multi-layer images.

Maybe you should try flattening your image before resizing it.

Sandman isn't Marvel. Vertigo Comics, an imprint of DC.

I don't grant your premise. While there's certainly a good deal of cartoony adventure games (even today: Runaway), there are just as many that aren't the least bit corny. Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, Sanitarium, Blade Runner, Prisoner of Ice, The Longest Journey...

And what about AGS efforts like The Uncertainty Machine and KQ2VGA?

In this thread, Crash posted some code that looks like it would allow you to drop up to thirty items in each room. On inspection, it probably doesn't scale too well when the number of rooms gets large, but there are other ways of doing it that are more elegant.

Considering the fact that Monkey Island has been released with several different interfaces, I'd say your obsession with "authenticity" goes beyond anal.

Nice! I was just about to start a similar topic myself.

In his book 'Games Programming' (1984), Eric Solomon describes adventure games as games where the object of the game is to figure out the interface (discover the verbs that perform the desired actions). That was only ever true of the worst text adventures, and the adventure genre has come a long way since then. Still, that kind of thing is what bothers me most about some GUIs:

In my opinion, the primary goal of an adventure game interface should be that the interface is never the reason why the player is stuck.

So an interface should make it easy for people to do what they want to do. That means all features of the GUI should be readily apparent, and it should be clear what they all do (which I don't think was the case for 'The Uncertainty Machine'). If I can't bring up the options panel, or don't know that I can examine items in my inventory, that's not a good GUI. Some games use completely incomprehensible icons instead of command verbs (I seem to remember 'Flight of the Amazon Queen' as one). Very, very bad.

Minimizing number of clicks is less important, but still worthwhile. LEC-style interfaces should always, in my opinion, support keyboard shortcuts. Neat little features like that really smooth out the gaming experience. Here are some I wish were used more often:

* Double-click "walk to" on an exit, and the character goes immediately to the next room. (From 'The Dig')
* If the character is walking somewhere to perform an action, it can be interrupted by giving it a new command. (TSOMI)
* The ability toÃ,  change text speed and skip a line of text with any button and skip a whole conversation with ESC.
* Changing the walk speed. (Sierra)
*(For LEC-style games) Keyboard shortcuts. Default verbs on the right mouse button.
*Replay conversations. (Gabriel Knight)
*Hotspot indication. (Sierra games seem to rely on the absence of this feature to compensate for having fewer interaction modes. That, to me, is cheating. It only makes puzzles harder if players can't find the interactable objects, and hunt-the-pixel is not an interesting challenge.)

I'm undecided about a "show all hotspots" feature (Simon the Sorcerer). It solves the hunt-the-pixel problem, but it also ruins the illusion by showing visually how limited the interaction is.

I do think hotspots and objects should be labeled, though. Especially if the graphics aren't the most brilliant. A status bar doesn't really matter, it doesn't really make the game any more playable, nor does it ruin any puzzles.

Some general principles:

* If things in your inventory change on their own without direct interaction (e.g. ice melting when you walk through a reactor core), the game should explicitly tell you that. The same goes for things appearing in your inventory.
* If there are exceptions to how things work, a demonstration/example of the principle at the beginning of the game is required. (LSL7 with the text-entry.)

I can't think of anything else right now. I would like to hear about other small but important interface innovations.

You don't need to use GlobalInts. You can define and export variables in the global script, and import them in the script header. That way they will be available everywhere in your code.

Google ASCII.

Yeah, the QFG games are true adventure classics. If you start looking for them now, AGDI may have the remake of QFG2 out by the time you finish the first. (Fingers crossed)

QFG 4.5 isn't half bad either.

Yeah, what Ashen said.

The pink squares in the sprite manager are not the maximum size of your sprites. They're just thumbnails. You can have bigger sprites, and a small picture of them will be shown in the sprite manager. They'll still be full size in your game.

Answering your question, the door almost certainly doesn't need to be a character. You can achieve the effect with an object.

Yeah, it's a cutscene, and you have to use scripting to create it. Open up the room interactions, and for "Character walks of left/righ/top/bottom screen edge" insert a script that runs a cutscene of the character walking off.

In order to create the cutscene, you probably need to use the MoveCharacterDirect function, which allows your character to walk outside of walkable areas (like outside of the screen, for instance).

There have already been several other threads about this recently. Basically, it cannot currently been done: The characters' "hotspot" (the point used as their position for purposes of walkable areas and walk-to commands) is fixed to the bottom center. However, it's on CJ's to-do list (and may be in the latest beta?), and there are workarounds.

If you just need to change the walk-to point, you can use something like:

Code: ags

if (GetCursorMode()==MODE_WALK){
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  MoveCharacter(GUYBRUSH, mouse.x, mouse.y+29);
}

The best workaround for the walkable areas is probably to manually offset them by the appropriate number of pixels. This is very easy to do if you're defining your walkable areas in a painting application.

The reason Alt-X is hardcoded is almost certainly that otherwise a bug in the game scripts could make it impossible to quit. This does not limit the "authenticity" of a GUI, only your ability to exactly replicate an existing one.

Do you really think anyone would care that this one particular key combination does something slightly different? As you point out, it's not like there aren't other ways to bring up the GUI.

You can create a sprite the size of your car, make an object from the sprite and move the object around. This is all in the manual.

Holy crap, this discussion/argument/debate/bitch-session sounds familiar.

Where have I seen it before?

Oh wait, I know, it was here except it was Alice in Wonderland instead of I, Robot.

I think I used a good expression to describe such instances. I believe it was "raping the corpse" -- as in the way the producers of I, Robot (the movie) have defiled the dead body of Asimov.

That was very different, though, as American McGee's Alice is clearly based on Lewis Carroll's stories, while I, Robot just appropriates the name for something that has almost nothing to do with Asimov's book.

As for the necrophilia, the canonical example has got to be this.