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How important, do you feel, is it for backdrops to have some kind of activity going on even if the player isn't moving. I see in things like Space Quest (4 through 6 particularly) that there is always *something* active - neon lights, people walking past, fans spinning - ans I was wondering how much importance you folk placed on making sure something was going on. I seem to have had a mad quest to shoehorn any kind of movement I can into it lately, and was wondering if there were any precedents for not having to put quite so much in.

[BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!]

The very first game I've actually managed to get finished with AGS is, ironically enough, not an adventure. In fact, it's

BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!

Do you like colours? Silly question, of course. Do you like vats? Hell, who doesn't? What if, by some freaky coincidence, the two needed to be combined?

BILLY certainly does. He has been tasked by the PROPHETS to find KREZUNTHOR, a mystical colour which only he can see; it is also the key to defeating the evil Lord Prezorthh@x. So what do you do when PROPHETS order you to stack colours? Well, you stack 'em of course! Or else.

Featuring game modes like:
- Quantum!
- Clockwise only!
- Bombs Away!



Aside from the action-packed story, this is a puzzle game, involving the stacking of coloured pieces. They fall from the top, you make rows of threes, they disappear. What more could you want? What's that? Points? Well, yes, you get those too.



Find it here at GameJolt.

Do let me know what you think. I just needed to get this damn thing out of my head before I move back on to adventure games. Keep an eye out of "Cyclone's Eye"!

[BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!]

The very first game I've actually managed to get finished with AGS is, ironically enough, not an adventure. In fact, it's

BILLY AND DESMOND'S FANTASTIC AMAZING RAINBOW TUBE!

Do you like colours? Silly question, of course. Do you like vats? Hell, who doesn't? What if, by some freaky coincidence, the two were mixed?

BILLY certainly does. He has been tasked by the PROPHETS to find KREZUNTHOR, a mystical colour which only he can see; it is also the key to defeating the evil Lord Prǝzorthh@x.

Featuring game modes like:
- Quantum!
- Clockwise only!
- And many more!



Aside from the inane story, this is a puzzle game, involving the stacking of coloured pieces. They fall from the top, you make rows of threes, they disappear. What more could you want? What's that? Points? Well, yes, you get those too.




It's a simple game, it won't take you too long (unless you choose the reeaaaallly easy difficulty, or have a personality that makes you addicted to things easily). Just a few things to round off, but it's nearly complete - I can guarantee you'll have it by Christmas - whether it's actually finished or not!


Code & Game: 100%
Storyline: 100%
Decontamination: 100%
Graphics: 100%
High Score mechanism: 100%



EDIT: The internet here in Saudi Arabia is ghastly, so I've thus far been unable to upload the game to the internet. I'm afraid that it's going to be a New Year release rather than a Christmas one! Unless we can get some kind of international petition movement going to push Christmas back a week, but that seems somehow unlikely.


PPS Disregard that, it's done. Look at the completed games thing!

Hopefully the topic was expressive enough. What I've got at the moment is an array (int Rainbow[7]), and ten different values that each part of the array can be. To give the first one a randome value is easy enough:

Rainbow[0]=Random(10);

But now I need to make the next one random, but a different value from the one before it, and so on upwards until it does each of the seven parts. Initially, I was thinking of using "while" to go through each one, but it's only seven, so doing the code for each isn't exactly taxing. I'm just stumped as to what I'd tell it to look for each time it went up, or how to make it "re-roll" the random number if it's the same as one of the ones before.

Merci beaucoup!

Part of the problem I have when making games, is focusing. Not that I'm lazy or anything, I just have too many ideas on the go, and keep making drastic changes. On the whole though, I have four key ideas for proper adventure games, and have done some work on each, but have a desire to push forward with at least one of them. Right now, I'm finishing up a puzzle game, but after that, I'm going to put the (considerable) spare time I have towards finishing up one project in particular, and in order to avoid too much wasted effort, I'd be keen to find out what kind of adventure most people would be more keen to play. So, I present the four ideas I have - do tell me which would appeal to you the most, or how you might alter one to make it appeal more!

1: Cyclone's Eye
      - 1963: an experimental USAF spy plane develops a malfunction over Soviet Kazakhstan, forcing the pilot to eject in dire circumstances amidst the crumbling wreckage of his aircraft. As he comes to, he finds himself recovering in a rural doctor's surgery; in Oklahoma. A year before he took off. His goal is therefore to find out how he got here, and why everyone's a little bit off-kilter.
- Intended to be slightly more serious, in as much of a FoA style I can muster.

2: Welcome to the Quantum Police

     - having finally been forced to seek work after sponging off her parents for years, the only job that a young lady can find and keep is with an underground, well-meaning if often unsuccessful quasi-vigilante group, who take their orders from a quantum-supercomputer a bit too literally. While initially there for the money, she takes well to it, and finds herself increasingly becoming the "common sense" of the group.
- a shorter game, episodic with a story-arc over a few of them. More cartoony, sort of a Sam & Max style.

3: Manifold Selfhood
     - Harry Janeiro's acting career took a turn for the worse after his sudden and unexpected death in a transit accident. Fortunately, his insurance company stumped up to have his mind backed up into a computer, but no more. Now effectively stuck in a small box in his own apartment, he gets an offer he can't refuse from an old friend - pretend to be him for a week while he does some slightly shady work for a biotech company, in exchange for a new, grown-from-scratch body. But of course, it's never going to be as simple as that.
- sci-fi styled, sort of taking Deus Ex 2 as an aesthetic inspiration, and once again a bit more serious.

4: Sami the Cat and the Blasphemous Cake

   - Sami is, of course, a cat, and she would like to do something special for the
guy who took her in's birthday. Being a cat makes this a bit difficult, but an evil arch-sorceror decides to give her a bit of a hand by turning her into a girl, and suggesting she bakes a birthday cake. She's given free reign of the castle to do this, and is cheerfully oblivious to the sheer evil that resides within this temple of despair while she searches for the ingredients.
- Once again, more cartoony, with a strong theme of the juxtaposition of the sheer evil in the environment, and her nonchalant attitude towards it.


I'm well aware I should be making something I want to make, but these are four things I would like to see finish. I'd just rather that what I make is something other people want to/are going to play! Thanks in advance for your input.

*EDIT* - corrected. Consistently four now!

No idea if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how AGS's mouse things work, and do point me in the right direction if I am, but I'm wondering if there's a means of getting an int to change with the mouse's movement. In my case for example, increasing as it moves to the right, and decreasing towards the left. I was thinking of something like using the mouse's.y position on the screen, but a) the int would never get below 0 or above 320, and b) the int would always be the y position, rather than consistently increasing with right movement, and vice versa.

Hopefully I've made myself clear enough! Merci beaucoup.

Bit of an odd question perhaps, but for the purpose of a game, I'm looking to cause the game to crash when then user does something. Not just "close down and pretend it's a crash", but a proper, error-message creating crash, for authenticity's sake.

A lot of the time when I'm making something in the script that'll lead to a mistake, the game refuses to compile. I've managed to cause stack overflow errors, but what other kinds of interesting problems can I deliberately cause and how, for variety's sake?

Does anybody else have any odd quirks of the way they do their AGSing? Like a certain way/place it has to be done in, or in certain conditions?

In my case, I find myself only able to do anything in the middle of the night. For some reason, nocturnality is conducive to me actually getting things done, otherwise I fidget and find other things to do. Also, I cannot stand having noise in the background, especially not televisions. Music is ok if what I'm doing it repetitive.

Trying to go with a "grotesque" theme for some aspects of what I'm doing, so I've opted for making this health professional ironically unhealthy, most evidently through his penchant for saturated fats, his triple chin, and ill-fitting surgical mask.

Something about the way I do shading makes it feel wrong, though. Like it's a sub-image within the picture sticking out by about an inch, with an otherwise flat surface.

Well, they've finally done it, they caught you. After a month-long investigation of a number of bodies spread across the rural Southern states, and a harrowing emotional conflict for the lead detective as he finds himself understanding the murderer more than he's comfortable with, your career as the "Alabama Strangler" has come to an end.

For the sheer, disgusting and brutal nature of your crimes, the judge sentences you, of course, to death. However, because the local government in this jurisdiction is heavily sponsored by Rupert Murdoch, your death will be televised, and - even better! - you get to choose your own method!

So, two questions.

1) What method are the fine people at Sky One/Fox going to ensure justice by?

2) What are your last words?

Hopefully this is a "simple" enough question to go in the beginners' tech forum. Anyhow, for various reasons, I'm attempting to use the DrawingSurface to make an animation in the background - it's impossible to do with sprites because the game complains about having a maximum of 50 in the room.

My plan is to use DrawImage to put the image onto the room, then every few moments clear and refresh the DrawingSurface with the new "frame" of this animation based on an increasing int, in the room's repeatedly_execute. Unfortunately, what happens so far mostly results in the entire screen going pink, and the game "Waiting" all the time, while both frames appear at the same time on the screen. Being a complete idiot at DrawingSurface, can anyone point me in the right direction?


* EDIT - also, side question that might sort my problem out if it's changed. I'm still using version 3.02, and I'm limited to 50 sprites per room - has this limit been increased in 3.12?

I'm trying to work with creating a GUI for a turn-based strategy section, and have been attempting to have a balance between detail and ease of use. It'd be hard (and dull) to have nothing but words in the buttons, so I attempt to use images to convey what each does - and wonder how illustrative it is.

On the buttons, I've opted for a spanner for "construction" and an atom for "research", but would like advice on how it could be clearer. When either are clicked on, they open the sub-menu appropriate (the big green one, not normally visible).

The Power/Money/Population sections are just labels, and next to that, I've gone for a clock motif for the "next turn" one. Unfortunately, the resolution's quite restrictive for detailed things without a lot of practice/trial and error.




Any and all suggestions welcome!

In my GUI, I have an @OVERHOTSPOT@ telling me the descriptions for objects in my room. I'm aware that the "name" of objects is read only, but am I able to alter the "description" of them with the script, to therefore alter what it says in the GUI? I'll have to look for a workaround if it's not possible.

Merci!

Reactivating a project I'd started around Christmas, I've gone and redone the catgirl-in-an-apron, except I've opted for a 320x200 resolution. My intention is to do it with a more "NES" style pixel art for the characters and backdrops, but it's of course a limiting size for shrinking things that formerly had more detail. Particularly the face, I think that needs improving.



And, of course, animated!

Probably something deceptively simple, but it's just something I've run into. In order to control the game, I've got a GUI that spans the entirety of the 320x200 screen, and just realised that part of my plan of selecting the room objects underneath the GUI has been stopped by the GUI getting in the way, so "interacting" doesn't happen. Is there a means by which I can return which object is underneath the cursor, *behind* the GUI?

I'm unable to make the GUI smaller, because it's covered in labels all over the screen showing a value relating to each of the room objects underneath.

Hm...I think I've gotten the perspectives and such right, I just need to makethis shop seem...more full. Right now I'm having trouble making the shelves look better stocked when I'm using this resolution. Any suggestions?

Hopefully this is a "basic" question rather than an "advanced" one. I'll see if I can explain this one more clearly...

I have an array (int growth[10]; ), and within each of the indexes the number will represent the stage of growth a plant that each index refers to is at. When the player moves on to the next "day", the value of the indexes need to increase by one.

If there are different values in each index of the array, firstly: is there a way to increase *every* index by one, rather than manually going through each in the script? Something to make every index in the growth array go up by one?

Secondly, is there a way to make the value increase based on what the value in the index was before? For example, "if growth[2] == 50;" set it to 7 in the script - except to run this for every single index in the array, once again, without having to tell it to do it manually to each index of it.

Hopefully that's clear enough!

Bah, I take a two-month break from AGS for education, and I get back to find I've forgotten how to draw. I've been trying to do the outside of a cinema (on the left), old-style three sided ticket office and such, and have found my brain stuck when it comes to working out how to do a decent-looking exterior.

(the vanishing point is faaar off to the right, since this is going to be a long, scrolling scene)

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to make a decent sandstoney brick kind of look on a wall, or failing that, can anyone recommend me a good tutorial for this sort of area?

Merci beaucoup!

A philosophical question if you will, and because I think this place would produce some interesting answers.

In debate with an associate of mine, I asked her whether she thought police and law were a restriction of free will. After all, they serve to prevent actions of a certain nature (which would be detrimental to society), either preemptively or punitively. She said they were not.

I then asked her whether the technocratic idea of laws violated free will - i.e. ones that could not physically be broken due to mechanisms in place. For example, you can't hop on to the train without paying, since you can't physically get on to it. She said no, once again.

I posited the third option - if a person is physically incapable of breaking the law, either because they break down wretching when they consider doing so (a la Ludovico process in a Clockwork Orange), or because of drilling and conditioning. This, she feels is violation of free will.

I find it hard to agree - after all, it acts as a means of preventing a crime before it happens. Whether that's because a policeman is holding you back from assaulting someone, or because something in your brain has given you an adverse reaction to attempting to do so seems merely to be a difference of method. What do folk here think? Is it a restriction of free will? Is any kind of law enforcement a restriction? Is it desirable?

I'm fairly sure this question belongs in this section, and although the search brings up many related topics vis-a-vis the use of resolutions, they're usually quite old/pre-version 3/pre-directX 9, and I've been reading in more and more topics about peoples' monitors not being able to run games in certain, smaller, classic resolutions (320x200), and the solutions for getting around this on the player-end seem horrifically complex, technical and off-putting to the casual player.

For maximum playability by default on modern machine and under modern circumstances, should I therefore actually use 640x400, with the contents merely scaled up double if I want to create the old-style look, or am I being needlessly paranoid about odd grey-and-black hatching on text boxes that I've seen?

Much obliged!