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[P]

For one of my current projects, I'm building an in-game glossary for people to refer to for background information on the world. It's got five categories:

People
Locations
Organisations
Technology
Society

Together, the first letters of those would make the acronym "PLOTS", but I'd rather give it something a little more...dynamic-sounding. I'd considered "PILOT" (Places, Individuals, L, Organisations, Technology), but that leaves me with the problem of not being able to find a word for "Society" that starts with L. Perhaps someone who's learned English more recently than I might be able to come up with an idea, or even a different acronym using those five concepts?

My next soon-to-be-banned-in-Germany game, coming eventually. Here we go, it's




Nefarious pirate U-boats have been terrorising Allied shipments of treasure and spices throughout the Caribbean, and Fighter Command resolves to put their best man on the case - Johnny Hurricane, ace pilot! His mission to recover the Enigma machine is, however, complicated by the similarly difficult and vague task given to a young woman who won't stop following him around and taking anything not nailed down. Now, if he can just get out of this ruddy airport...


<sup>Defeat BUREAUCRACY and PHYSICS to make your escape from the town of Port Regis!


Make friends with amicable locals!</sup>


With a planned release at some stage in November or December, this game is still in its early phases, but as long as I don't suddenly find myself with a job, the progress on production is going remarkably quickly.


^{Mr Hurricane's trusty aircraft does not yet have a name! Can you think of something ADVENTUROUS and EXCITING and most of all NOT TRADEMARKED?}


Tally-ho!

As you've probably guessed from the title, and if you've played Nancy, that I'm trying to get closer to emulating Steve Purcell's venerable style, with mixed levels of success. I've been trying to apply various techniques - limited colour palettes, composition of scenes to maximise utility, making the purpose of rooms extremely clear, making sure there's something happening everywhere that's possible. However, it still feels to me like it's a bit...well, sterile, I guess. Especially the outside scene - perhaps a little artificial, I think. I also think that one of my computers has a different opinion on colours to my other machines, making things look washed-out on one that aren't on the other.

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/outside.png[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/hangar.png[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/controltowerinside.png[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/cafeDEMO.png[/imgzoom]

So, hopefully I can get your objective opinion on the matter - anything to improve it will help! Personally, I think I'm the most satisfied with the control tower, and the bar.

My game has a GUI that, when the mouse moves over it, it jumps out from the side to full length. This has worked well enough so far in most of the rooms, in four games now, but I've run into a problem that I've never seen before. In particular, there's a GUI that's designed to track the position of the sliding inventory, and this is what's been crashing it. When a particular room loads, the game crashes, telling me there's been a problem with this line

Code: AGS

if(SlideInv==false){gSlideLabel.X=gInvSlide.X-300;gSlideLabel.Y=225;}

The room is wider than normal - it's 500 wide, when the rooms are normally 320. When the character appears on the far right, the game crashes. When he appears on the left, the game does not crash. This leads me to suspect that it's something to do with the GUI thinking that its position is out of its range - does anyone have a suggestion about how this can be resolved?

...well, sure, he's a pilot, but not the civil kind. A couple of things I want to address here:

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/pilotte.png[/imgzoom]

- I've been doing the drawing on two different computers, and the screen on each is giving me a different impression of how it looks. The one on the left was coloured on one computer, and the jacket looked alright on that one, however on my bigger computer the right one was suddenly needed, or else it looked too washed out. So: which one looks more like a leather aviator's jacket?

- While I think the 3/4 view was a decent start, I'm not happy with the way he has his arm in his pocket from the front

- His face bothers me too.


So, what are the opnions of the fine folk on here? 

I'm planning on getting with the 21st century, and getting myself an actual website rather than a blogspot thing. After all, how else can I expect to look professional?

Anyhow, I've been looking through a lot of reviews online, but it seems that so many of them are simply plants/advertising by companies for their own services, or disinformation and slander by their rivals. So, who more trustworthy than the fine folks here on AGS to ask? So, my question - if you've got your own website, who do you get to host it? Are they any good?

So, I've put out a few games on the interwebs thus far (Latest: Nancy the Happy Whore. Go and buy the Summerbatch! /advert), and while reception to them has usually been generally positive thanks to rigorous testing, there are occasionally comments here and there about things that are, doubtless, better done in other games and by other people. However, for a long time, I find myself having a great deal of difficulty taking criticism of things I make. There's certainly a difference between constructive critique and "this sucks", but I always find myself getting a knot in my gut and a spinning head. It usually manifests thereafter in never visiting that website/forum again.

While I'm sure this will improve over time as I get better at things or release more, it'd be extremely difficult to get "practice" at taking criticism without releasing a whole lot of games in quick succession, does anyone get such a reaction from themselves about this kind of thing? Anyone have any tactics for handling it?

I've been attempting to create a script that "types" text into a label, one letter at a time. It starts by the player entering the name of the label in the function (LabelName), and the text of the string to type (TypeText). It should then, running through the "while" cycle, add an extra letter on to the string "TextInProgress" from the "TypeText" string, and update the label, before returning to the beginning and moving on to the next letter.

This, unfortunately, is not the case. It seems instead to just make the label "LabelName" blank. I'd been putting in display functions to tell me what it had been doing, so I'm certain that it's moving up through the numbers, just not adding the letters on to the TextInProgress string.

Can anybody see what I'm missing here?

Code: AGS

function TechnoTextType(Label *LabelName, String TypeText){
  int TotalLetters = TypeText.Length;
  int LetterOn = 0;
  String TextInProgress = "";
  
  while(LetterOn<TotalLetters){
    TextInProgress.AppendChar(TypeText.Chars[LetterOn]);
    LabelName.Text = TextInProgress;
    LetterOn++;
    Wait(1);
  }
}
  

In keeping with the new philosophy I'm trying to use when making games, I've made use of a several-step process to design the basics of a character. Starting with a basic shape with the general colours of the areas, I then apply one layer of shading, then a slightly more detailed shading (i.e. darker), and details here and there like the zip and facial features.

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/NL.png[/imgzoom]

Would you say, so far, that this is producing acceptable results? I have a suspicion it's a little pillow-shadey on the front and back views, but I'm not a great judge of art by any stretch! At least it's an improvement over how she looked before...

[imgzoom]http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/latha3.png[/imgzoom]

I've been trying to make an improved, cleaner, more functional version of the GUI style I've been using for the last few games I've made, and I just wanted to see a) what kind of feelings it evokes from people, and b) whther you lovely folk think it could be improved somehow.

The impression I'm going for is, surprisingly enough, futuristic - like a PDA or holographic terminals of the future. Because of this, the blue part of each of them is partly transparent. The menu at the top-left is for Options, Save, Load and Quit Bottom-right will contain all of the inventory items. As the mouse moves over each, they slide out on to the screen in a smooth, accelerate/decelerate motion.





I'm unsure about the style of buttons at the top left I've got here, so I've got an alternative that might fit better.

Right now, I'm using English and a German translation with my game. I can tell the game to check TranslationAvailable, and currently use it to make it so that, if the translation is being used, background objects appear in German rather than English.

Since I'm considering adding other languages, is there any way to make the game know which foreign language objects to use, rather than it just being a different language to default?

I've created a custom font, and I plan to see that the game is translated into French. Since french involves characters not present in English (acute accents, etc), I've decided to make use of thepeculiar set of symbols in the top cluster of this font, since they'd otherwise never be used in this game.



Problem is, I have no idea how these things would be entered into the text in AGS. My character map doesn't have "smiley face" or "double exclamation mark".

Could anyone explain to me how these strange letters could be placed into a character's speech? Merci!

[<==== SORT-OF FIXED ====>]

<==== SORT-OF FIXED ====>

Well, I figured I ought to start making a website for all of my delightful games, but it seems to have hit rather a snag that I can't quite seem to puzzle out. It wouldn't have fit in the AGS technical forum, or the critics lounge, so maybe someone can point me in the right direction here.

technotest.uphero.com

I'm mostly an IE user, and within IE it looks absolutely fine and dandy.



But then in Firefox and Chrome, everything in the background shows up green.



I have no idea where it's getting this colour scheme from. I've checked the "inspect element" tool on Chrome, and it says

Code: ags

td[bgcolor=rgb(65, 70, 87)] {
background-color: #005000;
}

so it apparently knows it's supposed to be showing blue/grey (65, 70, 87), but suddenly leaps to that green (#005000). I'm pulling my hair out with this, and there must be a simpler answer than "rewrite the entire page in CSS" - surely it's possible to change the colour in HTML to ensure everyone sees it the right way?

Many thanks for your help.

I found my brother frantically attempting to download from the link that appeared on Abandonia recently, for the cancelled Warcraft adventure game (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/30343/.html). To his frustration, he was unable to get it to work - first his computer complained that it was a 32 bit game, and then the setup refused to work. He was then confused as to why the game, when it worked, seemed to simply be the demo of Warcraft II.

Spoiler

When I looked at the date on the website however, it turns out this was an entry from the first of the month. Oh well!

[close]

Has anyone on here actually played the beta that was leaked? I think it's probably the holy grail of abandonware in our household!

...I've never actually played King's Quest. Ever. I've Policed, and I've Spaced, but never Kinged, and I'm finally able to admit it!

Also because Steam have the King's Quest series at half price today. So, has anyone else missed out on classic, seemingly obligatory parts of adventure gaming?

It's a couple of months yet to go, but I thought I'd get the whole "showing" people thing out of the way to build up excitement. After all, this is the Excitement Games Studio forums, aren't they? Aren't they? They aren't? Damn. Well, in that case, coming soon to a computer in front of you:

Nancy the Happy Whore and the Perfidious Petrol Station

Nancy, the titular sex-worker with an unshakeably optimistic attitude, finds herself running out of fuel while on her way to the Big City. Now, with the help of her best friend and crack-fiend Susie the Drug Addict, she must not only procure the petroleum to make her auto-machine go again, but help defeat an armed robbery, a disillusioned amateur hippy and THE PROPHETS themselves to help uncover the evil lurking within - the PERFIDIOUS PETROL STATION!





(Graphics sort-of representative, and subject to a whole lot of improvement and cleaning-up before it's finished)

Featuring:
- An intricate and disturbing social commentary on the issues of modern womanhood
- Non-linear art
- Eight rooms!
- Voices! (which reminds me, who wants to voice a character?)
- Graphics!
- Six languages (including ENGLISH (UK), ENGLISH (USA), ENGLISH (CANADA), ENGLISH (NEW ZEALAND), ENGLISH (ZIMBABWE) and ENGLISH (FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA))

Release date: THIS SUMMER

Since this is intended to be part of Mods' Summerbatch group of games, it'll also be my first venture into charging people money for what I make. COMMERCIAL! WOO!

Edit: FINISHED! PAY MONEY TO PLAY WITH NANCY, THAT'S WHAT SHE'S THERE FOR![/url]

Sonething I need to know, from folk around the world. Hopefully you folk (who live around the world) can help me.

1) What country are you from?

2) What do you call the place you fill your car up? Gas station? Petrol station? Fossil-fuel boutique?

3) What measurement of distance do your road signs have? Miles? Kilometres? Parsecs?

It's for a game, I swear.

[Political advocacy]

The Bake Sale's been going delightfully well, and it has such a good goal - who can argue with charity? It's going towards Child's Play, but something I've noticed is that this decision has roused a bit of inexplicable bile from people ("WHY IS IT ALWAYS CHILD'S PLAY RARGH RARGH I HATE KIDS IN HOSPITALS RARGH") on websites like RPS. This led me to think - what if there were other gamer-focused charities? So, my question is essentially this: what kind of charity would you, as gamers,

a) agree to support
b) feel is sufficiently in line with your position as a gamer?

so, here are a few ideas.

i) Political advocacy - a lobbying organisation aimed at putting the voices and opinions of gamers into the ears of politicians around the world (SOPA, age rating systems, etc). Or, providing legal advocacy and assistance to people in trouble over games/internet related matters (people brought up on bogus piracy charges, opposing whoever the new Jack Thompson turns out to be, etc). Maybe even issues like freedom of information/communication, goodness knows that's topical right now!

ii) War Relief - For a group with so many activities revolving around casual destruction, from a direct or a strategic perspective, we know that war is a ghastly affliction upon society. So, the aim of this charity would be the general relief of symptoms, working with other groups like the UN, Red Cross, Refugee organisations and such to show that gamers understand the impact these things have on the real world.

iii) Developing Countries - Many parts of the developing world, from South America to Asia to Africa, are unable to sustain themselves currently, and have problems with even finding basics like water and power. These development groups work toward constructing infrastructure like pumps and generators, enabling poor rural communities to reach a better standard of living.

iv) There are many people with the ideas and skills to make the next big things in independent gaming, but unable to without starving to death in the short terms, or need funding grants for their education in game development. A grants charity would provide funding to those who can demonstrate that they have something worthwhile to pursue, and would lead to an increased quality of independent games being produced.

v) Animals. Everyone loves animals, whether it's Dogmeat, or ponies. This concept would strive for various animal-related goals, such as vetinary assistance, care, prevention of cruelty and rehoming.

vi) Got a better idea for a gamer charity? TELL US NOW

So, I've no doubt it's just paranoid speculation on my part, but I was wondering about the use of real-life, branded products in fiction, specifically adventure games since that's kind of the focus of the AGS fora, isn't it?

I would imagine that it's a lot less of an issue in games that aren't commercial, since they can more reasonably count as "parody", but in my case the next game I'm planning is aimed at being sold, so I figured I should get it cleared up in order to quiet the paranoia in my brain. The story, as it stands, has a Hawker Hurricane as a central plot element.



Lovely, innit? The more rational part of my brain tells me that:
a) it's a cultural icon, as part of Britain's history
b) Hawker went defunct in the sixties, Hawker-Siddeley went out of business in 1992, and BAe probably has bigger things to care about

I also thought that if anyone has a concrete idea of what constitues "fair use", it'd probably be a useful thing to clarify for other creators on here!

[THE RAIL]

On a tidally-locked world, the only way for resources to be moved under the deadly sun is by high-speed train. The management refuse to automate it entirely - after all, then there'd be nobody to blame when things go wrong - and it's been your uneventful duty for the past several years to see the train back and forth along:

THE RAIL

So naturally, things are going to go wrong on your watch. Things like, oh, maybe hijacking? And bombing? And all of the above?





Featuring:
- a train
- a man
- animations
- another man
- a desert
- guest starring Castle Bravo as itself.

An exercise in art and timekeeping practice, I decided to try this as an effort to prove that I could, and to take my mind off Technobabylon, because I really wasn't pleased with how that was going.

So, since I've been sticking to my plan, the game is essentially finished. Barring music, it'll be complete on Sunday, four weeks and two days after starting on it. And I intend the first place for people to be able to play it to be AdventureX, on the 17th of December.

So, yes, anyone fancy giving it a test-run after Sunday, for an objective opinion on the matter?