Topics

So, I've built a couple of games now, and I'm a good way through my third proper one. Since I put them up in Christmas and March, they've both had a couple of hundred plays, both through this site, and through Gamejolt where I've been hosting them.

Since I'm a great big vapid attention-whore though, I've been wondering - what other places on the interweb does everyone else announce their latest great creation? I'd like more people to experience what I've made (mediocre as it may be thus far), but word of mouth is notoriously unreliable. Whereabouts do you fair folk fanfare your finest fabrications? Or would I be safer bribing people to give glowing reviews of these things on blogs?

So, I'm trying to flesh out a bit of my placeholder art for Forklift, and in doing so give the tank more directions than "left" and "right".




Ok, so far so good. Now, I've been trying to make a version of it rotated 90 degrees to face downwards...



...and I keep coming up with abominations like this. These things just don't look right, no matter how I do them, and I feel that in a sense clinging to normal ideas of perspective is unhelpful. On the other hand, I'm not an artist, so I'm probably verbalising from my posterior.

So, any advice on how to improve the up-down kinds of view? How wide do you think the tank/turret ought to be from the front?

So, as I was busy chugging away at Operation: Forklift, I've already been accumulating new ideas for what my next crazy project ought to be. Using elements of what I've been experimenting with, I was thinking a management game would be where I'm going, but after adding various elements on manually, I figured a better summary of the gameplay style would be thus:

"Tropico meets Sim City meets X-Com" - it's the tale of an eccentric billionaire who wants to build the ulimate holiday resort (management sim), but happens to have done so in a terrorist-ridden island chain, which requires flushing them out (turn-based tactical).

So, I figured it might be fun to consider mashups of different games to create new concepts, using the "X meets Y" or "the bastard child of X and Y" framework. What thoughts do you have, then?

Trying to kill several birds in one go, I've been trying to practice my anatomy, and my pixel-shading in order to make a new logo. So, here's my latest effort.





The part I'm least happy about is the respirator on her face - the detail seems a bit fiddly to do with pixel-art for me at the moment, but anybody who's seen that photo of me will know what I'm trying to base this on...

Danke sehr!

Thanks to a mixture of cargo-cult programming and fluke, I've been able to use the drawingsurface to create the backdrop of my rooms out of tiles. Ok, so far so good, but I'm also looking to make a radarmap for Operation: Forklift. I've figured out what's needed to draw it, but the problem is that when it's drawn, it appears underneath units as the screen moves around.

In another thread, I've seen people saying it's possible to use drawingsurface to make dynamicsprites appear on the GUI. What do I need to do to make the sprite appear here, rather than on the background?

Congratulations! You have been installed as part of the new government of a small, West-African state following a military coup by foreign interests. The country has been mismanaged for decades, undergoing successive regimes of corruption and personality-power. It is minerally-rich in platinum, uranium, and other valuable deposits, but has been underutilised in the past. The population are small, and the armed forces now down to a handful of private contractors whom the corporations used to support the coup. Financial supporters in the West have seen fit to bankroll the experiment of this state, to see if it can be run better.

So, the questions are these -

- What position in the new government do you have for yourself? Aside from president, that role is being kept for a local figurehead.

- What projects do you want to pursue in this capacity? Considering you now potentially have a lot of wealth at your disposal.

This is a strange one. Every time I try to compile, it complains about this one bit of script -

<222> if(UnitSelected>-1){
<223> if(SqContent[50]==5) Display("Hello");
<224>}
<225>

The game claims that, in line 223, there's an unexpected } but unless I'm going blind, I can see no such thing. I have many other similar instances of code all over the script, but this is the first time it's started complaining, even if I copy/paste it from other parts. What on earth is it complaining about, and how can I fix it?

The exact message it gives is:

GlobalScript.asc(223): Error (line 223): Unexpected '}'

My game started as 16bit. Using different kinds of sprites as tiles, it would draw an entire room as a landscape, and work fine and dandy - it looked like this.



So far, so good. But then, when I upped the colours to 32 bit so I could make some of the characters partially transparent, the landscape started looking like this:



It's only the stuff on the drawingsurface that's come out weird, not just the wrong colours but a little warped too. I tried reimporting the sprites, but that just changed the colour of weird. Does drawingsurface have issues at 32 bit?

Atteeeeeeen-tion! Listen up soldier, VFP shows it's FUBAR out there, and we need you on the DZ ASAP. No more R&R for you - stock up on AA&E, get in touch with CINC.

After its first free elections in decades, the tiny island-chain republic of Vontinalys has been overwhelmed by seditious elements of its own army and a dictatorial political movement, the "Socialist People's Union for Democratic Democracy" (SPUDD), leading to the most brutal military dictatorship the region has ever seen.

As a last resort, the civilian government has appealled to the League of Nations. To put an end to the crisis and help restore democracy, the League has agreed to deploy its elite peacekeeping force, the legendary White Helmets, to the islands. Commanded from the nearby HMS Tactless, the White Helmets must return control to the legitimate government - and investigate rumours that SPUDD have been stockpiling weaponised Explodium, to unknown purposes. Prepare to commence:

OPERATION: FORKLIFT

As part of my ongoing campaign of completely ignoring the "A" in "AGS", Forklift is a turn-based strategy and a shameful knockoff loving homage to certain other favourites (Nintendo Wars series, Endwar, and a bit of Cannon Fodder thrown in), putting your tactical skills to the test.
Featuring:

- Incredible AI!
- Turn-based hotseat mode! (requirements - at least one (1) friend)
- Play-by-mail mode! (if I get enough people telling me this is the kind of thing they'd make use of)
- Seven (7!) varieties of combat unit!
- A riveting campaign storyline!
- Surprise bear attacks!
- Fully-functional map editor, for if you feel I'm just not good enough and you want to build your own custom battlespace environment.




Being constructed as part of a test of all sorts of elements for the next game I plan to make, Forklift is currently well underway, and helping avoid all this "socialising" nonsense my coworkers are trying to compel me into. At this rate, it should be complete by July/August. In fact, I guarantee August at the latest, since I'll be extremely sick of it by then anyway.

Graphics: 90%
Plot: 100%
Editor: 100%
AI: It will now make more reasonable choices of targets.
Bears: 100%
Levels: 40%, now just the campaign ones to do...
Sound/Music: Wonderfully appropriate music being cooked up by Shivermesideways

July 1st: Looks like I'm still on track for a July-August release. Skirmish testing will commence this weekend, provided I can get the demo up and running. Mostly to test for fatal errors, and balancing issues.

August 19th: Did I say July-August? I meant September-October. This whole "building the campaign" thing is deeper than I thought.
Further SITREP to follow at later date...

Occasionally, I get a message when compiling -

Unable to register for Vista Game Explorer: Unable to load the custom icon: EndUpdateResource failed

It has absolutely no impact on the game's compilation, but it has started to get rather annoying. Is there something I can do/shouldn't be doing to stop it happening?

So, while trying to make a balance between "military stencil" (like the kind they have for "M*A*S*H" for example) and legible, this is the result I've ended up with. To me though, it seems that in a way it just looks like a normal font that's broken in places. Any sage pointers towads making it look more like it's supposed to, or better yet someone more expert on fonts than me?

Since I assume that everyone else on the forum is better than me at everything ever when it comes to making things in AGS, I was curious - how long does it usually take you to make things for games?

In my case, I tend to measure things by evenings (roughly three hours), since they're the free time I get from teaching small people. So...

Non-walking character - an evening
A fully-animated four-direction-walking character - about three evenings
A  room- one or two evenings
Objects - half an hour to an hour
A game - the last two that I've finished were, start to end, two months. On the other hand, I've so many games that will never see completion, might as well average it out to "infinity"

How about yourselves, then? Am I rushing things, or about on average?

While I certainly feel I've been able to make some improvement since the far-gone days of MS Painting terrible abominations, there are still a few things I haven't quite been able to master at low resolution. I think the biggest thing I want to fix on this guy is the face, but everything I do seems to make too big a change, what with only a limited number of pixels available.



What can the experts on C&C suggest, then?

As part of my long term plans (conquer world, enslave humanity, buy milk, etc), once I'm done with my stint of teaching in Korea I intend to return to the UK to continue my academic endeavours. Basically, I intend to put off joining the real world as long as possible.

I'm going to continue in the field of Politics as I've done before, since I aim to get started on working towards my PhD. The brilliant thing about politics is that it can cover so many different areas, but I wanted to choose an area to research that'd be not only interesting to myself, but one that I hope would be enlightening/appealling for other people to gain the results of once I'm done. So, I've narrowed it to three main areas I'm keen on looking at...

1) Modern piracy; its causes, and the lack of power other states have to prevent it

2) Total war; whether conflicts such as World War 2 are even possible in the modern context, and the most likely places for them to occur today

3) The growing trend towards federalism; why bodies like the EU, NAFTA, AU, Arab League etc are springing up, the powers that people are comfortable with them possessing, and the likelihood that international politics are likely to be conducted in such a context in the future as a norm.


So, you, as a normal person - which of the three would interest you the most?

No idea if this is even something vaguely feasible within AGS, but I thought I might as well ask.

Anyhow, I was wondering if it was possible to change what parts of the room had what hotspot in them, during the game itself? As in, at a point in a script, the game checks x,y coords, and if there's hotspot at this coordinate, to change it to hotspot 0? And from there, I can make use of maths to govern what shapes to change the hotspots by.

The idea is for creating deforming terrain, using circles for the "explosion" to take a chunk out of the hotspot. Is this feasible? Is there another better route you might suggest? Or is this a situation where ambition has overstepped physical capability?

Well, as of this time next week, I'm off to Asia - I'm going to be teaching English to the natives in Korea for a whole year, and actually doing something fairly useful for the first time within this gap year (though at this rate, gap two-years). I'm no stranger to moving, my parents worked all over the world, but this is the first time I'm doing it by myself.

So, I thought it'd be an interesting thing to examine. How many people on here have moved out, not just from their home, but their home country? What did you find you missed once you got to wherever? And is anyone on here from Korea and/or able to warn me about things to look out for once I'm there?

An nyoung!

[1st Drop]

Well, my second complete AGS project is finally finished, so I present:

1st Drop - a gravity-assisted landing game.

Taking inspiration from classics like "Dropzone" and "Lander", I decided to experiment and see if I could implement a similar system using AGS. Naturally, I succeeded, so the result is finally here! Because I'm now sick of making it (and I'd like to keep to a 'one game every two months' schedule), I've decided to release as-is. It's fully functional, and there are no game-breaking bugs that I've discovered, so here it is for y'all.

And because, of course, straightforward landing would just be dull, there are all kinds of other objectives, like:


Hunting through the rings of Saturn for distress beacons. or...


Rescuing colonists from the path of a hungry mining-robot.

!!WATCH THE TRAILER ON YOUTUBE!!

Plus, special unlocks to be found...

So, if you fancy a little bit of arcade-action, this might be what you're looking for. That, or you want to make sure your understanding of gravity isn't completely messed up. So, get yourselves over to GameJolt to acquire it, and save the solar system from the Corporate menace!

GameJolt Download

AGS Games Database entry

[1st Drop]

Right, I'm thoroughly sick of working on this game, so I've decided to wind it up ASAP and release what I've done so far, before I have to flee to country. So, with limited ado, my sales pitch for:

1st Drop - a gravity-assisted landing game.

This might remind a few people of a certain classic arcade game. Shameless plagiarism? Naaah, I take a good idea and add a few new things in. After all, why stick to just landing on the moon's surface, when there are so many other kinds of thankless tasks for astronauts to perform?



Search the rings of Saturn for the black boxes of less fortunate spacecraft



Rescue colonists before a robotic miner that thinks they look tasty gobbles them up


And...uhm...adventure!


Since I almost seem to now be able to finish a game in two months (improvement from finishing a game in never), this game will be out by the end of next week - whether it's tidy or not. It'll certainly be playable, but since I've cut down a lot of what it was originally going to be, it's more of another demonstration of what weird stuff I like to experiment with in AGS.

In a nutshell, it's a space-suit that's more geared towards soldiering than NASA's usual line of work. While the person inside is supposed to be a woman (I suck at drawing, yeah), she *is* supposed to be fairly masculine - long hair doesn't work well with helmets after all, and armed forces aren't going to go to much effort "feminising" suits beyond functional necessity. Still, I want to improve on it, and any advice is much appreciated! I think I could do better on the face, in particular...

If anyone's played one of those reeeaaaallly old lunar-lander games, they'll know what it is I'm trying to implement as a mini-game in AGS. I think I might have gotten myself in over my head, but it also makes an interesting thought-experiment. There are a couple of problems I've noticed having been experimenting with it. I've probably gotten it organised in a really ineffective way, and any pointers would be helpful!

I start off in the level, having the player as the "lander". The three main variables I'm using are "Thrust", "Gravity" and "Speed". In Repeatedly_Execute I have the following:

Code: ags

int Gravity = 1;
Speed=Speed-Gravity;  
  
player.y=player.y + Speed;

This alters the speed of the "lander" every cycle, based on the force that gravity exerts on it. In effect, making it move downwards more quickly as time progresses, as "Gravity" is subtracted from "Speed" every cycle. The problem I find here therefore is that it becomes absurdly fast, and zooms downwards off the screen, even when gravity is only 1.

My second issue is thus - controlling the lander.

Code: ags

  if (Thrust>0) Thrust-=1;  // So that thrust doesn't stick at full every time it's pressed
  
     if ((IsKeyPressed(eKeyUpArrow))&&(Thrust<5)) {
      Thrust+=2;
   }
   
Speed = Speed + Thrust;

In order to make the thrust propel the craft upwards, the addition of "Thrust" is designed to counteract the subtraction of "Gravity" from "Thrust", resulting in net upwards movement. once again, it moves far too quickly.

As I say, my first problem is the absurd rate of movement, but for the second, I notice that as it gets faster, it will move by several pixels per cycle - this will actually cause trouble by, for example, leaping straight past the "ground" at the bottom if falling too quickly. What I need it to do instead is always move at a *distance* of one pixel, but the speed of this one pixel movement to change depending on the speed of the lander.

If anyone could offer any suggestions, I'd be most appreciative, or if they could point me towards a helpful thread - I've not been able to find something quite appropriate yet though.

Many thanks!