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Thanks for the birthday wishes, but I'm not 21!

(My current age will remain a secret) 

I tried this with a vertical scrolling room but couldn't replicate the problem.

Please make sure you're using 3.1.2 SP1 -- if not, upgrade and check if it still happens.

If it does, can you upload a sample game that demonstrates the problem?

I've sent you a PM. Let me know if you got it alright.

This is with DX5. My game wont run on my current computer with D3D.

edit: actually, both rooms are vertically scrolling. I think the artifact may disappear when you reach a non-vertically scrolling room.

When I use the ShakeScreenBackground command on a vertical scrolling room (game is in Letterbox mode), it appears to artifact some of the room and carry it on the letterbox into the next room.

Here is what I mean (spoilers have been mosaic'd out):

Vertical Scrolling room with the shaking:


Next room with the artifact:


I'm not sure what exactly causes this problem (it goes away by itself eventually after several screens), but it may be related to another problem I had with shake screen here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=38029.0

I think about 2 or 3 days ago.

Just in case anyone is interested, Yahtzee has released the special editions of 5 Days (and the rest of the Chzo Mythos) and even 1213 for free on his website.

They all can be found here: http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/donate.htm

Rock Paper Shotgun wrote an article about you: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/16/take-heed/

Congrats. 

Congrats on the release!

And thanks for mentioning my name in the credits, that's very nice of you. 

The difference with Braid (I never played the full version, so I may be wrong) is that it's very non-linear.

If you can't complete a very hard puzzle, you just go onto the next one. If you can't figure out that one, you keep going. That way if you're ever stuck in the game, you don't have to sit there and stay being stuck. You can just go on to the next puzzle.

And anytime you want to come back and solve the earlier puzzles, it's your OWN decision--you're not being forced to be stuck there for hours, and that's one reason why it succeeds, IMO.

I would say the average person no longer has the time to play an adventure game, because so much of it consists of, as Voh said, "figuring out what to do" and most often times failing.

When you only have a limited amount of time to plug in to playing new games, I don't think most people want to spend hours failing and then in the last twenty minutes of their session finally figure out the solution and think back, "man, that was a fun 3 hours I spent wandering around and not accomplishing anything." You want some kind of feedback, some guarantee that the effort you put into something will bring back results. With first-person shooters or RPGs, you know you've progressed and will progress every play session. With adventure games, there's always the potential you can sit down and waste away hours doing nothing.

Of course, this wasn't really a problem as a little kid growing up, where just the very fact of playing a game was enough to be entertained. Today, I think the only market for adventure games would be something casual where you don't play it as you would other games. Maybe pop out a game on your iPhone to play it for twenty mintues when you're bored, and if you can't find the solution, just turn it off and come back later. I don't think people will grab adventure games and boot them up on their computers and devote hours of their time to them in the same way as before.

Great list, Jared.

I think your first point is really critical, particularly in adventure games. Whenever I'm a player I want to feel like the puzzles I'm completing are actually contributing to the game world and story. I don't want them to just exist as independent obstacles that could pop up in any context.

Cool! That code did the trick.

Since it was a scrolling room though, I had to add a GetViewportX() in there for the GetWalkableAreaAt. Everything seems to be working now.

Thanks for the help!

Walk speed is 7 and animation speed is 3.

The walkable area is about 110 pixels in width and 40 pixels high. The character can be stopped directly in the middle of the walkable area and when the smasher falls, he still gets teleported to the closest available walking area.

Doh, I also forgot to say I disable walkable areas when the smashers are down (otherwise the players could walk into them and die when the smashers are stopped). That's probably why he's teleporting, but I don't know how.

This is that code which is also in RepEx:

Code: ags

    if (oSmasherRight.Y < 125) {
    RestoreWalkableArea(2); // 
  }
  if (oSmasherRight.Y >= 125) {
    RemoveWalkableArea(2);
  }
  if (oSmasherLeft.Y < 125) {
    RestoreWalkableArea(3); // 
  }
  if (oSmasherLeft.Y >= 125) {
    RemoveWalkableArea(3);
  }

In a certain section of my game there are multiple cylinder devices dropping from the ceiling that can smash the player. My collision detection consists of detecting if the player is on the region the smasher comes down on, and if the smasher object is below a certain y position. If both are true, I run a "kill char" code.

This sequence works, except it has one odd problem. When the character walks and stops directly below the smasher before it falls, he dies when it comes down. However, if the player walks below the smasher, and then repeatedly clicks to the other side (but fails to make it), the player gets instantly transported to the other side when the smasher falls and the kill code refuses to run.

Here is my code in RepEx:

Code: ags

  if (Region.GetAtRoomXY(player.x, player.y) == region[2] && oSmasherRight.Y > 160 && IsGamePaused() == 0) {
     // if (center7phase == 7) {
       if (player == cDeltaSix) {
        player.StopMoving();
        DieDeltaSix(Maintenance);
        Wait(40);
        }
  }

My Die code is this:

Code: ags

function DieDeltaSix(Death2 param) {
  int animspeed=2;
  player.LockView(VDELTADYING);
    player.Animate(player.Loop, animspeed, eOnce, eBlock);
  //player.LockView(DIE);
  Wait(40);
  Autosave(Load);
  }

Also, the room is a horizontally scrolling room, so I don't know if that may take into effect on it.

[2) Consistency in character mortality]

2) Consistency in character mortality

If a character can die in the game, then any perilous situation can cause death.  Do not let the player roll through the whole game without any consequence in the face of grave danger and then suddenly hit him with a sudden death near the end.  This will lead to players getting complacent in their saving and then getting really pissed when they have to replay a huge portion of the game.  If death is possible, it should be possible from the beginning of the game.

One kink in this is that it's difficult to communicate to the player that the character is mortal and could die in the game before the first time the character actually dies.  You could put a warning right at the start that says "The characters can die in this game, save early, save often." but that breaks the mood and kind of sucks.  I'm not sure the best way to inform the player that death is possible, but one way would be to have several ways for the character to die right near the start of the game, so that when the player discovers the character's mortality, he doesn't need to replay too much.

While I see the merits of this, I think you have to be careful about letting players die early in the game. If the chance for failure is so high in an early scene, players may give up for losing so often and being unable to find the correct solution.

One example I can think of is in Pleurghburg. In that game, I don't think you could die until the very end of the first day. However, at the night scene on the docks I probably died upwards of seven times until I found the correct solution. If that scene was at the very beginning of the game, I may as well just have quit the game in frustration for failing so many times. However, since it was put later in the beginning, I had an incentive to keep trying and figure out more of the story despite my failure.

[was]

I believe you use 'were' when the subject of the sentence is plural (more than one person). You would use 'was' when the subject is singular (a single person).

So, you would say: "John was building a house."
But you wouldn't say: "John, Jessica, Jason, and Jeremy was building a house."
You would use 'were' in that case.

Listen, about that story you're working on, tread carefully.

If it was me (I?), I think I would use a colon or a dash (out of personal preference, I could be wrong!).

"Listen, about that story you're working on: tread carefully."
"Listen, about that story you're working on--tread carefully."

The resolution is 320x200. The problem occurs with and without letterbox mode, as well as with the resolution set at 320x240 (don't know if that's the same thing?).

I tried the workaround with the GUI and that works well. If the problem can't be fixed, this alternative would suffice.

Bump for help please.

Also: I forgot to mention the one room I use ShakeScreen() with Tint also happens to be a vertical scrolling room. I don't know if that would have an effect on it.

Yes, I think it's related to ShakeScreen as well, but the problem is I'm not using ShakeScreen during this particular Tint command. In one instance during the game I do use them both simultaneously, but I don't see how that can affect all the other Tint commands in other portions of the game.