Topics

I suddenly looked at my desk tonight and realized how cluttered and filthy it was, so I decided to take a photo.



Here you can see the bubble mix, lego, bouncy, squishy, slimy and stretchy things, and various other assorted garbage that I've collected over the years. I got the desk itself for free way before I started making games - which was when I last gave it a fresh coat of paint, if you can't tell. It's been my game making desk through 3 different houses and lord knows how many projects.

Be kinda rad to see other people's game making stations, too...

Dreamfall fans: Yes, it's been a long time since any word has been mentioned about Dreamfall since The Secret World, but with this tweet from Ragnar Tørnquist comes this article.

The followup is in the works.

How pleasing!

He is the Spaceman!

He is in Space!

Made with Grundislav for Mags October 2012.

Play it now!

Click here to listen and enjoy to your favourite podcast about blue cups:

Episode 1: Animation, The Dig, Metal Dead.

Episode 2: Backgrounds, Project Nomads, Ico.

Episode 3: Remakes, E3, Journey, Botanicula.

Episode 4: Vince Twelve, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, inFAMOUS 2.

Episode 5: Designing & Writing, The Walking Dead Episode 1, Br�tal Legend.

Episode 6: Boss Battles, Killzone 2, Rayman Origins.

Episode 7: Introductions, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Tiny Bang Story.

Case 8: Releasing Your Game!

Episode? NEIN!: Starting a New Project

Episode 10: 2013! The Morales Paradox! PETER GABRIEL!

Episode 11: Art direction! Full Throttle is good!

Episode 12: Deadlines! OROW! Magic Potions! Friendship!

Episode 13: Top Scores! Game music!

Episode 14: OROW Games! Dialogue! Silliness!

Episode 15: Consequence! Multiple endings! *SPOILERS*!

Episode 16: Companion characters! Friendship and shit like that.

Episode 17: Atmosphere and other environmental concerns.

Episode 18: Grundislav is a cat.

Episode 19: Is this even a podcast?

Episode 19.5: Top Scores 2!

Episode 20: Podcats.

Episode 21: Objectives in games etc

Episode 22: Assorted remakes, hello Joel

Episode 23: Interface discussions, etc

Episode 24: Halloween! Spooooky!

Episode 25: Schedules! Other rambly crap!

Episode 26: Robert A Williams!!!

Top Scores #3!

Epissode 27: Anatoly.

Epissode 28: Development workflow!

Epissode 29: On game types

THIRTY: BALLS (teamwork)

Episode 31: Dave Gilbert!

Episode 32: Testing & Feedback

Episode 33:

Episode 34: DANE KRAMS

Episode 35: Censorship, privacy, taboos etc

Episode 36: Vegemite and paint flavoured tea

Episode 37: Vince Twelve again!

Episode 38: Work environment.

Episode 39: Cutting the fat.

Episode 40: GDC

Episode 41: Animation #2

Episode 42: Music

Episode 43: Backgrounds again

Episode 44: Andail

Episode 45: Sex Tapes Voice Acting

Episode 46: Beta testing/feedback

Episode 47: I honestly don't even remember it was so long ago D:

Episode 48: Designing a story specifically for a game.

Episode 49: Coding!

Episode 50: Talking Adventure with Richard Cobbett.

Episode 51: It's the fifty first episode, yes it is!

Episode 52: Learning!

Episode 53: Hello again, Dave Gilbert!

Episode 54: The mailbag

Episode 55: Development pitfalls

Episode 56: Regrets & Things we'd do differently

Episode 57: Making games - as a set of skills.

Episode 58: Crisis in games as a plot motivator.

Episode 59: Dave Gilbert returns!

Episode 60: Context.

Episode 61: Pacing in design & writing.

Episode 62: AdventureX

Episode 63: THE YEAR IT FLOODED

Episode 64: Imposter Syndrome

Episode 65: Remakes

Episode 66: Design without words

Episode 67: Narration and Minigames

Episode 68: GDC 2015

Episode 69: Thinking about other genres

Episode 70: Promoting your game

Episode 71: Changes midway through production

Episode 72: NOW YOU HAVE RUINED IT

Episode 73: Stepping out

Episode 74: Length and pacing

Episode 75: Endings

Episode 76: Look, are you going to give me a choice here?

Episode 77: Being "Fun" vs being "Interesting"

Episode 78: I wonder when Francisco will realize the first post has had Comic Sans as the font for months now

Episode 79: DIE

Episode 80: Trappings of the genre

Episode 81: A T 1

Episode 82: A T M O S F E A R

Hello, AGS community. How are you? That's good. What have you been up to? I don't know anymore because you never tell me!

It's time to change this!

It has been a whole darn year since the last Release Something and that means it's time to show us what you've all been working on! Post screenshots, animations, game demos, tech demos, rolling demos, voice demos, code modules, game music, I don't care what it is, but show us!

Show a sneaky screenshot of that super secret AGS game you've been making but don't want to do a GiP thread for. We're curious! Making a game that's not in AGS and so don't want to post it because you're too polite? Post it here! Just learning to draw and you're starting to create some game assets? Show us!

We love you, AGSers. You have until the end of June.

Release something.

Whether or not you're sick of the idea of Bundles, here is an excellent chance to get your hands on a heap of adventure games for a paltry sum of cash.

The Bundle in a Box is an indie adventure game bundle (with one interactive fiction game as well) and is your chance to get Gemini Rue, Time Gentlemen, Please!, The Shivah, Metal Dead and more for one of those crazy low bundle prices.

Seeing as how I've been meaning to get Metal Dead but keep putting it off, I'm totally nabbing one of these

[Moira is tired. The nightmares won't go away no matter how much she drinks, and she has drank enough that she can't even remember why they started anymore (oooh).On top of this, one of her clients has died before he settled his account (on purpose).She may have forgotten everything else, but she's not about to forget this. The debt will be collected, even if it kills her (it does).There are, however, those who remember that which she does not, and they're about to remind her (spoiler).Sometimes the things that wake us up sweating and terrified are more real than we thought (oooh again).]

A few months ago I talked to m0ds about his Summerbatch idea, and said that if I had time before the event I'd do my best to enter a game. I finally found some free time the last few weeks, and so myself, qptain_Nemo and Kenneth Hyde (The Falling Skywards team, don't you know!?) have been putting together... this...



Moira is tired. The nightmares won't go away no matter how much she drinks, and she has drank enough that she can't even remember why they started anymore (oooh).

On top of this, one of her clients has died before he settled his account (on purpose).

She may have forgotten everything else, but she's not about to forget this. The debt will be collected, even if it kills her (it does).

There are, however, those who remember that which she does not, and they're about to remind her (spoiler).

Sometimes the things that wake us up sweating and terrified are more real than we thought (oooh again).



PISS will have bad language, way too much writing, way too few and easy puzzles, might not get done in time (though fingers crossed!), if it does get done in time you will probably have to pay a tiny bit of money to play it and even if that hasn't put you off the game yet, we had the audacity to call it PISS.

Pretty sure I couldn't sell a game any worse than that... 

In saying that, I've drawn 6 rooms and 13 characters (which is about half the game) and am pushing the writing and gameplay so that I can have the first part kinda playable in the next few days, which all means: Progress is good!

<3 Ben



omg I did a little developer diary with thoughts about designing interesting scenes here!

And I've done a neeeew developer diary, this time about character design! 

And hey, look here, I've gone and started a development journal!

When the meteor hit, huge chunks of the earth were launched into the Earth's atmosphere. Now, high above the ground, where the air is thin and gravity weaker, there are whole cities, shattered and orbiting the planet.

Some see opportunity here and fly up in pairs - as one waits for the other in their aircraft, the partner searches through these broken midair wastelands for treasures that can be flown back down to people below, where the world is still recovering from the catastrophe, for a fair profit.

But these airborne cities are desolate and empty, devoid of life, for the air up here is too thin to support mammals without respiration equipment.

...right?

Falling Skywards

Also! For those of you who want to watch someone else play the game and hear me discussing various things in the game, you may now find a video of this right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXMXJjBi2Ww. I sound sleepy and Australian but had a lot of fun doing this with WHAM, so hopefully some others will enjoy it too!

Julian has been turned into a werebunny and is quite cross about this! His human abilities have been replaced with only animal instincts!

Bite, headbutt and shout your way through this short game as Julian in order to find a way to change back!


A game by me, with music and help from Sebastian Pfaller.

Download!

OceanSpirit Dennis has finally made his way out of the uterus dimension he was so cunningly trapped in! But being in the uterus dimension has left him vaginified! OceanSpirit Dennis must obtain the help of some mysterious and powerful ladies in order to LOSER HIS VAGINITY!

Pictures and puzzles by me, music by Nemo, writing by both of us.

FIGHTS!!!!

Soundtrack links are here and here.

Source goes up once enough people have played that I'm certain there's no bugs.

[This is a doughnut that is part of the AGS Bake Sale project.]

When the meteor hit, huge chunks of the earth were launched into the Earth's atmosphere. Now, high above the ground, where the air is thin and gravity weaker, there are whole cities, shattered and orbiting the planet.

Some see opportunity here and fly up in pairs - as one waits for the other in their aircraft, the partner searches through these broken midair wastelands for treasures that can be flown back down to people below, where the world is still recovering from the catastrophe, for a fair profit.

But these airborne cities are desolate and empty, devoid of life, for the air up here is too thin to support mammals without respiration equipment.

...right?

This is a doughnut that is part of the AGS Bake Sale project.

In order to beat Karen, Dennis must learn a powerful new ability. The scrolls told that he would find the ability to do this here, and so he has traveled in order to learn the magic he requires to overcome Karen in battle.

FIGHTS!

Drawn and built by me with music and additional writing by qptain Nemo

It's an OSD game and that means: Source code!

I saw this on Twitter the other day, and felt it'd be appreciated by many here:

http://neurotech.imgur.com/

It's an imgur album of backgrounds from those old LucasArts adventure games that so many people here have loved over the years. There's hundreds of scenes taken from the games here, some truly inspiring artwork.

Hello!

What I would like to do is to capture the contents of a background, and then use this image as the graphic for an object in a seperate room.

I decided that an effective method of doing this would be to assign a graphic to a frame in a view, and then set the object's view to the same frame as the dynamic sprite.

I have written this piece of code to achieve this:

Code: ags

  DynamicSprite* tag = DynamicSprite.CreateFromBackground();
  tag.Resize(48, 32);
  ViewFrame *frame = Game.GetViewFrame(VSTATION, 4, 0);
  frame.Graphic = tag.Graphic;

I get this error, sadly:

---------------------------
Adventure Game Studio
---------------------------
An internal error has occurred. Please note down the following information.
If the problem persists, post the details on the AGS Technical Forum.
(ACI version 3.12.1074)

Error: There was an error drawing object 6. Its current sprite, 335, is invalid.

---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

I have checked that the frame and view correspond, and they do seem to. Is there something I have missed?

[Update:]

Icey/Studio3 recently mentioned his idea of "AGS E3", and whilst it may appear foolish to try and copy this aspect of the AAA game design scene, I think it would be cute and positive if we *did* have an event where we could showcase our stuff - unfinished projects, demos, screenshots, trailers... or even knuckle down and tie up those last few loose ends we've been putting off doing for months and actually finishing that game we've all had sitting around forever waiting to be done.

We used to have these under the guise of a "Release Something", and while I never participated, they were great fun, it's amazing to see all the different members of the community showcase little parts of their projects. I think having a date, an event in which you know people will be interested in this sort of thing and all your buddies will be doing it, really motivates one to tidy something up for people to look at it. And, if nothing else, it gives you somewhere to finally show off those couple of screenshots that you know aren't going to be in a game anymore, but you spent hours working on and might as well do *something* with, even if it does just mean posting them for people to go "oooh, I wish that was a game!" over.

As far as I can tell, the last Release Something was February 2009. We had something a little in the vein of this last year in May when ProgZmax set the mags topic to "Release Your Game" and the comp was clearly a great success - 6 entries in a MAGS comp is a great showing by anybody's standard, so the interest is clearly there.

That was over a year ago - perhaps it's time for another release something?

(sorry if this is in the wrong board)

Update:

With no objections having arisen, I'm going to go and set the deadline for this activity as the 10th of July. You have one month to polish up your games/tech demos/demos/prototypes/vertical slices for release! Keep the sweet stuff rolling in guys, it's awesome to see!

Othello, Vani and Edme have finally reached the long forgotten treasure room of the Emperor Kemal.

Loaded with relics, it seems they have finally obtained the goal they've been chasing.

...or have they?

This was made for the May 2011 MAGS competition.

Special thanks to qptain Nemo for his assistance with music and testing! We didn't get time to do a full beta test, so when you encounter bugs please let me know

Go to the game's page!

[idItem[7];]

Hello  

In a flash of brilliantly inspired bad game design, I'd like to force users to look at their items before they're allowed to use them. I decided I could do this with a simple boolean flag of identified (there may be an easier way, but I only have 7 items ) but I am having a little bit of trouble getting it to work.

What I'd like to do is have a global array like idItem[7]; and use it to check which item I am using and whether it has been identified with something like:

Code: ags

function ItemCheck()
{
  if (idItem[player.ActiveInventory.ID] == true)
  {
    Identified = true;
  }
  else Identified = false;
}

Sadly, when I have this script in my game, I get a strange error stating "Unresolved import" without telling me a specific line. Commenting this line out allows me to run the game without getting the error, so I am certain it is this bit.

I've checked the import script in the script header follows the import bool idItem[7]; formatting, so I'd really love some help to show me what I am doing wrong.

Cheers!

Edit: Ok, so after posting this I thought "Hang on, why do I have the ItemCheck in the room script, shifted it to the global script and imported that instead of the idItem array and now of course it works fine. Sorry for wasting your time 

My apologies if this has been mentioned before, but I don't recall it being brought up!

I had my attention drawn to the Residual project this afternoon; what it appears to be is a project similar in nature to ScummVM, but for the GrimE engine.

Considering how little luck I've had getting Grim Fandango to run on anything that isn't a Windows 98 machine, I find this very exciting news! Apparently the project status is up to "completable with a few minor glitches".

The project's site is here!

My first GiP thread ever woo 



Having no luck getting the local government to deal with the threat of the Airwave Radio station being demolished, local disc jockey Elodie Major makes up her mind to travel to Eda City to meet with the people responsible for the sale of the property to see if she can organize some form of arrangement, suspecting some foul play in the matter.

With the help of some friends - both new and old - Elodie must use her wits and resolve to get to the bottom of the matter and take on the threat before the station is lost.


Status: It's been a while since I worked on this due to computer troubles and a busy life in general, but I've got a new computer and possibly my weekends back to myself, so I hope to push forward and get the next chapter built. After much deliberation I've worked the chapter plot into a shape that I am finally satisfied with, and am currently focusing on puzzle design and some graphics here and there.

Release date: 2011

Elodie Major has been running a little indie radio station called Airwave Radio with her friend Zak for 5 years now, and they've manage to win a strong following amongst the people of the small town of Wave.

Recently, however, they've found themselves under pressure from mainstream record labels to play their music, and have resisted quite forcefully, but they haven't seen an end to this attempted interference just yet...

This is the first part in the ~airwave~ series of games.



As usual, I have a ton of people to thank:

Sebastian, David and Miranda, who made my strange little dream of having a full radio show in the game come true - and so much better than I expected it to be. When I envisioned doing a radio show for a game, I never thought it'd be anywhere *near* as good as this, and I am totally awestruck that I'm allowed to have such a cool thing in one of my games.

Sebastian once again, for putting up with my craziness and mood swings, for putting together and hosting a radio show despite being super busy with everything else, and for his input in the design and writing departments which was most valuable.

Calin Leaftummy for putting together sounds, testing, listening to me moan about basically everything and cuddles.

Ryan Timothy and Arj0n, for their bug finding efforts once again - I'm sure they're sick of me by now

Chris Jones once again, for his lovely engine.

And, of course, everyone who I annoyed whilst making this game, which was no doubt a whole bunch of you. Sorry 

You can get the game here!