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The Last Express is a game I remember reading about as a kid, forgetting about as a teenager and remembering and wanting as a twenty-something.

It's notoriously hard to track down, like many older games, however it is now happily available from DotEmu, so I thought I'd share in case there were others out there like myself who found themselves interested in the game but not in possession of a copy.

I've yet to get a copy, but am quite thrilled to see another well loved classic finally easily available for purchase.

After months of discussions and saying "We should totally do an Australian Mittens" I have finally booked my plane tickets just several hours ago to fly to Melbourne on the 22nd of October and catch up with Xenogia in what will be possibly the first ever Australian AGS meetup of 2 people from other sides of the continent.

Yes, I know, it's 2 people - slightly less than the usual Mittens count - but come on people! Australian AGSers! Meeting up! It's going to actually happen

Those of you who've been following Dr. Tim Langdell's (or as I like to think of him "The Enemy") infuriating activities may be interested to read the following:

http://gamepolitics.com/2010/10/07/edge-games-stripped-trademarks-could-face-fraud-charges

It seems that maybe he's finally met his match. I am sure I'm not the only one that hopes this is the absolute last stunt Tim Langdell ever tries to pull.

[Astro Galaxy Mega Quest VIIII: The Half Moon of Ray'don, Chapter 008.52 - Sci/Psy/Psi/SighBots of the Past (Historical Simulation Series) Editor's Choice Edition]

Astro Galaxy Mega Quest VIIII: The Half Moon of Ray'don, Chapter 008.52 - Sci/Psy/Psi/SighBots of the Past (Historical Simulation Series) Editor's Choice Edition



This was built months ago but it never got released. So now I am releasing it.

Take control of the Master Chef and, with the help of his lovely sidekick, brave danger and certain death in order to make your way into a base on a planet far from your home! Left click interacts, right click looks.

This game was designed to recapture the feeling I got when playing classic Sierra adventures as a kid (and still get!). Characters graphics by AngelicCharon. Music by funkmast. Assistance in various ways including writing by kaputtnik. The rest by me.

Please note: You can die in this game, so make sure you save!

Download

Because somebody had to take the joke too far



Life partner Ray has gone to play adventure games and Oceanspirit Dennis must win his love back by starring in an adventure game of his own!

Dennis hatched from an egg laid by Snake, was given backstory by ddq, listens to music by Sebastian and dances like a puppet to my whims.

DOWNLOAD!

Also there is some source code for anyone who might want it.

Brought to you by Square Peniks.

[IN YOUR BROWSER]

I've been called many things.

But this city calls me...

Oceanspirit Dennis: Scourge of the Underworld.

You can now choose to play it in 2 ways!

#1. You can be MODERN and play it IN YOUR BROWSER thanks to the silvery light of XAGE  :o :o :o

#2. You can be old fashioned and play it on your personal computer via an .exe that you can: DOWNLOAD!

#3. THIRD BONUS OPTION: Download the source code!

Written by Drew Wellman (not that he realized it), music by Sebastian Pfaller, everything else by meeee.

Spoiler

please don't download this if you can't take a silly joke

[close]

EDIT: Fixed, it should be finishable now...

Sorry for being a pain but I've started getting this regularly on the forums:



I've just been ignoring it and clicking cancel and it seems to work fine - but I looked for other threads pointing this out and couldn't find one.

Ignore me if you're on top of it 

Eternally Us is a tale of love, life and friendship. It was built by Leafshade and I for the April MAGS competition, with the help of some fine voice acting folk and the testing advice of Sebastian.

We hope you enjoy.

Download

Trailer.

I know Andail has been discussing background illustration issues in a recent thread, and don't want to feel like I am infringing upon this, but I have had a number of requests from people in various places asking how I draw my backgrounds, and so in order to avoid doing up new tutorials each time I have decided to post something here as a more permanent reference for those interested in such a thing.

Before I go into any details, please be aware that I am not a trained artist and my techniques can be regarded as being full of bad habits. That being said, however, I do not believe that it is essential to study for years and years in order to simply make some nice backgrounds for one of your projects. What advice, if any, you choose to take from this guide is up to you, but be warned that some of the things I suggest may be "bad" advice when considered from the viewpoint of one who is familiar with more traditional painting techniques.

Before we start, let's have a quick look at the background I've painted quickly in order to demonstrate the steps I use:



As this was simply done for an example image, I didn't worry too much about the following, but these are important things to consider before you start drawing your background:

- Where are my exits, and how many are there?
- What items, objects, characters and hotspots am I going to need to fit into this background?
- What sort of atmosphere is my setting designed to evoke?

Also, a quick discussion on hardware/software:

- Make sure your monitor is calibrated properly with the colours. If you use Photoshop, Adobe Gamma is rather good at getting good colour settings for your screen.
- Whilst it can be done with a mouse, this sort of thing is much easier with a tablet. I use a little A5 Wacom tablet - not too expensive for my little needs and big enough to sit comfortably on my lap. Pressure sensitivity and smoother line control is really helpful for painting your scenes.
- For backgrounds, a good choice of program is Photoshop. Because full Photoshop is so expensive, I use Photoshop Elements 8 - not only did I buy it for about 1/10th the price of CS4, it still has all the stuff I use (although I never really use much more than the brush and eraser tools) and isn't filled up with expensive filters and the like that I will simply never use anyway. Other alternatives include Paint Shop Pro and Painter. GIMP is a good free alternative if you simply cannot afford these programs.

And on a technique related note:

A lot of the things I do here are things I developed whilst doing pixel based backgrounds. I learnt a lot about things like atmospheric perspective and choosing interesting palettes by learning "pixelart" for a while. Playing around with colour palettes to see what works well is really beneficial to creating eye catching backgrounds, and learning to simplify your work with pixels can also speed up the way you work with brushes a good deal. It is not essential to learn these things, but it can help.

With regards to layers... I try not to use too many, and if I do end up using a few I always merge them whenever possible. Painting with lots of layers is easy, but not really all that necessary, and I often find I work slower when I try using lots of layers because I spend more time switching between them and trying to keep them organised. If you can paint your backgrounds on 1-5 layers then it will be a lot more manageable - and whilst layers make erasing things easy, I don't find it that hard to paint over things instead anyway.

With those things in mind, let's take a quick look at each stage I use to create a scene:



The first step I use is to establish the main hue of the background. For an outside background this is often the sky, for an inside background it is the primary lightsource. Also, I draw my backgrounds at twice the resolution of the final image, and resize once I have finished drawing it.

For the sky, I use a gradient. Skies that are a flat colour work as well, but appear much less interesting and more flat. As Andail mentioned in his guide, the atmosphere is lighter towards the horizon and darker away from it.

I also copy in a 200% zoomed image of the main character sprite before I draw any structures on a seperate layer. This is a good reference point to ensure that none of your doors/chairs/tables etc look out of proportion with your main character when she/he is walking around. I always try to avoid character scaling, as it tends to look quite awful at the resolution I use for games.



The next step is to draw in the playable areas. This is the areas in which the player can move her/his character around and interact with objects. Using the reference sprite, I draw silhouettes of everything using a dark, desaturated colour. I try to avoid black as I feel dark purple/blue/green/red looks nicer, but it is all down to personal preference.



The next step is to introduce secondary lightsources. These provide some nice variation of hue throughout the scene.

To create these, I usually use a couple of layers - first I draw the white shape with a hard edged brush, then I either trace the first shape again in white with a softer edged brush or copy it to a new layer and use gaussian blur to soften the edges. Then, in a layer below this, I use draw the colour of the light with a softer edged brush. This creates a fairly nice feeling of glow.



The next step is to give some depth and form to the shapes we have drawn in silhouette. Here I use a brush at low opacity to highlight the areas that are facing the appropriate direction. You can do this with either a soft edged brush or a hard edged brush. Often I use both, but for the sake of speed I have used a hard edged brush here.

Learning to colour pick and use the opacity of your brush to blend colours is very helpful here, and is something well worth practising.



Now I add the secondary lighting to the scene, using similar techniques to the previous step. Try to balance this so that the secondary lightsources don't look too strong or weak - doing it on a separate layer and adjusting the transparency of this layer is one way of getting the right setting. Doing this gives you some great opportunities to light places that would otherwise remain in shadow, so run with it!



Finally, I add in some background detail. Although I am often tempted by the simplicity of simply drawing buildings as rectangles facing dead on, it is much nicer to rotate them a bit and have some nice angles in the background.

In order to make these buildings look further away I simply rely on atmospheric perspective. The buildings you see here are painted with a translucent brush, allowing the sky colour to show through, giving the appearance of atmosphere in front of these buildings. The more transparent the brush, the further away the buildings look. Simple, no?

From here, all that remains is the process of cleaning up your messy brushstrokes and adding in details and textures. With this done you can resize the image and import it into your game!


If you have comments/questions/criticism or something else to add to the discussion, I am certainly open to it, and look forward to seeing your thoughts. I hope this gives some insight to those who have been inquiring about the way I draw this style of background.

That fiendish Count Can't has gone and taken the town's monument for his evil purposes! The town's mayor has assigned !, Robot to the case - lend him your mind and your heart as you use your left mouse button to solve riddles and get the bad guy!

This short and silly game was made possible with the help of the following people:

Sebastian Pfaller, musician, advisor, tester and all around source of additional creativity.

Chris Jones, creator of the AGS engine - the solid and wonderful foundation that we've desecrated with this nonsense

Sylvr, who was there when I originally came up with this concept more than half a year ago, and demanded I make a game from it.

Monkey_05_06 who taught me some cool scripting without too much nagging on my behalf.

Peder Johnsen, whose webspace I soil with the presence of my games without even giving him any money.

David Pfaller, who programmed !,Robot's voice during the rap battle.

Get the game here!

[In the fight against the machines, featherweights play a minor role - scouting, recon and spying. Considered as mere data collectorsrather than true warriors, they're untrained in combat and ill equipped for any encounters with the enemy. However, when Thadd, a youngfeatherweight, sees a fellow featherweight captured by the enemy and taken to their base, he decides that he will sneak into theircompound and help her escape - even if he has to do it all by himself.Using your left mouse button (Walk, interact, select items) and your right mouse button (look, deselect items), guide Thadd in his daringattempt to break his fellow featherweight free!Get the game here!]

I've been saving post #1337 for something special, and here she is 8)



In the fight against the machines, featherweights play a minor role - scouting, recon and spying. Considered as mere data collectors
rather than true warriors, they're untrained in combat and ill equipped for any encounters with the enemy. However, when Thadd, a young
featherweight, sees a fellow featherweight captured by the enemy and taken to their base, he decides that he will sneak into their
compound and help her escape - even if he has to do it all by himself.

Using your left mouse button (Walk, interact, select items) and your right mouse button (look, deselect items), guide Thadd in his daring
attempt to break his fellow featherweight free!

Get the game here!



The following people have as much thanks as I can possibly give for their help:

Sebastian, for being a creative powerhouse of sounds and music and really helping me shape the game.

Ryan Timothy, not only for testing and saying nice things about the game, but also for redoing my OverPlayerTranslucency function to be thrice as nice with that fading effect! (and also for putting up with me spouting rubbish on MSN at all hours of the night/morning)

Abstauber, Arj0n, Bicilotti and Crimson Wizard, who were fine testers indeed, and called me out on tons of little glitches!

Khris, who jumped in and answered one of my questions in the beginner's tech thread when I was frustrated!

monkey_05_06, for being patient and dedicated to getting those right clicks working perfectly in that inventory!

Funkmast, whose credits tune actually forces me to dance, even if I don't want to!!!

Peder Johnsen, who hosts my files without me even having to ask! (but I usually still do! )

Chris Jones, for the most incredible engine I've used!

And you, fine people, for playing my other games, saying nice things about them, showing me where I've made mistakes and keeping me encouraged.

I hope you enjoy!

[Voting Categories]

For this activity, I ask you to present us with your impression of the topic 'Ruins'.

Do feel free to take this in any way you wish; I am hoping to see everything from the crumbling remains of an ancient city or temple to the shattered shell of a crashed spaceship in a crater.

Please have your entries in by November 23rd, as I will be asking for votes after this date.

Please also keep in mind that your background should be AGS compatible - in other words, minimum resolution of 320x200.

Voting Categories I've taken the liberty of stealing these from Misj'

Idea: Was it an original/creative interpretation of the theme?
Atmosphere: Was an interesting world created? - Did the scene evoke a feeling?
Design: How well the individual elements are designed, from clouds to doorknobs.
Composition: How well the elements are combined to create a pleasing whole, and lead the viewer to the points of interest.
Functionality: How well it would work as a background, with clearly defined entries and walkable areas, as well as a good viewing angle (this also includes introductionary shots of an area as long as a player character can be present in the scene).
Technique: How well it's rendered (within the chosen style!), in no way meaning the more elaborate the better.[/u]

Be creative, and I hope to see some inspiring entries!

I haven't really done much playing around with GUIs, and today I finally got around to building the GUI for a game and thus have 2 little non urgent questions:

1. I'm not quite sure how, but I want to make it so that when over the inventory with the mouse mode as eModeUseInv a right click deselects instead of looking. I've thought about maybe trying to tie the on_mouse_click function to the repeatedly_execute_always function but can't think of how and am sure this is not the correct manner to approach it in. Any thoughts?

2. I've put in a GUI.GetAtScreenXY function. Usually I'd write a GetAtScreenXY (ie, for a character) function like:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{
  if (GUI.GetAtScreenXY != gInventory)
  {
    gInventory.Visible = false;
  }
}

But this doesn't seem to work with a gui, and I had to jump into the manual which suggested I do this:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{
  GUI *theGui = GUI.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y);
  {
  if (theGui != gInventory)
    {
      gInventory.Visible = false;
    }
  }
}

This is no problem - it does exactly what I want, however I'd like to know why I can't use the other method (if anyone knows) and what purpose the GUI *theGui (this seems to be setting a variable?) serves.

Thanks for your help

[Alien City!]

For this fortnight's Background Blitz, I'd like to see you draw an:

Alien City!

Strangely shaped buildings, possibly even an odd coloured sky... let your creativity run wild! Note that by definition 'alien' means unusual, not something out of a science fiction film, so you needn't create a science fiction inspired design if you don't wish - it merely has to be strange.

The background must be AGS compatible.

Voting will begin on the 25th of October - I hope to see some cool entries!  

Fadi has been given permission to visit his Aunt Sylvia for the day - but Auntie Sylvia has a problem, and would like some help fixing it.
Join Fadi on a snack sized adventure through a colourful world that is host to a bunch of even more colourful characters!

I've been wanting to make a short one room adventure game all year, and have been distracted twice already, so this time I forced myself to not be so distracted (and I needed a break from my bigger project).

The game's page is here - I hope you enjoy

[Theme:]

Theme: One of my favourite things about arcade style fighting games as a kid was working out how to do each character's signature moves. I want you to create an animation of a brand new signature fighting move for this (or your own) character sprite!

Rules:
- Your animation must follow the theme above.
- No size, colour or frame limits.
- You may animate the supplied sprite, modify and animate the supplied sprite or draw and animate your own sprite.
- All entries must be posted in this thread by the deadline below.
- The host of the competition will judge the winner.

Supplied Sprite:



For those of you who like to use layers, I've added a second version of the sprite with the body and arms ready for adding in to seperate layers. Remember you don't have to use this sprite, you can draw your own!

Deadline:
All entries must be in by the 2nd of September!

Remember that a signature move can be as simple as shooting laser beams from the eyes or poking someone in the eye, so don't stress if you have trouble producing an animation; all entries are welcome!

Hello once again, all.

I'm sure you're quite tired of my seemingly endless string of "please help me draw  " threads, however after learning a bit and putting it into use in my last thread of this nature, I am once again keen to learn some more - thus I have returned.

My hope this time is to improve my ability at drawing cities. Whilst I learnt a lot doing the last thread on tablet based digital graphics, it was primarily with organic shapes. I still find myself quite dissatisfied with the way that buildings and the like turn out when I draw them, so I've done a couple of example illustrations in the hope that some of you can help point me in the right direction. I've kept them fairly rough (as there seems little sense in refining details when composition as a whole can be improved first):




It probably comes as no surprise to those who are moderately familiar with my graphics in the past that I've opted to use strange, science fiction settings for these two. I do plan to do more than just this setting, however it is the one I am most comfortable with, so it seems a good starting point. The strange forms are closer to organic ones, meaning I am more comfortable shading them, and the large array of lights and colours keeps me interested in drawing the image.

A couple of points that strike me as needing improvement before I go ahead and hit that 'post' button:

- I have trouble using the composition techniques I learnt when doing natural backgrounds in man made backgrounds. Perhaps I need to warp building a little to help frame the images better?

- Possibly too many light sources?

- The horizon in the pink image is a little off, and makes the foreground look as though it is sloping downhill.

I appreciate your time and any advice you may have to bestow upon me!

[An encounter with a strange spirit and an even stranger fly leave a traveler with questions about purpose, fate and the source. Follow this traveler as they seek to find something more from their life and find their true purpose.Download now!]

An encounter with a strange spirit and an even stranger fly leave a traveler with questions about purpose, fate and the source.

Follow this traveler as they seek to find something more from their life and find their true purpose.

Download now!


The following people have my sincere thanks for various reasons:

Sebastian Pfaller, for putting up with my erratic game creation habits and always being willing to make music.

Arj0n and monkey_05_06 for testing the game and giving me lots of feedback and useful suggestions about how I could improve the game.

loominous, Misj' and TheJBurger, for various pieces of advice, both big and small, that helped me make this game.

Peder Johnsen, for keeping me motivated and hosting my games.

Chris Jones, for his most wonderful engine.

And lastly, but not leastly, everyone who followed me on this experiment. I really do appreciate it.

Hi all

I've noticed something in AGS 3.12 (well, 3.1.2.81) that I thought was something I was doing wrong, but I cannot seem to find a fix for it.

When I have a character facing a certain way (I've only noticed it when the character is facing left, but I may be incorrect here) and they begin talking at certain times, the direction they face seems to change to the 'down' direction, then flick back to the 'left' direction when they are no longer talking. I had this problem in Shifter's Box and am starting to have it again. Is there something new in 3.12 I have missed, or is this unexpected behaviour?

If need be, I am happy to upload a file with this issue so you can see for yourself .

Cheers