Messages

Ummm...That's great, except the email addie doesn't work. I've tried it twice and got a delivery error both times...Maybe you can check that it is working?

   

SSH- Yeah, I'm sorry about that. People have noted it to me before, and they and you are right. My excuse/reason is thus:

1) This is my first game, so I was bound to make at least ONE freshman mistake...
2) Because this game is rendered in 3D, the door in the 3D space that I had modeled was over on the left. So to me it seemed obvious, simply because I'd spent all that time rendering it and I knew the rooms like the back of my hand. It never occured to me that what was a given to me because I knew the room, would NOT be a given to anyone else...

...does that make sense?

I *think* (knock on wood) that that is the only room that does that to you...the rest of the game SHOULD be smooth sailing (knock on wood.)

Anyway, I'm glad you are enjoying it, though! Please let me know if you find any other rooms that are hard to understand like that! I might release a version 1.2... 

T_ed89- Hopefully you were playing version 1.1? If so, and you were still having bug problems, please let me know. I might try to port it up again to the latest AGS, as those bugs are NOT from me, they are AGS bugs.

Glad you enjoyed it though! Spread the word! It's awards season! And I wanna make a sequel!!!



Please, if anyone else is having bugs happen in version 1.1, let me know. I need to know if I should make yet another port up to a newer AGS.

Talk laters,
Trisk

[Best Game]

The link to the game is at the bottom!

I'd like to submit my game, Prodigal, for:

Best Game
I worked hard, and the combination of story, puzzles, music, sound, and atmosphere all create the game's world in a way that is uncommon for any game.

Best Gameplay
Prodigal's story and atmosphere will keep you glued to your monitor to see what is around the next corner, and what will happen next in the story!

Best Puzzles
Balancing puzzles in an adventure game can be difficult. It is all too easy to end up with utter nonsense like many Lucasarts games, and also very easy to make them too obvious like Resident Evil. Prodigal has a good blend of challenge and logic to all its puzzles.

Best Documentation
Hey, how many games include a walkthrough? I didn't want anyone to quit playing because they were frustrated.

Best Story
Prodigal's story is awesome! If you haven't played it all the way through the credits, you haven't seen the last of it! The shocker ending is unforgettable!

Best Background Art
3D gives the ability to have animated backgrounds like no other. From the green lightning shining off the Ela portals, to the murky reflections in the oily water, I'm proud of Prodigal's backgrounds.

Best Music
Prodigal's background tracks defy simple definition. Are they music? Sonic disturbance? Also, the tracks by Peter Thomas, and the credit track by goth rock band Shadowplay make Prodigal's soundtrack professional like no other!

Best Non-player character
Mike. Just go play the game and see why!

Best Character Art
Edgar Rocha's many closup drawings of Prodigal's characters give them a life and depth that is hard to achieve.

Best Use of Sound
So spooky! Prodigal regularly uses every available audio channel that AGS has! Play it at night with the lights off and the sound turned up!

Best Dialogue Writing
Touched up by lgm, and passed back and forth between four other people, Prodigal's dialogue took a long time to write.

Steph-

You are revealing end of the game spoilers in normal text and hiding bug reports?!? What is wrong with this picture??? I've already reported to the moderators asking them to hide or delete your post!

Spoiler

The ending is "To be continued," which you should know if you watched it all the way through to completion. Things are in dire straights, but this is part one of a 3 part story!

[close]

As for your comments on the bug, that is an AGS thing. The only thing you can try is to hit CTRL-J to activate no-clipping mode, then try to walk onto a walkable area and turn no-clipping back off. No-clipping mode is NOT supported by me, however, as you can easily break the game with the cheat.

Dan-

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you had fun, and it makes all the hard work worthwhile! You aren't the first person to have that opinion about that puzzle. Some people seemed to get it right away, and some people were really confused by it. I tried to make it as thoroughly clear as I could in the game text where you should look, and the positive search area is actually huge all around the torch...I'm not sure what else I could've done. Perhaps like you said, a warmer colder system...but in my (extremely) limited understanding of metal detectors, they just beep when they're over metal...

Actually, this is sort of another relic from a cut puzzle system. You were originally going to use the metal detector to find bullets all over the place in every room, to prepare for the shooter section of the game. (see the shooter I uploaded to my website, prodigal.lilgryphmaster.com, for more information about this.) When this shooter section got cut, I nearly cut the metal detector too, but decided it would make an interesting puzzle on its own...

Tzupy-

I'm 99% sure that is an AGS bug. Especially when it magically clears itself up, that tells you as much.

Just a quick note...anybody surfing onto the Prodigal webpage might notice something new available for download...and that is all I have to say about that!

Hey, thanks GBC! I do appreciate it!

Tzupy- I'm not sure what that would have been...but I don't think it was the game. I don't THINK there is any way for the code to have caused that...I did have alot of problems with the code for the water, though. Is it possible you clicked on the door FROM standing in the pool, or were you out of the pool when you clicked on it? If you clicked on the door from standing IN the pool and that happened, then it was a bug. Otherwise, it was an AGS thing.

strawberrypicker-

Spoiler

I'm sorry to hear you get motion sickness. I don't know if you've tried some things, but doctors recommend sitting closer or farther from your monitor, having lights on or off, increasing or decreasing monitor brightness...changing things like that. Often, one combination will help the problem.

Ulisigi Ela flickers by displaying light moving across bump mapped textures, which makes the scene seem to shimmer. The effect is cool and spooky, but I can see why it would make your brain go "What the heck are you doing to me???" Wish I could offer more to help, but that is the best advice I can give you, straight from the doctors at Bioware.

[close]

Tzupy-

Ack! Those are both bugs, alright! Crud. I can see why I never got the crash bug...neither I nor my testers prolly ever thought of trying to open the door again after it was already open.  Still, a bug is a bug. Rats.

As for the water sprites in the tower, can you reproduce the bug? If so, can you please give me the steps you went through to get it to happen? I thought I'd fixed all the bugs with that darn pool. Bleh. 

Thanks for the reports!

m0ds-

Yay! Glad you are having fun! You're half right and half wrong on your guesses about the FMV. The rendering set ups are much like how you describe, however, you WILL see some character sprites on the FMV frames later in the game! ...but I cheated, adding them into the finished frames using Photoshop, and some of that crazy camera trickery you mentioned.  Still, it works, and that's what's important.

However, when I said "in engine FMV", I meant IN ENGINE FMV!!! There are no .avis or .flcs in this game. I didn't like the flicker and pause they caused when they'd load, not to mention the HUGE file size they were. The FMV is absolutely being done by the AGS engine. I is proud of how I figured it out.      Took lots of work, though. And lots of hours wasted in dead ends that didn't work or didn't look right.

Ichaussard- The game does come with a walkthrough, you know!

Spoiler

In the dining room, where the Arch-Lord is, look on the shelves to the south. Keep looking at them, and Jacob will see a silver platter. Pick it up, and combine it with the plastic bowl. That'll appease the Arch-Lord!

[close]

strawberrypicker-

The first bug with the hotspot bar is a known issue. Since it doesn't bother game play at all, and comes back on soon thereafter, I'll only fix it if a new version needs to come out. Thanks for reporting, though!

The second bug is an AGS issue, and has nothing to do with Prodigal or my programming. Just restore your game and try again and you should be able to continue with no problems. If it happens again, do what CJ recommends and post that screenshot up on the tech forums.

hopefully you can get through the rest of the game with no issues!

Eh, good point Rui...  Maybe I shoulda thought of some areas in Lucasarts games instead.

xenogia and Traveler- While the in engine FMV thing isn't really hard to do, or that difficult to figure out how to do  it if you are an AGS programmer, I don't really feel inclined to give out a "trade secret." It took me days of research into all available methods of in game FMV to find. Sorry.

Traveler-

Glad you enjoyed it!

Awe man, this is so awesome! After the abominations that were KQ7 and KQ8, I was REALLY looking forward to KQ9 as a game that could restore the good name of the series. Like most others, I was crushed when VU stomped on it.

But I am overjoyed to hear it is back! Yay, yay, yay!!! And THANK YOU VU for actually listening to your fans, for once....er, fans of your old games, anyway. 

On the Snow/Rain plugin:

It worked fine on AGS 2.7 in Prodigal. But when I ported the game up to 2.71 RC3 and/or RC4, suddenly the rain disappeared. So I loaded the Snow/Rain demo game that comes with the plugin to see if that was any better, and neither the rain nor the snow show up.

Weird that nobody else is having this problem, since it worked fine for me in 2.7 and 2.62...

I'm running in 16bit color...maybe people who aren't having troubles are running in different color depths?

-**EDIT**- Other people are having this problem too. Check this topic:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=23494.0

CoolGuy, hopefully this bug is fixed in version 1.1 of the game. Anomylous things were happening like that, and it was NOT a problem with the game code. Version 1.1 is ported up to AGS 2.71 RC4, which should fix this, I hope.

If you still have trouble, download the new version!

Nikolas -

Yes, they are an awesome band. I really wish I could buy their CD...but that'd be hard to do since I'm in the US and they are in Australia now. The other songs on their sight are great too. Check 'em out!

Peter -

Spoiler

I don't THINK that's a bug, you may not have talked through all the dialogue topics with the Arch-Lord. He has to tell you where the recipe is before you can pick it up.

[close]

Iv4n -
Sorry, no. Old saves will not work with Prodigal 1.1. Because the game is ported up to a new version of the AGS engine, AND because I changed the global script to include the cheat codes, the engine will crash if you try and load a Prodigal 1.0 savegame.

I was really hoping to have the code so clean that new versions wouldn't be needed. And from my end, it was. Nobody has found any show-stoppers that were my fault. All the odd crash bugs people experienced were/are from AGS 2.7...which CJ has hopefully fixed with this version. 
Necro -

Glad you enjoyed it! I guess how you like any puzzle is a matter of personal taste...I like single room lock-in puzzles because you KNOW the answer must be right there in front of you...it is just a matter of puzzling it out. Sierra used these on many of their games, such as the inn in King's Quest 5, or the Sea Slug battle in Space Quest 4. 'Sides, I included a walkthrough in case you get stuck on anything. 
Laters!

Prodigal v1.1 is finally out! You can download it from the game's main page, or from here:

http://prodigal.lilgryphmaster.com/download/prodigalv11.exe

A list of fixes:

V1.1
-Fixed a typo on the wooden stairs light that caused a game crash. Thanks to Stefano for finding this bug!
-Fixed a zone line problem in the “Oily water” area of the cliff dwellings. Thanks to InCreator for first reporting this!
-Many users are reporting strange behavior in the game. Jacob disappearing, getting stuck outside of walk-able bounds, crashing on game save, etc. Ported the game over to AGS 2.71 RC3 in the hopes that these odd happenings will stop.
-Upgraded several GUIs to high-color sprites to make them easier to see. Also fixed a couple GUI buttons to increase visibility.
-Added backdoor cheat codes to allow users who are experiencing problems with SSH's save/load GUIs to be able to use the stock AGS save/load GUIs. Simply hit CTRL-S to save and CTRL-X to load. PLEASE do try to use SSH's save/load GUIs first, though…just use the backdoor if you have problems. EDIT: SSH recommends saving with the old GUI first, in case of problems. Please DO use the normal one as well though. Without it I won't know if this fixed the problem or not.
-Added a clipping cheat. If it becomes necessary, I will tell people how to activate it. This should help if people have problems with Jacob getting stuck outside walkable bounds.
-Fixed frame mismatch on the storage room guard's knockout animation. Frames now display in correct order.
-Fixed a bit of sloppy coding with the portcullis in the dining room of the Cliff Dwellings. Looking at the portcullis will now yield a close-up, just like using it will.
-Ported up to AGS 2.71 RC4. We hope this will fix the glitching savegame system, as well as the many, many odd glitches being reported.
-The snow/rain plugin has stopped working with v 2.71 of AGS!!! ARGH! As a result, I had to remove the excellent plugin and make a sprite based rain sheet that doesn't look nearly as cool. If the plugin is ever fixed, I shall create a patch to add it back in.
-Fixed odd bug in “cancel” button on savegame GUI. Not sure when this happened…
-Added a real icon to the executable file. No more stock icon! Now you can create a decent shortcut, too!


So anyone having problems can go download now! Let's hope it'll fix 'em all! Let me know!




lakerz-
Glad you enjoyed it! We had fun making it, and hope we can do the sequel!

Ozzie-
Thanks for all the kind words and well composed thoughts!

Spoiler

You actually CAN pick up the stone before lighting the torch. I do it all the time in my playtesting!Ã, 

As for the bug...ACK!Ã,  I just released v1.1, and hadn't noticed that one! Well, it isn't too severe, I guess...if a new version ends up getting released, I WILL fix that though. Thank you!

[close]

And I'm glad you enjoyed the ending! There is still alot of story to tell, so stay tuned!

Nikolas-
I was OVERJOYED when Shadowplay said I could use "Alone," because it does FIT so perfectly! It seems as if it was written for the game! I HATED having to cut the first verse out, but it was needed to make it fit entirely.

You can download the full song FREE from Shadowplay's website! Just head over to

www.theshadowplay.com

A quick update on version 1.1:

I've ported Prodigal over to AGS 2.71 RC4, and with any luck it SHOULD fix the savegame bug. Now I'm having trouble with the Snow/Rain plugin not working! All my cool rain is gone. It seems the plugin no longer works with any version of AGS 2.71. I PMed Scorporius about it, but I'm not going to wait too long for a fix. I really want to get the new version out, so I may have to substitute the plugin for a lame sprite overlay. Sigh...such is life.

Anyway, I'm going to release 1.1 THIS WEEK, reguardless. So we should have a good fix for the savegame problem soon! Sorry to all who are having to wait!

ness and Nikolas-

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed the game! Spready the word about it!   

Nikolas-

Thank you very much for the kind words! Edgar helped alot with the comic book art, and many of the Tsvsgino animations, so I can't take all the credit...not to mention my brother wrote the awesome story. And believe me, it's just getting going with this game! 

Ness-

You missed out on alot of the atmosphere without the soundtrack!  Out of everything I did in this game, I'm most proud and satisfied with my soundtrack. But thank you for the kind words!

juvinal-

Spoiler

To get to the long cave, you must leave the cliff dwellings, go back to the upper elevator room, then head south onto the lava bridge. From there, go west across the bridge to the stone stairway. Head west up the stairs, and west again up the wooden stairs. You will arrive in the long cave. Jacob is a teeny dot in the distance, and the room is a scrolling room.

From here, just click the metal detector under the left torch to get the brass key.

Hope that clears it up for you!

[close]

Glad you're having fun! And thank you for spreading it around! The more the better!

Does the Snow/Rain plugin no longer work with AGS 2.71 RC3? It looked great in 2.7, but now that I've ported up I can't see my rain anymore...?

Has anyone else had this problem?