Messages

I'd suggest just trying a couple rooms to get the feel of it.  Take the backgrounds that you have, no matter what size they are, and make a room for each.  Then fill each one with walkable area so you can walk around them.  Then use the debug command ctrl-x (unless you've changed this) to warp between those rooms.  You can also try creating different projects with different screen resolutions and doing the same thing.  It only takes a few minutes and it's definitely going to help you understand it more than us explaining it.

No.

You can make each room different sizes if you want.  It doesn't matter to the program.  You just need to know that the screen is only going to show a viewport equal to the resolution that your game is running at.  Everything else will be cut off unless your player walks there.

If your game is using 640x480 resolution, your backgrounds need to be 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels wide.  Anything larger than that will be visible by scrolling the background.  To scroll the background, either the player needs to walk across it, or you need to manually set the viewport with SetViewport(x,y);

So, if you have a tall background image, like the one you're showing here, the top will be cut off unless your player goes up there (or you can manually set the viewport).  If you have a wide background, the sides will be cut off until the player walks over to the side.  The "camera" will move with the player to show those parts of the background.

This is just what "After a Brisk Nap" was trying to explain to you back in this thread on adventure gamers.

Whoah, hello thread!  Thanks Dan!  I actually started making a remake of this game in Flash.  I had three games in this series planned out, just never got around to making the other two.  If I had time, I would finish them all in Flash.

Try it out here: http://www.xiigames.com/misc/anna/

It feels a lot better with smooth movement, rather than the fade in/out that I used for walking up/down in AGS.

Edit: I also think we need an Annie Android vs. Anna spinoff game.

Ooh, thanks yall!  And a happy one day late bday to Kinoko!

The first problem, involving the use of cDan.Transparency-- won't work because of the way AGS rounds Transparency, I believe.  Instead, create a variable to store the transparency, and decrement and set off of that.

Code: ags

//global
int dantrans;

//rep_exec
        if (bFadeIn)
	{
      		if (cDan.Transparency > 0) 
                {
                        dantrans--;
                        cDan.Transparency=dantrans;
                }
		if (cDan.Transparency <= 0)
		{
			// do whatever!
			 bFadeIn = false;
		 }			
	}

It's not that there isn't any room for commercial adventures.  Even Indie-made adventures can make money, but they have to meet a level of polish, and also appeal to the niche gamer who might buy such a game.  As far as the polish level goes, your game, I'm sorry to say, lacks it all around.

I downloaded the demo, and I actually kind of like the graphics, as weird as they are.  The world seems really big with lots of animation and some interesting choices for design and camera angles.  I don't like the main character's graphics at all, but at least the world around him is somewhat neat looking, in a kind of mix-n-match, scattershot, clashing, kind of way.

But the game itself is buggy, impossible to control, and confusing.  The demo starts with my character in a room facing the door.  Walking out the door triggers a long cutscene that doesn't make any kind of sense to me, and the game crashes once it's done.  SO I started again and tried looking around the building at things.  Looking at the firehose crashed the game again.  The third time, I was able to look around several rooms and get out onto the street behind the starting building.  None of the characters would talk to me ("There were no more themes to talk about," is a really strange way of putting it.) to let me know what the plot was about, and trying to go in one direction told me that I shouldn't return to the scene of the crime.  I wasn't aware there was a crime.  Perhaps you started the demo in a weird place.  I then went back into the building and it crashed again.  I never found anything that I could interact with in a meaningful way and had only managed to spend ten minutes struggling to make the character walk in the direction I wanted him to walk.

The controls are really weird.  The main character controls worse than a tank.  He turns extremely slowly, and only in 60 degree increments, and can't turn and walk at the same time.  The camera frequently changing positions makes it even more confusing (and the split second of blackness between switches makes it worse).  Having to open up the inventory to choose "talk" is a really weird choice, and needing to switch your hands away from the arrow keys to press i and enter is exceedingly awkward.  The text on the bottom of the screen is also extremely hard to read.

If you expect to sell a game, the players need to know that it reaches a certain level of quality, and no offense, but I don't see it here.  I probably wouldn't play the game if it was freeware.  Your demo would probably convince more people not to buy the game than it would otherwise, and I actually like your website (except for having to click on images to see the story, and the trailer's music).

My advice would be to have some friends or other people play the game with you watching and tell you what they like and don't like.  This game really doesn't feel like it's been played by anyone other than the creator (for play testing or bug testing purposes).  I think that anyone playing the game would tell you that the character control alone makes it unfit for distribution.  Several other things need to be tweaked and polished, but you might as well make the game easy to play for starters.

I'm not sure what you're asking in your last post, but if you're looking for a book publisher to publish a game, it's hard enough to get a book publisher to publish a book from an unpublished author.  I don't think many of them are looking to get into the super indie niche-game publishing business.

("there'll be this awesome moment when it's revealed that your dog is the killer!")

Damn it Snarky!  Have you been reading my Resonance design docs?! 

Unfortunately, Resonance is still stuck in 3.0.2 so I can take advantage of that Text resolution trick.

And, do buttons have .Transparency properties?  I thought just the GUI itself did.  So if I wanted to control the transparency of different parts separately,  I wouldn't be able to.  Maybe I'm mistaken on that, but I don't have the program in front of me to test.

I'll often use separate GUIs for one big layered GUI with some layers using alpha transparency as the GUI backgrounds, and some layers using no alpha transparency, but needing their own GUI so I can use the Transparency property to manually control it at runtime for neat effects.

I've just put a Computer interface GUI into my game that uses three GUIs.  They work like this.

-Top layer: The frame around the computer screen and some shine on the screen itself (GUI background with alpha for the shine and transparent middle) Not clickable

-Middle layer: A snow/static animation (no alpha, set to 90% transparency, but adjusted manually faded in and out as the screen gets broken) Not clickable

-Bottom layer: The screen background, buttons, and labels that are actually used for the Computer interface.  (no alpha, 0% transparency) clickable.

You just kind of learn to work around the limitations to make things look how you want them to look.  I could likely have done this without using multiple GUIs, but this way was a quick way to get the look i wanted.

Then again, I am a time traveler...

How are you saving the .png from Photoshop?  Are you just pressing save and then selecting the type?  Are you using save for web?  Did you make sure the transparency check mark is checked when doing so?  Did you delete the solid background layer before saving (so that you can see the white and gray checkered pattern behind your image? 

Just making sure.

Well, I did it several months ago, so it is working out for me just fine.  Thanks. 

I did the very thing thezombiecow is suggesting in the game I'm making. 

I had a section of the floor that could not be walked over until certain conditions were met.  I put the proper code into the playerWalksOntoRegion function ("Oh no I can't walk here!" etc), and then for each hotspot on the other side of that region, I checked if the conditions had been met, and if not, had the player only walk just as far as the edge of the region and stop.  That would trigger the playerWalksOntoRegion function.

Since I had only four interactable items beyond that region of the floor, this was a simple and effective solution.

Edit:  This thread explains it better than I could: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=34537.0

I just installed it on the W2k Virtual Machine that I have for testing purposes.  It's completely bare except for the .Net framework.  It ran perfectly fine.

Just posted this on the Adventure Gamers Review comments, but I thought that I should post it here to, so that AGSers who are on the fence might be tipped in the right direction.
>>>
I done finished the game and shucks if it wasn't awesome.

I can understand how some players going in with different expectations could be disappointed.  It would be impossible to please everyone.  Casual players are going to wonder why the items aren't hidden all over the screen, and why you have to talk to characters, and hard-core adventurers are going to bemoan the fairly easy puzzles and simplified interface.  Especially if they only play the one-hour trial.  The hand holding drops off significantly later in the game, though it never does become genuinely difficult.  However, the game works great for someone like me who is really looking for a unique story, fun characters, and great writing, and are looking for a little diversion that can fit into their jam-packed lives.

First off, the background and character art are excellent.  The game bogged down when there were too many animations on the screen at once, like when characters were shooting magic at each other.  But other than that, I loved the old-cartoon stylings of the characters.  Especially the duel-arena owner.

The story and writing are both just as amazing as you'd expect from Dave.  I loved how, even though I've never read the books, the game did a great job at filling in the blanks on the history and lore of the land of Oz beyond what you get from the gussied up version we saw in the classic movie.  I'm not sure what amount of the world was authentic to the books, and what amount was Dave's own unique Noir-twist on things.  Though the story starts as a little missing-persons case, it spirals into an epic tale (at the expense of the Noir feel, sadly) that would have been a chapter in the history books of Oz, so Dave was clearly not afraid of taking the reigns and making the world his own.

The characters and interactions are all expertly scripted and fun.  Unlike most adventure games these days, I made sure to choose every dialog option possible to hear all the lines of dialog.  I loved the voice acting as well.  I thought it was excellent across the board, with a few standouts (Anzel, Oz).

The puzzles are mostly easy, with some toughies spread around.  A couple of the puzzles were particularly clever.  The game had a built in hint system, but as the game was fairly easy and logical, I can't imagine someone needing it very much.  However, I'll admit to not being inside the mind of a casual player.   This would be the first time I've finished an adventure game in a long time without needing to go hunt down a walkthrough.  So, if that is a bad thing to you, then you'll probably be disappointed by the difficulty, but if the story and characters (and non logic-bending puzzles) are more important, then you'll have a grand time.

I think this is the best indie adventure game that I've played.  And I think the only games that come close are Dave's Blackwell series.  So, he's definitely on top of the indie adventure scene in my book.  I would agree with the four stars of the reviewer.

A method not yet covered in this thread, basically because it's a bit stupid but I thought I could mention it anyway, is to have the object not appear until it's needed. In Lure of the Temptress there is a special herb that grows in a patch of grass, but it's not visible until you're told to search for it. Not very logical but still...

Definitely be careful with this method, if you use it.  This was going to be one of my Why Your Game is Broken articles.  If a certain item appears at a place in the game that you have visited earlier in the game, then there better be some kind of indication that we should check back there.  That's a big gripe for me in some games. 

If I can pick on just one game, (and this is by no means the only game to make this mistake, I even see it in some professional games) Diamonds in the Rough makes this mistake several times.  At the beginning of the game, you're told that you need to go speak to a certain character, but when you go to his office to do so, he's not there.  Later in the game, after solving a completely unrelated puzzle, he appears in his office.  However, there's no indication that he has arrived.  So, you're left stuck with a huge area (about 40 rooms) to wander through until you notice what has changed to let you proceed. 

A simple solution would have been to have the player think to himself "Hmm.  I'd better go check and see if so and so is there." or even better, when the player walks out of the bar (which is where the puzzle triggering the character's appearance takes place) have a car drive by and the player character remark "Hey! That's so and so's car!"  Something like that, so that it didn't seem so arbitrary.  X triggers Y.  Very cold.  Not organic.

This happens later in the game with a letter in a mailbox.  No indication, you'd better just happen to wander into that room and notice that the flag is up on the mailbox (at least it had that very small graphical indication that something was in there).  I would consider this a serious flaw in a game.  When expressing my concern with the game's author, however, he told me that he likes this kind of puzzle in a game and enjoys wandering around a large gameworld taking notes.  So, to each his own, I guess.

Spooks also had this issue, so I'm guilty of it myself, though.  But at least that room only had nine rooms to wander through.

Thanks Raider!  That would be this video preview she's talking about if you're interested Joshua.

You could start with the winners of the AGS innovation award.

2006- What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed (my own game)
2007- _Access
2008- ColourWise (not really an adventure game, but a very nice puzzle game nonetheless)

Edit: Another game that is springing to mind (I'm sure there are a bunch others) was Into The Light, which wasn't a terribly good game, per se, but I liked the unique attempt at making the main character blind, and imposing some of those limitations on the player.  An interesting game to check out.

Also, for linear/nonlinear storytelling innovation check out Deirdra Kiai's Chivalry is not Dead, or any of her other games for that matter.  They're not AGS games, but they're all fun experiments in storytelling: http://www.deirdrakiai.com/

Edit again: Also not AGS games, but check out Jonas Kyratzes games.  http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/?page_id=66

Edit Edit: Radiant has done quite a bit of innovating.  Quest for Yrolg and Warthogs are both quite unique gameplay wise.  I loved Warthogs, and Yrolg was a good attempt at breaking the mold, but as attempts at trying something new will often do, I think it falls a bit flat in the fun department.  Just my own opinion.  I still really love it for thinking outside the extremely cramped adventure box.