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Glad you and your daughter are enjoying it, even if it's confusing her.

It's not actually confusing her.  She just asks questions all the time.  She also asked me how old I was when I was little and where grandma's toothbrush is.  True story.  I don't know how she comes up with some of this stuff.   I can't even read her a book without answering 2-3 questions per page.  It's kind of hard sometime to explain what's going on in a Dr. Seuss book...

I bought it with the through PlayFirst last night, sorry, I guess you would have gotten more money if I had waited a day and gotten it off your site.  I didn't even think you were going to be able to sell it through your site.

Anyway, it's looking really good so far.  My daughter sat on my lap while I played it and kept asking things like why the sofa is flying or why the lion is bad (she's accustomed to nice lions like the ones in Lion King and Madagascar 2 ).  I'm looking forward to playing it some more tonight!

Alternatively, if your game doesn't have a huge amount of text, you could make each line an image. 

I did that for Linus Bruckman.  All the Japanese subtitles (about 1000 of them) were sprites that I called by number.  I wrote out the whole game script in a spreadsheet, then numbered each line, then translated each line, then imported the lines as an array of strings with index corresponding to sprite slots to which I imported graphical versions of the text.  Lines and sprites were consecutively numbered and then in the game I used functions like playLines(51, 55, 832, 836) to play a sequence of lines (lines 51 through 55 on the top and 832 through 836 on the bottom).  The downside is that it bloats your filesize and it takes you a long ass time to get all those images made and imported.

Or use SSH's module that lets you use sprites for fonts and then write a conversion program that converts your text from unicode to the sprite slots.  Still time consuming.

If your game is short and light on text, the way I did it for Linus is not a terribly hard work around.  You just need to keep your numbers straight.  If your game is really long, it might be worth it to use SSH's module and take the time to write the code to convert your unicode to sprite slots.

In the meantime, you could just make the game with voices, and no text.  I tend to prefer having subtitles in in games, even if they're not very wordy, like a shooter or something.  However, having a game that was spoken in my language with no text would be better than not having a game in my language at all...

If Jupiter defied the laws of physics and ignited into a star, no amount of ninjas at NASA could cover it up.  Millions of astronomers pro and amateur are checking out the sky around the clock.  When our technology has us studying and discovering planets and celestial events in other galaxies, having a second sun in our own solar system and not knowing about it would be like having President Obama move into your spare bedroom and you not noticing.

One more note regarding lumping music/sound/speech together: Speech should probably be kept separate so we don't lose the ability to have a separate speech.vox for optional speech or multiple language packs.

Yeah, having the option in the wizard to only number un-numbered lines would be great.  I suggested this a few days ago in the 3.1.2 wishlist thread.

player.Say("&EXPLAINITALL I've been meaning to explain this for ages.");

which then played EXPLAINITALL.OGG, would we still need the distinction between the three types of audio?

I think that this way would be extremely cumbersome in a game with thousands of lines of dialogs.  As long as there is still an auto numberer (with the ability to customize it to search for string arguments to other functions) this would be fine.

Also, I would definitely want anything like cCharName.Say("&EXPLAINITALL Blah blah blah."); to play charnameEXPLAINITALL.OGG.  So much easier to keep track of that way.

As for music and sound.  As long as you can set specific tracks to looping/non-looping then there doesn't really need to be a distinction between sound and music.  Ironically, in Linus Bruckman, I did all the music as sound and all the sound as music because I needed the ability to fade the volume all the way out (can't do it properly with music) and play more than one piece of music at a time (also can't do it properly with music).

The only issue I can think of where someone might want to have them separate is for separate music/sound effect volume sliders in a settings GUI.  But you could just have them control certain tracks, and make sure to only play music/sounds on the proper tracks.

Ooh, if you're overhauling the music/sound system, I'm indifferent about how the scripting works, but I do want a few features:

1) Ability to get what sound/music is playing on each track and at what volume.
2) At least two music tracks. (allow manual crossfading)
3) Toggle looping for each individual track.
4) No more music skip or stutter when changing rooms or loading large animations/sprites
5) Working music volume controls!
     a)  Track volume (set from 0 to 200)
     b)  Room sound & room music volume modifiers (set from 0 to 200)
     c)  Global sound & Global music volume modifiers (set from 0 to 200)

Actual volume would be a percentage of the regular sound file volume computed by multiplying the three percentages together.  If the percentages multiply to less than 100, the sound or music is quieter, if the percentages multiply to more than 100, the sound or music volume is boosted.  Setting any of them to zero would result in silence for the track/room/whole game respectively.

This way, you can change individual track volume for a sound that's too loud/quiet by adjusting the track volume, you can adjust the room volume if you want one room to just be quieter, or you can adjust the global volumes (like in a settings panel) to affect the entire game. 

Perhaps there should also be something similar to a PlaySoundAtVolume(int sound, int volume); (adjusted to match whatever new scripting you decide on) that would set whichever track the sound would be placed on to the specified volume, play the sound, then return the track it to it's previous volume.  Also, playsound functions should return the track that the sound was placed on.

Haha.  That was the bees knees, SSH!  Really well done!  Best AGS Award Ceremony this year!

Yeah, when Kinoko started it, it was with the intention of getting people to regain some momentum or motivation to actually finish something that they'd started; pick up those things that they had left behind and actually start working on them again.  People who start making games and then get sidetracked can say "Hey, a Release activity?  And everybody is going to try and release something great!?  Wow, maybe I'll pick that up again and finally work through this writer's (designer's, artist's, musician's, whaterver's) block!"

I specifically people should be discouraged from looking through their hard drive to find some dusty old thing they thought they weren't going to share with anyone and post it.  That's not much of an activity.

Awesome Luke!  I'll definitely check this out with my wife!  Though you'll make her wonder why I've never made an irresistibly cute game for her...

I would like the ability to further customize the auto-number speech lines wizard.  Specifically, I would like:

-The option to number all un-numbered speech lines (instead of having it re number each time and probably screw up whatever speech files you've already made) and

-A way to define other strings to be auto numbered.  For example, if I have a custom speech function, like instead of character.Say() I use my own character.Speech() and character.Thought() functions.  Then I could tell the auto-numberer to also number any strings in my own functions.

Ben, I loved this game!  I haven't played an AGS game (or any other game for that matter) in ages, but I had to find time to play this little adorable game.  Charming is the best word to describe it.  Really nice work!

I enjoyed Obi's Office Life so much, I had to make a fan film:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090203234259934

Oh... kleptomania... how cliché!

If there's anything we can conclude from this discussion it must be this: Every non-alien, non-desert island adventure game should have at least one street corner with a dollar store. It would make things so much easier for us players.

Ok, but to get a dollar, you have to deliver this letter to the baker across town, then take the cake he gives you to the flower store.  The girl there will give you a bouquet, which you can use to make the museum security guard sneeze so that you can steal the painting, which I'll buy for a dollar.  Then you can use the dollar to buy a screwdriver.

Thanks Sallow!  I'm hoping that the finished version will drop your jaw even further.

The game will be commercial.  The price hasn't been determined yet, but it will likely be inline with what you see from other similar indie offerings.  In other words: it will be well worth it.

I have a bad history with backups.  I haven't had a lot of trouble with losing data from my main hard drive, my problems always seem to be my backup drives.

My backup USB thumb drives always seem to find their way into the laundry and die.  My backup CDs always seem to get into the hands of my daughter or thrown out by my wife.  The huge external HDD that I was using for backup even died and refused to read or write again after a year and a half.

I always thought that the point of the backups was to outlive your main HDD, but it always seems to be the other way around for me.

I'm using score in an different way in Resonance.  I'm not sure how popular it will be.  You can read all the details here with a follow-up here.

Basically, you get points for doing things in the game.  Some of them are things that you have to do to progress the game, some of them are optional puzzles or tasks, and some of them are easter-eggy things.  There are plenty of points to get throughout the game.  However, your point counter only holds a max of 99 points, so there's no point in worrying about missing some here or there.

The points are used to rewind the game when you die.  If you die in an obvious manner, doing something you clearly shouldn't be doing, like manhandling a live power cable, it will cost a large number of points to rewind and undo your error.  If you die by failing to accomplish something that is difficult, like a timed puzzle or something, it will only cost a small number of points to rewind (allowing you to try multiple times).  If you die and don't have enough points to rewind... game over.

Of course, for people that don't like that idea, there will be two alternative game modes:

-Infinite Rewind, where you can just rewind as many times as you want, and points never play into it.
and
-No Rewind, where it's just like a regular adventure game.  No points, no second chances.  If you die, you'd better hope you saved recently.