Messages

I'm trying to understand

Spoiler

the logic of the supermarket maze. For the beers I just walked straight in front of me. But this doesn't work to find coffee.

[close]

Fairly major puzzle clue below:

Spoiler

At each step, try to look for one of the four directions that is the odd one out, that's different from the others somehow.

[close]

And the outright spoiler for said puzzle:

Spoiler

Coffee is never on sale or discounted when you need it.

[close]

[Tuulipuku-Tauno Darrassa]

My MAGS entry for the June 2025 contest: Tuulipuku-Tauno Darrassa  (Windbreaker-Willy has a Hangover)

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/2872-tuulipuku-tauno-darrassa/

This game aims to showcase what it feels like to be Finnish, up to and including how difficult even the most simple activities in life can feel when you're hungover, exhausted, confused and in pain. Help the protagonist regain control of his life by brewing a cup of coffee. This should be a simple task, right? What even could be complicated about it...?





Key features include:

• Readlly annoying-to-use doors (though there may be a trick to making Tauno more capable of dealing with them for a while)
• Authentic Finnish ambience
• Bilingual: all text displayed in both Finnish and English
• 640x360 resolution: hand drawn ultra high-definition graphics
• A secret bird

Warning: contains mild nudity in the form of hairy legs and thighs (no, you can't see Willy's willy).

Much appreciated! I was also now able to add the missing images via editing the remaining entry.

Wow, that's... not great, I will stop tinkering with the page now so it doesn't happen anymore. The error message had me thinking nothing had been submitted and I had no idea I was screwing up this badly.
Sorry.

EDIT: I took a look and it seems the images have not been added, so maybe the issue was related to those, though I'm just guessing. I won't touch any of those right now. At a glance it seems I am not able to delete the extra copies myself, so I'll wait for some guidance on how to clear them out so that only the one copy remains and then I can try to add the missing images to it later on.

[Tauno is now released]

Tauno is now released and moving freely in the wild! Hide any and all alcoholic beverages (it's for his own good). Check out the game page from the link below:

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/play/game/2872-tuulipuku-tauno-darrassa/

Alternate Itch.io link: https://wham.itch.io/tuulipuku-tauno-darrassa

Target URL: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/create/game-submit/add-game/

500: Internal Server Error
"It looks like something's gone wrong on our end. Sorry about that!
Please post on the Site & Forum Reports forum, giving as much detail as possible about what you were doing when the error occurred."

I've filled out the form for adding a new game and as far as I can tell all mandatory fields are filled. There are 3 images attached in .png format, 2 download links. Not really sure what I could provide that'd be more specific. I am still able to go back on my browser to find it all pre-filled out so I'm holding on to that page, but the "Save your game" button sends me instantly to the error page.

EDIT: I followed those handy notifications to try and rate some of the games I've played and it seems adding ratings also doesn't work. The button just doesn't do anything, so perhaps that is related as well. Noting the observation here just in case.

I'll be releasing the game later today or the coming night. I'm having a ton of dumb issues with the audio channels and clips randomly not working right, but I don't have time to rebuild all my sound code at this point. Having learned some new things again in this project, I'd do a few things very differently if I started this project again from scratch. Oh well, maybe in the sequel.


Fun fact: the Finnish national broadcaster YLE has a bunch of audio, sound effects and ambient sounds, available for free on the Freesoundproject sound library. So many of the sound effects in my game are actually funded by the Finnish taxpayer! This feels immensely appropriate. They even had fart noises!

EDIT: Release candidate has been sent out to a couple people and some initial fixes and tweaks were already done based on feedback. There are a hundred things I'd want to do but lack the time for, but such is the way of MAGS. Release will go out on Monday, I need to go out and buy cat food now, or else these fuzzy little bastard will eat my toes while I sleep!

Final week of dev time is underway. I already know I'll have to scale back some ideas I'd wanted to do, and some art assets won't be of the kind of quality I'd like, but I'm fairly certain my game will be in a playable and completable state by wednesday evening, leaving me a couple days of time left to do final polish, tinkering with sound effects and music and such.

Crunch time has been booked for the weekend so I can push hard on finalizing the game for release.

So far the feedback from friends has been very positive, at least in the sense that my game does seem to capture the atmosphere, look and feel of being a certain kind of Finnish very well. What kind of an experience will that be for non-finnish players? I've honestly no idea, but I look forward to hearing what people think!

EDIT: Why didn't anyone tell me that if I make my game bilingual I have to write everything twice!? HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IT'D BE THIS MUCH WORK!
But all in all I'm getting quite close to the game being in a beatable state now. A bit behind schedule, but not too badly. Things are starting to click into place here.

MAGS game status update. 3 room backgrounds are pretty much finished, 4 more are required. Talking animations are added in and I have scripted the players interactions with the doors. There are three functional doors in the game so far and they take 300+ lines of code to operate! I may have been consumed by madness in my effort to create functionality to simulate how difficult it can be to operate something as simple as a door when massively hungover. There's the locking and unlocking, remembering to turn the handle, pushing or pulling in the right way... It might be easier to just get Tauno buzzed again so it all doesn't seem so complicated.

I also have all the room navigation done and all the sound effects already in place, so those rooms can now be fully explored. The rest of the room transitions in the game will be simpler interactions.

Despite my effort of minimizing animations by omitting the up and down walkcycles, I'll have to go and do those anyway since I decided to add stairs the player uses in those directions for a mini-puzzle about avoiding the neighbors in the stairwell so the pensioner living downstairs doesn't shout at you for being too loud at night. Tauno can't really handle that kind of interaction in his current state.

EDIT: another sneak peek image with a more final verb UI and a test inventory item


EDIT 2: another sneak peek to prove

Spoiler

(to whom? myself mostly...)

[close]

I'm still making progress. Don't want to do new posts on a chain.

I'm having fun toying with the dithering tool in Aseprite, but the lack of a noise generation tool for texturing large surfaces is a major issue that forces me to use a secondary software to finalize some of my backgrounds.

Thank you, folks! Immensely informative and useful!

[is there an easy way to detect if a character.say command has finished]

Since I failed to find this in the manual and in the search: is there an easy way to detect if a character.say command has finished and the text dispalyed over the characters head has disappeared?
I am using the Lucasarts style speech and haven't found out any GUI element that the character.say text is bound to so I could check its text value or visibility, so I'm guessing its tucked away somewhere inaccessible.

What I'm trying to accomplish here is a simple subtitle system where a text label is assigned a bit of text whenever the say command triggers, which works fine, but trying to figure out when to clear the subtitle text (whether because the player skipped the dialogue or the timer ran out) so it doesn't linger on screen for longer than the standard speech text is what I'm failing to accomplish here. My initial idea was a simple repeatedly executed script that checks if any speech command is ongoing, and if not, clear the subtitle text away.

The minute I post the question I figure it out! The say command is blocking so I can just clear the label in the next line of code and not overthink things so much! IT WAS OBVIOUS!

Still, a bonus question: how does AGS calculate the time the .say command text stays up if no voice line is attached? I'm guessing its X milliseconds/frames per character, but didn't find this in the manual either. Just a vague "The text will remain on screen for a limited time".

You mean finnish in time

Exactly that!

Here's what I have after 1 evening of work:
- Tauno, our protagonist, has 2 walkcycles and 2 standing frames done.
- First half of Tauno's home has had its first pass done. Still needs posters, trash, grime and detail to make it feel authentic.
- Script outline is written, story is set and I have my list of tasks to complete for the game (7-8 backgrounds in total, couple GUI's, 2 minor cutscenes with unique art)

Challenges I've set for myself this MAGS:
- First time using a verb-based UI
- Bilingual game (all dialogue and most text is on screen in both Finnish and English at same time)



EDIT: Oh yeah, the tentative name of the game is "Tuulipuku-Tauno ja Darrakahvi" (English translation, while changing the name in order to retain the Leisure suit Larry inspired alliteration, could be something like "Windbreaker Willy and the Hangover Coffee"). I have a few ideas for this character, as he has existed as a sort of in-joke in my friend group for years and years now, so I might reuse these assets for other games in the future, assuming this one is ever finished of course.

Okay, I have a game concept themed around alcoholism, depression and caffeine that is inspired by Leisure Suit Larry. If this isn't going to be the most thematically Finnish game ever I don't know what will!
Now to see if I can execute in time!

Damn, Finland has been mentioned (torilla tavataan!) so I guess I have to start drafting something here...

I've been toying with a bunch of ideas, but haven't actually gotten beyond that ideas stage.  My brain keeps going to some dark places with this theme and I don't like those right now.

['The Year of MAGS' by OneDollar]

A new month, a new batch of games! As always, play the games yourself if able, but if you just can't find the time before the vote, check out the videos and consider voting anyway!
I messed up during the stream and so the latter third of The Expedition is missing visuals. My bad!

'The Year of MAGS' by OneDollar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8xOL-obfc

'The Expedition' by Soulstuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMtQ9UQD5ZY

'The Twilight Zone - The Lost Episode' by Repi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7I1OPv7Pi4

[incredibly unqualified]

A new month, a new batch of games! As always, play the games yourself if able, but if you just can't find the time, check out the videos and consider voting.
A fair warning to viewers, these are games on topics I am incredibly unqualified to comment on and also the chat in my livestream is not the best behaved. Also I recorded these while having some sort of flu-like disease so I sound and look marginally more awful than usual.

Burn Down the Closet: A Game About Being Agender (by Rootbound)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8scY9PsD5l4

Let's Talk About Anal Sex (by Mandle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIWETY_Hb-Q

Weaving Time (by Soulstuff)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szDA-32a7Xc

[Limblob (by Soulstuff)]

Behold, WHAM's Regular Monthly MAGS Videos (WRMMAGSV)! As always, play the games yourself if able, but if you just can't find the time, check out the videos and consider voting.

Limblob (by Soulstuff)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLehNMEmN8k

Finding Balzac (by pell)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF8aYnVGMzw

MAGSMan by (Kara Jo Kalinowski)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWYNCPwOM3M

Alpha Beta Gamer on Youtube has covered the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXEoD3ZR7-U

Neat!

Yeah, I'm out for this month. Too volatile and too prone to upsetting someone with something, no matter what I'd do, as seen above already.