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Update: I've put some short notes about the planning process that led to this game here

[learn]

I'm in the jams to systematically learn something about adventure writing, and so I usually try to bring in something new that I have never done before. For this jam, I wanted to do a bridge troll.

So of course, I needed a river and a bridge. How can I bring a river into the story line? Let's make Bunny Son walk along the river. He must reach flower fields that are upstream or down stream.

Wait: If we have a river, then Bunny Son might go by boat! In “Jake's Very Last Journey” I had found a way to make Jake drive from the left of the screen to the right with little animation effort; perhaps I can do something similar for Bunny Son boating from left to right.

So let's make Station 1 a boat mooring: Bunny Son will acquire a boat.
Insert small animation about Bunny Son boating.
Boat crashes, so Bunny Son needs to foot the rest of the way, arriving at:
Station 2: Bridge troll guarding the bridge to the flower fields. 

So there you have it: That was the core of my high-level planning.

[all]

The “Once upon a time” schema will usually only give a high-level story arc with much to much scope.

I can't tell all of that and I shouldn't. Also, I'm in a jam and I must make the story about a “journey” (that was the jam motto). So let's cut down the scope further and only concentrate on the part of getting the ingredients. Let's make it a journey of getting the ingredients. Egg colours get made from ... erm ... spring flowers so the bunnies must collect spring flowers. Let the boy do it; he'll be the protagonist and go on a journey of collecting spring flowers.




In my experience, what limits me the most after the number of characters is the number of locations. I can only do a handful of them in the month that I have. So let's plan and limit the screens next. To make a “journey” feel like a journey, it needs to have a start and an end and several stations in between. Bunny Son will collect the flowers and come back, so conveniently I can re-use the start location for the end location. I can tell the story of the journey with just two stations in between, so let's do just two of them. So my general plan is

Bunny meadow Start location: Establish mother, son, problem that son must solve.
Station 1 Do some riddles
Station 2 Do some riddles
Bunny meadow Son returns with colours, festivities ensue.

[one]

IMO, a big part of Adventure writing is reducing scope.

The more people there are in the game, the more sprites to draw and animate. And the harder to make them all individual and different from each other. So immediately after establishing this story, I tried to cut down the protagonists. When I thought about the “bunny meadow”, I envisioned lots of bunnies being busy with lots of egg laying and bundling.

Far too many. So, let's do a “bunny family“ instead of a “bunny herd“ and have just one of a kind. A father, a mother, a child.

Come to think of it, I can even cut out the father and still tell the story. So let's just do “Bunny Mother” and “Bunny Son”. One female and one male, one old and one young, so amply different from one another. “Bunny Mother” will do all the grown-up work: earning the money by laying and bundling and selling the eggs, and now she must colour them too. So “Bunny Son” comes to the rescue and offers to do the painting part.

[Once upon a time, there was]

FWIW, here's an outline of what I did for my most recent adventure, “Huggles goes on a trip”. It's a jam adventure, so I only had short time to splurge on abstract planning; the detail planning happened in the coding stage.

It so happened that the jam in question finished just before Easter, and so I decided to present an Easter adventure.

I started out with a broad story / background line. The schema I usually use is:

Once upon a time, there was ... (a herd of bunnies).
They lived ...  (on a bunny meadow).
Each day, ...  (the mother bunnies laid some eggs, and the others bundled them).
(And once a year, the father bunnies went to the town to sell the eggs to the town people).
One day,  ... (they didn't manage to sell any eggs at all. The townspeople now only wanted coloured eggs, nothing but.)
So therefore,  ... (the bunnies researched egg colouring.)
So therefore,  ... (they got the necessary ingredients.)
So therefore,  ... (they experimented until they were able to produce high-quality egg colours)
So therefore,  ... (they coloured all their eggs.)
And so,  ... (they won over the town people again and got filthy rich by selling coloured eggs.)
In general, the story schema can have any number of “So therefore” lines.

The parenthesized parts are what I did this time to  “fill in the dots”.

I envisioned humanoid bunnies because I have little experience with animating animals.

[end result]

It's very hard to answer that in a general manner, the more so because different adventures stress different aspects. Short adventures need different planning than long adventures.

There are some design documents on the Internet. Here's a specific example: the design document for Torin's passage.

I personally think that they document the end result of the planning process; I don't find them all that good at explaining just how the authors got there.

[How can you get away with doing this sort of thing _first_?]

Hi folks,

Here's something that has always made me wonder:

Most of the adventures seem to be constructed based on beautiful screenshot drawings. For instance, I remember a “work in production” whose very first picture they did was a Western town in glorious 1080p. They even included an animation of some cowboy being knocked unconscious while standing in a specific porch.

It must take days and hours to produce this level of intricate detail. How can you get away with doing this sort of thing _first_?

For instance, that picture above was in accurate hand drawn 2D perspective. So whenever some technical need comes up to re-arrange the houses or to make space for a side alley, etc., then all its prettywork will have gone completely to waste: All the fundamental lines will then work out differently which means that all the intricacies will have to be re-drawn from scratch. What if it turns out that the cowboy needs to be punched out on a different porch - or inside a living room? What if that particular scene will need to be even cut out completely?

You wouldn't construct a house or a luxus liner this way, or as that goes, a coffee machine. There, most of the important work would go into fundamentals: architecture, statics, plumbing, fire protection facilities. The form would be dictated by the function, not the other way round.

When all your friends are invited to the roofing celebration, even the windows haven't been put in yet. It's all still ugly. The upholsterer and interior designer will only be retained at a much later stage, _after_ the architect and the carpenter have done their thing.

In a similar vein, you'd expect adventures to start out with lots of boxes or blue cups where finished artwork will be inserted later on. You'd expect the finished screenshots to come nearly _last_.

Yet it seems to be even firmly ingrained in out forum rules that they should come _first_ before the house has even been constructed yet:

3) A minimum of two (in-game) screenshots must be available.
If you aren't far enough to be able to take different screenshots, don't post yet!

Well, at that stage the work is no longer “in production”, or it shouldn't. It's in the final stages of getting the finishing touch.

[Edit:]

Hello folks,

I've happened by this jam page about an “Adventure Jam 2021”, scheduled to start in eight days, on May 7th (I'm neither organizer nor moderator).

Is any AGSer participating?
Is it worthwhile?
Do you have any experiences to share about that jam?

Edit: Just a short note/reminder that this jam will start in about 1 ½ days, on May 8, 1 o'clock Berlin time.

[have]

In general, it's just hard getting your game to be noticed and played.

True.

Well, for example your game plug from last year November seems to have been called up some 2'000 times, as counted by the forum software. How did you do it? Does this forum even have a few thousand active users?

Hello folks,

Please have a look at this plug (Huggles Goes On A Trip in the section "Completed Game Announcements").

Would you mind giving short feedback on the following points?

[ ] The thread title / game title is off-putting / doesn't appeal to me.
[ ]        Because of that, I didn't even open the thread.
[ ] The screen shots are off-putting / don't appeal to me.
[ ] The tone of the plug is off-putting / doesn't appeal to me.
[ ] The advertised plot is off-putting / doesn't appeal to me.
[ ] The advertised subject matter is off-putting / doesn't appeal to me.
[ ] The advertised game size (snack-size) is off-putting / doesn't appeal to me.

If there is just one area about the game plug that needs improving the most, what would it be?

This version and release date information is a part of "Windows Game Explorer" category, and is saved into special binary chunk in game data

As far as I understand, the Windows Games Explorer is a Windows Vista idea and has been removed from Windows 10 as of version 1803. So this part of the AGS is probably going to become increasingly obsolete. Even if the game coders fill the fields in, all the Windows boxes post Windows 7 lack the means to do anything with it. And Windows 7 as well as Windows Vista have dropped out of Microsoft support.

Update: I've revamped my download server, and Huggles has moved to a new destination (cf. the updated post at the start of the thread).

[automatically]

Hello,

is there an easy way to automatically get the build date (the date and time that F7 was hit in the Editor) into a constant that I can work with and display? Or alternatively, a build number that is automatically bumped whenever I hit F7?

I find it hard to keep the versions apart when incrementally fixing things and moving compiles around.

Keeping a global in the game and bumping it per hand doesn't quite cut it for me: When I fix things in a hurry, I tend to forget to bump the variable afterwards. So then I'm forced to talk about "the compile that is exactly 772335 bytes large". That isn't er, quite, er, professional.

[two]

Something is off. 
Going by what people have claimed, there should be (at least) two votes for Huggles Goes On A Trip.

Ideally the build system needs to handle more of this, and the CI system just invokes the build system.

It's certainly what I have looked for first: A sort of one-step "make dist" command that makes the computer groan and moan for all its life and then give birth to a ready-and-shiny "gold disk" in due course.

But the underlying trouble seemingly is, we don't have a "cross compiler". So to get a bundle that can compile Linux as well as Windows executables, we need a Linux system to generate the Linux engine and separately from that, a Windows system to generate the Windows engine. Only then can we start the bundling proper.

The Cirrus servers offer just that. You can start up a Windows VM and a Linux VM etc. etc. and when all those tasks have successfully done their thing, start the process that bundles their respective subproducts.

Hello folks,
I've tried building a complete AGS 4.0 system on Windows from the GIT repository.

Starting with the instructions in ags/Readme.md, you get pointed to ags/blob/ags4/Windows/README.md.
You're pointed to the solutions for building the Engine and Editor, but building those is not enough per se:

• The resulting Editor will not find the templates, e.g., the BASS template
• hitting F1 will provoke an error that the help file cannot be found (Should it even? Doesn't AGS4 have a HTML based help?)
• the Editor doesn't offer an option to compile for Linux.

So several “bundling” or “deployment” steps seem to be still necessary. I haven't found information for that, but it might be me, I might have searched the wrong places.

Assuming an AGS4 Editor and Engine is compiled. Just what do I have to do  to end with an installation that is just as complete as what I get when installing AGS-3.5.0.31-P9.exe?

[great]

@sthomannch has great tips. But if they still don't work for you, here's an additional point:

Spoiler

What do you do if the guard doesn't seem to mind the bird flying around?

[close]

Spoiler

Talk to the guard and exhaust the dialogue options until you can talk to the guard about the bird...
Do so ...
Note what happens when you chase up the bird now

[close]

[rightmost]

But I got totally stuck at a puzzle...

Spoiler

Look at the tiles marked in red below: Their lines run into an edge of the puzzle. This can't be right. The tiles must be turned in such a way that all the tile lines continue on other tiles or else the lines can't end in a diode. So no tiles can have lines on them that run into a puzzle edge.


For example, take the tile that has been marked in the rightmost column in the picture above. It can only be turned in one of two ways:
or .
All the other orientations make the line run into the puzzle edge.

Now consider the top left tile that has been marked in the top picture above:
The only way it can be turned is  . All the other orientations make its line run into the puzzle edge.

... so the tile to the right of it is okay (its line doesn't run into the puzzle edge and it also joins the line on the adjacent tile)

... but the then following tile is not okay it doesn't join a tile that we know is okay).

So let's turn that latter tile into the only orientation that matches the tile to the left: We get .

But now the tile that follows then can't be right: For one, it runs into the puzzle edge, and for another, it doesn't match its left neighbour....

[close]

Try to see if you can work your way to the solution in this manner. Work from the puzzle edges inwards. Note that the puzzle has a "hole" in the middle: This "hole" is a puzzle edge too.

[this]

Objects and GUIs live in different, incomparable worlds. As we know, objects are part of a 3-d world, which is "filmed" into a 2-d screen. Then, the GUIs are placed ("overlaid") onto this 2-d screen. In this 2-d screen, we have a "desktop/icons" type of environment whilst in the game proper, we have a 3-d environment (represented in 2-d).

In an analogue world, designing a GUI would be akin to designing a scrap book or photo album page. The "video screen", in which the game proper plays, is akin to the album page background. You can tape paper flowers on top of this or photos or write spiffy texts. Those would be akin to the GUIs or GUI elements. The "origin" of a button is a point to reference the button by; it's a convenient way to specify where the button is located in relation to other buttons on the "album page".

But there's no reason whatsoever to assume that this point of all points should be preferable as a pivot for rotation. It even seems far-fetched and contrived: I can imagine writing some tilted text into a photo album. I can imagine conceptualizing this as writing it upright and then tilting it. But in this case I'd never think of of it as tilting the text by its upper-left corner. Most "natural" for me would probably be the centre point, but I can imagine other situations where I'd want to turn around another pivots. But never around the top-left corner.


A point can be made that designers might prefer the origin of a character as a turning pivot in the 3-d world. But you've already pointed out that it wouldn't be so natural with, e.g., church bells. And even a human character that is turning cartwheels or doing gymnastics at a bar would have another pivot than the middle of their base line.

Probably the simplest and sanest would be to not assume anything and to always ask the user, i.e., make the pivot an argument of the rotation function. If it turns out to be hard to fill this parameter, e.g., because characters can be scaled, then _this_ is the underlying problem that needs to be solved. Instead of assuming that characters would "want" to be rotated around their origin, we should introduce Character.Width and Character.Height attributes so that the pivot parameters of the rotating function can be filled sensibly.

(Ceterum censeo: And we should strive in AGS 4, to make all those pesky differences between objects and characters go away. For instance, Character should have capitalized X, Y, Z fields -- all the fields of all AGS entities should be uniformly in capitalized camel case without exceptions --; Character.on should be capitalized (!) and renamed/repurposed to something like Character.Enabled and Character.Visible -- or else Objects given a Transparency; Object.IgnoreScaling and Character.ManualScaling should be unified to the same field name; the origin of characters and objects should be made the same -- probably middle of base in both cases --, etc. That's been bugging me for years.)

[Edit:]

The images don't show...

I don't quite know why because the images do show for me.

This might be a http:// versus https:// thing. The internet addresses of the graphics begin with "http://" not "https://".
Edit:
The https:// addresses should work now as well.
Download the Windows game at https://www.loquimur-online.de/ags/HugglesGoesOnATrip/Windows.zip.
Download the Linux game at https://www.loquimur-online.de/ags/HugglesGoesOnATrip/Linux.7z.

I've converted all the graphics addresses in my original posting to https:// as well. Drop me a note if they still don't show properly.