Messages

[look]

There are complete and detailed descriptions for almost EVERYTHING in the game …

And that's not even the worst. After the ghost has found its glasses, most of the clickables have TWO descriptions: the ghost's are preponderantly different from the count's. I really went to town this time.  I promise more restraint in future, if only to spare my poor fingers a mountain of typing.

I'm flattered to learn that a player as actually taken the trouble to look at all this lot. 👍   I was wondering … but then it was already too late to stop my endeavour.

you don't want to overuse the trope of nagging or stupid woman without balancing it, either with stupid male characters […]

I can offer the neighbour/vigilante from “Jake's Very Last Journey”: He's so full of teaching Jake self-righteous lessons that he can't listen to anything whatsoever that Jake tries to say. And he's male. 

Perhaps it's time for a more sympathetic female character then? […] (This comes after playing most of your games.)

You're dead right there. You're probably alluding to the bridge troll in “Huggles”?  That latter one happened purely “by construction”:

Spoiler

Huggles' Mum needed to be female because she's the one that lays eggs, so I wanted Huggles to be male for contrast. The bridge troll needed a credible motive to deny Huggles the bridge. What credible motive could a bridge warden ever have to dislike a perky, helpful, harmless rabbit? And that's when I came up with the idea, well, perhaps the guard dislikes males in general, irrespective of their perkiness. So the guard was born that hides their own insecurities and weaknesses by projecting them onto the bystanders whilst deluding themselves about their own capabilities. Huggles being male caused the guard to be female. Thus, a female delusional bridge troll.

[close]

 

It would be kind of cool if I could come away from that “escape” theme in further installments of the saga, it's getting a bit old (for me). Instead of “Castle Escape”, the game could be called, “Tales of Castle Burburton” or some such. Perhaps Lady Anemone could be the next protagonist and redeem herself somehow whilst explaining what turned her into the possessive, domineering personality in the first place. Some credible reason would need to be provided.

It's kind of hard because there's not much room for character progression in those game jam miniatures. You need to transport some specific personalities quickly, and the easiest way to do this is by drawing on clichés.

I haven't planned an overall story for the saga; I'm making up things as I go along, aligning the installments to the respective jam theme.

..

[after]

...
Setting up window
Initialize sprites
Engine initialization complete
Starting game
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

in fact, no coredump around.

Oh dear. I'll post a bug report for that.

Trouble is, the game is written in AGS 4, the major version that will come after the next major version (AGS 3.6) It's somewhat experimental and sometimes gets fixes a bit later than the other major versions but it's the only one that features the new compiler, and I wanted to stress test the new compiler.

Well, the compiler was up to the task apart from some small bugs that I found and fixed, but it seems that the Engine and/or Editor are not and generate faulty Linux. 

Spoiler

but it seems the ghost cannot help me with the crystal ball,

[close]

so I am a little stuck here

Hi, sorry that I'm a bit sluggish replying: My mother has died this Friday, that I have tended to and cared for until the very end, and I've got a full book with chores, tasks and duties right now.

Spoiler

You need to enter the cupboard as Count Bumbley. Don't use the ghost, it can't enter the cupboard. (You can enter the lower right compartment of the cupboard by clicking its back wall.)

The problem with the lock in the cupboard is that it will draw a new set of random letters each time you get the chance to guess and enter the combination. It's different and random each time. So your chances to guess all the letters correctly purely by chance are kind of slim.

Unless ... you can ... you know ... cheat a little and increase your odds somehow?

[close]

[your]

[glow=blue,2,300]Castle Escape[/glow]

Hello folks, Meet Count Bumbley.

He's a brave chap, he's affable, and ... he doesn't want to marry his love, Lady Anemone, just yet.

Lady Anemone, OTOH, has other plans. And she has the wiles and willpower to see her plans through.

Count Bumbley must escape his fate – and with your help, he will be able to!

• Battle talkative shoes!
• Help a poor ghost to be redeemed!
• Solve absurd riddles!
• Meet absurd characters!

Download the game here
There are two chapters available, for the time being in separate files:

• Castle Escape: Chapter 1 – for Windows for Linux (untested)
• Castle Escape: Chapter 2 – for Windows for Linux (untested)

Forgotten to report that the game is in the AGS Database now.

[completely]

For context: I participated in a game jam some months ago. I was completely uninspired by the jam theme, and I never even got a story going. So in the end, I had to abandon the project.

On the other hand, I came up with lots of possibilities for this month's MAGS theme. So I decided on a complete rewrite, with a new story, completely new puzzles and new coding, all adapted to the subject of time and timeline. I've only recycled some visual and music assets that I had made for the old jam. And, of course, Count Bumbley and the shoes had already been drawn for Chapter 1.

This adventure has been written in AGS 4.0, using the new compiler. I thought it would be high time to have the courage of my convictions and to use the new compiler in a small production context. All in all, the compiler was up to the task.

Enjoy!

So, unfortunately a bit belated, I can present my adventure:

Castle Escape: Chapter 2

Count Bumbley had escaped his bedroom, where his love had imprisoned him in order to force him to marry her.(That was Chapter 1.) He's withdrawn into his study. But now he's in another pickle: How can he progress from there? The room seems to only have one door, and Lady Anemone is blocking that one. Perhaps a ghost can help...



Standard BASS interface: Right-click to examine things, left-click to interact with them. Get the menu via the "hamburger" button.

Sometimes you'll play the ghost, sometimes Count Bumbley. It's easy to recognize what's what: The ghost pointers are grey, and the ghost's world is slightly hazy.OTOH, the Bumbley cursors are coloured and the Bumbley world is clear.

Get the game here:

• for Windows
• for Linux (untested)

[might]

I might be able to contribute this month, only there are family matters which have been taking a lot of time, so it mightn't be ready on midnight.

Wish me luck. 

AFAICS, there are ways to download SpriteFont although the company that produced it doesn't have it on their homepage anymore. I found the following download location via Bing: https://download.freedownloadmanager.org/Windows-PC/SpriteFont/FREE-2.0.1.html

But the old download address of the AGS plugin has become unavailable. And I haven't been able to turn up a download location for the executable "AGSSpriteFontGen.exe" either.

So, where can you download the plugin now? Are there perhaps even sources available somewhere?

[for all users]

Long shot, but does anyone have any idea why SpriteFont doesn't show all the fonts installed on your computer and if there is any way around this?

Inkscape may have had just this problem, or used to have:

See to it that your font is"installed  for all users", not only "installed". (Right-click on the font, choose "Install for all users"). I think in the olden times there wasn't any other way of installing fonts than installing them for all users. The option to install a font only for the current user is new. So programs that predate this innovation will only read the fonts that are installed "for all users" and not know about the others.

Because what I'm talking about is allowing the event handler be activated using script as in a second control instead of clicking the GUI buttons.

Where's the difficulty in that? You only need to code oBlueCup_Interact();, i.e., to simply call  in code the function that comprises the event handler. (If you use the current compiler, this function call must be anywhere below the definition of the function that is called.)

It's not quite that easy if you're in GlobalScript and need to call an event function that resides in a room script file. In that case, you'd call `CallRoomScript(...);` in the GlobalScript file and have an `on_call()` function in the room script file that calls oBlueCup_Interact(); etc. in its turn.

As concerns the GUI controls, note that they are all handled with globals. So it's entirely possible in code to have the handler for one GUI control modify the states of another GUI control. For instance, let's say that you want to do: Whenever the user clicks on Button A in GUI G, then GUI H should close. Behind-the-scenes, Button A has an event handler A_OnClick. This is a function, and in this function, you can go

Code: ags

function A_OnClick(GUIControl *control, MouseButton button)
{
    H.Visible = false;
}

The delegate objects that I'm currently implementing might help. You can load a delegate object with lots of function calls at runtime. Whenever the delegate object is invoked, all its function calls are executed in turn.

So you'd have, e.g., a function

Code: ags

function oBlueCup.Interact()
{
    MyDelegateObject.Invoke();
}

and see to it that MyDelegateObject is loaded with the function calls you need.

Don't hold your breath, mind you, progress is slow, but I am working on the feature. 

I would also watch out for the title, I can see the letters have been cut tu because of the shadow, see?

I'm not really sure I understand what you mean? Do you mean the capsule or the header?

is it a particular font?

I haven't really given much thought to the font yet. I simply used the one that I use in-game, namely Nova Oval . Except that I hated “H“ of Huggles, so I typeset that in Nova Round instead.

Looking at a lot of other art, I realize that people like to "hand draw" and layout their titles calligraphically so that they become a logo. I haven't really got that skill yet, so for the first attempt, I let caution prevail and did it simply.

Echoing the advice from the video I shared in that thread, I'd recommend making something specialised specifically for that banner header image. Right now it looks like you took the sprite for Huggles, a caravan and clothesline from the game, and put the title text in the middle. I'd suggest something more...full? Like a whole, contiguous image made for that purpose

And since he's on a trip, use an image where he's walking?

Good ideas, seeing that the Mooring room features a road that Huggles trudges along. Come to think of it, the header doesn't need to feature the game title at all because GameJolt helpfully adds it to the top of the page.

So, rearranging things a bit to accomodate for the very wide format (4:1), I arrive at:



Better?

[started to play]

I started a game ... How can I contact the authors to ask them the question?

What do you mean by "started"?

If you mean that you started to play a game and want to contact the game authors: That would depend on the specific game, of course. If the game is indie, they probably have a website somewhere that will point out a method to contact the author(s), e.g., a Discord forum or an email address. If it has been published, I suppose it can't hurt to ask the publishing house whether they can provide a way to contact the authors.

If you mean that you've started to write a game yourself, then the building tool (the AGS) isn't the most important aspect in so far as marketing is concerned. No matter what your game is written with, the task of marketing a point & click adventure is more or less the same. If you do manage to find the golden recipe to get the word out and get thousands of gamers to download and play your game, do me a favour and disclose it in this forum.

Here's a first pointer that might start your search: https://howtomarketagame.com/
Some talks by the same author:

I am talking about this thread

By the bye, your pointer was very interesting and helpful. I went down that specific rabbit hole. I watched the talk, then found out that the author had several free blog articles about the same subject: game pages and capsules with a focus on Steam. So I read all those articles, too. In the end, I used these insights and transferred as much as possible of that to the Gamejolt universe when I polished the presentation for "Thinker".

So, thanks a lot for pointing out this video to me.

[that]

Hi Babar,

You've been struggling with this one for a while, haven't you?

Oh yes, I keep at polishing all my creations! 

Your thread reminded me of a similar thread from a while back I shared a link in …

Hm. The one thread in Critics' Lounge that I'm aware of was the one where I asked for critique of Huggle's Completed Games phase. You weren't in that thread AFAIK.

What thread specifically are you referring to?

The reason that I return to this right now is that next Easter is coming up and so I've extended and polished the game. And then I decided that the next step would be to move it from my private repository to an indie games site. So I'm interested in having a good page there.

making something specialised specifically for that banner header image.

Thanks for the idea!