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Brazil.

*shudders* That movie was way beyond weird, holy hell.

Besides being an awesome film, MOON would make a pretty cool adventure game too. And there are more people that feel that way apparently:

It seems weird that they would invest so much time in drawing all those 2D characters with all the different outfits and faces while they could have stuck it into animating the 3D characters. But I do agree that it's easier to convey emotion with 2D art (unless you work at Team Bondi).

But overall I really enjoyed the game. Especially the slow simmering build the story has without going for flatout scare tactics. And I'm a sucker for being able to roam around any sort of base or headquarters, so the limited locations didn't bother me. Very well done.

I love that there's a new episode in this ongoing circus every time I visit the forums.

But on a more related note, your download link just sends me to my Mediafire dashboard instead of your game, so no, didn't play it. And if you made a typo in the thread title, why don't you just correct it?

If the subtitle is "For the Greater Good", does that mean that this game is a Hot Fuzz parody?

Dumbledore and Grindelwald as a badass magical police duo, now THAT'S a game I would love to play!

This is actually surprisingly good already. I worked on a topdown game once but we copped out by having it under the sea so we could create all kinds of weird fishes that swim sideways so we wouldn't have to bother with topdown woes. But your animation looks pretty good. The hair waving is way too strong but I do like it, adds a little extra flair to it. Maybe just turn it into a little horizontal squiggle that moves up and down his head.

1) Thank you! If all goes well you'll be able to play it next week.
2) I know, I feel dirty when I use mp3's but this was just a throwaway tune that I stuck in there as filler. But in the meantime I did re-encode to OGG and that hasn't given me any grief since, so shoddy mp3 encoding still remains the primary suspect in this case (to stay with the lingo).

Hey fellas, reporting on a weird issue I just encountered.

I added a song to a prototype I'm building, and all of a sudden after about a minute of playing the font goes haywire, preceded by a popping noise, like if you'd twist an audio cable while it was plugged in. Whenever that happens, a certain set of letters turns into some sort of garbled mess. It's only those letters, and they change on every playthrough, it's never a recurring set.



The first few times the game just hung, then I got this error message about something completely unrelated.

The (ir)relevant code blocks referenced in the error:

Code: ags

player.Narrate("Was the killer looking for something?");

&

Code: ags

function Narrate(this Character*, String txt) {
  //this.SpeechView(0);
  this.SayAt(22, 740, 978, txt);
  //this.SpeechView(0);
}

I think something inside the mp3 is borked because as soon as I comment out the .Play command for it, no more crashes of any kind.

It's not really a problem, I can re-encode the song or pick another one, it doesn't matter, just thought I'd drop this here for smart people to take a gander at in case it's something weird in the engine code - using 3.2.1.111, by the way. 1024x768, 32bit, and all that.

I like how they handled it in Alpha Polaris, where the cursor is appended with two symbols when over a hotspot, one for the left button and one for the right. This way you can see beforehand what will happen when you click. Some hotspots only have one, some have both. In AP they only employ USE/TALK and LOOK, but in theory you could contextually map any number of common interactions to the buttons. It's rather elegant.

Looks like some great entries this month! Looking forward to playing.

Great thread.

I'm a big fan of simple control schemes, I abandoned the seperate walk/talk/fondle cursors a long time ago, but I'm not sure I'll give up on the look option yet, mainly for character development reasons. For every stupidly obvious desk interaction there is a wealth of LookAt interactions to be had with other things, like characters. If any click on a character initiates Talk, you miss out on the opportunity to have the player comment of that character. The way the protagonist describes him/her might be indicative of how they feel about that person. Plus if the purpose of a metal sign hanging somewhere is to be picked up so you can use it to wedge a door open, clicking on it will never tell you what the sign said (except with Theo's DoOnlyOnce method, which does sound very ingenious, though it relies on the fact that the player will think to click on the sign again). Besides, though probably few and far between there might be games that do not have a cursor overlay that already tells you what you're poking at.

I suppose it depends on what you are going for with your game. If it's a simple game, a one-button scheme might suffice. I remember I found it a breath of fresh air that talking to characters in Death on Stage involved no branching dialogue of any kind. So straight-forward clicking might make things easier to process. I did an action-based adventure one time with no dialogues or LookAts, and it didn't feel out of place. But at the same time I found some TellTale games very empty and bland because there were only two things to poke at in every room and that was it.

People are working on that. The code first needs to be cleaned up and restructured a bit but it will be implemented in a future release of AGS. Ofcourse you can always download the compiled source from the Skygoblin wiki if you're feeling adventurous.

That was uncalled for. We are trying to understand your question, as you did not provide us with many details to go on. You didn't answer my question either; if you can show us the help file entry that you mentioned, or link to an example or a screenshot instead of just mentioning a game in passing, we would know what you mean and might be able to help you.

Huh, weird. Well, here you go http://mediafire.com/?rtb464g5ahllh9q

I don't think I've ever heard of such a feature. Which passage in the help file were you reading?

After I finally got around to figuring out how to create modules, I thought it might be a good idea to convert this template into one. So now you don't have to start a project from scratch (or do a lot of awkward copy-pasting) to be able to use it!

See the first post for updated download link and installation instructions, and let me know if you spot any bugs.

There is now an Audio tab in the editor, so you will have to actually import a sound file into that first if you want to use it in AGS, it will no longer automatically absorb audio files you place in the game folder anymore.

[patches]

That's not bad Vertigo. It's a little too neat maybe, only wealthy hotel heirs or reality show contestants from New Jersey spend that much time combing their hair

If you're looking for some more reference, you could take a look at some examples of my attempts at it aswell.

When you're drawing hair, don't treat it as a big helmet, but don't draw every strand either, as aforementioned. Instead, focus on patches of hair. Hair usually flows, and in that flow you can often identify some seperate 'chunks' for lack of a better word (there probably is). My second and fourth example show that most I think. You can sorta see the outlines of the chunks and within there are just a few lines to indicate the direction the hair is flowing in.

The mockingly exuberant feature list alone is sure to entertain me for hours before I even get around to playing the game. Nice work Ponch!

Yeah it's pretty good. The hair would be the only thing I'd really have reservations about. It could help to see the original image so we can judge the likeness. Or did you paint it live?

Man, Chris, I gotta say, this massive undertaking of book adaptations you're doing are some of the most amazing AGS games I've seen. They're so unique in style and atmosphere, I just love em. Keep it up!

Farmville Mafia Wars, and all of it's clones on Facebook.

If you have an iPhone there's also a few on there that fit the description. Godfinger is pretty fun, and Tiny Tower sorta does the same thing, and there's probably a few more I don't know about.