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Hey everyone,
    I made Meshumba's Reckoning a few years ago and never posted it so I thought I might as well do it now. This game is a short one with a lot of animation, you are a cult leader named Helsifer who has taken over a church in some fantasy land and is trying to summon a demon before some knights arrive to save the day. Left click is interact, right click is observe, and there's an inventory system but you don't really need to manually use objects on hotspots.

The game is 1024 x 768. If the graphics look stretched go into the setup.exe and check side borders.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate all comments and feedback.

Meshumba's Reckoning

This screenshot contains blood and gore so just to be safe I'll hide it.

Spoiler

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CLARENCE'S PARADISE


Clarence's Paradise is a short game where you explore a small zone of forested wilderness and figure out how to activate a machine. This game really only involves one puzzle, but subsequent games will have more complexity, content, and features! Also you may want to have a notepad on hand to map things out or record various clues you find. I just released it on Itch.io a few days ago, and more recently on Indie DB and Gamejolt. It's free!

You can follow the development of future projects at my blog: locustdalewildlife.blogspot.com

I've spent a lot of time with AGS in the past and have worked on a few (mostly unfinished) games, it is a truly awesome tool! This however was made with Java. As such it requires Java to be installed, so I've included a download link to the latest version on my itch.io page. It's a little awkward but hopefully soon I can figure out a more convenient solution.

Here's the link to my itch.io page where the game is available: https://coolsunenjoyer.itch.io/clarences-paradise

Feel free to check it out, and if you have any thoughts or feedback I'd like to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, here are some screens of the thing.
 


   



           

They did make 5 myst games. There were a few others that came out that were myst-likes, maybe anna or kairo would be recent ones though i never played them. These 1st person adventure games aren't that popular I guess. I loved myst when I was a youngster but I always found the puzzles to get in the way of exploring the world which was much more interesting to me. I personally got fed up a few times and just used a walkthrough.

The only thing that comes to mind is realmyst or myst V which was essentially an fps puzzle solver.

Oh yeah! Phantasmagoria is exactly what I'm talking about, you couldn't actively move around but clicking on hotspots would trigger little scenes and change the position of the character or bring her to a new room. I think that lends itself to creating a cinematic vibe/pacing but you for sure lose that sense of control or inhabiting the character.

I had Shadowgate for the gameboy way back. I'll have to check out cat lady, I've debated keyboard controls vs. point and click in my head many times. keyboard definitely gives you that immediate response but without clicking it really changes the logisitics of how you design the game. Unless you just did both I guess.

Hey thanks for your reply. I'd say the most important advantage of 'movement' is the feeling that the player is controlling the character. For me at least, I don't feel much more immersed when I click on an object and then watch the character stumble over and flail at it with a pre-canned animation. But I think being able to navigate an avatar through an environment automatically makes the player more engaged in that environment and in exploring it. Kyrandia 2 seems like an interesting middle ground, I don't think I can get it to work on my computer but I'll watch some youtube videos of it haha. Thanks for the suggestion.

I've been thinking about different ways adventure games present the world to the player. Seems like most allow the player to navigate an avatar through the world and that movement is key to manipulating the environment. others, like text adventures force you to imagine what's going on as you cause things to happen in the room, but there's no visual representation. When you're told you're in a room with a lamp, and you say "turn on the lamp" it's implied that you walked over to it, but that isn't depicted, and after you're done turning on the lamp, the character's 'location' is still just 'the room with the lamp'.

Puzzle agent kind of treads the line, it has rooms but Nelson doesn't actually move through these rooms. When you click on a door or an object, there's a brief close up cut scene of him approaching that spot, or looking at it, when he's done with it though, and we revert to the original room, he's still in that same position. In the case of puzzle agent it's not necessary to control nelson walking around the scene, but it's also not a game that focuses heavily on exploration, but still, I could see this kind of presentation working with a game like grim fandango. What do we gain by having Manny traverse the environment with a terrible control scheme?

tl;dr
Anyway, the actual QUESTION that I wanted to ask: Can anybody name some games that present themselves/control in the same way that Puzzle Agent does? (where the player character is unable to be moved around in the background) Because as far as adventure games go, I can't think of any.

ok thanks Khris. Good to know, my game is very short so that's not the most tedious thing in the world by any means. I'll mark this as solved.

Hey everyone.

I want to create a custom dialog GUI, I'm not sure how to start. Right now I'm Using LucasArts style speech. What I'm aiming for is a system where the character's lines appear not over their heads, but in a static rectangular GUI that occupies the bottom of the screen. When I say static, I just mean that unlike with the TextWindowGUI method, the dimensions of this GUI shouldn't wrap to the string of text. I'd also like to have separate GUIs on the right side of the text window to display a non animating portrait of the character whose line is currently being displayed. Additionally, I'd like to keep the characters doing their speech animations as they would normally. I've been checking out tutorials and the manual, and old forum posts, but I'm still kind of lost. Anyway, It seems like I'd need to create a function (or void?) that passes each line of dialog to be displayed in the GUI label, and also one that checks which character is speaking and changes the portrait GUI Graphic accordingly. So I THINK I know what I need to do, but I don't know how to do it. Any ideas?

If anyone is confused about what I'm trying to achieve, I can always upload a picture to reiterate.
Thanks a million for any suggestions.

EDIT: After posting this I kept tinkering around with it and it finally clicked (kind of) and I was able to scavenge some ideas from an old thread.

//placed right after function game_start in global script, I also Imported it in the global.ash

Code: ags

void Saying(this Character*, String message) 
{
  lblText.Text = message;
  gDialog.Visible = true; 
  this.Say(message);
  gDialog.Visible = false;
 }

finally I realized that I needed to replace every instance of 'character.say' with 'character.saying'. I also replaced the speechfont with an invisible one.
Im making a bit of progress here, but is this the most sensible way to go about this? Also does this mean that I have to go into every dialog script and replace the streamlined dialog commands with my own 'Character.Saying' one?

Hey, I know you can set import options when you're importing individual sprites, but is there a way to access the import options when quick importing a bunch of sprite files or frames from a .gif? My current method is to make an animation in photoshop, save each individual frame as a 24bit .bmp, and then import all of them at once. I have one set of sprites that is part of the background though, and so I'd like to import the whole image. I could import each file individually but it would be more tedious.
  Thanks for any advice!

I don't know how to access the engine source code and I wouldn't be able to make much sense of it anyway, but (@ Crimson Wizard) what you posted there does explain why the hiccup between views varies slightly so that's good to know. Since that's the case though, I wonder why this problem is encountered so infrequently by people using the idle animation this way. Before I posted the topic I did try to force-play the animation through some scripting in repeatedly execute but I wasn't sure how to go about it, and wasn't sure if it was even possible so I gave up. I'll look into it more though, since detecting whether the char is in motion or not would be a lot more immediate. Thanks for the help guys.

Hi all, I've been searching the forums and beating my head against my desk all day trying to figure this out. Basically the player character in my game is a robed guy with flames billowing out from under his cloak. He doesn't have a traditional walk cycle, instead he sort of glides around. So my Normal View is his "walk" cycle, which is essentially his robes flowing a bit, and flames coming out of them, but while there is a first standing frame in this animation, it is just a placeholder and not his actual standing pose, which I am handling with an Idle View. In the idle animation, his robes are not flowing but flames are still billowing out from under them.

I've put a line in the Global.asc under the Game_Start function: --->      cCharacter.SetIdleView([idleView], 0);

The game starts and he's standing there looking good and I move him and that all looks fine too, but when he reaches his destination he gets stuck on the first frame of his normal view for anywhere between one or a half of a second before switching to his Idle View, which loops uninterrupted once it gets going. By first frame I mean the standing frame, I know it is this frame because I had it blank at one point in which case he'd disappear before going into idle view.

It looks crappy and I can't figure out how to fix it. As a side question, is there any way to include those first frames of the normal view loops into the animation itself? Sorry if I'm posting too much, thanks for any help.

Hi all, I've been searching the forums and beating my head against my desk all day trying to figure this out. Basically the player character in my game is a robed guy with flames billowing out from under his cloak. He doesn't have a traditional walk cycle, instead he sort of glides around. So my Normal View is his "walk" cycle, which is essentially his robes flowing a bit, and flames coming out of them, but while there is a first standing frame in this animation, it is just a placeholder and not his actual standing pose, which I am handling with an Idle View. In the idle animation, his robes are not flowing but flames are still billowing out from under them.

I've put a line in the Global.asc under the Game_Start function: --->      cCharacter.SetIdleView([idleView], 0);

The game starts and he's standing there looking good and I move him and that all looks fine too, but when he reaches his destination he gets stuck on the first frame of his normal view for anywhere between one or a half of a second before switching to his Idle View, which loops uninterrupted once it gets going. By first frame I mean the standing frame, I know it is this frame because I had it blank at one point in which case he'd disappear before going into idle view.

It looks crappy and I can't figure out how to fix it. As a side question, is there any way to include those first frames of the normal view loops into the animation itself? Sorry if I'm posting too much, thanks for any help.


EDIT: should I have posted this question in Advanced Technical Questions?

I have a room that where the foreground gradually gets darker than the background. I have the sprite colored to match with the background, but I was wondering if there was a way to tint him gradually as he proceeds into the foreground. For example his legs could get darker as he moves forward, and if he moves even further, the tint could affect his waist/torso. In my experience with region lighting, the only way I've been able to use it is to change the lighting of the character suddenly, as soon as he moves onto that specified region. I thought of creating an object with the top half transparent and the bottom half translucent, with a gradient in between. I'm not sure how well that will work though, and it would alter the color of the background as well as the character, which wouldn't be any good. If anybody has any advice I'd like to hear it, thanks.

EDIT: Nevermind actually, I achieved a decent effect just by using multiple regions with different light levels, to give the impression that he is gradually moving into a darker area. That's maybe not ideal but it works well enough.

hmm, I found my AMD version of what you were talking about doomantia, I'll try fiddling around with that, thanks.

I have a 1024x768 game, I've built an exe and I am running it fullscreen, everything works fine. My monitor's resolution is 1920x1080 however, so it gets a little blurry when it's stretched onto that screen. I do have the side borders up, so it's not an issue of it being stretched horizontally, I just feel it loses the crispness of the graphics when it's blown up like that, but i'd still like to have it take up the full space of the monitor. I ran game setup and tried every option available, but even the lowest filter makes the game a higher resolution than my monitor and thus it won't work (2048x1546). Is there any way to scale the resolution up a bit so that the graphics won't look so murky? or am I stuck with a windowed game? I'm guessing it's the latter, but I just thought I'd ask. I'd like it to fit on a larger screen without doing that anti-aliasing thing, (it's not actual anti aliasing I don't think, but its taking away the sharpness of the pixels).

Thanks for any help.

Alright thanks for the input, that is what I shall do!

Yeah I don't know, I was thinking about situations where the player would want to dodge something, like a boulder or something, and I thought giving walk it's own mouse click would make the character feel more mobile, instead of the player having to scroll through cursors for 'walk'. Of course that's effectively how it is in the normal L/R click scheme, I'll probably just go with that. I just thought my method might make things more graceful in situations where there was a timelimit or some enemy that had to be dodged, making it so a player wouldn't ever accidentally click on something interactable when they wanted to simply move there. The more I think about it, it doesn't make much of a difference.

I'm considering implementing a simple interface, but it's a little different from any game I've personally encountered. It works as such:
right click is walk, regardless of the cursor that is selected.
left click is either 'observe' or 'interact', you scroll the mouse wheel up to select observe, and scroll it down to select interact.

I'm trying to decide between this, and the more traditional 'left click to move/interact, and right click to observe' control scheme.

I'd just like to hear some opinions, try to imagine it. Does the first method sound confusing, awkward, clumsy, or in any other way unintuitive to anyone?

whoops replied to wrong thread sorry.