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Oh, how exciting!  Congrats on the release.

This looks useful!  Thanks for posting.

Oh wow I didn't even know this was a thing until just now.  Well, I guess I have all the old episodes to listen to!  Great work.

This youtube series of tutorialshttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL21DB402CB4DAEAEF is a bit old but most of the information is still quite usable and it's how I got started with AGS.  It goes a long way to describing how to do some of the things you've asked like cutscenes since that's not really a question that can be easily answered, especially in a forum post.  I think using a GUI will be the best way to have the menu options before you start the game in the first room.

EGA is my favorite!  Glad to have a fellow EGAer.

As a guy who works pretty much exclusively in the EGA palette I have to say that I agree with everything here.  You can also see a great comparison of the Last Crusade EGA to VGA on the same website and the same thing is true there.  Of course, these games were designed with EGA in mind so it's no real surprise that the VGA upscalings are kinda bland because I don't think they got the time and attention that everything got the first time but even so I still love EGA.  It's not 100% nostalgia for me but it is, I must admit, a little nostalgia.  The games I liked the best were always VGA as a kid but looking back I really think that the EGA era (looking at you Colonel's Bequest!!) is really a sweet spot.  It's a shame that the era couldn't have lasted another year or two longer so we could have a bigger sample of games.  And it's a shame it's so hard to play to original versions of Indy 3 and Monkey Island.  I just love those sixteen weird colors.

You fall out of a vortex and into a fjord.  Crawling out, you find an architecturally baffling castle off on the horizon.  It's the only shelter as far as you can tell and it's getting dark...

Oh wow!  This is amazing and exactly what I meant.  So, I guess that no there is not really an easy way to do it but there is certainly a way.  Thanks so much for putting that together.

Awesome! And then I hope the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes it into game number 3! 

Oh, heck, I knew I was forgetting one!

Here's a little note to talk about what I'm working on currently.  As you recall from playing the first one (https://springstreetonline.itch.io/saturday-night-is-the-loneliest-night-of-the-week) that we had a real mystery on our hands when the bride-to-be was whisked away into a vortex of time and space for reasons unknown.  Well, follow their adventures when they find themselves in a castle inhabited by a cast of zany characters including but not limited to Dracula, Frankenstein, the Phantom (no opera), a spooky ghost, an alien, a skeleton with a heavy secret, and of course a mummy.  And a werewolf.  Try it for yourself soon in this EGA, gender-fluid, gun-free, New Wave-inflected classic horror romantic comedy graphical adventure.

EDIT: I released a game that's going by II already so this one gets bumped to III.

I followed those instructions and the speech bubble module is working great in 3.6.0.23

My game is not a true 8 bit game but I do use the sixteen color palette exclusively as as an aesthetic decision.  Thus, using character fade outs and ins kind of feels like cheating to me.  When I import a sprite it has a transparency mask already so I'm wondering if there's a way to randomly replace pixels in the sprite with this transparency mask one by one until the whole sprite is then transparent.  This would look a lot better to my eye than having a character fadeout like from the manual:

Code: ags

int trans = cEgo.Transparency;
while (trans < 100) {
  trans++;
  cEgo.Transparency = trans;
  Wait(1);
}

Thanks, everybody!

Unexpected shelter is pretty much the theme of the game I'm working on now where you find yourself stranded in a castle full of spooky monsters in love with each other.  And I haven't yet drawn the castle itself so I'll definitely be posting something soon.

Oh, this is very clever!  I was not using the think view so repurposing it for this is really nice.  I also had the positioning way off but this works beautifully.  Thanks so much for your help!

Code: ags

int thinkTimer;
 
void ThinkAbout(this Character*, Character* targetCharacter, int thinkTime)
{
  gThoughtBubble.SetPosition(this.x-7, this.y-83);
  gThoughtBubble.Visible=true;
  btnThoughtBubble.Animate(targetCharacter.ThinkView, 0, 5, eRepeat);
  thinkTimer = thinkTime*GetGameSpeed();
  SetTimer(THOUGHTBUBBLETIMER, thinkTimer);
}

The part that I'm stuck on is how to assign the variable argument if that makes sense.  That is, a single GUI will work but assigning the proper view to the GUI button based on which character it is called for is unclear to me.  I could assign the view integer to each character's custom properties but I'm unclear how to pass that to the function. 

I am trying to make something like this but that actually works:

Code: ags

#DEFINE VDRACULATHOUGHTBUBBLE 42 //view 42, dreaming about Dracula

function ThinkAbout(this Character*, int ThoughtBubbleTarget)
{
  this.SayBubble("I sure think Dracula is dreamy!");
  gThoughtBubble.Visible=true;
  btnThoughtBubble.Animate(ThoughtBubbleTarget, 0, 5, eRepeat, eNoBlock);
}

So I can call this or change the target for whoever may be in your thoughts and dreams:

Code: ags

player.ThinkAbout(DRACULATHOUGHTBUBBLE);

That bit of imaginary code skips the timer part, obviously, but that's not the part I'm struggling with.

I know what I would like to do and I'm reasonably certain it can be done but I don't myself have the chops to do it myself so I would appreciate any help.

What I want: a character function that displays a thought bubble GUI when that character is thinking of a particular different character.  I have the thought bubbles themselves laid out in different views and I think animating them with a GUI button since I will want to be able to call it from anywhere.

Code: ags

player.ThinkAbout(Dracula, 10);  //displays the Dracula thought bubble above any character for ten seconds

would be something like:

Code: ags

guiDraculaThoughtBubble.SetPosition(player.x+20, player.y-30);
guiDraculaThoughtBubble.Visible=true;
Button.Animate(VDRACULATHOUGHTBUBBLE, 0, 5, eRepeat)

But this doesn't solve the problem of how long to display it and is really just a pile of pseudo-code I'm using to illustrate a point.  And also it would have to be non-blocking.  Anyway, any thought on this, as always, are very much appreciated.  Thanks a million!!

https://preview.redd.it/73wa5mnmpyd81.gif?format=mp4&s=2db53193cc33bf410acf59a79d46093cfbe239cb
https://preview.redd.it/p21p6s1z9bc81.gif?format=mp4&s=a50ba32145b7e76421784c93e93b2df7e4b547f9
https://preview.redd.it/yicc24vhcxg81.gif?format=mp4&s=37d6c65743d6e64e333e6ddf68fa78f4a916f15d

Here are some examples of lighting I have done.  These are all done in EGA with palette shifting.  The links are a little weird and you may have to set them to "loop" but they generally give a good idea of how I'm doing it.  I really love the way lighting looks like this.  I wish I could figure out a way in AGS to do this sort of thing dynamically.  It could be done since you would essentially just be swapping one color for another and you could make a kind of mask character or something and move one color to another either lighter or darker as it comes within the mask.

You can also dowload the SCI Companion and use that to rip all the assets from a Sierra SCI game which can be a useful tool for seeing how a game uses its assets.  It will export a sprite sheet which you could then edit.  Getting familiar with aseprite and how it works is probably also a worthwhile task for creating your own art assets as well.  Just importing a sprite sheet is a little tricky but once you figure out how to do it it's very, very useful.

Here's the background by itself.

I doctored up a background to which kinda sorta fits the bill.  Just for fun though since I stole the buttresses and door pretty directly from Indiana Jones because I was in a hurry.  You don't have to consider me for the big prize.