Messages

If you want the player to understand what goes on in his head without having him think out loud, you just have to let us peek into his thoughts.

Comic books are experts in this field: There's always big text boxes everywhere telling us what's going through Batman's head. I know that AGS has a "Think" command, but I prefer to use the "Display" command for thoughts (assuming that one character is the established "narrator").

If you think that's a bit too lame: find new ways to reveal your character's thoughts. Let him write a diary in the cutscenes. Or let him fall asleep on the couch and have a bad nightmare -- doesn't necessarily have to be a flashback, either, rather a manifestation of his worst fears or something.

Don't forget that "cutscenes" can be playable! Imagine what a boring game "Trilby's Notes" would have been if all the flashbacks in the game had been movies forcing the player to just watch instead of playable scenes!

Oooh, SHAG.

Yeah, a little entertaining, could have been a lot better (the last thing this game needs is the default Sierra interface), but what can you do in an hour, eh? Good show.

An error I found if you ever decide to make a Deluxe version:

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"You rub your hands up and down your clothes." The horse doesn't have clothes.

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Having several walkable areas are useful if you need to have different properties occur depending on where in the room you are standing. For instance, when the character walks into the background, maybe you want him to become smaller and smaller. Then you can use different walkable areas, and have the character be only 60 % of normal size when he's in walkable area 3 ... Or something like that. Often, at least for your first game, one walkable area is enough.

[Don't be afraid to ask for help.]

Don't be afraid to ask for help.
If you think that you're an expert on drawing, animation, music, story design, coding, dialogue, etcetera, etcetera, it is an interesting challenge to create a game from scratch all by yourself. But most often you'll realize that there is at least one field of the gamemaking progress you're not that good at. If, for instance, you have an excellent story and you code like Gandhi, but you really hate to draw, players will notice that your passion is not in it, if you even finish the game instead of giving it up the second you have to sit down and animate a walkcycle. Instead, look through the "Offer your services" thread and find that it's full of people eager to help out on games, and if you find someone who offers to help out with what you struggle with (and you like their references), send them a PM. If you recruit a team, you won't have to do the parts you hate all by yourself.

Look through available modules.
Chances are that if a GUI or game technique is very popular, there exists a module for it. Skim through the modules forum and see if you find the things you need. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

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Ha!  Oh, so far off but in funny ways.   It's actually: tie wizard to bed with chandelier rope, engage in autoerotic asphyxiation with belt, throw knife into prince and use prince's body as cushioning for free fall from tower.  Heh, seriously though, the prince is only one of the "rescuers".

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Can't wait so see the others, then :-)

[Story design]

Maybe it's time I put up my name in here...

Story design
I write fiction for a living, so I like to think that I have a somewhat creative mind and that I can create good plots in most genres, or help you evolve a plot you already have. If you want to, I'll be happy to write the entire game design document. I also write dialogue, of course.

Play-testing
If I'm not terribly busy when you ask.

(I can also do some proof reading and translation (if you for some bizarre reason want a Norwegian version of your game).)

I just love the prince's quote. If all your dialogue is as funny as that, I'm really looking forward to downloading this game.

Let me guess:

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Strangle wizard with belt, get knife, unhook chandelier, cut rope from chandelier with knife, tie rope to balcony, climb down, watch final cutscene where the damsel ditches the prince to go to Vegas and marry an Elvis clone?

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There is a remote chance it may be pushed back a day, but I'm working my hardest to have it out on time.

Take your time, Grundislav. We won't love the game any less if it's a week or a month late, and we won't love it MORE if it's clearly rushed, unfinished and buggy.

Looking forward to this game, but won't mind it being a bit late anyway.

I think your problem is that you've tried to change function names manually (I don't even know if it's possible to make things work that way), but that AGS wants to run the functions by the names they would have had if you'd created them automatically.

I assume that most of your problems would be gone if you changed the name of the hotspot (listed somewhere under the properties) from "hHotspot1" to "hPasto".

Optionally, rename your script functions from "hPasto_Interact" to "hHotspot1_Interact" etcetera.

Can't figure out whether you were sarcastic or you enjoyed the ride.

No sarcasm. I really liked it. I think it's a brilliant idea in an adventure game to take the visuals away for a moment, so that the player has to feel around a bit to find out what things are. Of course, when used wrong, that can easily lead to blind pixel-hunting not knowing what to look for, but your hotspots were big enough for that to not be a problem (also, the "?????" mouseoverhotspot really helps). So yeah, I liked this one.

I personally found the puking jokes (or, one of them) to be quite disgusting ... I don't mind the character vomiting or even that he's vomiting voluntarily, but vomiting in the place where the game requires him to vomit to make the story progress almost made me quit playing.

But we can't all like the same things, so I guess this is just a matter of taste.

One thing that annoyed me was the cursor system. I use the right mouse button to swap through the cursor modes, so whenever the cursor looked like a hand, I automatically assumed that I was in "Interact" mode. Of course, TWO of your cursors were hand-shaped, so instead of walking around trying to interact with things, I walked around trying to make things vomit without being aware of it. But of course, that's my fault for not reading the manual and not really using the GUI the way it should, it was just... funny and annoying at the same time to figure out that I'd been trying to get a tree to vomit.

My favorite part of the game: The "dark room trying to find the light switch feeling your way around" part. A highly entertaining concept.

Congratulations on the two cups and good luck on the next game -- though, if it contains more of

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feeding your vomit or other body fluids to cute little animals,

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I probably won't play it.

For what exactly?

There are several ways of solving this problem, and though I have no doubt TwinMoon's ways works excellently, I'll just mention the other one because I personally find that one to be easier:

If you write the text "@OVERHOTSPOT@" in a GUI label, it is automatically replaced by the name of the hotspot, object or character you're hovering over. (manual entry)

Forgive me for asking, but wouldn't it be easier to just use @OVERHOTSPOT@?

JBurger is correct -- Brad Bird directed "Ratatouille" as well as "Incredibles", maybe that's where the confusion lies?

Olaf: I think that the main difference between Pixar and the rest is that pixar wants to tell a story...

I agree. I haven't seen a new Disney-not-Pixar animated movie since "Brother Bear" -- at one point I strongly considered to go see "Chicken Little" just to figure out what it was all about, but when I started reading reviews about it, I quickly decided not to. What really turned me off was the notion that there's a thirty-second-or-something scene which pretty much consists of the characters calling out various synonyms of "pee" to each other.

Yeah, the people at Pixar just want to tell a story. My favorite scene from them is probably the way they ended the final race in "Cars", mostly because I know that probably no other movie company would have ever thought of doing the same thing there.

Oh well, Wall-E doesn't debut up here until the end of the month.

It's strange -- Pixar do things their own way, and you would assume we'd gotten used to that by now, but instead, they keep surprising us again and again and again. They manage to make brilliant movies based on ideas any other company would screw up to the point of utter failure.

To quote a webcomic about movies a while before Cars came out, discussing the potential for success in that movie: "It can go both ways. On one hand, it's a Pixar movie about Nascar. On the other hand, it's a Pixar movie about Nascar. I personally strongly dislike cars, sports, car sports and everything related to cars, sports and car sports, and I hadn't even heard of Nascar before that movie came. But after seeing it... I can't remember ever being happier, really.

For each and every one of Pixar's last three or four movies, I've said "Wow, NOW they must have reached the top, they can't beat this one!". And yet they've done so every time. I'm really looking forward to seeing Wall-E, I have a feeling it's going to be one heck of a movie.

Does the two pieces have to have the same shape? Are the two people allowed to use a ruler?

Seriously, olaf, it's not like the player is required to type Ctrl-3-/ while turning the mouse wheel north to get the GUI.

I know. I'm nitpicking. It was just a suggestion, and it probably was a bad one. Sorry about that.

So the rock wasn't there? Bizarre.

In case the order of things matter for some buggy reason, I've always picked it up

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straight after visiting Zombie World, before finding other items in the Americanized world.

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Worst case scenario: There's a bug in the game which has caused the rock to disappear completely.

I tried replaying it, and it's there on my screen. Took a screenshot: Here it is

That's strange. It should be

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On the ground on the floating island you're standing on.

Try moving your characters around a little bit to make sure they're not overlapping it.

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Darn, now I have to replay to make sure I don't remember things wrong.