Messages

My solution would be the same as KhrisMUC's, except I'd put a return in at the end of each block to avoid doing unnecessary tests:

Code: ags

if (...)
{
    //blah
    return;
}
else if (...)
{
    //blah
    return;
}
//etc

Setting yourself the goal of writing a complete game in 48 hours is unrealistic, especially if it's the first time you've written a game. Why not give yourself, say, a month (a much more achievable target for a first game), and set yourself subgoals? That way you will get a sense of progressing little by little rather than hitting your artificial deadline all too soon and feeling that you should give up because you keep running into problems and haven't done as much as you thought you would.

Things will take time to do, and this is normal. Writing programs always takes longer than you think. Believe me, I've been programming for over 25 years as an amateur and as a professional and I still underestimate how long things will take (but don't tell my manager ).

So I'd suggest giving it another try, but over a longer time period, and breaking it down into smaller tasks. You might also find the thread "AGS tips" worth reading - there are some excellent tips there.

AGS: Late nights start here.

I was about to log a bug here until I read Lufia's post. I got in the van and the game told me I was heading off to my house, and then the red car drove away and the game seemed to stop.

I then saw Lufia's post, tapped the left and right keys, and lo and behold, the blue van moves around.

Is it mentioned anywhere in the intro that you have to use the arrow keys to move around? If not, it ought to be; if it is already, then I think it needs to be made clearer.

The driving concept is a cool idea - I played many a game like this in the 80s. There doesn't seem to be anything stopping me from driving on either side of the road, though, apart from oncoming cars. Oh, I stand corrected - looks like the cops have got me.

Now here's a bug report - the game crashed at this point. I get a Windows error message ("RIPP.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please tell Microsoft about this problem, yadda yadda yadda."), so does that mean it's a bug in AGS rather than your game? There's no point in posting the error report and memory dump here - it's huge.

Also, how am I supposed to know where "home" is?

[Plan out the whole game before starting to create it.]

This is an excellent thread and there have been some excellent tips posted so far.

Zor has already said this, but I think it is so important that I'm going to repeat it:

Plan out the whole game before starting to create it.

Taking a half-completed idea and starting to work on it in AGS is an almost guaranteed way of ensuring you'll never finish your game. So here's my related tip:

When planning out your game, work out early on how it is going to end.

Once you know how it is going to end (and how it's going to start), you'll have a good idea of what needs to happen in the middle of the game in order for it to get from the beginning to the end.

Write a to-do list and keep it up to date.

Even small games benefit from this approach. You know you (or your co-creators) need to draw the graphics, work out the plot, do the scripting, compose the music, put in the sound effects, do the beta-testing, fix the bugs and find somewhere to host the game, so there is a lot to keep track of. All of these tasks will have subtasks, and new subtasks will come up all the time. If you're writing one particular scene and find something that isn't working in another scene, write it down so that you can work on it when you've finished writing the current scene and don't forget about it.

A little and often

CodeJunkie has already mentioned the "often" bit ("Don't stop working on a project for more than a few days") but similarly, don't go to the opposite extreme and code/draw/whatever for 18 hours non-stop - you'll fry your brain and become thoroughly sick of your game.

Get someone to proofread the text in your game.

This is important* whether you suck at spelling and grammar or have a PhD in it them.** If you suck at spelling and grammar, be honest with yourself - your game is probably going to have a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in it. For some people playing your game, they won't be bothered by this, but for other people, it will be an annoying distraction. If there are a lot of mistakes, some people might think your game's not worth playing and give up on it. If, on the other hand, you're a spelling bee champion five years running, still get someone to check your spelling and grammar. It's all too easy to make typos or use homophones ("their" instead of "they're", for example) accidentally.

* Yeah, yeah, call me a grammar Nazi if you want, but I think this is important. And any typos or grammatical errors in this post will be because I didn't re-read the message closely enough before posting. So there  

** Oops, just proved my point, really.

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.

Well said. The deadline is your own personal one, Grundislav, so no one is going to mind a bit if it comes out later than you say. We've waited a long time for this game and another day or two isn't going to upset anyone.

A mathematician chips in (I'm not a mathematician by trade, but I have a degree in the subject):

One of the great things about mathematics is that it works. All of the other sciences stem from it, and it is its consistency that means we are able to do science at all. If it weren't true that every time you added 2 to 2 you got 4, then it would not be possible for us to do science, and, indeed, the universe would be a very strange place, if it were even possible for it to exist at all.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem is not a flaw in mathematics. Put simply, it says that however much we develop mathematics, there will always be new mathematics to be discovered. So it shows that mathematics is infinite, not that it is flawed.

Here's a simple example (this is not quite what the theorem is on about, but it illustrates the point behind it): consider the everyday counting numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... If you add any two of them together, you get another counting number; for example, 3 + 5 = 8. Combining two numbers of a particular kind and ending up with another number of the same kind is the concept of "completeness" that the theorem talks about.

But if you subtract one from the other, you can end up with a number that isn't a counting number; for example, 3 - 5 = -2. So you need to throw zero and negative numbers into the mix if subtraction is always going to work. Now multiplication of any two of these numbers gives you another one of the same kind, but if you divide one by another, you can end up with a different kind of number, that is, a fraction like 1/2. So for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division all to work, you need fractions as well as whole numbers. (I'll ignore the thorny issue of dividing by zero here, as that's another matter.)

So this set of numbers seems to be complete for any sort of arithmetic you might want to do. But it's not... you can square a number by multiplying it by itself (eg, 3 x 3 = 9) but doing the opposite operation, square roots (that is, finding what number multiplied by itself gives a certain number - for example, the square root of 4 is 2, and of 25 is 5), often gives numbers that are neither whole numbers or fractions. The square root of 2 is not a whole number and neither is it a fraction. So we have to bring in another set of numbers (called irrational numbers) so that we can always do square roots (of positive numbers and zero).

And so it goes on (finding the square roots of negative numbers is very useful in maths, but these square roots are not whole numbers, nor fractions, nor irrational numbers, so mathematicians invented more numbers so that they could do maths with the square roots of negative numbers). Every new mathematical concept that mathematicians come up with allows them to do things that result in something outside the scope of mathematics as it has been developed so far. This is what Gödel's incompleteness theorem states, in a nutshell.

Sorry to drag this thread away from the original topic, but Redwall's assertion that "maths is broken" is false and I felt it needed to be countered.

Whoo, maths!

I haven't checked whether Gilbot V7000a's formulae are equivalent to the following, but I would have thought a simpler proof of this formula for finding the maximum value of two numbers would be:

If a > b, then abs(a - b) = a - b, so [a + b + abs(a - b)] / 2 = 2a / 2 = a. Replace > with < (or swap a and b) to show that the result works the other way round too. When a = b, abs(a - b) = 0 and the mean is equal to both numbers.

Taking squares and square roots just to avoid using comparison operators is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, of course, but this is the sort of exercise that top-notch universities put in entrance exams for applicants to their maths and computing courses. The classic example for computing courses is to build various logic gates from NAND gates, or something like that.

And don't even think of suggesting the square and square roots method if you are applying for a job in the video games industry... square roots take up too many clock cycles and are usually approximated using a look-up table or some other faster workaround.

t took me a long time to realise that  'lakh' wasn't an english word.

Well, it is in English dictionaries (see http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/lakh?view=uk, for example), but I've never heard anyone use it in the UK. How do you use it? Would you talk about a lakh of rupees, or lakhs of people, or something like that?

My first language is English but sometimes when I am speaking French or Italian I have to stop and think which one is coming out of my mouth. This is especially true when I use both languages in one day.

This game is trickier than I thought it would be...

Spoiler

I have the ball and the dog whistle. The whistle has no effect on the dog. I've tried using the drainpipe, the mud, the board on the shed and the holes in the tree, and tried getting in round the back way, all to no avail...

[close]

Any hints on what I am missing?

Thanks.

It started out with the first ever point 'n' click game I played, which was Chasm (a very cool Flash game - if you haven't played it already, search the web for: chasm point 'n' click). I wondered if there were any other point 'n' click games out there, and soon found there were hundreds, if not thousands.

Somewhere along the line I discovered the RON games, and from there it was a short jump to AGS. I couldn't get the hang of it at first, so I deleted it. Then a year or so later I thought I'd give it another go. As I'm not the best at drawing, programming being much more my bag, I teamed up with Ben304, posted loads of newbie questions to Beginners Technical Questions and Trance-Pacific was born...

There's not much on it other than a couple of games I've had a hand in writing, but here it is anyway: http://www.freewebs.com/paoloags/

An ATM number panel is not a minigame unless the definition has really changed.  Minigames are things like punching people, throwing darts at a board, jumping bottles, sliding tile puzzles, that sort of thing.

Funny you should say that... the game I am working on now (not for this competition) has one of these in it... I'm not going to say which. You'll have to wait and see!

EDIT: I've had a great idea for a minigame but unfortunately I don't have time to enter this month. Good luck to all the entrants.

One method that creative people use to plug plot holes that require too much effort to fix properly is to draw attention to them. That's right - make it blatantly obvious that there is a flaw. The trick is to move the flaw out of your scripting and into the plot.

Here's what I would do as an Easter egg: your character has a calendar with February 29 on it, even though it is one of those pesky years that is divisible by 100 but not by 400 (such as 2100). She looks at it and says "What? February 29? But this year's not a leap year! I knew I should never have bought that cheap calendar.*"

Ta-da! Instant bug fix. The player thinks that there being a February 29 in a non-leap year is deliberate. No more sleepless nights striving for perfection and irritating messages from players pointing out your "bug".

Alternatively, you could even keep it as a computer bug by having her use the date application on a computer and say, "It's February 29 tomorrow? That can't be right! Bloody <insert name of faulty operating system here>!" That might make a nice little in-joke.

By the way, does the system time really think that 2100 is a leap year? Isn't this a bug in your operating system? Isn't there a fairly good chance that it will have been fixed by then anyway?

And no, it's never possible to fix everything. All computer software has bugs in it - it's just a question of whether they are significant or not. Like OneDollar says, just worry about the important stuff. I look back at Trance-Pacific and see loads that I would like to change, but Ben and I only had three weeks to write it, so we just did the best that we could in the time available. (Having a deadline is a good way of concentrating on the most important bugs, by the way.)

*This is not as strange as it might sound. My colleague has a Dilbert calendar that duplicated about three weeks of dates in one month and missed out a big chunk of another.

I haven't tried any other game design software, and this is kind of off-topic (maybe it belongs in a new thread), but is AGS the adventure games engine with the largest number of games available? There are some excellent adventure games made by other games engines (I'm thinking in particular of Out of Order, which was made using the SLUDGE games engine - anyone who enjoys AGS games and hasn't played this one yet should certainly do so, in my opinion) but there never seem to be many downloadable games available on the game engines' sites. This suggests that AGS is the most popular games engine out there, but of course this doesn't necessarily mean it is the best.

[snip]

I have one neighboring family in my house. They go to church every sunday. They pray. They do everything like "true" christians. But they don't help you when you need it. They won't say hello when you approach them and say hello to them. They look at you like you're an ape, because you don't go to their fucking church every single sunday and you don't sing their fucking songs every time. [snip]

You can be a hell of a good person which helps others, but someone keeps telling you that you are not a christian because you don't go to confessions, you don't go to church, you don't..... Christianity is not about how often you go to church. Christianity is about how you treat others.

[snip]

Well said. These people are church-goers, but they are not Christians. They can that they are all they want, but if they're not living up to the meaning of the term, they might as well be atheists.

Looks good. I think you made the right decision with going for one-point perspective. Now that your character is in the room, you'll see that there's a very good reason why 2D adventure games use it - 2D characters have one-point perspective. They scale as they move forwards and back, but they don't tilt towards the viewer (like the doors do in the two-point perspective version). If you'd used two-point perspective, the doors would have looked really odd (slanting) when the character (which is always vertical) walked close to them.

(Even in adventure games with 3D rendered backgrounds, the characters are generally rendered once from a single viewpoint and then just scaled as they move forwards and backwards, so extreme three-point perspective in the rendered backgrounds is not a good idea.)

Played a few minutes. For non-english people it's very hard to read, because the text changes very fast. Would be a good idea to add a text speed slider or just let the text change a bit slower.

neon,

Sometimes even we English-speakers find that the text goes by too quickly! I sometimes found that the French text went by too quickly in Dread Mac Farlane, so I played the game in a window rather than full screen (which I usually prefer to do anyway) and clicked on the desktop each time there was a lot of text to read - this has the effect of pausing the game.

Hm, what do you have to do around here to get four cups, I wonder?

I seem to have opened a can of worms here... For the record, I wasn't intending to criticise the panel's judgement on what merits three cups and what deserves four, but in my opinion (and my opinion alone) this deserved a higher rating. I respect the panel's view, and this was not the place to open up a discussion of how the panel determines how many cups a game should get. So, sorry if I offended anyone with my sarcastic question.

I notice that the script generating the web pages displays n blue cups and 5 - n grey cups. If your browser application window isn't very wide, this sometimes makes the last cup wrap on to the next line, which looks odd. Would displaying a single graphic made up of the five cups rather than five separate graphics fix this, or would it just make all five cups wrap round to the next line if the browser window is not wide enough?