Messages

One of the most highly praised games previewed at Mittens 2003 is now available for the public's adoration, and before 2004 too (GMT)!

Following the adventures of Jon Stickman in his quest for the love of a girl you will experience many exciting locations, a cast of interesting characters all rendered in gorgeous stickman style!  Discover the corruption in our healthcare services, the lengths one man can go for his love and the number of animations AGA can force me to do some time in the future when the game is out, for now try this demo.

Due to wanting the demo out in 2003 and it being 2004 in 5 mins this hasn't been tested, have fun!

It's 1.12MB

You just don't know when to stop, do you Vel?

When a thread has been locked and cleaned because you are posting flames and spam in it (which a moderator has already told you was the reason) then it is not a good idea to continue in the same vein on the new thread.  There is no need to respond to this post btw.

If Jodo is doing something wrong then the more responsible members of the board will deal with it.  He does not have to prove to anyone he has the ability to finish the project, or that he can design a good game, or that he has a demo.  It is unfortunate he would pretend he has one if he doesn't but that's hardly a good reason to make pages and pages of pointless posts about it.

This thread is for advertising, suggestions and feedback.  Not personal attacks or non constructive critisism.

If he can't finish the game then you've already got what you seem to want.  You can shut up now.

A storyboard might be useful, or at least sketches of the locations and characters and actions, but since adventures aren't played in a strict order like an animated movie for example a general design document is what people will more often make.  You could look on Al Lowe's site for his design documents for some of his games for tips.
Learning as you go with AGS is the best way, it has a gentle learning curve.

Alpha channeled sprites don't currently work with scaliing antialiasing, or colour tinting or light levels.. I think that answers your question..
800x600x32 with alpha channelled sprites?  Wish I was brave enough to use that

By 'People are discouraged from arguing with ops, for they are gods!!!' I presume you mean people feel they can't argue with Annie?  Well sure, even ops feel that way  Generally the people who get bothered are people who won't stop arguing about any little thing, ever, or until everyone has each other on ignore, and that includes Annie.  I personally am very tired of it so I'm glad if people feel do feel discouraged.  Unless there really was a big sensible argument where people were treated unfairly recently that I missed I think you are over dramatising things.. you did try to leave the channel a while ago to work on your game, so this new incentive not to spend time chatting might not be such a bad thing I personally don't think either side has been particularly sensible in the arguments between Annie and certain members of the channel, they are always seem so petty, and at least some of the time just caused by a will to argue for no particular reason.

I might have got this all wrong though and you're referring to something else.. but I certainly don't think the ops are useless (they do idle a bit too much though), I don't think people would react favourably to more moderation in the channel, we're mostly just there to kick out people who are intentionally causing a nuisance, and that is usually done within minutes in my experiance.  I'm not quite sure what you're asking for the ops to do.  Sorry if I've in any way offended you myself btw...

ISSUE ONE:  You could do that, yeah.. big sprites can be slow but you can pause the game when text is on screen so that doesn't matter.. I'm not sure if you could do it with the default speech options because I've never used Sierra style myself.  Maybe someone who knows more about that can help...

SECOND:  Yes, any image is fine however it is produced, to produce art in this way may require a bit more technical skill because you have to worry about antialiasing and animating is harder.  But there's no problem with anything hand drawn.

THIRD:  Game can be hundreds of mb if you want.. you can split off data into seperate files if the main exe becomes too big and slow, but it's not usually necessary.  There are limits on things, 500 dialog topics (2000 dialog messages), 299 rooms, and a limit of 150 characters.  Even if you made such a large game there are ways around them and most probably aren't too hard to increase.


FOURTH:  I'm not sure which is more popular, I prefer a less intrusive interface personally.


Here are all the other limits by the way:
  20  objects per room
 100  messages per room
 500  global messages
 299  rooms per game
 300  inventory items
15000  imported sprites
 240  sprites per folder
 400  views
  16  loops per view
  20  frames in each loop
 150  characters
  40  GUIs
  30  controls on each GUI
 200  total GUI controls of each type
 500  dialog topics
2000  dialog-script messages
  30  options per topic
  10  screen overlays at a time
 500  text script GlobalInts
  50  text script GlobalStrings
 100  interaction editor global variables
   5  background frames per room
  20  mouse cursors

The easiest way to do this is to use global ints,  they are a collection of numbers you can set and read globally useful for working out if things have happened or not and making decisions.  You need to use a different int for each even though
If you picked global int number 130 then the script would be like this:

// Talk to hotspot script

if(GetGlobalInt(130)!=1) {
Display("You speak into the hole you hear a noise coming from the other side.");
PlaySound(soundnumber);
SetGlobalInt(130,1);
}
Display("You hear no more sounds.");

I was a bit bored on IRC and the hour games have gone a bit quiet, so I decided to do one.. but nobody else was around to compete against so I'm the only one.  Anyway, here it is, took 3 hours in the end - http://www.agagames.com/scotch/hopscotch_(jear_grou).zip
It has a puzzle, and an original walk cycle and language!

http://www.sylpher.com/ig

Hold down the mouse on the brush tool for a second and the pencil will pop out for selection.  You can do that on all the tools that have the little triangle in the bottom right corner to select different ones.

Not really incorrent, but if you want a pixelly style then it is better not to, when working with higher res antialiased images scaling down doesn't do much damage and makes them easier to paint sometimes.

ah ok.. I think you're referring to the fact that they are antialiased, I think personally that if you can use antialiasing well then there's no problem with it in 320x200, but I cas see why you might see is as blurry in those backgrounds.  In photoshop or PSP you can turn of antialiasing on the pencil, fill and line tools, use the pencil tool instead of the brush tool, it's not antialiased.  If you're using a vector program like flash you can turn it off in the export options.

(note that if you resize a background then it will look blurry, this is due to the filtering that is used when scaling, draw pixel art at the size it is intended for rather than resizing, and if you need to resize turn off bicubic or biliner filtering)

you might be using antialiasing (which I think looks good in 320x200 anyway) or using the blur tool.. these things become more obvious at low res.
Perhaps you could post one of your backgrounds, that would make it easier to work out.

To port to mac you need to offer to port it, get the source code from CJ and try to get it to compile on a mac, which might be hard considering it wasn't initially meant to be cross platform, (specially the editor, I think).

You probably won't be able to do it unless you have programming experience on the mac, if you want a port you'd have to find a responsible person who does know how to do it and get them to offer to port it, like the Linux port.  The Linux port doesn't have the editor ported though, just the runtime engine, and I don't think it'll be any easier on mac.

http://ifarchive.org/ is a huge collection of newer IF.  It has various interpreters and compilers for IF too, if you want to try making some.
The best games will probably be found in the Inform and TADS sections, they are the two most widely used languages for IF and have the most flexible parsers.

The underdogs does have many of the best modern freeware IF games on it's site though, the IF section there is a good place to look for the best games from the annual IF competitions.

Not totally relevant but I noticed your signature, it looks like you haven't heard of http://www.scummvm.org which will run almost all the Lucasarts 2d adventure games including MI3 (apart from the ship to ship fighting bit but that's not too important) and also a couple of non Lucasarts adventures, it has a mac port available.

A Mac port of the AGS editor doesn't sound very likely, there isn't a linux version yet even though the runtime engine has been ported to linux.  I think you'll just have to wait for another engine, or try and run AGS in a PC emulator on your mac.. or (even though you said not to say it) get a cheap second hand pc.. AGS doesn't require anything expensive.

The pathfinder works out the path then starts moving along that path, it takes a little time to work it out, so if you keep telling the character to move every game cycle then it will just be working out paths and not moving, until you release the mouse.. you could only start moving toward the mouse when the button is pressed and then stop the character when it is released.. but that wouldn't update the target position as the mouse moves.. you sould just tell it to move toward the mouse every few steps when the mouse is down but that would probably be quite jerky :/ I can't think of a way that will do the pathfinding.

It's because IF people are all clever and literate and we're mostly just dumb teenagers.

It's also less time consuming to develop text adventures, I think if it was just a case of writing out a description of a room or character in AGS then we'd all have much more time to come up with innovative designs.  IF can't show off with graphics and music, so writing quality and new game concepts are what all the effort goes into, that's not usually the case here.

I'm not saying people here couldn't come up with somethng new, we just need to stop describing our games as having 'Monkey Island' style humour or a 'Gabriel Knight' style plot and start thinking of new kinds of adventure games.. it's only been a few years since we were made able to make our own graphic adventures, amateur IF has been made for much longer, after their first few games people will get bored of generic designs and start innovating.. that's what I'm predicting.

I've been looking high and low for a 3d adventure game engine, or a 3d engine I could convert to be an adventure game engine (with my extremely limted programming ability)  3D adventures wouldn't have to be harder to make really.. animation becomes easier I think.  Graphically I'd find it about the same amount of work personally.

As for AGS, I don't think it could easily make a transition to 3d.. a whole new engine would probably be the same amount of work I would imagine.

I'd love to make an adventure that pushed the lmits of graphics ahrdware, because since scenes in adventures are so controlled you can increase detail and effects to higher levels than you could in any other game genre.. that's why historically adventures have often looked prettier than other games of their time I suppose.

It could work, yes.. but it would probably take a lot of scripting, you should also be able to do a 2 player online AGS game with the tcp/ip plugin but that would be even harder..