Using AGS on non-adventure game stuff (new thread 19/10/2023)

[Gilbert]

I think there was a thread on this, but I was not able to find it, so I start over.

There are people who make games of genres other than adventure games, but AGS is also a great tool for trying out ideas.

It has a simple IDE and could easily get something running without doing a lot of setups or messing with dependencies (especially graphics related, even though AGS is not particularly strong here). It is good for experimenting and making prototypes of stuff, or, say, draw stuff easily from equations (while it's not mentioned, but yeah, all the images were generated by AGS).

Recently I came across a nice small BASIC demo after talking with some people and I think it would be a great idea to port it over to AGS.

So, here it is. I made it with some old AGS V3.5 installed in my computer so any version of AGS recent enough should be able to open and compile this. It's just a direct translation from the original BASIC code (everything is in ROOM1's script) and it runs at ~11 FPS here (oddly the performance is more or less the same when I tested it on two vastly different systems, like there is some bottleneck with AGS script).

Anyway, here is a screenshot:

(The screenshot is actually flipped incorrectly, which was fixed in the above download, but I am too lazy to update the screenshot.)

Anyone who have random non-adventure game stuff made with AGS to show can continue in this thread.

[cat]

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but eri0o did some amazing 3D stuff in his games:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2530-i-rented-a-boat/
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2643-don-t-give-up-the-cat/

[Gilbert]

Yeah, eric0o's awesome stuff count, so they can be list here if you like.
Though it's more about mundane things like those small experiments I made above (which eric0o also had done a fair number of), less about complete games, but there is no restriction on this.

[Matti]

That basic demo is quite cool. thanks for porting, Gilbert.

[CaptainD]

I made this back in 2018 and honestly it's pretty basic and I didn't know what I was doing, but still... I was attempting to make something vaguely along the lines of the 16-bit demoscene. But I didn't fully understand AGS colour commands or know how to use trigonometric functions, so I failed pretty badly. 

[eri0o]

Hey I love these things (thanks for mentioning me!), I am a bit out of steam lately, so I haven't been able to finish much stuff.

I think in this realm of non-game stuff I kinda wanted to do a physical thing one day. I have a plugin that adds serial features to ags (somewhere in the modules/plugins/tools thread in the forum), and I have been fascinated by these interactive experiences that are available in Science Museums, so something like that is probably one thing I would love to explore at some point.

I have only something small and old to contribute here, which is this experiment I did ages ago on Mask Drawing, this was done to test the PR that added the Walkbehind, Walkable area and such mask drawing functions.




Edit: I remember I think @edmundito once did something like a galaxy drawing in ags!

[Danvzare]

Reminds me of Populous.
Hmm... I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to recreate something akin to that game in AGS. 

[Crimson Wizard]

I don't know if this matches the topic, but I've been writing a "dungeon crawler" prototype in AGS.
I did not have exact plans for it, but put some effort in making it customizable, instead of hardcoding things like perspective, types of walls and objects, etc. It is still in preliminary stage, and all the wall gfx are generated using colored triangles:
(EDIT: to clarify, this is not real 3D, it's all made out of Overlays arranged as wall tiles)



Quick list of what it supports at this point:
- Configurable first person view (tells where the walls should be located on screen, etc);
- Each cell part (floors, ceiling, walls) may have a switchable or animated "texture";
- Triggers and simple list of actions (currently used only to make "teleports");
- For active objects and characters it uses state machine scripts inspired by classic Doom engine's actor scripts.

Spoiler

Code: ags

// SYNTAX:
//
//     STATE STATENAME
//         LOOP L F,F,F... [DELAY [ACTION [CHANCE [ARGS]]]]
//         ACTION [CHANCE [ARGS]]
//         GOTO CHANCE STATENAME
//         STOP

Example:

Code: ags

		"STATE Walk					\n"
		"    LOOP 0 0,1,2, 4		\n"
		"    LOOP 0 3 4 A_Step 1	\n"
		"    LOOP 0 4,5,6 4			\n"
		"    GOTO 1 Walk			\n"

[close]

Few older videos were posted on Discord a while ago, but keep in mind these had bad perspective settings:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221048119637311489/1138681750109835355/2023-08-09_06-52-48.mp4
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221048119637311489/1139451793915527168/2023-08-11_09-53-10.mp4
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/221048119637311489/1140479946364571748/2023-08-14_05-59-13.mp4

Game download link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kra2jx9ocspk086/crawler_test.zip?dl=0
Controls:
- arrows to move and turn,
- Z,X to strafe

Game project:
https://github.com/ivan-mogilko/ags-crawlproto
It's opensource under MIT license, although I would not exactly recommend using this code blindly for any purpose, as it's may be overcomplicated in parts. As mentioned, i had an idea to make everything configurable.
I'm writing this in AGS 4, primarily because of a newer script compiler, so you'll have to download AGS 4 Alpha for opening the project.

I'm posting this also because I know myself as a person who rarely finishes any side projects, so if not me, then maybe someone else could find this useful, or at least curious.

[Radiant]

I've been playing around with non-adventure ideas a lot, and in the past have done

Vector Vendetta, a shoot-em-up based on rotated vector graphics;

Also mainly in the sense of "can it be done". It looks less impressive now but this was written 15 years ago and I wasn't sure if AGS or the hardware back then could support a large amount of RawDraw functions within repeatedly_execute (because the manual explicitly stated NOT to do that).

Eye of the Tempest, a 3D blobber-style dungeon crawler (unfinished);

This appears similar to what CW is doing above, except this one is based on zoomed sprites instead of triangles. It's actually pretty hard to make 2D art look good for this style. Although this is tile-based, it has a rudimentary function to pan/zoom to the next tile (similar to what Lands Of Lore does). Originally a MAGS game.

Indiana Rodent, a scrolling tile-based platform game.

Again an exercise on how much we can stack up in a repeatedly_execute loop. It also supports parallax backgrounds, frontlayer tiles that go on top of the mobiles, and a point-n-click level editor that I keep wanting to reuse for different projects. Started out as one of the AGS Bakery charity games, although that first version has rather floaty jumps.