Messages

Also worth looking at is PowerQuest from Powerhoof: https://powerhoof.itch.io/powerquest

It's a name-your-price Unity plugin and I've seen it used in Intergalactic Wizard Force, which certainly feels AGS-y from a player's POV.

Oh wow, I had no idea this existed, this looks great!

Well you'd need somebody who has tinkered with all of them to really tell you, and I don't know how many people have done that given the time sink that making an adventure game is.

You're correct that collaborative work on programming is difficult in AGS, not impossible but requires some coordination.  I left a project in a huff when issues with SVN meant I was getting constant compiler errors.  Ideally I wanted guys to write the new code and give me references for where they wanted it copied and pasted but I got ignored.

There are a couple of other things about AGS that to me seem to suggest its hobbyist roots.  Maybe I'm just paranoid but I've always felt as though the global script balloons too quickly and had memory concerns over it. (I understand some devs make characters objects in a scene for this reason) Other than that drawbacks of AGS would be a lack of 3d support, the fiddliness of some of the in-engine tools (I'm thinking particularly about walking areas, I've always found drawing those awkward), no real cross-platform capability in engine (though I understand there are decent third party tools) .

Due to my limited experience with others, I can't say that much.  Sludge, as I recall was very lightweight and used some odd formats, but as it was a hobby from one programmer there wasn't a lot of documentation.  I see there have been some new releases from another programmer, and sludge is also apparently open source now as well as free.

A drawback to Adventure Creator to me is that can't look at screenshots without getting a migraine lol.  There are a lot of menus with a lot of stuff in them, God damn.  But seriously I'm sure pros would include Unity being a highly optimized modern pro engine, the full 3d support, COLOSSAL online support, full cross platform infrastructure, the graphical tools look very flexible, etc. I mean frankly it looks pretty great.  I'd be using it if I had the time to commit to learning from scratch, but as I said the number of menus is intimidating.

Downsides to AC is the entry price point, apparently the licences agreement is that if you make a big profit you give some to Unity, people say there is a general awkwardness to working in 2d in Unity, and my understanding is that AC doesn't support walk-behinds in the same way AGS does.  It may have changed but apparently you needed to create everything you walk behind as an object in the scene.  It's something that can be done very quickly in Photoshop, but it's still a bit of extra busywork.

A free general engine you didn't mention is Godot which seems to have the reputation as the hipsters Unity.  Godot is free and anecdotally has more intuitive features for 2d gaming.  It's very lightweight in terms of design and file size but also surprisingly feature rich.  I played around with it briefly following a platformer tutorial and found it surprisingly intuitive.  3d support as well, no cross platform built in, but apparently there are 3rd party porters.  The amount of engine support and community online seemed pretty healthy.

Scrapheap Challenge  -  more an annual sort of thing, I guess but the idea to make a game where all the backgrounds or characters (depending on what you have the most of) that you've drawn but never used are the assets you use to make a game. It's similar to the complete your game challenge, but it's come up because I've noticed that my Pictures folder is crammed with pixel art characters which, of course, I've never used because I STILL have managed to not make a game yet.

Alternately if we could host a page where a heap of people upload unused sprites, backgrounds (pieces of music, I suppose, AGS is all inclusive ) and then the challenge is for people to make a game using only those resources...

Eh, as I'm typing this I'm going off the idea, actually, as it's similar to a lot of AGS stuff that's out there. But it would probably be fun anyway.

Probably isn't but it looks kinda like Aliens Versus Predator

Hmmm, neither but looks kinda like something that would have been in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.. as my wild guess..

...but nobody remember's Yahtzee's paranormal investigator's demo?

I get the feeling that I've asked this before but didn't find it in my posts and it's something that has been bugging me for ages... Yahtzee did a game that was called something like "Steve and Perry: Paranormal Investigators" that he only ever released a short demo of.

This may seem a weird thing to be bugging me for ages, but as the amount of writing about Yahtzee has increased over the years I've been amazed at seeing no reference to this game having ever existed, even on his own website. It's enough to make me question my sanity...

Arr, I'm in desperate need of some help right now.
I have this song playing in my head that I heard about ten years ago that I would love to find again, but as usual, I don't know who did it or what it's called. All I know is this:

- Musically, I seem to remember it as a mix between an organ/keyboard-melody and a more modern, dance-oriented beat(though still a rather subtle one) Rather repetitive, most likely intended to be a club-hit or something.

- There was also more or less one vocal line repeated constantly throughout the whole thing - If I remember it correctly it was something like "I see you ride o-on a storm / I see you ride o-on a storm / I see you ri-i-ding on a storm", sung in a rather cheesy, crooning, baritone-like voice. I'm not sure if this is sampled from some other song or if this was actually written for this track, though.

- The music video for the song featured an extremely and deliberately kitschy/colorful 50's/60's-styled party in a living room or something similar, with an equally kitschy/campy live-band playing the song in question.

The one time I heard the song and saw the video was through the Swedish tv-show "Mosquito" that aired between 1998 and 2001, and showcased new music/visuals/3D-graphics, so I suppose it's most likely a song made somewhere in between that timeframe. Anyone who has the slightest idea what this song might be, do please tell, because I think I'm going insane from hearing this song play in my head and not being able to find out what it's called...

As Cailin says this is a cover/sampling of The Doors' 'Rider on the Storm'. The only dance-y remix I've heard is one by Puff Daddy, which was on the soundtrack for, IIRC, Need For Speed Underground. I remember that one being quite dance-y but I can't recall if there were additional lyrics.

A (somewhat) interesting note from that is that the assumption that it's cold in space is actually wrong. The best known astronauts from our missions are in danger of freezing if outside the capsule for too long, but that's because their missions have been deliberately run when the Earth is between themselves and the sun to give them protection. A book I read stated that in direct sunlight the temperature of space is literally boiling.

The astronauts could just pull the rope by hand once it's attached.

At that point they'd have basically exactly the same mechanism that they have now..

While on astronauts thing - they should give them something like the ropes Batman uses for grapling (only maybe with some thing sticky or magnets at the end, so they don't damage the actual ship). They should have that on their arms so if the drift away they just point it at the shuttle and shoot...maybe they even have that.

The trouble with that idea being that Batman uses one in a situation where there's gravity and a clearly defined 'up'. Because the grapple pulls him away from the Earth's gravitational pull it's easy for him to stop. In a Zero-G environment, once you accelerate you need to apply an equal force to stop yourself moving which is basically asking astronauts to pick up over their own body weight. End result - astronauts slamming into the ship's hull and it becomes a contest as to whether the suit or the ship takes the worst/most expensive damage.

Tools don't work predictably in space. They found early on that a drill used in Zero-G would actually cause the astronaut to spin around at great speed, for example. A lot of the way things work mechanically here on Earth is due to our gravity and we don't take it into account.

Odd request here, because I'm not really looking for it, but more sort of 'wondering if I'm losing my mind and whether not this actually existed' because I can't find a mention of it anywhere. But back before Yahtzee was an internet shock job I recall him working on a game that had a name like "Dave and Perry: Paranormal Investigators". A three room demo was all that was made and it was decidedly non-mindblowing.

I was just planning to reference it in something for the sake of complete obscurity, but now I'm seriously wondering if anyone at all knows what it was.