Messages

[Rowen's Grand Adventure]

Rowen's Grand Adventure is a reboot of my very first AGS game.

What started off as a normal day (for Rowen at least), quickly turns into him being forced to take a couple of vacation days. So join Rowen and his (supposedly evil) twin brother Roger, as they travel to a strange country known only as the United States of America. While there, Rowen will enter a cooking show, mess with the mafia, help finish a movie, and escape from a hotel. But Rowen's blundering eventually leads him into stumbling into an operation that deals with something that's worth more than ten times the price of gold.

During this adventure you will meet many colourful characters, such as a clown with globophobia, a cactus which says it can't talk, and even the Grim Reaper himself.

So join Rowen on this truly grand adventure. 


Screenshots:







Current Progress:
Story--  90%
Puzzles-- 85%
Graphics--  55%
Scripting -- 70%
Music/Sound-- 75%


Release Date:
TBD


Development Diary:
25th September 2023
This is the biggie. The game I've been working on since *checks notes* 2014. Although that's when I started this iteration of it. The absolute first time I worked on this game was *checks notes* 2008. Because this was actually the first game I ever tried to make with AGS. I never finished that game though. Instead I turned it into a crappy comic, and I subsequently made a crappy game that served as a prequel to said crappy comic. That game was the first game I ever uploaded onto AGS. It was so bad, that I spent the next 8 years improving before I tried uploading another game onto AGS.

This game is also quite easily the largest game I've ever made to date. I'd easily say that the end product will be about four times larger than my current largest game (which I think is Crepe Fields). I've not announced this game until now, because I wanted to get it to a state where I could see the end goal in sight. And while I am still many months away from that finish line, I can finally see it. Although that's in no small part due to the sheer amount of time I've been spending on it this year.

I'm currently at 33 characters, 32 rooms, and 143 items. So that should give you some indication of the scale I'm going for with this game. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, I want to make one of those small demos that reuse assets from the game but has it's own set of unique puzzles, and I want to include another (much smaller) game as a completely optional easter egg. I'm really making sure to earn the "Grand" in the title.

Of course before doing that I still need to finish the game, improve all of the graphics (primarily the backgrounds), and do some thorough bug testing.
I don't know if I'll be giving an update every week like I usually do, but I'll definitely make sure to give an update at least once a month. 
If you've read this far, thank you. 

If anybody wants a BlueSky invite code, I have some. Just send me a PM

What is BlueSky? And why is it invite only? 

This is less of a gear grinding thing, and more of a pet peeve.

There's been an influx of indie games with a retro 3D look, which I'm all for and I really like.
But they almost all insist or using nearest-neighbour for the texture filtering, with the argument that it both looks better and is more fitting with the retro aesthetic.

I suppose if you grew up with a PS1 or a Sega Saturn, then sure. But if you grew up with a N64, PC, or played a bunch of arcade games, then you'll probably have a preference for bilinear texture filtering. I grew up with a fairly powerful PC, so for me, I grew up with basically all of the options set to max (and typically played the games at a resolution of 1024x768, which technically counts as HD from a vertical pixel count).

Whether one looks better than the other is purely subjective. So at least give me a choice!
As an example I really like the low-res texture work on the System Shock Remake (it's not really going for the retro 3D look, but the textures are), but please give me a choice for bilinear texture filtering! Low-res textures with bilinear texture filtering look brilliant! 



On a related note, there's those people who insist on strong scanline filters on anything going for a retro aesthetic. Like seriously... how bad were your monitors? Because I literally still have mine, and I assure you, if you look really closely you can barely see the scanlines. I'd call it more of a soft blur. (I never ran Windows at the maximum resolution of 1280x1024 because you couldn't read anything due to that blur.)

So yeah, my pet peeve is that people consider the cheap crap they used as kids, as being the one-true depiction of retro.
(And for the record, my family is dirt poor, it's just my dad was really into games and computers. He made up for the cost of the decent hardware through the use of Warez CDs.)
I can't imagine anyone trying to play Tomb Raider 2, Thief the Dark Project, or the original Rainbow Six, at something like 640x480, or worse... 320x200.

(And before the Windows PC, we had an Amiga, and even that had a decent monitor with basically no sign of scanlines. Seriously, how cheap were the screens that people were using?)

my latest discovery was how amazing and pretty simple it actually can be to rotate a sprite almost to a 3d looking level using upscaling to keep the sprites from anti-aliasing (getting blurry). I'm talking about a wheel or fan rotation, then downscaling it inside of the AGS engine to your resolution of choice! No AI involved in that tho, probably could use one tho, if i knew how to work the AI, the only AI i use atm is for my voice acting, i love it alltho some friends help out too, lended their voices and replaces some lines that sounds ass!  So they don't have to work so hard, for no cash. 

You basically just described how RotSprite works.

You might want to rethink Unity, at least until they u-Turn this nonsense.

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten

This honestly reminds me of the time Steam started charging for mods. 
I bet just like Valve, they'll reverse their decision, but I wonder if there will be any lasting impact, or if people will just forget the stunt they pulled after a couple of years. 

On the other hand, if they decide to double down, this could be the end of Unity.
In that case, maybe I might edit that original post just to remove Unity from it. 

Wonderful answers, everyone! You've really helped me.

What do you think will help drive the genre forward? Make it more mainsteam? Maybe have an AAA adventure game?

Well the general way the genre has been moving forward in the past few years is to simplify it. Some developers have been removing the puzzles, and instead focusing on the story and exploration such as with Firewatch. Others have instead removed the story, instead focusing on the puzzles and exploration, such as The Witness.

These simplifications are a way to evolve the genre so it has more mainstream appeal. Which in turn makes publishers and developers more willing to work on projects in the genre, since it'll be more likely to sell. Since the mainstream audience is obviously much larger than the original niche audience that made up all PC gamers back when Adventure Games were at the height of their popularity.

So I think the genre will be driven forward by a need to continually simplify it.
Of course people like me though, won't play those games. And the genres will split, and Adventure Games will be back to where they are now. 
Because quite simply, we like the games as they are. We like the way the puzzles are interwoven into the story, facilitating a need to explore and learn how the world works in order to figure out the puzzles.



Here's an example of what I mean.
This is a forum about Adventure Games, so I don't think I need to put this in spoiler tags, but I'm going to anyway.

Spoiler

In The Secret of Monkey Island, you defeat LeChuck by spraying him with a can of root beer. This makes absolutely no sense when explained plainly like this. But in the context of the game, it's the only solution that makes any sense, and you would be a fool if you didn't come to that conclusion.
So how can something insane ever make sense?

Well it's the puzzles and story that lead up to it.
Early on you get a map to a treasure which turns out to be dancing instructions. Which if you follow them, take you to a treasure. Therefore teaching you that instructions are not always what they appear.
Later on you get a cooking recipe, which using what you learnt before about instructions as well as where the recipe came from, you figure out must be a map to Monkey Island. But you don't have the strange ingredients for it. In the end, you figure out that you can use substitutes, instead of a pressed skull you can use a pirate flag, which has a flat picture of a skull on it. So you learn that substitutes can be used from this puzzle which you only managed to solve because you learnt that instructions are not always what they appear.
Later you are told by some cannibals that you need to get a magic root to defeat the ghosts, which makes sense from a fantasy-setting point of view. The root is then turned into a liquid of some kind that you spray onto the ghosts to make them disappear.
But you lose the magic root juice when you fight against the ghost pirate LeChuck. But there is conveniently a vending machine full of root beer nearby. You've already learnt about substitutes in a previous puzzle, and you've also learnt that root-based liquids kill ghosts, so naturally you use the root beer. Which obviously works.

[close]

This act of learning about the world through the story and puzzles, is at the root of why fans of the genre love adventure games. After all, adventure games are at their very heart, about exploration. The genre is literally named after a game called Adventure, which is basically a game about exploring a colossal cave. (Funny how people complain about Metroidvanias being named after Metroid and Castlevania, or Roguelikes being named after Rogue, but no one complains about Adventure games being named after Adventure)

The problem is though. The majority of people don't enjoy exploring and learning, and as such can't understand how anyone could enjoy the genre as it is. They either want the story or the puzzles depending on their preference, but learning how this fictional world works is a foreign concept to them.
So the Adventure games as we know and love them, can't move forward as a genre, because the majority of people don't enjoy the genre.

I remember watching a video on Extra Punctuation where Yahtzee explained the problem with Adventure games. And while I was watching it, I couldn't believe how someone who used to make Adventure games on this very forum, was also so completely oblivious to what makes them fun to begin with. But at the same time I recognize that, most people simply don't find the thing that makes Adventure games fun, that fun. It's like trying to explain the concept of house insurance to a medieval peasant or nobleman. It just doesn't make sense to them.



To make somewhat of a bad comparison. It's like asking how Slasher movies can move forward as a genre. They can and did to an extent, going from silent killers, to killers who make quips. But the fundamentals at the heart, the reason people enjoy Slashers, is because at their core, every Slasher movie is the exact same. A bunch of teenagers do dumb teenage things, and get killed off in a brutally horrific fashion. That's what makes Slasher movies enjoyable. But admittedly most people got sick of it, which is why the genre isn't as popular as it was in the eighties. For the genre to move forward from that, it would have to abandon what makes the genre what it is, and what fans of it enjoy about it. In which case you end up with something that isn't a Slasher, but rather something else entirely different in the horror genre, like the Found Footage movies.
The genre did move on, exploring other ways of telling the same story, such as satire, and turning it on its head. But at the end of the day, there's only so far you can go before it a new thing entirely.

But that's just my two cents on the matter. Sorry for the wall of text. 

In my lecture, I will discuss the resurgence of the genre since the mid-90s and early 2000s, when it was annonced as "dead".

Ah, the time when budding indie developers began to take root until eventually forming into something much bigger.
We saw the rise of Telltale, Wadjet Eye, and Daedalic. And let's not forgot the creation of Hidden Object Games which have changed from mindlessly clicking random items in a list, to full blown Point and Click Adventure games (although they're still typically ignored by the hardcore fans for some reason, probably because of the stigma surrounding casual games).
We also saw Telltale move to more cinematic games and then failing completely due to expanding too quickly because they got lucky with one game (The Walking Dead). Daedalic also seems to be abandoning adventure games, which seems to be working for them somewhat.

with a focus on the last three years. So, what do you think were the most exciting events in adventure games in this time period?

Personally the only noteworthy thing I can think of from the past three years is Return to Monkey Island.
This isn't exactly a genre where something new and exciting happens every few months or so.

The genre has comfortably found its niche. It's glory days behind it (not unlike western and slasher movies). But it's hardly dead. Manic Miner Clones, now that's a dead genre. 

First thing to think of is: How many verbs do you need?

Walk - unless it's Sierra Template, you don't need a verb for this one. Just clicking anywhere on the screen will make you character walk there (if the spot isn't a character, object or hotspot).

Then you have Look and 2 hands. Do the 2 hands  do anything different?

Looking at the image, it looks like he wants something similar to a verb coin, where the feet are used for kicking rather than walking, and the hands are just two buttons for the same action for artistic symmetry. But that's just my interpretation.



My question to you Blano, do you want this GUI to always be visible, or do you want it to pop-up when you click something?

I'm not so sure these days as I haven't tested it for a while but you used to be able to get away with clicking a wrong square or two on those things.

If I'm not mistaken, aren't the answers based on the answers of everyone else?
I'm fairly sure these captchas are used to train algorithms, so presumably what it usually does is average out people's answers to increase it's own understanding.

I definitely remember hearing that whenever it forces you to do it twice, it's because it knows the answer to one, but is collecting your answer for the other.

I personally just use Microsoft Word. When writing down a design document, it's important to be both succinct and linear (even if what you're making is non-linear), so it's easy to read and understand. At least, that's what I took away from my degree, and also when I viewed actual game design documents.

As an example, here's a page from my design document for Black Friday II (in spoilers because it reveals puzzle solutions and plot points):

Spoiler

[close]

Of course I supplemented that with some pictures like a puzzle dependency chart made with yEd, as well as a room layout chart made in Umlet. And I also included some lists, like a list of all of the items and their respective uses, a list of all of the characters, ect.

Something like that Twine editor looks like it would take twice as long to comprehend than it realistically should. And I'd hate to use something like that, get far into development, take a break for a couple of years, and then come back to it. 

Then again, I make most of my games by just keeping everything in my head, and just making the occasional note to reminds myself of something important. (Which is how I'm currently making my most recent game which I have yet to announce.) So perhaps I'm not one to judge since I've only ever used a proper design document once, and such design documents are really more befitting to team projects. (It was an absolute joy to use though, even though it did take me ages to write it all out.)

Still my recommendation would be to try out good old Microsoft Word. Considering eri0o has suggested Google Docs, it seems like I'm not the only one in preferring the simplest solution. 

It grinds my gears how people act like there's only two types of games.
Either super high budgeted AAA games or zero budget Indie games. With absolutely nothing in between.

It's like watching people passionately argue between McDonalds and home cooked food, as though those are literally the only two options to get food in the entire world. 

Like most long-running manga (imho), it seemed like another relatively simple premise stretched to brain-numbing length.

You make it sound like that's a thing that's exclusive to manga. In my experience that describes about 99% of all long-running media. 

Hm...
Well, rip.

One doesn't usually say a flippant-sounding comment like that upon finding out someone died. We pretty much know you are a rather aloof kind of fella but show some respect FFS.

I'm sure he didn't mean any disrespect. It's hard to show tone of voice in text.
The fact that he cared enough to even make a comment shows some level of respect in my humble opinion.

I've already said my part in the other thread, so I'll refrain from repeating myself here.
Instead I'll share another story. I'll never forgot when I helped someone else add some voice acting to their game "10 Ways to Sunday" and it got nominated for best voice work... because Slasher also did some voice acting for it. 
So whenever I see that little silver icon beneath my avatar, I'm always reminded of him. I've never made a game worthy of being nominated, but thanks to him it looks like I have. 

Wow, so it's finally finished then.
I remember when Attack on Titan was all the rage among anime fans. That was around ten years ago I think. I never got into it though.
I always found it strange how people suddenly stopped talking about it completely roughly around the time that second game released.

Was the ending handled well though? What about the series as a whole?
I'll probably never watch it, but I'm always curious as to whether or not an ending is well received.

Well that's some saddening news to find out today. 
Thanks for finding out for us though heltenjon.

I can't say that I knew Slasher well, but I was definitely acquainted with his games, and boy did he make a lot of them.
I would sometimes notice him asking a question in the technical board or sharing a coding trick he had, so he was always around. I remember him finding a bug in one of my games after I released it (I even remember the game and the bug), and I made sure to fix it as soon as he spotted it. I also added him to the credits for spotting it so fast, as a way to say thanks.

I'm going to miss him, and I really do mean that. 

I can't think of any other instance where we describe an item by the colour of the background it sits on, rather than the colour it actually is.

Apropos of nothing, here's the AGS splash screen with the big blue cup logo:

All in favour of renaming the logo to the "Big White Cup" say aye. 

Hmm, looks interesting. I like the little throwback stuff in the screenshots. I'm going to have to check this one out. 

Seems like the X is supposed to be spelled and pronounced 'Sh'.
VERY fitting name.

So instead of Tweets, do we call them Xeets, pronounced "sheets"? If, so, people are going to be Xeeting all day and all night, and sometimes even Xeeting themselves.

Ok, seriously? He literally called it Shitter and Shits? (Just with an elongated "I", which is actually how I sometimes pronounce "Shit")
The guy is either an idiot or he's trolling us. Wait a minute, those two things aren't mutually exclusive... 

Ooh, the best movie monster. Well in that case, I think I'd have to go with the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, simply because they created an entire genre that's still going strong to this day.

But I don't think they'd be my favourite movie monster. I'd have to spend a couple of days thinking about it to choose that. 
I did rather enjoy the blob from the 1980 remake... but is it my favourite though? Hmm...