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UPDATE 9 AUGUST 2023

The game is fully playable all the way through!    Art, music, and puzzles are complete. Just a little work left to do on GUIs and the save/load system, and it will be ready for playtesting. 

In the meantime, I've uploaded a teaser music clip so you can get a feel for the tone/atmosphere. I've put a lot of work into writing, arranging, and mixing the music for this game, and I'm very proud of it. 

Music clip available here:
https://rootbound.itch.io/tunnel-vision

Still trying to finish one of my bigger games this month, so probably won't enter, but it's great to see engagement with the prompt!

Played and finished both games!

My vote went to:

Spoiler

Forgotten Tavern. Definitely a more fully-realized work, with a well-developed story.

Horror, Naturally had some good points, but had overall less immersion for me.

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Not sure how to do the fade non blocking except maybe using the tween module's tween transparency command. That's probably the easiest.

For not having to copy and paste the code, you could put the custom fadein and fadeout functions in the global script and then export the functions so that you can call them from any room.

If you're using a GUI for the black screen it should work fine. If you are using a room object for the black screen you probably would need to use a global object pointer (I think that's an option) instead of referring directly to the in room object. Then you define the global object pointer in each room as referring to the room object you're using.

(Hopefully I am not out of my depth here as I am away from the computer and unable to test this method. It will result in a null pointer error if the function is called before the pointer is defined. There might be other pitfalls I'm not thinking of too).

The change room command would stay in the room script, after the fadeout.

Awesome! Glad it worked!

@Gal Shemesh hmm. You could try putting in Wait(1) instead of waiting for the whole sound length, and see if that starts the sound playing before the room starts to fade out?

So it would be

Audioclip.play();
Wait(1);
player.Changeroom();

My guess would be that sounds are nonblocking and change room is blocking, so change room would execute first. You could put a Wait(length of sound) in after the sound and before the change room function and see if that works.

[If you are joining us from Itch, welcome.Please remember your entries do NOT have to be adventure games but they MUST be made with Adventure Game Studio editor.]

If you are joining us from Itch, welcome.
Please remember your entries do NOT have to be adventure games but they MUST be made with Adventure Game Studio editor.

Hey @Stupot

Should this boldfaced section go in the first post too, just in case people coming from itch don't read the whole thread?

Overall I like it. Not sure what you mean by "more suggestive." If you mean you want it to have more character then maybe think about who the innkeepers are and what their personalities and habits are, as well as who tends to stay there. What is its history? Then think about how those details affect the building. What
parts would be old and neglected? What would be newly replaced and shiny? What details could suggest who is inside and what has happened here in the past?

Not sure if that's what you were asking for, so I hope it's helpful. 

Hey @AndreasBlack thanks for the ideas.    I chose more saturation deliberately because I wanted it to be more pleasant to look at. Total realism isn't the goal, just enough realism to feel not cartoonish. A sort of cleaner, touched-up reality if you will. 

At this point I think I have moved on from the piece to work on other things, so no brush tool needed. But thanks for the offer. I prefer "awesome" over "good enough" but I also prefer "finished" over "100% perfect." 

Hey mods, I hope it's OK to ask questions about a module that hasn't been commented on in over a year.

I'm trying to experiment with the module and having difficulty.

Right now I'm just trying to set a ground sprite and get it to be visible when I run the game. Nothing else yet.

I started with the blank game template, one empty room, and a player character with no sprite, set to start in the empty room. Then I imported a single ground sprite (slot 1).

I wrote this code, based on my best understanding of the script API detailed in the original post above:

Code: ags

// room script file

Mode7 ThePlace;

function room_Load()
{
  ThePlace.SetViewscreen(640, 180, 0, 0); //should cover half of screen. I'm assuming 0,0 places top left corner of drawing in top left corner of game viewport screen. Tried it at 320, 180 (center of screen) as well, with no difference in effect.
  ThePlace.SetGroundSprite(1); //some green ground
  ThePlace.SetCamera(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0); //This will turn out to be a problem, but changing it all to 1.0 doesn't fix everything.
  ThePlace.Draw();
}

First I get an error saying sprite 19 doesn't exist. I wonder where this is called from and find it in line 111 of the Mode7 script. Not sure what that's about. I import 18 more sprites, all unique, then run again.

This time I get an error saying line 222 is dividing by zero. I look there and see it seems related to the camera. Change all camera values to one, like so:

Code: ags

Mode7.SetCamera(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0);

This time the game runs but I still just get a black screen with nothing drawn. Did I miss a command?

Now that MAGS voting is over, I've uploaded version 1.1.
-Minor bug fixes
-Minor GUI and text changes
-Improvements to the "randomness" of things
-Tweaks to some of the more infuriatingly difficult achievements

Same download link works. Thank you to anyone who's played it so far. 

Looks like a tie. 

I had the pleasure of play testing this game, and it is fantastic. The art and music are amazing and the lore of the setting and story go very deep even though the game is short. The puzzles are logical and not too frustrating. Really great fun with a fascinating story. Highly recommend.

(Man, it would be fun to revive the Black Stories with some new cases again.)

That was before I joined the forums, but the thread from 2020 was still fun to peruse. I'd play if this were revived. Don't have any ideas at the moment, but I could probably think of one given a few days' time.

Done! I put in a lot of work because my entry last month was a twenty-minute pencil sketch. 

Hid it behind a spoiler so that other potential entrants can still listen to the music without having their reactions to it colored in any way by pre-existing entries. Maybe I don't need to worry about that, but why not?

Spoiler

There's definitely a story here, but I have no idea what it is!

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Thanks for a great prompt, @Creamy ! It's fun to create something without having any particular game or context in mind, and to just focus purely on composition and on conveying a feeling through an image. I could see potential for re-using this prompt without it feeling repetitive if the music is very different each time. 

Got an idea and did a quick sketch in my notebook. hopefully will have time to flesh out!

This is fun!

Spoiler

Was the mug already in the microwave because you had already microwaved it earlier too?

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This is a great idea! Don't know if I'll have time to enter, but I'll listen to the music and see if it sparks anything. 

Yes, sorry, I'm not as good with the technical language at this level. Perhaps I should have said the "number pointers"? I mean each character's ID number as generated by the editor.