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I liked this approach to making a game. The story and the characters stay in the centre of the gameplay, and the small hindrances along the way really only reflects how we would handle our inventories in real life. You wouldn't normally walk around with a bunch of random items, hoping they become useful.

The game looks good, sounds right, and the voice acting is well done, too. The lack of real puzzles seems like a design choice and shouldn't turn people away from giving this a go.

Congratulations on making your first game! You seem to have learned a lot about using the editor by making this, as it runs flawlessly. Like the others, I'll compliment your voice acting. The two Rogers had different voices and it was easy to distinguish between them. I also appreciate the coffee humour.

Hope to see many more games from you! Curious to how it will look if you make your own graphics.

I played this now and echo the sentiments of the others who have posted. This is a great game! 

Starting off, graphics. Frankly, I've never cared for CGA, but boy, does this look good. Paired with a sort of dynamic musical score and nice use of silhuettes for the characters, the visuals and audio is top notch. You basically had me from the drum track mimicking train sounds on the title page.

You weave in a fun story and allude to a larger world involving these two enemies, and you make this impression so well that I want more stories from this world. Less is more, indeed.

But what sells it, is the puzzles. The timed puzzles, which I usually don't like, feel natural in the circumstances, and the solutions, while hard, are logical and fair.

Congratulations on the release. Highly recommended to players who want a challenge.

Sorry, but I don't think this is a good approach. First of all, if the player can lose the drink, this check will no longer work as intended. Granted, if they cannot lose the drink before leaving the area with the machine forever, this will work, but this is error prone in general and should be avoided.

I thought more in the vein of making sure that the player had only one drink at a time, which could open up for using the drink in multiple ways: drinking it, spilling it, giving it to the wrong person, etc. But  I think I didn't consider the stuck coin in all that, so I agree.

I always try to mimic real life:

(snip)

I'm also not too fond of using the inventory as a substitute for variables, tbh.

I think the logic of a npc having iKnowledge in their inventory is flawless.  It's certainly easier for some beginners (like myself) than integers. But anyone more serious about learning coding is better off by taking Khris' advice than my own.

I guess I'd then have to set CoininMachine back to false somewhere afterwards? So that the player can't repeatedly push the machine and get the drink added again.

You could add another if statement to the top of your code to check if the player already has the drink. Then make the reply "I already got a drink". Check for the drink before you check for the coin. (You can solve this in multiple ways, depending on what player response you want.)

[nothungry]

Another small trick in the same vein is that you may give the npc items that only work as bools, like calling an inventory item nothungry or scared, then check for them in the manner described above. With an if statement you may then use this to trigger an action, make a dialogue line visible or something like that. (This is a more roundabout way of doing what Khris explained.)

On Les' Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@maelstromobscura1575/videos there are walkthroughs/game videos from several of the unreleased chapters: New World Order, Antarctica and Yeti.

@heltenjon you don't happen to have any build of his unfinished masterpiece?  Would be fun to see his best effort!

Sadly, no. He was looking for testers back in spring 2022, but given the game's size of nearly 6 Gb, if I recall correctly, it was hard to get people. I told him I could do it, but not quickly, and he responded that he was doing some self testing. I never got a download link.

Case 1 is in the database, though. https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2372-maelstrom-obscura-case-1/

If someone should have the entire thing, I would perhaps think @Adeel could be a better guess, listed as assistant scripter on the Maelstrom Obscura page. But I don't know how updated that page was.

The links from the games pages should work now. 

Unfortunately, I think there have been problems with the search functionality for some time.

@Mike the Wino , You can find the games here: https://grundislav.itch.io/

[Maelstrom Obscura]

When I started using the AGS pages, it was partly because they provide a huge supply of relatively short games, as I had little time for playing full length titles. And the heart and soul of it all was the MAGS contests. (In my mind, they still are, even with dwindling participation.) Even now, I may find an old MAGs thread, download the games and see what different people got out of a theme. MAGS games thus was my way of finding Slasher's games.

I was always amazed by this non-stop game making machine. He would be finished in half the time, and fix errors if we players found them before the deadline.  Looking back, there are dozens of shortcuts made: re-use of character graphics, or simply recoloring their clothes, ripped music or backgrounds, anything to get the job done. What was so amazing is that he made use of almost every conceivable genre. There would be mystery games, science fiction stories, horror, musicals, board games, love stories, westerns, action games, driving games and so on. And always with a quirky sense of humour. Among my favourites are Stuck on you (the one where you have to get rid of a wig glued to your head), The Rat Pack do Cheesy Castle (which may not be the greatest game, but those rats singing about cheese always put me in a good mood), and Deep Space Mission: Are We Alone? (the upcoming pick of the month and an impressive full length game in its own right).

I volunteered to do some voice work on his unfinished epic Maelstrom Obscura, and he basically taught me how to use sound programs, make ogg files and do voice work. Even though my Helicopter Pilot voice work probably never will be heard, I've made use of this for my own games and when making voice work for others.

Here's to you, Les. I will do my best to play and comment on all of your games in the database. I dread the day when I have played them all and know there will be no further games from you on this plane.

I hope the site will be up again soon. Meanwhile, if you tried to download the Pick of the Month, you can find it here: https://archive.org/details/adventuregamestudio?tab=collection&query=ben+jordan

I second the choice. I played this yesterday and was really impressed by how good a game it is.

I have received the bad news we were afraid of from Slasher's son:

Hi yes my dad passed away back in November due to a heart attack

I will leave the proper eulogy writing to those of you who have known him longer than I, save to say that I will miss his humour and almost endless barrage of games. Fortunately, I haven't been able to play them all yet, though I will. Here's to you, Les. 

I played this yesterday. Great fun!

I downloaded and played through this. I was surprised by the length of the game, I'd say it's more like a medium size than a short game.

In testing, we were clocking under an hour, but obviously with me hovering around and maybe nudging it along.

For the database page, short is 30 minutes or less. (For the annual awards, the medium length games are included in the short category.)

Here's my thoughts this month.

Tales From a Forgotten Tavern

Spoiler

Funny and lots and lots of Ponch style dialogue. I like that. There are nods to online RPGs, funny even though I only know about that stuff through the jungle telegraph. I also appreciated the many nods towards this forum's history, understandable even for someone who has played the games and read the posts post-fact.

[close]

Well... Horror, Naturally

Spoiler

Not a game, so there really isn't a contest. However, I was entertained by the scary tale and thought it was quite well put together technically. Some of the pictures were even creepier with the character's heads edited into them. I wasn't quite on board with the shift of endings, and the reveal was a bit too unclear for me to quite understand what the relation between the last one and the killer was. The story was a bit too short to build up tension and care for the characters, but they came across as distinct personalities, at least.

[close]

I voted for

Spoiler

Forgotten tavern, because this is a game contest.

[close]

Edit: @tbook - please add both this and your first interactive story to the main ags database on the games page.

A Blondbraid/Cassiebsg game sounds like a hit!   

I spent much of a long drive with my kids doing a brainstorm for the theme, and we managed to get some rough ideas sort of connected. But seeing as my kids are a somewhat unreliable workforce, I have my doubts whether we will actually commit to making an entry. Still possible, though.

I downloaded and played through this. I was surprised by the length of the game, I'd say it's more like a medium size than a short game.

I generally had a good time while playing. The main point for me was the silly story and the humour, even if I didn't get the reference in the opening scene. The puzzles I'd describe as fairly easy, but one could still get stuck a couple of places. More importantly, the puzzles were fun to solve. There's a fair amount of moon logic, but it's consistent with the humour in the piece, so I didn't mind.

Graphics are made by some assets and worked fine without making a lasting impression either way. The music was self-composed and quite good, I thought. But the one thing that will divide people here undoubtedly is the synthetic speech. I found it strange, a bit funny and a bit grating at the same time. I'm sure some players will absolutely hate these voices - helpfully there's text on the screen, so one could simply turn the sound off.

I had the game crash on me once, trying to exit somewhere from the street scene. After that I saved regularly and had no more troubles. I couldn't reproduce the crash afterwards.

As your first AGS game, this one is pretty good, and you can pat yourself on the back. I hope you manage to add it to the database and get a few more downloads that way. An area of improvement could be to add interactions for actions that aren't the solution to the problem. Lots of them now simply has no effect, but there ought to be a message to the player that it didn't work. You could easily put in more humour and funny fails if you want to keep polishing your game further.

Hope to see more games from you.