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Done for the $107 Adventure Game Challenge.  Classic EGA graphics and resolution.  A quick little tale where the main drive is wearing disguises in order to pull off a heist.  I had a blast making it and since I already had a lot of useable backgrounds I could concentrate on adding a few little character animations and trying to set a mood. 

Two endings!  Nobody has picked the second one yet!!

AGS Database

Itch Link[/ur]

Fooling around a bit and I created an portrait generator.  I'm using it for another project but it's fun enough on its own to slap it up on itch.  If you come up with a cool one post it!  There is not good way to extract it though lol.  Anyway, there's a couple of Easter eggs.  You can make an EGA portrait of several quasi-famous people if you click around.  Press "M" to enable to cursor if you're not on mobile and if you are on mobile I'm sorry it's so insanely tiny.  I'll add the boy version to this thread when I finish it if that's allowed.  It's all the same thing after all.

EGA FaceMaker 3000


Some generated faces that more or less resemble what you can make:

So, I'm using the @eri0o Mode 7 module and it's working great with one little exception which isn't really related to the module itself but a problem more broadly so I thought I would start a new thread.

The code to add an object to the "ground" sprite is as such:

Code: ags

Mode7Object* Mode7World.AddObject(int x, int z, float factor, int graphic)

I want to randomly populate the ground with trees and rocks.  So far so good, he does this himself in the demo.  The problem is that I don't want rocks and trees to be drawn into the road and I don't know a good way to do this.  The sprite I am using is roughly 3000x800 which makes it feel huge.  I assume going over the sprite with GetPixel is out since that's like 2.5 million pixels to iterate through.  And also there are two colors to disallow not just one (the black of the highway and the yellow painted lines).  I have a Python script that takes a mask of the highway portion of the ground sprite and returns a CSV with the appropriate coordinates but that's still like 600,000 coordinates and I don't think making an array of Points of 600,000 is a really good answer and I'm not even sure how that would be done anyway.  It doesn't need to be pixel perfect, however.  That is there isn't a real need to tell it not to draw a tree on 0,345 0,346, 0,347 0,348 et al. since a block of fifty pixels to allow or disallow is probably sufficient.  You could also anticipate the disallowed shape somewhat by using a pattern (like maybe a sine wave or something) although I'm going to be using a few different maps just to give variation to the highway.  I'm only kind of trying to recreate Desert Bus here!

The short version is that I somehow need to supply that function with "correct" coordinates so that it can draw the objects but not in particular places.  Anyway, thanks for reading!

It's definitely not a perfect system but I think most of that has to do with Instagram's compression algorithm making the pixels blurry than anything else.  Anyway, I'm having fun with it and I thought a few people here might get a kick out of it as well.  If you want to follow Brick Sundown and Ham Embargo's adventure feel free to check it out:

Several minutes of content!

In brainstorming ideas for a new Background Blitz I took a look around my workspace where I do all my pixels and thought to myself "is this an artist's studio?"  Maybe, maybe not but that's what we're gonna do here this month!  How do you work in a studio?  What makes a studio?  Maybe the studio is a crime scene.  I think I remember seeing an AGS game with an artist's studio as the scene of a crime.  Anyway, your imagination is the only limit.

So, for this competition you can do you own studio, your dream studio, an imagined studio, or really any place an artist could work.  The whole world's a studio!

Deadline: June 21st, 2023.  Of course, this is made up and we can fool around with it as needed.

Voting:

Concept: Your background should tell us something about the place you have depicted.
Playability: does it have clearly defined walkable areas, things to interact with, etc?
Artistic Execution: does the image convey the wanted atmosphere? What's the feeling of the place?

Good luck and have fun! Can't wait to see the results of this somewhat meta theme!!

[Concept:]

This go-round let's all take a look at the reach of time and its effects on our cities.

Take this to mean whatever you like.  It could be a Rust Belt bar on a street where nobody lives or it could be the seedy underbelly of a dystopian cyberpunk city.  It could be the streets of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper stalked his prey.  Or just Detroit.  From Wadjet Eye's New York City of the past, present, and future to the steel sky of Union City there's a long history of adventure games taking place in such an environment.






Take three weeks to come up with something then we'll have a week of voting.  Is that the normal period of time?



Entries will be judged on the following and will close on Tuesday February 21th.


Concept: What is the background about? What sort of mood does it spark? What is, as it were, the big idea?

Playability: What is its opportunity for gameplay like? Walkable areas, hot-spots, and so forth?

Artistic Execution: How well does the picture convey an atmosphere? How well is it executed?

Dracula has been annoyed by a rude ghost for the last time.  He takes the affront so personally he chases the ghost into his maze of a dungeon where he aims to dispatch that pesky shade from this mortal coil.  Wander a new maze every game while you find ghost-busting tools in this short EGA dungeon crawler.

MAGS November 2022 entry:

https://springstreetonline.itch.io/ghost-hunter-dracula

There was some chatter on the Discord and since I think there's some people on the forum who aren't there I thought I would make a post to discuss it.  I think it's a really good idea since I think a lot of people here and probably people we don't even know about could really benefit from something like that.  I think making a list of features we would want to include would be a good place to start.  That is, what do we think needs a working example game to showcase?  Some of the discussion on the Discord inlcuded custom dialog options are a custom .Say function.  What else comes to mind?