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Does anyone remember the Monkey Island remaster on Steam? I was thinking about it while developing my game and I thought about how you could flip between the "classic" and "remastered" graphics and sound with just the press of a button. Besides being a really cool visual effect, I started thinking about some ways I could turn that into a gameplay mechanic - by having certain cues, dialogues, and objects only accessible from one "side" (kind of like Super Paper Mario, flipping between a 2D and 3D world) My game is a satire on old skeevy point & clicks like the original Leisure Suit Larries and it does just feel very fitting that the game be able to be played in a very small 320x180 resolution as well as my original 1920x1080 graphics.

I'm pretty well aware my desired effect (switching resolution/graphics in-game) isn't feasible in AGS, so I have a workaround... I'm thinking I upscale all my 320x180 graphics manually in photoshop (the multiple is x6, which gets me to 1920x1080) and just have it *look* like it's switching res without actually doing so.

My question is: is this going to look absolutely godawful on resolutions that are not 1920x1080? I would test it but I don't have any monitor that isn't 1920x1080, and tbh I don't really fully understand how to play with the resolution that well. If anyone has any other ideas on how to go about my gameplay mechanic as well, please let me know. Everything I've searched for regarding changing res mid-game is a few years outdated so I'm not sure if AGS has updated anything like that in the time being.

The past week has been extremely frustrating, in which every technical aspect of AGS and my game have refused to cooperate on every level. The two primary issues have stemmed from both how AGS handles video, and the game's resolution.

Much of my game relies on videos, which I export using the ".wmv" extension. For a long time, they ran flawlessly, but suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, they stopped working. Whenever the game needs to load one, it gives me this error message:



Unsure of what to do and remembering that my previous game (which was done in the 3.4 alpha of AGS) ran .wmv's without an issue, I decided to make the switch and upgrade the game by making it now in the 3.4 alpha. Thankfully, it did work, and my .wmv files ran perfect. Earlier today, however, I decided to test the game in .exe format, and after building the .exe the .wmv files would, again, not work.  It now gives me the same error as shown above.

I have a strong feeling this is related to the .wmv extension itself, but converting them to another format wouldn't quite work. Aside from the larger file size, it would undoubtedly result in a loss of quality. For me, .wmv files are most preferable, so this is a frustrating obstacle.

As for resolution, for the first month I've developed my game I did it in 800 x 600, but then read up that apparently widescreen is a much more preferable resolution. I began to redo everything accordingly in 640 x 480, mistakenly thinking it was widescreen because of its resemblance to 640 x 400 -- which IS a widescreen resolution. A really stupid mistake, I know. Still, I found the game ran perfect in 640 x 480, and 800 x 600, but upon making it to 640 x 400 I began to run into an issue with the test-run (F5) of the game, which would always open it in a much larger preview window. The game would look significantly worse in terms of quality, and I'm sure this is just because the preview is larger, but I don't know entirely. All my backgrounds are in 640 x 400, so it's nothing to do with that. I'm wondering now -- was it worth all the work I did to make it widescreen? Should I go back and start over again?


So, these have been my issues, and I've run into a wall in trying to address them. Any help or insight would be much appreciated!


Edit: Resolution's no longer a problem, but video still is.

For organization and convenience, I strongly prefer to keep a lot of my character's interaction in dialogue script. I don't have any options programmed, and strictly have a @S and "stop" at each end of the interaction (which holds several regular game codes as well). However, it seems that they don't work that way, as any time I've tried to launch the game it would always give me an error of "Nested functions not supported". It gives me no particular line, and instead points to the entire dialogue script. This perplexed me for several hours, because there's nothing wrong with the code itself.  It also seemingly did this to only one of my dialogue scripts, and not the others. It was only after deleting it did I see then that it had the same issue with the others too, just didn't say it.

My question is this: Is there a work-around to being able to use dialogue scripts in such a way? My game is almost exclusively based around character interaction, so having to use "cCharacter.Say" codes for everything would be extremely tedious.

[Also known as "DUANE: The Iconic Video Game Based on the Hip Dancing Celebrity!"]

Also known as "DUANE: The Iconic Video Game Based on the Hip Dancing Celebrity!"

You take on the role of Duane, a young boy growing up in the late 80's whose only goal in life is to live it to its fullest. He goes about this through his passion and incredibly devout love for dancing.

Duane's Origin, for those unaware.

Inspired somewhat by the RPG Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, my aim in creating 80'SQUEST is to poke fun at typical tongue-in-cheek conventions regarding age, changes in society over time, cultures by the decade, and generally pointing fingers at a whole lot of media from that time period. Its intention is to be lighthearted and generally amusing, based off an absurd circumstance and world that almost takes itself too seriously. It's a hyper-80s view through the lens of a smart, clever, but hopelessly oblivious child who only wants to be the best at what he loves to do. Now, I want to clarify, while the journey he takes may seem silly to us, I assure you that to Duane, it is in fact very real to him.

It's centered around the most pivotal point of Duane's childhood -- the night he's scheduled to dance at the Barbie Dance Club. The event, to him, represents his entire livelihood. He's worked his entire life mastering dance so that he can show he is truly the best, and he does this at the Barbie Dance Club.

Screenshots (more to come later):

A line from the intro

Duane in his room

Amidst a dialogue scene with Duane's best friend, Donny

The style of the game is intentionally bad and drawn to resemble MS-Paint art. Overall, chances are that if you'll find anything bad or particular awful about 80'SQUEST, it's intentional about half of the time.

Development Progress:

Story: 80%
Scripting: 20%
Graphics: 65%
Sound/Music: 90%

FEATURES:
A chiefly unique style of bad
Cinematic cutscenes
Roughly an hour to two hours long
Somewhat limited open-world
Day-and-night mechanic
Multiple endings
Midi music

Expected completion date: Mid-April?

The latter question's been on my mind for some time, especially after checking out the cult-classic point-and-click Noctropolis, which was really recently released on Steam. If you've not heard of the game before, it's essentially a product of the FMV-craze in the 90s. It attempts to utilize real actors as sprites as well as other elements like live action footage that's integrated into the core gameplay. It was definitely one of the more mysterious and interesting titles from that subgenre, so I was happy to check it out. And, in a lot of ways it was a huge disappointment, but visually and atmospherically it was absolutely amazing.

I've found this to be somewhat of a recurring theme in point-and-click FMV games I've played -- games like Bloodnet, Synnergist, Harvester, Ripper, Phantasmagoria, and of course all the older Tex Murphy games. I love these all to death, for various reasons, but for me the genre never quite reached its potential. While many games from the era were visually stunning and had a real out-of-this-world atmosphere, they failed on other fronts like storytelling and design. My love for that subgenre and its potential makes me think -- just how possible is it to make one of these games in AGS? Some would be easier than others (Harvester I think would be very easy to replicate), but something like Noctropolis and seems very difficult.

Thoughts?

Really sorry if this has been posted before. Almost every other issue I've run into I've been able to get around after digging for however long, but with this one I've searched, read the manual a whole bunch of times over, and still can't figure out why using this line doesn't work in my game. I'll outline it in AGS like this:

Code: ags

function room_Load()
{
SetSpeechStyle(eSpeechLucasarts);
}

And it always comes out saying "Error: Undefined token 'SetSpeechStyle'

Is this an outdated command, or am I missing something really simple?