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Thanks dactylopus!

[Today Bik is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux!]

Hi Everyone,

Bik is not an AGS game but I hope some of you might be interested!
Today Bik is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux!
We're also offering an apk of the android version.  The official mobile versions for iOS and Google Play Store will be released in the next month or so.

We had a few members of the AGS community beta test and they were AMAZING!

Some early reviews:
RPGFan.com - 80%
http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/Bik/index.html

RETRO - 4 out of 5 stars
http://readretro.com/reviews/bik/

Hope you enjoy!

http://bikgame.com

[About Bik:]

Hi Everyone,
We are currently seeking beta testers for our adventure game, Bik. The game is complete and has been in testing for a while now, so the focus for this beta is getting feedback for the difficulty and clarity of puzzles.

If this sounds interesting to you please sign up using this form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/194v7dzQ6OTqVHIHGIfVrSqiVl55TDJEzwfZNv9adutY/viewform

Thank you everyone! If you have any questions please leave a comment!

**Note... Bik began as an AGS game, but early on I moved it over to Unity3D.  This forum was still extremely useful in helping me craft the framework I built in Unity to make a 2d old school adventure game.

http://www.bikgame.com

About Bik:
Bik is a point-and-click adventure game that follows a young boy who is abducted by aliens while on a camping trip. After joining forces with two friendly alien mercenaries, Bik escapes from his abductors and tries to find his way home. Along the way, Bik and his newfound friends outsmart hijackers, (eat some brownies), accept a perilous mission to find a missing alien, (make some sandwiches), foil a dastardly plot by an evil corporate empire, (argue with disgruntled robots), and save a planet on the brink of destruction.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri2xozoJyBc

I'll lend my vote to Photoshop and the timeline feature for animation.  Plus, the content-aware feature can be amazing. I'm not technically an artist, but if I need to edit something from my artist real quick and if its a landscape, content-aware can work miracles.

was he ever NOT in vogue?!

I know you mentioned Unity early in the thread and were against it for time reasons.  I'm in the middle of programming my 2d point and click adventure in unity and you are right, Unity will take you a long time to get the basic framework together.  Right now what I use for hotspots in Unity is colliders.  You can have a mesh collider which can form to any shape you want.  For pathfinding I use an implementation of the A* system and limit it to 2D.  In Unity you can have two types of camera, an orthographic(2d) cam or a perspective(3d) cam.  I use the orthographic cam and then assign a baseline to all the objects so that they appear above or below eachother according to the baseline.  I assign the baseline dynamically based on screen position.  Handling sprites is done using sprite sheets.  I built my interactive dialogue system using XML and then I use a parser that puts the dialogue into proper classes and then into lists.  I have a custom editor i built for the XML that enables quicker entry.  For game sequences I built a state machine that can take XML directions or call a custom C# script if the sequence requires more then the pre-defined methods.  If anyone is interested in talking more about it i'd love to!

Hey everyone, I have my first playable demo ready!  I implemented a zooming in and out feature using your mouse scroll wheel too!
Check it out and please give me any comments you have!

http://www.bikgame.com/bikdemo

Hi dactylopus,
Its been about a year since I was using AGS so I don't quite remember everything about its full capabilities.  But I will say that I had a playable demo up within a day or so in AGS.  It was dead simple.  Once I switched to unity it took me about a week to just get a character to walk across the screen properly.  So yea, there was a big learning curve. 
The biggest pro to unity is that you can do anything you want with it.  Need parallax scrolling, its a natural side effect of the 3d engine.  It runs super fast for the types of graphics traditional adventure games use. Want shadows? they are built into unity, but you do need to know something about shaders to make them work right.  It automatically builds to Mac, linux, windows,and mobile platforms(after you program the touch interface).  You can even build to the WiiU, xbox, ps3 etc.  There are a lot of nice built in methods for accessing web content. 
Building the framework was/is the hardest thing about Unity.  Remember there is no Inventory, Dialogue, Mouse actions, menu system, there is nothing in unity. Just a (awesome)framework for displaying and manipulating objects in a 3d (or 2d) environment.

If you want a modern game engine with all its graphical power and you want to publish to every device/computer you can think of, Unity is awesome.   If you only want to do 2d without fancy shaders and shadows and all that, and you don't mind the trouble to publish to different platforms, AGS is amazing!  Building the framework is a CONSTANT tweak that never ends despite me thinking I have it all done.

However you will be a much better programmer(if you even want that) after using Unity. I stuck with Unity and really sharpened my C# and now I feel like I could program anything I can imagine!

Sorry if I ramble.  If you have any specific questions i'd be happy to respond!

Thanks so much for checking it out!

I have thought about opening up the framework.  I think after I finish the game I may try and make the code neat enough for others to go through and take out the parts they want!  The biggest issue is for displaying sprites in Unity i'm using another framework (ex2d) that is not open, so i'd have to make a way for people to plug in their own sprite animation and display framework.   Unity is really amazing to work with.  What is cool about Unity is you can write your own editor extensions. So feasibly you could replicate AGS right in Unity!  For example if i want to add a new character to the scene, I made an editor extension that I click on and put the name/sprite/NPC or player character and then my c# script creates automates the entire process of placing the character in the scene. Then I have another editor for Interactions/Events.  The character now shows up in that editor and I can create dialogue and events right in the editor.  If the event is more complicated than some simple actions I can add a special event which will take a C# script that I can do anything I want with.  I can try to put together some screen shots of the editor if anyone wants to see it just let me know!

Hi Everyone,
I'd like to show you my game i'm working on.  I originally started this in Adventure Game Studio.  AGS was so easy and great to use I was able to get the first level done in practically no time, however I eventually decided I wanted a more flexible engine to experiment with physics and 3d space scenes, so I moved on over to Unity3d.  Unity was much harder to get into.  In fact I had to build from scratch in C# a dialogue XML system, interaction system, Save System(that was the worst!), Menus, Walking AI(wow that was hard!), Mouse and touchscreen input system, inventory system...basically everything!  I'd love to talk about my experiences if anyone is interested.  Meanwhile here is the game.  Also i'm in the middle of a Kickstarter to try and get funding to pay for the artwork to finish the game.  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Thanks so much everyone!

Mike
DEMO: http://bikgame.com/bikdemo
trailer: http://vimeo.com/54158522
website: http://www.bikgame.com
Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mikepinto/bik

So awesome!   Do you think apple would ever approve this in the app store?

Thank You so much for your reply!  I did not know it was called parallax scrolling! 
I'm going to try to implement this myself for practice but I also did a quick search and found this thread which might help...
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33142.0

Hello all, I have researched this ALL day and come up with a solution, however I feel like it is VERY inefficient...could you guys possibly suggest a better way to implement this:  Thanks in advance, this is a great forum!

A foreground object moves slightly while the character also moves..

Code: ags

 //Foreground Trees
int xposgl = oTrees.X;
int yposgl = oTrees.Y;
int bikview = cBik.Loop;
while (cBik.Moving)
{
  if (bikview == 1){
    oTrees.Move(xposgl, yposgl, 15, eNoBlock, eAnywhere);
   Wait(15);
  xposgl--;
  }
  else if (bikview == 2) {
    oTrees.Move(xposgl, yposgl, 15, eNoBlock, eAnywhere);
  Wait(15);
  xposgl++;
  }