Finishing School

Not much to show. Working on scripting the interface.

Also, a very special event:

function cskuli_Interact()

{

Display("Rape!");

}

“I’m not putting my mouth on that thing.”

- Full Throttle

<3 Vector.

One of the significant differences between the first half of The Golden Age of The Adventure Games and the last half is the Pie Menu UI system. Long story short, the Pie Menu system or ‘Verb Coin’ system as LucasArts called it cut the distance and the amount of clicks that a user had to perform in order to complete a task, such as “Look at Rope”. Instead of moving the pointer to the ‘Look at…’ button, then moving it to the object, then click the object; you simply click and hold the cursor over object and drag your mouse to look icon and release.  It be came very easy to perform this action blindly. It’s all a bunch of Fitts’s Law Bullshit that that average jerk dosen’t care about until it’s not there. I’m looking at you Maya users!

Which brings me to my point. I have decided to forgo the early LucasArts games UI (think Fate of Atlantis) for the later ‘Verb Coin’ system (think Full Throttle). Infact, look at the mockup.

LucasArts Love

While your sitting there watching your Obama, I have decided to utilize the AGS engine, for simplicity’s sake. For what it’s worth, it’s great. What I belive the project will entail, it should suit my needs. Most of the games that have come out using AGS it are still set in the 90’s style when they didn’t make use of Alpha Maps.

For whatever reason, no one has used PNG based animations and objects that the engine fully supports. All use the early (and let’s face it, tired) LucasArts 1990’s style in a 3:4 ratio that is as old as the adventure genre itself. It’s a modern engine that supports DX9 as well as Direct Draw. It’s hardware accelerated, and supports any resolution you can name.

I’ve created a test room, with very little effort I might add, just to get a feel for the process. The scripting seems very much like Actionscript, but specific to the engine enough that one can hook into commands with out really thinking all that much.

So to re-cap:

1. High resolution & wide-screen.
2. Make use of hardwear acceleration & transparency in animations, images, & items.
3. ???
4. Profit.

You like that, you see what I did there?

Our Hero?

Being an unemployed and, generally, a creative person I find myself wanting an outlet for my new found-depressingly ample spare time.

I like games, animation, and sometimes, when I’m in the right mindset (really really bored), scripting.

I’ve recently been looking at the posibility of spending my new free time, (while applying for work in LA of course,) making a game.  Now,  I don’t know a thing about complex programing, that is to say; I don’t know anything about good programing.  I do wish I could be better. I figure, I might as well learn while I have the spare hours to do so.

But! I want it to amount to something.

This is one of my motivations for  wanting to produce a game.  Why a game? Well a game is, in its simplest sense,  a moving piece of art; and I am at least competent at fifty percent of the (indie?) production process: Art, animation, assets, fullmotion video, etc. Basically, anything visual to do with a computer I can do, or learn to do very, very, very, quickly. Like supa’ fast yo’. The other half, the stuff behind the curtian of Maya, I’m going to struggle with, but I know a few people I can ask when it comes to strange things like booleans, and arrays.

I have a few stories going on in my head. We’ll see what happens.