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Hullo!

edited June 2015 in Adventure talk
Hi all. Dave Gilbert here. I run Wadjet Eye Games, and for almost a decade we've been making and publishing games made in AGS. You might know us from Blackwell, Gemini Rue, Primordia, Resonance, and the recent Technobabylon. We also published Chris Burton's game "Da New Guys 2!" 

AGS is great, but it rapidly showing its age and I don't think it's going to be viable for much longer. So I've recently made the leap to Unity and to AC.

I am VERY new to this engine and it's all strange and scary to me. So you'll be sure to see lots of questions from me and laugh about what at newb I am. Nice to meet you all!

-Dave

Comments

  • Hi man, really a fan of blackwell and also the effort you guys make to keep adventure games alive.

    Great to have you here.
  • Welcome to the community, @DaveGilbert!

    Having come from AGS as well, it took a few attempts to find out the best way to make an adventure game engine in Unity.  My first attempt tried to emulate AGS' workflow 1:1, but it was quickly apparent that Unity has a very specific way it likes to do things, and trouble brews if you try to do anything different.  So while I've had AGS in mind when building AC, some of it's features have had to deviate by necessity.  I recently answered some questions from another AGS user, which you may find useful here.

    I don't know if you're going to continue your low-res style with AC (looking forward to finding out, though!), but you might be interested in seeing what @Humaldo, another AGS-convert, is doing with it, as he may have some useful tips to share.
  • Hey! :)

    Sadly, things like Apple enforcing 64bits runtimes for the app store and the support of newer and greater hardware took AGS away from the game.

    On the other hand, Unity handles all the future-proof and compatibility things, Chris has made a great adventure engine with almost everything you'll ever need :P and he's such a gentleman ;) always around here to help.

    So, welcome :)
  • Hi Dave :-h
    As Chris already mentioned, I'm currently trying to carry the AGS look (~early 1990 lucas arts style) over to AC. Our projects are rather simple and short and absolutely not comparable with Wadjet Eye's complex masterpieces, though. If you're interested, here you can find the AGS version (Windows Download) and the AC Port of our first game (The port is playable directly in the browser using the Unity Webplayer Plugin).
  • We actually got the AGS-iOS port working again! But we know a few updates from now it will break all over again. 

    Humaldo: I checked it out! The pixel work looks REALLY good. It's funny how I'm used to a specific look and feel from AGS games. I played a unity-made pixel adventure at Pax East this year and it blew my mind that the character didn't jitter slightly when the camera and character moved at the same time. :)


  • edited June 2015
    Ah, good to hear :) Yes, basically every new big iOS version (= every year) can/might break everything if you're doing your own tech/using old tech.

    I talked to a couple of people who tried to change from AGS to AC and they all didn't like AC's visual editor-scripting. Being able to script like in AGS was the single most important thing for them. I had only very little experience with AGS, so the switch to AC was no problem for me. 

    The biggest problem for me at the moment is how Unity renders sprites (seems it has to do with sub-pixel-rendering) which makes pixel-perfectness really hard to achieve and causes strange distortions. I still have to start deeper research on this topic, but it seems the unity guys are already working on that. Maybe @ChrisIceBox can share some more information. 
  • Huh. No scripting could definitely be an issue, especially considering how complex our games can get. I had blindly assumed there WAS some accessible scripting under the hood! Is that the case, Chris?
  • edited June 2015
    Of course!  AC's just another Unity asset at the end of the day - and sits beside other assets or any custom scripts of your own.

    While it's true that the core to building logic (Cutscenes, Hotspot interactions, etc) is the ActionList system, they can be customised or even bypassed completely with scripting.  New Actions can be plugged in (see this tutorial), and Hotspots can be set to refer to script files rather than Interation objects when clicked on.

    You can also run custom scripts as part of your ActionLists: the Object: Send message Action allows you to invoke functions on any gameobject with a script you want to call.  But again: custom Actions allow you to do basically anything.
  • Yes, if you're unity-savvy, you can basically do everything in AC. I'm usually writing from a "I'm just a designer and I want to only use the AC feature set" perspective :)
  • @humaldo ...about the pixel perfect thing. I use 2Dtoolkit mainly for its 2D camera settings and "pixel-perfectness", it solved all my issues, maybe it could be of use to you too.

    For Unity sprites, there is this blog post published just yesterday:

    http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/19/pixel-perfect-2d/

    And I still have to try it but think this extension could help also: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14498


  • edited June 2015
    Ah, thank you! I asked Chris a while ago if additional pixel-perfect-assets (in particular the "Pixel Perfect" asset) can be used safely with AC, and he said that other users already reported compatibility issues with AC. So you're saying "2Dtoolkit" (OMG it costs more than AC :D ) works with AC?  
  • Well it serves me until now, it's a great asset, but I don't know if it will do the same to you :/ It's a costly asset so :S

    On compatibility, sprites are full compatible.. but for example I don't use 2D AC camera because the transformations that uses to pan and the one that 2Dtoolkit camera does overwrite one with the other. Also I round to integer all the transform movements (camera and characters) to have everything aligned to units.

    But as I said... I'm looking for some way to have pixel perfect without using 2DToolkit, or becoming crazy :P
  • Did you find any solution with the pixel perfect issue? :)
  • Hi! Unfortunately not yet. I'm still pretty busy with scripting my current game and I'm only working with quick-n-dirty placeholder stuff at the moment. I will take care of the beautification including the pixel-perfectness afterwards :)
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