Part Two!
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Part Two!
Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16!
ADVENTURE GAME STUDIO
Credit: www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk
In part one of this series, we indulged in the nostalgia of playing classic point-and-click games from the ’80s and ’90s, such as Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky. We also covered setting up one of the best and simplest-to-use game editors for the genre, Adventure Game Studio (AGS), which can create games to be run on Linux.
AGS has excellent documentation and sample files, which we used to set up your first room and define walkable areas for the character. We also discovered how to have the character walk behind objects, as well as set clearly defined edges for the room, so the game knows when to load new areas.
The final part of the tutorial involved creating hotspots These are fixed parts of the background, such as statues and trees, with which the player can interact. If you’ve followed us this far, there are now two hotspots in your first room: a glowing orb and a spaceship, which the character can examine by right-clicking.
By default, the player can interact with a hotspot from anywhere, but if you want a more Monkey Islandstyle game where characters walk up to objects first, follow the steps in Walk-To Points (opposite) before continuing.
Importing objects
OUR EXPERT
Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro games. The first thing he did when discovering Linux in 2004 was play Beneath a Steel Sky. Be vigilant.
OUR EXPERT
Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro games. The first thing he did when discovering Linux in 2004 was play Beneath a Steel Sky. Be vigilant.
The essence of any point-and-click adventure is picking up certain items and using them in context. Classic games usually make you jump through various hoops to obtain what you need, such as in Day of the Tentacle, where you have to place a blanket in a chimney in order to pick up a gold-plated quill pen, which is one of the items you need to trade with an NPC (non-playable character) to obtain a battery.
AGS refers to such items as objects – anything in the room that can disappear or needs to be animated.
While daisy-chaining objects LucasArts-style will come in time, for now we’re going to keep things very simple by introducing one object to Room 1 that your character can inspect and pick up. To get started, click Sprites in the Project Tree, then Main in the folder tree, top-left. You’ll see an image already in here. This is a blue cup, which is already in your character’s inventory.
Move the mouse to the top of the play window to view the inventory. Rightclick to inspect objects, left-click to use them.