Point'n'click graphic adventure game

Hi notnsane jayderyu ,

as promissed, I worked on my game this week, trying to mimic a SCUMM based games:

SCUMM WIP

What took me the longest were the fonts. Since I want to support multiple languages, everything has to be rendered with sprite fonts (while it would have been tempting to just uses plain images for the action buttons). The are three different fonts the the moment, and except from the dialog font (the one you see if the main menu), I ended up making them from scratch in photoshop, based on screenshot of the game, a real pain in the ass.

Anyway, I manage to get the action interface behave like the real one, including the default action on right click (you can test on the windows, the only "interactive part for now, just for testing)

I also implemented the pause on space bar, and quit on alt-x. I'll take care of the save menu later when necessary.

I tried to mimic everything as close as possible, which was hard because the font actually change from a game to another, so I settle on the VGA version of the first monkey island.

More to come soon

Looking good OliverC. I'm impresed. Keep it up :)

Thank you. I noticed that when you hoover the windows it says "Walk to look" while it should say "walk to sky". It used to work fine, I must have messed something up with my excessive cut/copy/paste. I'll look into it tonight.

OlivierC

You bring back my memories. Lovely work.

It's getting there. Awesome.

And as I said, I'm still very worried about the walking behaviour.

Sometimes guybrush takes a while to start walking (probably you done that, I prefer instant walking).

But I think that what bothers me the most are the smooth animations. Is there a way to lower the engine's FPS to 24 or 30 FPS? I have to make a research about that, but it should be doable and might give that 486 feeling with tons of frameskip =P

If not, create it artificially.

you are right, it's not exactly the same thing. The reasonn he does not start walking right away I think is because I use he pathfinding behavior with a cell size of 1 which takes longer to find paths. If I use bigger cells, some narrow areas like the stairs don't work (the character scalling on the stairs is broken at the moment btw, I need to adjust it)

I played the real monkey island this week end to take notes on the interface and also noticed a few thing: the scrolling is a lot choppier while it's smooth in my case, and same thing with the charater. While I think I can do something for scrolling (update it every 0.2 second instead of every click) I don't know for the character, since I'm using a default behavior, I'll have to check if I can modify the stepping rate, not sure.

I worked a bit on the game last night, but nothing you can actually see, just some opimization. I decided to stop supporting touch for now and focus on mouse only. It was clunky and the events were getting really messy. So I revemped the controls for mouse only and it's a lot cleaner now. I'll make a new set of control for touch later, when I get the thing to actually work with a mouse.

Nice work :)

It's great work. However to play devils advocate.

If I want choppy. I'll play Monkey island on an older computer :D

notnsane, I implemented the FPS hack that Arima suggested to you in another thread and it seems to work (check my previous link, i keep updating the same folder)

i simulates 12 FPS. I could not find Monkey island actual fps, but I think it's something like that.

I don't know if I'm going to keep it because it looks like the game is running slow because of poor programming ^^

The good thing is it's done with only two events so it's easy to urn on and off. I can even make it an option

Ok, next update, I'll post in my own wIP thread and stop highjacking his one

Sorry, I do not post in my own topic like I said because I did not make as much progress as I wanted to. But just to show you that the project is not dead already, here is a small update:

http://soletme.free.fr/SCUMMClone/

lots of work in the background, the event logic got revamped. Started working on objects and actions. For now, objects only means things you can you can interact with, not item you can pick up, it will come later. I made a simple scripting system so that each action can trigger a simple line of text or more advanced stuff. For a demo, try to do the action "look at" on the window of the main room. The character should walk to the window, say something, pause, turnaround and finish his sentence. This is all loaded from a text file and in the future it should be able to handle animations, character moving around, interacting with objects, passing object to each others... In fact, even something as simple as the player saying a line of text is also a whole scripted action sequence, but with only one event. This way, simple dialogs and more advanced action sequences are handled the same way.

I also converted the doors to the same mechanic as the lucasart games. Now you have to click on the door "object" to change layout, not just walk over it.

More to come soon.

Ah, great. I see that you could actually "limit" the FPS correctly. How much are those FPS? I might raise it a couple since it seems too choppy but the feeling is way better.

The right clicking feature is very nice, also.

Generally, it's getting there. Now the major problem I have is the pathfinding. The sprite seems to move a couple of pixels up and down randomly while calculating the end point. And I again I have to idea if that could be solvable.

Thank you. The FPS is set 12 frames per second, it's very low, but that's what I measured when I played the original monkey island. But I can easily modify it, just need to update a variable. Right now you can turn it on and off in the main menu options, but I might add several values (12/24/60).

For pathfinding, I'm using construct's behavior, not much I can do about it. I tried something once where it would actually save the coordinates of the target position in variables (where the user actually cliched) and when the character reaches the end of the path (which could be a couple of pixels off), move the character to the actual target position, but I was getting a choppy effect, it did not look good.

Right now it's a bit slow because I'm making new artworks, I'm upgrading the test scene with actual graphics of what the game should look like, so I have spent more time in maya and photoshop than construct.

Hi OlivierC

Your game is incredibly interesting to me, as a MASSIVE fan of Point and Click adventures from the 90s (Lucasfilm games / Sierra etc), I am also currently (attempting) to develop my own using Construct 2.

You have done a great job so far!! I am a Construct 2 noob, but have managed to get a static character moving around the screen using the pathfinding behaviour.

Can you perhaps tell me the Pathfinding values you are using? (cell size, cell border, acceleration, deceleration, etc etc)

It's just my character does not move like yours! It waits a short while, then trickles along the path, and looks quite bad.

Hoping you can help

Regards

RetroYak

RetroYak

Hey, funny you commented today, I just updated the game with speak animation and basic inventory stuff (nothing to pick up yet, but all the functions are here and work).

Since my project is 320*200 pixels and that it's rendered in low resolution, not upscaled, it's rather small, so I just set the cell size to 1. I would be bad idea for an HD game, but here it's fine. The reason your character waits is probably because you're working in higher resolution so the path is longer to generate.

Cell border is 0, max speed is 100, acceleration is 600, deceleration 500, rotate speed 600.

I have been having problems with pathfinding lately, sometimes the character will just stop, turn 360 degrees and start walking again. I don't know if it's something I did or if it's a bug in construct. I did not mess with the character movement in a long time, so I don't know what may have caused this

OlivierC

Great thanks! :) I've been messing with the pathfinding for a few hours, and I think I have a nice happy medium (so far) for my character based on your settings :)

I'd love to see your update!