Community
General and Everything Else => Community Competitions => Topic started by: Cloudee1 on April 03, 2010, 09:19:14 PM
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Hey gang, I know the numbers are pretty low right now, but I am more or less finished with the point and click template and tutorial and I am looking for a couple of testers.
what better way to do that than to sponsor a competition based around it. The template includes everything that the tutorials covered, the cash, the string and the balloon. So in this competition, you must do something with the balloon. The french (I think) movie comes to mind, The Red Balloon. But besides that, you are allowed to create any additional inventory items (you are encouraged to in fact). There is no maximum or minimum room count, but a smaller game will be easier to finish than a long one, you are allowed to rip rooms and pics, but you MUST make use of text resources...
With that said, let the testing... I mean the competition begin, the judging will begin April 30, 2010, so please have your entries uploaded by then. I have added a couple of interaction examples to the point and click tutorial if you need any help figuring it out.
You can get the template from here (http://sciprogramming.com/download/pntnclck.zip)
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Neat idea! And what a great way to get the ball rolling in the community again. Things are looking pretty busy for me in the next few months but I'm sure I can find time to do a short game in P&C. Hopefully there's a good turnout.
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Hope at least a couple of people are working hard to put something together for the competition. I have been and as the judge, I can't even win.
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Ugh....I haven't had a lot of time at all to work on anything yet. Things suddenly got super busy. There's a good chance I'll be going to an audio production school in September and I'm trying to get ready for that as well as a million other things I have to be on top of. There's still 12 days left, though. You never know.
I did try to sit down with the template and figure out how to do stuff. I didn't get very far. It seems pretty complicated and seeing as how I don't remember a lot of the tricks I learned for regular SCI games, learning a whole new method of developing seemed like a daunting task...
For instance, how do you add a new inventory object (that you pick up and don't start with at the beginning of the game) to the inventory GUI?
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The commented out bit in the beginning of the inventory.sc (500) will walk you through adding new items to the game as well as the gui. I have to follow it myself when adding new items.
good news about the schooling though, congrats.
As a sidenote, my games coming along, not quickly, but coming.
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Alright gang, the clock is ticking. After working on it all day today, my game is now playable from start to finish. It's sloppy though so I'm hoping to get it cleaned up over the next couple of days. I don't know how clean I'll get it between now and then, but it will be done.
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I'm not going to be able to make it, I'm afraid :(.
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MI, I've got a sneaking suspiscion that no one else is working on an entry either. Apparantly April is a bad month for competitions (if looking at the last comp held in April is any indicatio.) I'm actually pretty disappointed with myself, only a couple of days left to clean up all my drawings and I spend all night trying to bang out a sound file.
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Too bad...we'll get a good competition going again sometime, though. I just haven't the time right now.
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Yeah...I could see myself devoting some time this summer to a competition...but this is the end of the school year and I'm both teacher and student, so it's pretty much crunch time for me.
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Well, the day has finally arrived, and unless there is someone who is secretly working on a game and needs a day or two to finish it up, then I guess this competition is officially closed.
The good news is though, I have made a game that fits the requirements of this competition, actually it meets the requirements of Eigen's failed April competition too, and it has been uploaded and is available for download. It can be found on the fan games (http://sciprogramming.com/fangames.php) page.
While it is nothing overly special, it is the first sci point and click game to come out of our little community, so check it out.
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Just fired it up here. Doesn't seem to be DOSBox-friendly. The first animation takes far too long and switches scenes before the logo is assembled. I can't play it without DOSBox because I'm using XP which has no sound and the graphics glitch horribly on DOS games. It also crashes in ScummVM before it even starts...too bad.
EDIT: Running the game in 22,000 cpu cycles in DOSBox seems to clear it up nicely. I'm now stuck with the shoelace, poster, and stringed-baloon. Let's figure this out...
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Yeah I noticed the bit about the logo and dosbox. I could have rewritten the changestate to insure that the logo came together completely but that would cause it to take way too long. Acceptable loss there. As for XP, only the internal speaker is supported so just playing straight as is should be fine. your not gaining anything musically by going the dosbox route. XP is what I'm running still.As for the puzzles, if I can even call them that, are pretty straight forward, you'll get there I'm sure.
Wait a minute, you said you've got the shoelace AND the stringed balloon. That certainly shouldn't have happened! Are you sure about that?
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Yeah I noticed the bit about the logo and dosbox. I could have rewritten the changestate to insure that the logo came together completely but that would cause it to take way too long. Acceptable loss there. As for XP, only the internal speaker is supported so just playing straight as is should be fine. your not gaining anything musically by going the dosbox route. XP is what I'm running still.As for the puzzles, if I can even call them that, are pretty straight forward, you'll get there I'm sure.
Well like I said, if I play it through raw XP I don't get sound (even from PC Speaker) and the graphics glitch like crazy. The cursour duplicates on the screen and pieces of areas duplicate onto other areas of the screen. It's not pretty. But DOSBox with 22,000 cycles seems to work nicely.
And I'm sorry. I don't have the shoelace anymore since I got the balloon with the string. My bad :).
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I haven't been able to download the file...Well, I should say I download it, but when I try to extract the files, it says the file is corrupt. ??? :'(
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It should be considered good practice to make sure that the games run without issue in DOSBox. Some versions of Windows no longer ship with the NTVDM and, of course, there are the non Windows users.
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For the record, the game is fully playable with dosbox. As MI pointed out, the cpu cycles need to be tweaked to get the game up to speed. Personally I only need to set mine at 11500. So unfortunately there is no standard setting apparantly. Without tweaking the cpu cycles though, the only thing that fails is my Sierraish style logo at startup. I thought it would be in bad form to make someone wait for it to finish rather than get the game started. So while it fails, the rest of the game does not and it is not essential to the game, so like I said before I considered it an acceptable loss. Is anyone else having the trouble that Doan is in downloading the game?
~ I uploaded a fresh copy of the zip file, I don't know what went wrong with the other one, so give it another try Doan.
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It was probably on his end. His download was probably unfinished. Happens every now and then to me as well. He probably just needed to redownload it. I had no problems.
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I don't think that was it. I lugged my laptop into town (no internet at home) and tried it out. It was corrupted, thats when I uploaded the fresh copy. Whatever happened has me a little concerned about all of the other zip files available...
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I got it! Will play it in a little bit :D
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I hope this zip works for you Doan. The game is really nothing special so don't expect to be blown away here. I didn't have time to do half the things I wanted to do, it always seems to come down to the graphics. I still think that is the hardest part. Anyway, let me know what you think. That goes for everyone else as well.
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For what it's worth, I think the graphics are fantastic. From the backgrounds to the sprite/animation art. Definitely does the job, anyway. Sure things could be better, but for one month's worth of work that's darn good.
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Well, I'm probably a bit late to the party, but I've just checked out Circus Quest and totally love it so far. The graphics are really fantastic, true to the Sierra style and very detailed. Kudos!
Laugh at me, but I actually got stuck in the game. I have the poster, the balloon on a string, 10 bucks left, nothing left to do and no way to get into the circus.
There is one screen where I wonder if I've come across a bug or just don't get what I'm supposed to do. When I look through the hole in the fence, I get the screen with the elephant, but on the first mouse click, the game switches back to me next to the fence. Even if I do a right click, attempting to just switch mouse cursors.
Is this right that way? Im playing via Dosbox on a WinXP machine.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Yeah, any click should take you back away from the hole cut view. It's only purpose is to show you the elephant.
As far as being stuck, my guess is that you don't have all the items that you need. Try picking up some more of the trash along the fence. The first couple of clicks probably gave you the bit about echo quest and not wanting to pick up trash, but not everything that looks like trash actually is.
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Thanks for the quick reply! Will check it out right away.
Rediscovered AGI/SCI today after a couple of years absence, and it's so good to see people have been so creative over the last years! Thumbs up!
EDIT:
Have scoured the whole trash by the fence, but couldn't find anything new. Earlier I found 2 things in the trash: one object next to the main entrance (which I already gave to "someone"), and another object which I obtained by examining something lying on the ground.
Is there another thing I'm missing somewhere?
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No, actually that is it I think. Have you put any of your inventory items together then?
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Yeah, I could join 2 things. Didn't figure out what to do with the result though. Clicked it on various spots but no luck.
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Have you tried using it on yourself... but not while directly in front of the fence. I would say that is the one real bug. The fence click takes precedence over the ego click. But if you click on just ego, maybe move down screen so that you aren't clicking on the fence too, something should happen
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Aaah, neat. :) Just discovered this as well while you were writing it. Finally, the circus! Great little game! Thanks for making this!
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Yeah the point and click template has come a ways since then. When I look at it now, I can't imagine that anyone would want to put the menu buttons in the middle of the screen ::)
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Cloudee, you do have the latest P&C template uploaded with the other templates, don't you?
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Correct.
However the pnc tutorial doesn't really match up with the latest template. That's another one of those things I need to find the time to take care of.
The one described in the tutorial corresponds to the one in circus quest.