Another AGI to SCI point and click remake is in the works...

[Cloudee1]

So creating a fresh game from scratch takes a very very long time. Especially one of any real size. So long in fact that there are going to be lulls in development where quite frankly you are just plain tired of working on it. I seem to be in one of those lulls and none of my games really interest me right now... So rather than do nothing I have instead elected to make another point and click remake of an AGI game. This time however I didn't pick one of Sierra's, instead I have gone with remaking Andrew Baker's Voodoo Girl.

For the most part, the whole world is now travelable and the game is actually playable until you get inside the dream castle. The problem that I have come across that I didn't encounter so much with The Black Cauldron is the graphics. Now keep in mind, I am not putting down Andrews work in any way because I understand that there is so much that goes into making a full length game, but I have redrawn a couple of rooms and now I am afraid that I am going to have to redraw a lot more of them so that everything matches up somewhat graphically. That is something that I am not really interested in doing... so I have a decision to make. Get it done and release it, or get to drawing.

Here are a couple of the rooms I have redrawn already



and...



and there is this one I pretty much stole from kq

[Collector]

Thumbs up from me!

[bokkers]

Looks awesome so far!

[Cloudee1]

The problem is that this is a pretty large game all said and done. I don't know that I want to do that much drawing. That's kind of what has put me off of my own games for the moment. 

[Collector]

Use the AGI Pics as place holders for what you don't have done?

[gumby]

Looks amazing so far.  I don't know how anyone else does it, but for me it feels like it takes a month for me to draw a single room (and that's with tracing images!).

[Cloudee1]

I am big on using views and addToPic()

I may draw something in the pic editor, but usually if it is anything really detailed I end up copying the whole screen, opening up a view and pasting the whole screen. Then crop out the detail that you want to keep. I usually start in pic editor for the dithering and getting it in the right proportion to the rest of the room, but I switch to using views because there is always some tweaking involved as well as placement to get the control/priority right.

For instance, the palm trees are just a couple of views used over and over again, likewise the rock in the same screen. Without them the room looks pretty bleh. But with them and tweakable, now I can animate the shit out of them if I want as well as slide them around a bit to get the best image I can out of them... or in the case of the rock, use it in more than one room if the mood strikes me.

I really like to make trees into views for the portability of them.

I don't know how many times I have spent time drawing the crap out of something only to pop open the priority lines and realise that I don't have it placed well.

[gumby]

Thanks for the explanation, that helps.  I hadn't considered copy/pasting an entire room into the view editor then cropping it.  The priority & control lines have burned me too, that's probably why it takes me a month to complete a single pic.

[Collector]

This is why it would be great if we had an IDE for SCI1. The Pic resources could be raster.

[Cloudee1]

Not to mention an orange. I would kill for orange sometimes

[Collector]

Yellow and red dithered?

[Cloudee1]

It doesn't look right. Some of the colors dither really well and some of them just don't. Red and yellow for instance, I have never been happy with the way it turns out. In fact, the brown and red come closer to orange than the red and yellow in my opinion.

[Collector]

You just got to the heart of why the "undithering" that ScummVM does not work like they think it does. The so called undithered color does not look like what the mind sees from the dithered colors.

[Cloudee1]

Well I have officially programmed the pnc remake as far as I have played the original. Turns out I am stuck, well not really stuck but I don't have an item I need and it is a bit of a trek back through to get it and get back to this point, so Instead of sitting down and playing some more I have gone back through and did some cleaning up of my code knocking out some obvious things here and there. It is still a long way from being completed, but the game is entirely playable up until you hit the insane asylum.

[Cloudee1]

So in playing the game, I still haven't conquered the last screen. But in my defense, I also haven't put any more effort into beating it yet. Instead, I have been a busy little bee scripting away and getting my remake playable to the point that I am  currently at in the game. I am sooooo close to being able to play my remake all the way through to the end. I should definitely be able to beat the game from start to finish tomorrow.

Now I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, there is still a lot of work to be done. But if you know exactly what to do and how to do it the game is playable from the beginning right up till the final confrontation. Which I will be getting marked off of my list tomorrow.

At this point... I am estimating between 2 and 3 weeks till testing.

Which I guess, this is as good as time as any. Does anyone know how to contact Andrew Baker. I have sent out emails and a couple of Google Talk messages hoping to track him down, but so far I have not had any luck.