Palette setup

The first thing you need to do when you create a new game is to decide whether you want to use 8-bit (palette-based) color or 32/16-bit (true-color / hi-color). If you want to use 32/16-bit color, you can still use 256-color backgrounds and sprites if you want to, but the engine will only run in a 32-bit color resolution, thus slowing it down.

If you want to use 8-bit, you need to set up the palette. This is because all sprite and background scene imports rely on the palette setup to be the same. You CANNOT use hi-color nor true-color sprites or backgrounds in a 256-color game.

All this means, use 8-bit color only when you know what you are doing or when you intentionally want to punish yourself with lots of nerdy fumbling around on settings for colormodes that were not artist's decisions but actual hardware limitations of the time and every artist is glad these restrictions are no longer in place.

But you can do really cool color cycling effects only in 8-bit games, other than that this is really outdated technology, but it still works of course, and how it works is explained in the next paragraphs.

You set your chosen color depth by opening the General Settings pane and adjusting the Color Depth setting near the top of the list.

After that double click the "Colours" node in the project tree, which will open a "Colours" pane and let you set up your game's palette. Please continue to the Colours Editor topic for more information.

Inventory

Most adventure games allow the player to carry a set of objects, which he can then use to solve puzzles. Adventure Game Studio makes this inventory easy for you to manage.

Every inventory item which the player may carry during the game at one time or another is listed under the "Inventory items" node. Here, each item has a number and a script name which you use in scripts to identify the object. To create a new item, right-click on the "Inventory items" node.

Double-click on an inventory item to open it up. On the left you'll see the graphic used for the object in the inventory window. To change this, select the "Image" entry in the property grid on the right, and click the "..." button.

The last thing to do with the inventory items is to define their events: what happens when the player manipulates them in the inventory window. Click the "Events" button (the lightning bolt button at the top of the property grid), which brings up a list which works identically to the hotspot events. The available events are described in the reference section.

NOTE: Each character in the game carries their own set of inventory items. This means, if you want to create a game like Day of the Tentacle, where the player can control three different characters, each character will have a separate inventory.

You have two choices about how the inventory is displayed to the player -- a built-in inventory window to get you started, and support for custom inventory windows when you're ready to make your own.

The default option is the Sierra-style pop-up inventory window, which is popped up by clicking on the Inventory icon on the icon bar. You can also have the current inventory item displayed in its own button on the icon bar by creating a button on the GUI and setting its text to (INV) which stretches the item picture to the button size, or (INVNS) which draws the inventory item picture straight onto the button with no resizing. Finally, (INVSHR) , probably the best option, will draw it at actual size if it will fit, or shrink it if not.

The other option is a custom inventory window. To use this, you will need to edit the GUI to add it, so I will explain this later on. While you are starting off with AGS, it is recommended to use the supplied standard Sierra-style inventory window.

Finally, you may have noticed a "Hotspot Marker Settings" frame at the top of the Inventory pane. This allows you to switch on an option so that when the selects an inventory item, the mouse cursor for it will have a dot and mini-crosshair drawn on it, to show the player where the hotspot is. You can enter the color for the center dot and also for the surrounding 4 pixels.

Importing your own sprite graphics

When you were choosing the graphics for the object earlier in this tutorial, you probably noticed that most of the graphics available didn't look up to much. This is no problem, because you can import your own graphics using the Sprite Manager.

Go to the Sprites pane in the editor. Here, you will see the complete sprite set for the game. There are two ways to import your graphics - either overwrite an existing slot with your graphic, or create a new slot for it.

To overwrite an existing sprite, right-click the sprite and select "Replace sprite from file". To import a new slot, right-click on the background to the window and choose "Import new sprite".

The graphic you choose to import must be at the same color depth as your game (i.e. if you are using hi-color backgrounds, your sprites must be hi-color, and vice versa). AGS will attempt to convert the image if possible, but if your game is 256-color then the results of downgrading a hi-color image can be poor.

Then, the Import Sprite window will appear. Here, you need to decide which portion of the image will be imported. You do this by right-clicking and dragging in the image, which will produce a yellow rectangle showing the selection. Once you are happy with it, left-click to import. Alternatively, you can import the entire image with the "Import whole image" button.

NOTE (256-color only): You may well find that the colors on your graphic look slightly strange in the AGS Editor. This is because the sprites are only allocated, by default, the first 41 of the palette colors (see the palette section), so your graphic will be remapped to this much smaller palette. If you find that many of your imported sprites look strange, you can increase the number of colors assigned to sprites, at the expense of background colors (again see the section above for information on how to do this).

If your sprite will only be used in one room then alternatively you can use the "use background palette" option, which will remap your graphic to the palette of the room currently loaded, giving much better results. Note, however, that if you do this, and then try and use the sprite on another screen, its colors will most likely be screwed up. To use the room palette, check the "Use room background" check-box. Make sure to un-check this box before you import any other sprites.

NOTE: The transparent color used by AGS is palette index 0 (for 256-color sprites) and RGB (255,0,255) for hi-color. Any pixels you draw on imported sprites in these colors will be transparent.

You can group imported sprites into folders. This prevents the main sprite list from becoming too long. By default, the Sprite Manager displays the Main folder, which contains some graphics and a sub-folder called "Defaults". Folders work the same way as Windows folders. Right-click on a folder in the tree to rename it or make a sub-folder.

You can delete a folder by right-clicking on it and selecting the "Delete" option; beware though that this will also delete all the sprites in the folder.

For more information, see Sprite Manager topic.

Introduction sequences

You can easily add intro, outro and cutscene sequences to your game. There is no specific function to do these, but using the provided animation and script commands you can create almost anything you might need.

Normally, the game will start in room 1. This is defined by the starting room number of the player character. To change it, open up the player character's Character pane, and change the StartingRoom number in the property grid.

TIP: The starting room facility is also useful when testing your game. You can make the game start in any room, at the point where you are testing it, rather than having to keep playing the game through to get there.

Cutscenes are created using the normal animation script commands, such as Character.Walk, Object.SetView, and so forth. I would suggest you leave this until you are more comfortable with AGS, and have some experience of how to use these functions.

Animations

In most games you will use some sort of animation during the game, whether it be a flag waving in the breeze or the player bending over to pick something up. The term "animation" refers to the ability to change the look of, and move, objects.

Animations in AGS are managed using Views. A "view" is a set of one or more "loops". A loop is a set of frames which, when put together, give the effect of movement. Each frame in the view can be set a graphic and a speed.

Go to the editor's "Views" node, right-click it and select the "New view" option to create us a new, empty view. Double-click the new view to open it. Each loop is displayed horizontally with its number at the left hand side, frames going out to the right. To add a frame, click the grey "New frame" button. To delete a frame, right-click it.

To change a frame's graphic, double-left-click it. The sprite list screen will be displayed (you may remember this from the Object graphic selection) where you can choose the graphic you want to use for this frame.

Note that for walking animations, the first frame in each loop is reserved for the standing frame, and when walking it will only cycle through from the second frame onwards.

You select a frame by left-clicking it -- when you do so, the property grid will update with information about the frame. One of these settings is called "Delay", which is the frame's relative speed. The larger the number, the longer the frame stays (i.e. the slower it is). When the animation is run, an overall animation speed will be set, so the actual speed of the frame will be: overall_speed + frame_speed . Note that you can use negative numbers for the frame delay to make it particularly fast, for example setting it to -3 means that the frame will stay for hardly any time at all.
Animation speed is specified in Game Loops (i.e. animation speed 4 will show the frame for 4 game loops - at 40 FPS, that would be 0.1 seconds).

The "Sound" property allows you to enter a sound number that will be played when this frame becomes visible on the screen. This is especially useful for footstep sounds.

You run an animation by using the script animation commands, which will be explained in detail later. Briefly, to animate an object, you first of all need to set the object's view to the correct view number (use the Object.SetView script command), and then use the Object.Animate script command to actually start the animation.

Characters

A character is similar to an object, except that it can change rooms, maintain its own inventory, and take part in conversations (more on these later). It can also have its own custom animation speed and movement speed.

Go to the "Characters" node in the main tree. You will see under it a list of all the characters in the game. To create a new character, right-click the "Characters" node and choose the "New character" option.

You will see that there are a lot of options which you can set for each character. The most immediately obvious one is the "Make this the player character" button, which allows you to change which character the player will control at the start of the game. When the game starts, the first room loaded will be this character's starting room.

The rest of the options are hidden away in the property grid on the right. Some of them are described below:

The "UseRoomAreaScaling" option allows you to specify whether this character will be stretched or shrunk in scaling areas of the screen. You might want to disable this if you have a character who always stands still in the same place, and you want the graphics on-screen to be the same size as you drew them, even though he is standing on a scaled area.

The "Clickable" option tells AGS whether you want the player to be able to click on the character. If Clickable is enabled, then the character will be interactable, like the way things worked in Sierra games. If it is not enabled then the character works like the main character did in LucasArts games - if you move the cursor over him or click to look, speak, etc, then the game will ignore the character and respond to whatever is behind him.

To set which room this character starts in, change the "StartingRoom" property. You can set the character's location within this room by using the "StartX" and "StartY" properties to type in the X,Y co-ordinates you want him to start at. These co-ordinates define where the middle of his feet will be placed.

The "NormalView" is where you set what the character looks like. You must create a view in the View Editor, and this view must have either 4 or 8 loops. If you use 4 loops, then when walking diagonally the closest straight direction is used for the graphics. Each loop is used for the character walking in one direction, as follows:

 Loop 0 - walking down (towards screen)
 Loop 1 - walking left
 Loop 2 - walking right
 Loop 3 - walking up (away from screen)
 Loop 4 - walking diagonally down-right
 Loop 5 - walking diagonally up-right
 Loop 6 - walking diagonally down-left
 Loop 7 - walking diagonally up-left

To change the rate at which the character animates, change the Animation Speed box. Here, a smaller number means faster animation. Note that this does NOT effect the speed at which the character actually moves when walking.

NOTE: The first frame in each loop is the standing still frame. When walking, the game will cycle through the rest of the frames in the loop.

The "MovementSpeed" option allows you to control how fast the character moves when walking. This value is in pixels per a single game update. A larger number would make a character walk faster, a lower number makes it slower. If you find that a movement speed of 1 is still too fast, you can use negative numbers (e.g. -3) which is interpreted as 1/N pixels per a game update (or N game updates to pass a single pixel).

The "SpeechColor" option specifies which color is used for the text when this character is talking. It effects all messages that are said by this character. You can find out the color for each number by going to the "Colors" pane.

The "IdleView" option allows you to set an idle animation for the character. To do this, create a new view, with one or more loops of the character idle (e.g. smoking, reading a book, etc). Then, set the "Idle view" to this view number. If the player stands still for 20 seconds (you can change the timeout with the Character.SetIdleView script function), then the current loop from the idle view will be played.

The "ScriptName" property sets the name by which the character will be referred to in scripts and in conversation scripting. The difference from the RealName of the character is that the script name may only contain letters A-Z and numbers 0-9 (the first character must be a letter, however). The convention in AGS is that character script names start with a lower case "c".

To set what happens when the player interacts with the character, click the "Events" button (this is the lightning bolt button at the top of the property grid). You will be presented with the events list; select an event and press the "..." button to allow you to enter some script to handle the event.

You can also set a talking view for the character. To set one, use the "SpeechView" property. If you set a talking view, then that view will be used to animate the character while they are speaking. You should generally have about 2-3 frames in each loop (the loops are used for the same directions as in the main view).

There is also an available "Blinking view". This is used to play intermittent extra animations while the character is talking. You may want to use this for effects such as blinking (hence the name). If you set a view here, it will play intermittently while the character talks (it is drawn on top of the normal talking view). The default time between it playing is 3-4 seconds, but you can change this with the Character.BlinkInterval script property.
NOTE: the blinking view is currently only supported with sierra-style speech.

"UseRoomAreaLighting" allows you to tell AGS whether this character will be affected by light and tint levels set on room regions.

If you disable "TurnBeforeWalking", it will override the General Setting for turning and tell AGS not to turn this particular character around on the spot before they move.

"Diagonal loops" specifies that loops 4-8 of the character's view will be used for the four diagonal directions. If this option is not enabled, the character will only face 4 ways, and you can use loops 4-8 for other purposes.

"Adjust speed with scaling" modifies the character's walking speed in line with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Adjust volume with scaling" modifies the volume of any frame-linked sounds on the character's view (e.g. footstep sounds) with their zoom level, as set on the walkable areas.

"Solid" specifies that this character is solid and will block other characters from walking through it. Note that both characters must be solid in order for them to block one another.

AGS allows you to export your characters to a file, and then import the file into a different game - so you can share the same main character between games, or create one for distribution on the internet. Right-click on the character and choose "Export character". The entire character setup and graphics will be exported to the file, including the character's walking and talking animations. To import the character into a different game, load it up, right-click the "Characters" node and choose "Import Character". The file selector appears, where you find the CHA file which you exported earlier. A new character slot will be created and all the settings imported.

NOTE: Because importing always creates a new slot, you cannot use it to overwrite an existing character.

Conversations

While the old Sierra games were mainly based on action and not talking, the LucasArts games took the opposite approach.

If you want to create a game with conversations where the player can choose from a list of optional topics to talk about, you can now with the new Dialog Editor. Go to the "Dialogs" node.

Conversations are made up of Topics. A "topic" is a list of choices from which the player can choose. You may have up to 30 choices in a topic. However, not all of them need to be available to the player at the start of the game - you can enable various options for conversation once the player has said or done other things.

The Dialog Editor is quite self-explanatory. Double-click a dialog topic to open up its window. You'll see the list of options for the topic on the left, and the dialog script on the right. Each option has a couple of checkboxes to its right:

• The "Show" column specifies whether that option is available to the player at the start of the game.
• The "Say" column defines whether the character says the option when the player clicks it. The default is on, but if you want options describing the player's actions rather than the actual words, you may want to turn this column off for that dialog.

Dialog scripts

You control what happens when the player chooses an option by editing the script on the right. For more information on how to handle this script see the Article about Dialog Scripts.

Parser input

You'll notice in the dialog editor, the property grid has an option called "ShowTextParser". If you enable this, a text box will be displayed below the predefined options in the game, which allows the player to type in their own input.

If they type in something themselves, then the dialog_request global script function will be run, with its parameter being the dialog topic number that the player was in.

AGS automatically calls ParseText with the text they typed in before it calls dialog_request, so you can use Said() calls to respond. See the text parser section for more info.

The General Settings panel

The General Settings pane contains a list of all the various overall options that you can set for your game.

Many of these options can be changed at runtime with the script command SetGameOption.

The available settings are detailed in documentation in the General Settings page.

Some settings you may want to adjust right at the start of your game include Developer name, Game name and Resolution. Resolution is the most important option, which determines the size of game area visible on screen at any given time.

Cursors

The Cursors node of the editor shows you the current mouse cursor modes available in the game. Each cursor mode performs a different action within the game. Double-click one to open it up.

The "StandardMode" option in the property grid tells AGS that this is a 'normal' cursor mode - i.e. using this cursor will fire an event on whatever is clicked on as usual. This mode applies to the standard Walk, Look, Interact and Talk modes, but you can create others too. Do not tick it for the Use Inventory mode, since this is a special mode.

The "Animate" option allows you to specify that the mouse cursor will animate while it is on the screen. Choose a view number, and the cursor will animate using the first loop of that view. You can make it animate only when over something (hotspot, object or character) by enabling the "AnimateOnlyOnHotspots" option.

The "AnimateOnlyWhenMoving" box allows you to do a QFG4-style cursor, where it only animates while the player is moving it around.

Three of the cursor modes are hard-coded special meanings into AGS:

• Mode 4 (Use Inventory). This is special because the game decides whether to allow its use or not, depending on whether the player has an active inventory item selected.
• Mode 6 (Pointer). This cursor is used whenever a modal dialog is displayed (i.e. a GUI that pauses the game). Normally this is a standard arrow pointer.
• Mode 7 (Wait). This cursor is used whenever the player cannot control the action, for example during a scripted cutscene. For a LucasArts-style game where the cursor disappears completely in this state, simply import a blank graphic over the wait cursor.

For the standard modes,

• Mode 0 will cause the player to walk to the mouse pointer location when clicked.
• Modes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9 will run the event with the same name as the cursor mode.

Fonts

AGS comes with a couple of default fonts, but you can replace the and add your own. You can use both TrueType (TTF) and SCI fonts (Sierra's font format).

SCI fonts can be created in two ways:

• Extract the font from a Sierra game, using the SCI Decoder program available on the internet.
• Create your own font and save it in SCI Font format, using the SCI Graphic Studio program.

There are also some fonts available on the AGS website.

When choosing whether to use SCI or TTF font following should be taken into account:

• SCI font is a raster (bitmap) font, which means that it does not scale and always keeps same size and pixel-precise visual shape.
• TTF font is a vector font, that may be scaled to suit your game (you choose its size during import), and may be rendered with anti-aliasing.

In general you should prefer using TTF fonts, but SCI fonts may still be useful in low-resolution games (because not all TTF fonts scale down well) and situations where you need pixel-precise looks of the drawn symbols.

Go to the "Fonts" node in the main tree. Here you can see all the current fonts listed underneath. You can create a new font by right-clicking the "Fonts" node and choosing "New font". To overwrite an existing font, open it up and press the "Import over this font" button.

Please refer to the Font Preview topic for more information on how the font may be imported and configured for runtime.

NOTE: By default font 0 is used as the normal text font for in-game messages, and font 1 is used as the speech font. To use any other fonts for these purposes, you can set the Game.NormalFont and Game.SpeechFont properties in your script.

Now you are ready to read more about scripting.

Next Reading: Scripting Tutorial 1

Return to Tutorials Index: Tutorials Index