Messages

Version 1.2 of Shards of God is out! First, a word of warning: YOUR OLD SAVES WILL NOT WORK IN THE NEW VERSION! Now that that's out of the way, here's (some of) the new stuff:

• A clever autosave system which creates separate labeled saves throughout the game's story. Even obsessive types shouldn't have to worry about saving manually anymore (the option is still there though!)
• Mother Tiabata now acts as a hint system. If you're stuck, she'll nudge you in the right direction
• Volume controls!
• More interactions give meaningful responses (eg. using items on characters), and one puzzle has been sliiightly streamlined
• Some small changes and additions to dialogue. For instance, the lamp puzzle is somewhat better motivated now, you can ask Radina about Plint leaving, etc
• A few cosmetic changes to backgrounds (can you spot them?)
• A fancy new Mac launch screen, courtesy of Nahuel! That readme file should be harder to miss now

All in all, if you haven't played yet or feel like revisiting the story, now's the time!

With Nahuel's help, I tried using the script Laura linked and at first it looked like it did the trick:



But then it turned out the files were still not executable, not sure what I did wrong. In the end, Nahuel ended up changing the flags for me manually, so the issue is solved now. Thanks everyone for responding, and especially Nahuel for sacrificing a ton of his time to help me out!

I got this report from a user who downloaded my game:

I'm unable to run it on Linux... After I set the 'execute' permission, it fails with the message: "Shards of God/data/ags64: Permission denied", and I can't figure out what permission it needs.

I don't have Linux myself and have never used it . What should I recommend they do? Thank you!

Thanks ^^ Not sure how I missed that. I thought I had

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examined all, multiple times. Maybe it was triggered by talking to the priest only after examining the room - ie it didn't matter if you had examined everything in previous attempts? Anyway, thanks, I will do the rest now.

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Game is great, by the way 

Thanks, glad you're enjoying the game!

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Examining the carving at any point in the game counts, but I guess it's easy to forget to right-click each picture.

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I am stuck. How do I

Spoiler

create some background noise, after I've given the priest the scroll to examine?
I have to suppose that after I extract the rod, I will use that in the machine at the forge, to create a knife version - which likely was the murder weapon

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Did you

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examine the center-left carving and speak to Catalus about the fact that it needs renovation? You're right about the rest!

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[Credits:]

On a distant desert planet, a crime has been committed. As Mother Tiabata and Sister Ava set out to solve the mystery, they soon find themselves facing an impossible conundrum: how does one murder a god?

Shards of God is a retro hand-painted point and click murder mystery - think Agatha Christie in a fantasy/sci-fi setting. It was originally started as part of AdvJam2023, and the full game was then finished within two months.


Check it out here:
ITCH | AGS database

Credits:

Written, drawn and coded by Jan Vávra

Music by Paco Diago

Sound by Maxim Grachev

Enjoy!

I'm finishing a short game that I want to release this weekend, and I would like to do some last-minute testing before I publish. The game should be ready for testing tomorrow (Friday July 14th) and then I want to publish as soon as possible - by Sunday at the latest, but preferably even sooner. If anyone happens to be available in this short time frame and would like to give it a go, please DM me here or ideally on Discord (http://discordapp.com/users/Honza#8830).

The game is called Shards of God and it's a fantasy/sci-fi murder mystery. You can check out
the game's itch page and a video playthrough of the demo.

Thank you!

Copy-pasting this from the actual game page, because it deserves to be said more than once:

This was absolutely gorgeous, well designed, well executed, just a brilliant short adventure.

Hey man, cool game! LOTS of scenes to walk in for two weeks work, very impressive. And the kind of settings I like, with weirdo statues and fungi and things. Also you had an interesting idea behind your story which I always appreciate. Great stuff all around. 

Thanks guys, really happy you enjoyed the game!

Art and animation were beautiful, I can't wait to see the full graphical remake.

Thanks again good sir . The basic remake of the jam version is finished, now the plan is to keep adding more content until it can pass for a full (albeit probably still shorter) game. I've been posting screenshots on Twitter if anyone wants to check them out: https://twitter.com/hnzvavra. Here's one of those:

[2)]

2) As a workaround: call SetVariableSpriteFont AFTER you set the glyphs. This does not seem to cause any problems, as the plugin is smart and creates a new font internally if it was not created with "SetSpriteFont" yet. But because the SetVariableSpriteFont is called afterwards, the plugin already knows the glyph metrics and so can already calculate text height upon registration.

Great, I did this and it works fine now. A very quick fix, thank you!

If you can send a game, that would be wonderful; if not, maybe I could try emulating this case in dummy game (but I would need to know some specifics about the font setups).

Great, thank you! I can't do it right now, but I'll upload the game later in the day and DM you. Is it ok if I share the current build of the full game or do you want me to make a test game just to show the problem?

@Honza which sprite font binary are you using? If you built, how was it built?

Apologies for my non-coder ignorance, but I don't know what you mean by sprite font binary . I'm using this plugin, I simply follow the instructions given in the thread.

This setting is for backwards compatibility; some TTF fonts require automatic adjustment in order to be displayed "correctly" in AGS. More information about this may be found in the manual: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/UpgradeTo36.html#ttf-fonts-behavior

I had read this part of the manual before I posted. What confused me was that the font I'm using isn't a "TTF font specifically created or adjusted for older versions of AGS" and it still required the setting to display correctly. For some reason, when I import this font at nominal size 19, the "do nothing" option assigns height 4 to it. I've now experimented with more fonts and they don't seem to have the same issue, but the problem with the sprite font persists.

Judging by the screenshots, the font height is not calculated right. I would need to investigate this in a test game.

Is this an offer? I can upload the game somewhere and share it if you'd be willing to look into it, but I don't want to waste too much of your time, so also feel totally free to ignore me.

Of course, as it's called "TTF font adjustment" it only affects TTF fonts. Sprite fonts are not TTF fonts and should not be affected by this setting (if they are - that's a mistake).

Sure, I wasn't trying to point out a mistake in the setting, just to clarify the issue. I suppose my question is why this setting is necessary in the first place and what can be done for the sprite font to work properly?

Update: It seems the normal font has the same issue as the sprite font with "resize ascender to nominal height" switched off? So this setting fixes the issue with standard fonts but doesn't affect the spritefont plugin? Honestly, I have no idea how it works exactly and why "do nothing" changes the font's height to 4 - I've been fumbling through this by trial and error .

I'm using Calin Leafshade's spritefont plugin and ever since switching to AGS 3.6, I've been having some issues with it (at least I *think* it started with AGS 3.6, but it could be a coincidence). What seems to be happening is that the game treats the font as if the first line had minimum height. When I disable the sprite font, the text appears normally. I've tried experimenting with various import sizes and combinations of the "TTF fonts adjustment defaults" and "TTF fonts height used in the game logic" settings, but none of it seems to affect the sprite font. The only settings that have an effect on it are line spacing and offset - so far I've managed to use those to work around the issue in text windows, but it doesn't help in lists, such as dialogue options or the savegame window below:




To make things more confusing, this list was messed up before similar to the savegame one, and now it seems to be working fine - and I have no idea what I did to achieve that  .



Will be thankful for any help, I would really like to keep using the plugin. I'm using AGS 3.6.0.39. Thank you!

Thank you, this clarifies it! I'll just work around it then.

As part of a day/night cycle, I'm using ambient tint with gradually changing RGB values (so that a reddish sunset tint slowly goes through purple to eventually change into night blue, etc.). And I've noticed that specific RGB combinations give strange results.

For instance, the value 26/20/37 should be purple, but tints the character turquoise. All surrounding combinations - 27/20/37, 25/20/37, 26/21/37, 26/19/37, 26/20/38, 26/20/36 - are appropriately purple. The same thing happens for the combinations 31/21/35, 30/21/35 - they are greenish blue instead of purple, as if the r value was 0.



I can manually find the problematic combinations and have the script avoid them, but I was wondering what was causing this. I'm using AGS 3.6.0.39

Thanks everyone for the nice feedback! If you decide to also leave a rating/comment on the game's page, that's always appreciated . Meanwhile, here's another look at how the remake is coming along:

[Please consider for:]

For your consideraiton:




Famed for its mushrooming business and idyllic countryside, the land of Fungham has seen better days. A child has gone missing, a demonic witch haunts the woods and if you're not careful, gnomes will take your socks. Also, there is a pig king... don't ask. But why have all these creatures suddenly appeared? Where did the witch come from and what does she want? Could the answer to everything lie behind the ancient gate in the nearby mountains?

The Witch's Lullaby is a classical point and click adventure, somewhat reminiscent of games like King's Quest or Legend of Kyrandia. It was made in two weeks for AdvJam 2022 and it ended up ranking #1 in the jam.

Windowed mode recommended if you have a low tolerance for blurry pixels .

Check it out here:
ITCH | AGS database

Please consider for:

• Best Freeware Game Created with AGS
• Best Short Game
• Best Writing
• Best Character (Helga?)
• Best Puzzles
• Best Background Art
• Best Character Art
• Best Music and Sound
• Best Gameplay

music1 is a bad name for a variable that represents the audio channel, this makes the code really confusing. 

Okay, I'll consider sticking to the "ach" prefix for channels you suggested before .