Good-bye, cruel Hack!

Woo! I posted our first screen shot!

Right on schedule!

Well, BAF and I slid in under the deadline. Our game is pretty short, but built on a really solid engine. If you grab the TINS distribution, you can build it using just Allegro (no other dependencies), and play it. As you are playing, if you have any problems, stop clicking. So far the two people I have shown it to have had problems solved by them just waiting for the dialog to finish. FYI, clicking restarts the dialog.

It's an adventure game, a la Monkey Island, as I've said before.

If you're interested in check out just how solid of an engine it's built on, grab the source from subversion, which includes the non-compiled levels. Until I bother to make a decent web page for the project, this will be the official readme:

To make new levels, run mklevel on the name of the directory containing the level files. The directory must have a scene.ini file, describing the level. The [scene] section must have a background filename, a collision bitmap filename (the character can walk on the white areas), and optionally a load script filename:

[scene]
background = bg.bmp
collision = collision.bmp
event/load = intro.txt

The script will be discussed in more detail later.

Then add entries and objects to the scene. An object section takes the name [object/name], and has a required x and y position, and an optional width and height (which default to the size of) an optional display bitmap filename, an optional z position (distance between the Y position and the "ground"), an optional "give" variable which adds a clickable padding around the size of the object. Use that with the optional "obstacle" field which tells the game to not allow the player to walk through the object. Finally, optional "interact" and "load" events.

[object/mound]
display = mound.bmp
x = 0
y = 240
give = 32
obstacle = 1
event/interact = mound.txt
event/load = moundload.txt

This object will run the named scripts when the user clicks the object ("interact"), and when the user enters the scene ("load").

Finally, the scene must have entries. These are named like [entry/name], and contains X, Y, and Z fields. Z default to 0.

The scripting language used is command-based with a very simple syntax. Each line represents one command. There is no expression support. Here is a short guide of some of the more important commands: (Note that the language does not support comments, you should not include the line beginning with # in the actual file).

I hope you enjoy our very short game!