How to Make an AGI Game
by David Smith
I am going to give a shot at trying to give a tutorial on how to make your own AGI game. This page is not done yet, but please feel free to look at my work in progress!
Here's what you will need:
- A copy of AGI Studio
- A copy of PICEDIT
- If you want to make sound, you will need certain sound utilities.
- And a good story for a game.
Story
Before you begin to program anything, I strongly suggest that you plan out a story for your game. I've seen many games begun, but then not finished and a lack of complete story was to blame. A good story includes a beginning, middle and end. It includes a good character or characters, a problem or problems that he/she gets into, and then a resolution. Of course, a game won't be completely linear, but there problems which need to be solved. In many Sierra AGI games, these problems are in fact the quests! So, plan out what your character's specific quest or quests is and how the quests will be completed. Think about characters that will interact with the player. Think about objects that will be gotten, and how and where they will be used. And most importantly, draw yourself a map of how the game will be laid out!
Starting out
Once you have planned out your story, you can begin actually making the game! For this, you will use AGI Studio. Here, I strongly recommend using the template which comes with AGI Studio. Under the file menu, select new game from template. AGI Studio will automatically copy the template files over for you into a new folder which will become your game. The template game comes with the necessary files to actually have an game which runs. It has a logic 0 (which basically runs everything), logic 1 (which is the start-up screen), logic 2 (which will be the first scene of the game) and several logics in the 90's which we will get to latter.
If you run the template game, you will notice the start-up screen will be black and say template game. If you hit enter, you will be brought to the first scene which is a white background with a template ego (the player character). You can take this first scene and change it into your own first scene. First, you must draw the picture using PICEDIT (link). For now anyway, name your PICEDIT picture as picture.002. Then, within AGI Studio, select the resource Picture. Go to the resources menu and select add resource. Select picture.002 and say okay. It will ask you if you want to write over the existing picture.002. Say yes since all it is a white background. Now that you have the picture in place, you must work on the logic. Select from the resource menu the logics. Select logic.002. This is the logic which matches with the picture you just added. Initially, the logic file will be pretty simple. It will have a few things at the top which set-up the scene. Then there will be the main body of text. Click here to see a typical logic layout (link). You can now add more to this. Notice the section of code which says if (said("look")) { print("This is t..."); } It is pretty obvious what this does. If the player types look, the game will print "This is..." Change that bit of code so that if the player types look, the game will print a description of the picture you actually drew! Then you can also add other if(said"...") commands which will take care of different possible entries the player could make. Remember, the more things the game understands, the more enriched it is, and the better the playing experience. You now have one scene ready to go!
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