Adventure Game Studio, Al Emmo and future products

[JustLuke]

I'm pleased that you've chosen to use AGS' maximum resolution of 800x600 but even this can seem rather low res and chunky these days - particularly for those of us who use LCD monitors (or laptops) which don't natively support this resolution. On both my laptop and my desktop's LCD monitor, 800x600 looks quite terrible; either 'scaled up' and blurry to fit the screen or in a small 'cramped but sharp' un-scaled box in the centre of the screen, surrounded by large black borders.

I know that many people might say that "it's not about the visuals" and that "low-res is old skool, dude!", but that's not very helpful when you're trying to make a profitable, commercial product, right? For commerical games, visual quality is king,

I can completely understand why you might have used AGS for Al Emmo - your familarity with it must have helped to shorten development time and minimise problems - but, perhaps, it would be in your long term best interests to think about migrating to another system?

I guess, in my own long winded way, I'm asking if you've considered or experimented with other adventure creation systems, for example Wintermute or AGAST, which make use of higher resolutions, or if you're planning to stick with AGS for the forseeable future?

[GameDevBrit]

Thanks for your post, JustLuke.  We felt AGS suited our needs perfectly for Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine, and we've heard nothing but positive comments regarding the visuals of Al Emmo from people who have actually been playing the game.

A higher resolution and another game engine is always an option, and we will take this into consideration in a future game, although we have not made any decisions at this time regarding that issue.

As of right now though, we feel very proud to support AGS, which is a wonderfully feature intensive adventure game creating tool.  Chris Jones has been fabulous about continally evolving the engine and working with us, and we feel honored to utilize his engine in our first game.

Thank you for your suggestion though.  It's something we'll definitely keep in mind.

[Angelus3K]

Hey Luke,

I'm a participant in the Beta stage of Al Emmo and I can let you know that on my PC 19" LCD monitor AND my 15.4" widescreen laptop monitor Al Emmo looks beautiful!!

I couldnt see any pixelaction related to the screen resolution at all.

Best thing to do is wait for the demo then you can try it for yourself. But Al Emmo should have no problems looking great on newer monitors at all  

[JustLuke]

Fair enough

Just to clarify my comments, I think that your game is artistically excellent, and I'm absolutely not negatively criticising that in any way. I hope that you have great success with it.

Limiting the resolution to 800x600 can cause problems with LCD monitors (in that the image looks 'soft' when the monitor auto-scales the image to fit the screen - this is a hardware related fact, due to the way the scaling works rather than a subjective opinion) and this does have a significant impact on the visual quality of any game or application that runs in a resolution that is not native to LCD monitors (although this last bit is subjective).

Still, your artwork is fantastic and reminds me of the good old days when Sierra and Lucasarts were producing their best adventure games. I also greatly admire your enthusiasm and your artistic and creative integrity.

By the way, will you enable the option to run the game in a window? And will it be compatible with the Linux version of the AGS runtime?

[Angelus3K]

I know what you mean Luke, but I don't recall any odd effects or anything.

Like I said the demo will tell all

The "play in a window" feature is standard in AGS and I would assume be left in for compatability reasons but again the demo (or a dev) can answer that