XAGE Private Alpha v0.2 - Download

The second alpha release is now ready. There is a changelog with the attached readme, but here's a summary of the main changes for v0.2:

• XAGETOOL now works with XAGE projects ("Game.xag") which references five sections of inerpreted game content (intro, menu, tutorial, game & credits).
  
• XAGE now takes any size for game screen, so can be used to develop retro 320*200 titles or 1280*720 behemoths. Each section can also have its own screen size and scale, so a retro game can still have a fancy Hi-Def intro and menu screen.
  
• XAGE games can now be deployed to the xbox 360 with the included skeleton project for Visual Studio 2008.
• Numerous tweaks and bugfixes.
  

There's a lot of fiddly little things to deal with for Xbox games to ensure you'll pass peer review, like dealing with unexpected controller unplugs or profile sign-outs. These have now been dealt with. The next release will focus on the outstanding functionality. As usual, if you'd like to get your hands on it, please email clarvalon@live.co.uk for the download link.

"Writer's Block"

It seems that someone's beaten me to releasing the first point & click adventure game on the Xbox Live Community Games channel. I've just had a quick go of Writer's Block and the similarities and differences between it and anything XAGE produces are interesting (to me, at least).

Both have SCUMM-esque interfaces, though WB toggles the GUI with a click of the left shoulder button whereas XAGE always displays it at the bottom of the screen (as per the LucasArts games). Early on in development I played around with various ideas for the interface similar to what the guys behind WB have gone for. In the end I settled on sticking as closely to the winning (Lucasarts) formula as possible, as it turned out that using the thumbstick for the cursor wasn't nearly as laborious as I thought it might be. In future, if there's a demand for it, there's nothing to stop me adding functionality for a Sierra style interface. It's purely because I much prefer the SCUMM system that XAGE uses it.

I quite like Writer's Block, and seeing a complete adventure game at a high resolution on a tv screen is refreshing. There are a few things in it that I'd have done differently - the dialogue system in particular is a little clunky, and the character graphics, whilst pretty decent, suffer from that 'beanpole' style that seems to curse most AGS games. I don't regard WB as competition as such as any game that brings more attention to the genre can only be a good thing.

Bye bye, Guybrush

The placeholder Monkey Island graphics will soon be replaced. In a way this is a shame as they're obviously of professional quality and gave the XAGE youtube videos an extra layer of polish.

I'd expected that I'd need to replace them with either some suitable public domain graphics (none of which I was able to find) or to approach an AGS developer to use theirs. In fact the answer had been staring me in the face all along. In the mid-90's an elder brother and I had spent countless months of our misspent youth making simple adventure games with AMOS for the Amiga 500. It transpires that my brother had actually recently managed to convert a bunch of our (mostly his, my creativity has always been highly derivative) deluxe paint drawings of various characters and locations. At some point Guybrush and the Governer's Mansion will be replaced with Artichoke and the island of Uh-Oh Yeti:



Also, I've contacted the creator of an AGS game who is potentially interested in converting his game to XAGE for release on the Xbox360. Nothing is set in stone yet but this is a particularly exciting development and can only make XAGE more robust as I implement all the functionality I've overlooked as part of the conversion progress. It should also be possible to automate parts of the conversion, specifically dialogue trees.

XAGE v0.2 Progress

XAGE goes HD: XAGE now accepts any gameScreen size. There are still a few scaling issues to resolve - I aim to add GUI customisation to XAGETOOL at some point. Here's XAGE using a background texture I borrowed from the AGS forums: Clicky.

XAGE on the Xbox 360: The next release will include a XAGE as a library, along with a skeleton VS2008 project for easy assembly and deployment to the Xbox 360. You'll need an XNA Creators Club membership (though you can occasionally get free ones).

Here's a low-quality clip showcasing the following:
1) XAGE running on the Xbox 360
2) Introduction and Menu scripts (essentially non-playable mini-games)
3) Simple loading & saving (one slot only at present) and X360 storage selection



The above two features were implemented due to requests I received after v0.1, so your feedback is taken seriously and is appreciated. I'm not sure on the ETA for v0.2 yet - there's a fair amount of refactoring to do that I've put off for a while. You can still get your hands on v0.1 by emailing me as per the below post. At some point there'll be a online bugtracker to submit bugs and feature requests but it's probably overkill at the moment.

XAGE v0.1 (Private Alpha)

It's taken a week longer than I had hoped, but the private alpha is now ready. As mentioned previously, there's a bunch of features not yet implemented and a handful of known bugs, but I've been able to test the installation package on another machine and it seems to work fine. There's a dummy game installer included which uses Microsoft's Click-Once installation to ensure you have all the requirements (dotnet 2.0, XNA Framework 3.0) and automatically downloads them if you don't. All this is covered in the readme.

If you'd like to participate, please email clarvalonATliveDOTcoDOTuk and I'll email you the link to the file (rapidshare). Please post any feedback or issues on this blog.

Much obliged.

Minor update

I've been laid up in bed for a few days with a touch of flu, so progress has been slow in the last week. I've implemented a few new features for the creation tool, including the ability to import your own non-compiled graphics. For animation frames I had previously been manually entering the pixel co-ordinates, which is easy enough, but I think most people would prefer being able to select the frames directly from the spritesheet using the mouse, so I'll put that in for the alpha.

The following outstanding features will NOT be in the alpha, as they'll take a while to code and I'm eager to get some feedback as soon as possible:

• Conversation Trees
• Global Variables
• Compression of save files
• Importing of SOME non-compiled assets (fonts & sounds)
• Full UI scalability

To answer a question in the comments, XAGE uses a system reminiscent of the SCUMM games in that there is a single executable which essentially interprets a gamecontent file (currently "Game.xml", but an option will be added to use a binary file instead). The gamecontent file is created and updated by the creation tool - you'll never need to touch or worry about the executable.

I'll post again when the Alpha's ready. Note that documentation will be light (read: non-existent), but I'll put in some tooltips so you can at least figure out what each field does. I'm hoping that the majority of the functionality will be self-explanatory.

Custom Animations

One of the improvements Monkey Island 2 had over the original was the use gestures. It made the characters seem more real if they were gesticulating as they talked, rather than just standing there with their mouths opening and closing.

Alongside the scripting system XAGE uses, I've added a simple Custom Animation structure, which simply lets you string together a series of frames at timed intervals. This allows a certain deal of flexibility and enables the creator to add their own gesticulations.

Here's a short clip that shows custom animations, along with character scaling, object occlusion, multiple rooms and background scrolling:



As part of the engine's release I want to include a small sample game (a handful of rooms, characters and scripts). Obviously I can't distrubute Lucasarts graphics as part of the package, so I need to stat thinking about either rolling my own or using the art from a different game.

I really like Murder in a Wheel; it's a good match for XAGE . Are there any public domain adventure game art assets, or is it likely anyone would let me use their artwork for my sample game?