I’ve been away for a while preparing my new computer and thinking on what to do next. My last updates before switch computer was a fix sent by Mario Pozzo (Thank you) and a bug fix about some file missing in the skeleton project where if you change to “modern” adventure system you got several errors about missing settings files.

The big last change is that now you have runtime loading of assets between scenes inside the game, now from the Resource Manager you can change if an asset is embed or runtime loaded. If it is loaded in runtime you must enter a Load group or Scene id and the asset will be loaded before entering into that scene.

All changes are available in SVN under the revision 201.

I am glad to announce that Pictomancer won the CODEAR mashup edition . Thanks to everyone who voted my game.

I’ve been working a lot in bug fixing discovered while I was developing Pictomancer, and I was sick for a while. This are some of the bugs that I fixed.

• Sometimes the character’s display disapear of the screen when you stress it by clicking a lot.
• The Entry topic of the dialogs now has an only once flag so the first words exchanged between characters are said once.
• The Character’s display now can has no animation assigned to certain behavior.
• The scene items now can has multiple views or DisplayObjects assigned to a state.
• The demos now has a preloader.

I have 22 pending bugs and issues to reach the Beta.

Sorry for the silence, I took a week of break from coding WAK since the last semi-crunch for my entry for CODEAR . I made an english version that you can check here.

I have to say that the WAK grew a lot after using it in a real mini project. A lot of bugs were detected and a lot of improvements were discovered. And these fixes and improvements will be included in the coming soon beta.

The Modern adventure style is completed. The modern adventure style is a mix between severals kind of interfaces used by some of the latest adventure games.

The philosophy behind this system is one click for everything without actions panel. A very similar to Scumm dialog system with some esthetic differences. And the inventory at the bottom along with a box to display scene and inventory information.

The mouse pointer also is used to give feedback to the player of the current action to be performed which depends on the context.

A new demo was added to the Demos section.

I will be taking a break from the WAK development until June 1. I want to enter to a mashups contest organized by ADVA. I want to cross the graphics adventures with some other gameplay that I have in mind.

After the contest I’ll prepare the new WAK beta release and make bug fixing.

I made a new release which includes the SCI’s Sierra adventure style. Some features of this release are:

• SCI(Sierra) adventure GUI fully customizable.
• SCI Inventory system.
• You can add any actions button inside the Inventory window.
• SCI Dialog system including animated portraits when a character is speaking.
• A topic based dialog menu.

You can download the release here.

Well, after a few unexpected delays the SCI systems is done and fully functional. I’ve added the new demo to the Demos page also you can find this demo into the svn under examples/DevTest2 . The DevTest2 doesn’t do so many things like DevTest1 it only shows the SCI action system, inventory, and the dialog system but there are no puzzles or hidden things to find. You can only walk around and talk with the other character.

For two weeks I’ve been silent. The week of 03/16/2009 I made some minor refactoring and bug fixing without too much visibles results to show. And the past week I’ve been on vacations in a wonderful and mysterious place called Capilla del Monte and just came back the past Saturday.

The graphic user interface for the SCI Sierra system is done (at last!). The SCI interface is fully customizable form the SciGui.xml file. I think this is the hardest part of the Sierra style implementation. The dialogs and actions system would be easier.

As I promised here is the link of a work in progress demo on what I am working on to show and test the SCI system.
Thanks Gabriel (Billu) for the actions buttons and the web site theme mod.