I’ve had a few bug reports from the new AGS3 versions of the games, mostly because of how AGS3 handles sprites differently. (It has an ugly habit of creating blank sprite loops then using them, resulting in characters becoming invisible – I thought I’d trapped them all, but clearly not!) With more people downloading  Les Miserables now that it’s free, I’m also getting more suggestions for general  improvements. E.g. there’s about a week’s worth of fixes and improvements to do. None of these is fatal, so I’m still leaving the games up, but I’ve added a warning to the downloads page.

Regarding the new combined game, it’s all systems go. It takes about two days to move all the resources (sprites, etc.) from each old game to the new combined game, then it will be another two days to convert each game’s code into a new combined code base that should work identically for them all. Then I’ll fix the bugs mentioned above, then test all the games again. In theory that can all be complete in ten more days. But long time watchers will know that it’s always a good idea to double that.

To end on a very positive note, my goal all along has been to get the game into state where I can focus purely on the story and not worry about code. By combining all the stories I’ll be closer than ever to that goal:

1. The best code will be in every game – for example, game 4 has more sophisticated code than game 1.

2. All the endless bugs relating to between game code will be over: never again will RunAGSGame cause me to tear my hair out!

3. There should be no future surprises: everything about this game – except its size – is standard AGS code, as used and tested in hundreds of other games on millions of computers. And as far as I can tell, the size itself should not be a problem. If it is then I’ll just give up and make separate games, but let’s not even imagine that, because…

4. My goal has always been to have a vast game where there’s always more to discover: combining the games makes that easier than ever – e.g. if I want to add something to an old scene, or reuse an old scene, I can just do it, without any worries about complex retro code.

5. Long term, the goal was always to reuse more and more, resulting in  smaller and smaller additions of art and music. So in the early days, when there are less than fifty stories, it might seem odd to combine everything into one giant file. But toward the end, when there are around a hundred stories, any other strategy would seem crazy.

Anyway. Back to work. So much to do!