I started playing around with Isometric pixel art a few months back.

Just messin' around I started to create a kitchen scene. Which then spread into a den, then a family room, etc. I then developed the upstairs.

The the idea hit me that this could look good in an adventure game.

The immediate problem I came up with was how to make certain objects, most notably the walls (which would be in the way), NOT be in the way?

So I started working on a way to remove them from the scene. I was using the last version of AGS (which didn't support regions) so it was all done with hotspots. This became a problem as I quickly ran out of hotspots which were needed for other inteactions in the room.

I created all (removable) walls as objects and had them shut on and off depending on which hotspot you stood on. This worked well, and when I downloaded the newest version of AGS I updated to regions (which made it function much better!)

Then I got the idea to have the walls 'fade' in and out rather than just shut off and on. After a lot of trial and error I achieved exactly what I was looking for with VERY little effect on game play (as they fade the game is effectively paused, but just for about 1 second)

So as the game progressed I realized that while this was cool (and something I hadn't seen in other games) I wanted to 1-up it a little.

The Space Ship.

This works so well that most probably don't realize the ammount of work involved in making it function. It involved shifting walk-behind's baselines and changing cursors and remembering the last cursormode (thanks to the guys in the tech forums for their help in the 'last curosr' area!) and changing character views and lots of boolean scripting to determine where to climb and what to say.

The fact that all the beta testers didn't comment on this makes me think I succeeded big time in making that part of the game!

I, of course, thought of a MUCH easier way to make this work AFTER I had coded it all, but that's neither here nor there. I learned a LOT about scripting during the process and that's what matters!

I really enjoyed developing this game and the advice I got from the forums (GiP and Tech boards) was just awesome! It's a great community over there!

Thanks to all those who helped out:

Squinky, Farlander, Dorcan, PenguinX, James Kay, Piraatlife4me, TK, a-v-o, Scorpiorus, Ryukage, oversizedchicken, Inkoddi ... the list goes on. If you helped me, you have my gratitude!