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It's a bit crazy. I'm wondering if they'll even do AG reviews anymore, the last one was May 26, 2025 (which wasn't all that long ago I know, but there was a steady stream before that...)

I was really impressed with the way manic arcade gameplay was mixed with strategy and puzzle elements. The SFX and CGA colour palette made it drip with retro vibes! Really well done. Can't quite believe this is the first game you've made with AGS!!!

Just a quick note - it's EndCutscene(); not StopCutscene();

Oh man I hadn't thought of that word connection! 

Spoiler

Which is even more stupid as I had seen there is an Oskar Schindler Museum in Krakow, which I decided not to specifically mention. "Holo-cast" was simply a mechanism to give an impression of this being somewhat in the future. I chose Krakow arbitrarily - I wanted to avoid the standard Washington / New York / London scenarios, so I chose somewhere a little less obvious. Having never been there, a 20 second search of its main tourist attractions was my only guide!

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Spoiler

Mandle's I felt was an interesting idea and clever implementation, although not entirely sure it fit the criteria so I was inclined to judge more based on the letter itself than the context around it. Either way, the mystery itself was interesting, although I suspect Mandle may have had his game developer hat on here as I felt it would have worked really well as a segment of a game - finding the bottle on the beach, reading the message, researching it - but maybe not quite as well in the context of this competition. I also had difficulty reading much of the letter itself, which may have been intentional / part of the point, I'm not sure. (I'd be interested to see this basic idea turned into a game one day!)

Sinitrena's entry was absolutely believable as a page from a historical novel. It was impressive how much characterisation was packed into such a short space, and a great quest / purpose was clearly hinted at, without being fully revealed. I really got a sense of the dynamics between the the characters even in such a short sense of time.

Stupot's again was very believable as a page from a novel. The air of mystery was incredibly strong and ending on "the fifth" was a masterstroke - the fifth WHAT?!?! I have to know!

Stupot - 3
Sinitrena - 2
Mandle - 1

All good entries, Mandle's I would like to see as part of a game sometime, Sinitrena's I would absolutely read that novel, Stupot's got my top vote because I really felt like I wanted to know what happened next.

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@OneDollar - I've often thought of making a game along those lines, but I'm sure yours will be better than what I had in mind!

Both games look really impressive.

It's been a long, long time since I entered one of these, but I thought I'd give this one a go:

Looks like this will be fun and a nice improvement on Skrex Banmarist and the Kasalowan Conspiracy (which was also pretty fun) - hope development goes well.

This looks absolutely amazing! All the best with development.

Did you record all the lines yourself? That's pretty insane! 

Looking forward to the game.

Woot! Congrats on the release.

Amazing work!!

@CaptainD I think the multi-layer hinting sounds really smart. In practice, though, that sounds really difficult to design without simply including a "hint system." Is this demonstrated in the newest Captain Disaster demo? Would love to see how you're implementing it.

I don't think there's anything in the demo, although truthfully the puzzles in that are pretty easy anyway. The two specific examples I can think of relate to tougher puzzles that are standalone in nature - what I've done is make it so that if you try and fail once, the game points you towards asking for help, who will give you a hint. If you try again and fail, you can get a slightly more pointed hint, and then a third. The game checks that you have tried the puzzle (entered the room it's housed in, essentially) before it opens up the possibility of the next hint.

I haven't had much feedback on how well it works because the testers either worked out out themselves and / or didn't realise the hints were available - I have made it a little clearer in the dialogues and responses that this is the case now.

But it's pretty arduous to implement in-game and I think the easier option would be to have a consistent hint option in the game. One I remember quite enjoying (I'm not actively against hint systems in games, incidentally, I just try to avoid them in my own games) was Runaway 2 (or maybe 3), where you could phone a character to get a cryptic hint. That character was already built up in the series to be a bit of a crackpot so it worked well in-universe.

[Viking]

Just wanted to showcase some of the voicing now in the game. Please note that not all graphics are final quality, and video compression has naturally reduced the quality of both visuals and audio.

So here are a few of the characters you'll meet in the game:

Wilson - voiced by Viking (who is also responsible for the game's wonderful OST)

ContainerBot - voiced by Durinde

LSP - voiced by me (and no, I'm not telling you what "LSP" stands for...)

Skar - voiced by ManicMatt

Baldorn - voiced by Durinde

Still tons of work to do before the game can be released, but we are definitely getting there.

@RootBound - my process is pretty similar to yours really.

1 & 2 - Whatever puzzle is in the game should fit with the story somehow (and preferably, wherever possible, it should even add to the storyline or lore of the game universe in some way, rather than simply be an obstacle for the player to overcome, although it's not really possible to do this with every single puzzle (unless you have rather few).

The tone of the game is also very important when it comes to the puzzle solutions, too. When I designed "The Corruption Within", I decided from the outset that I wanted everything in it to be at least vaguely believable that it could happen and be solved that way in real life. (Much to the disappointment of those who thought the game was going to be a gothic horror, I guess.) With my Captain Disaster games, much zanier solutions are obviously possible (even desirable), albeit they still have to fit in with the internal logic of that game universe.

3 - Definitely agree, sometimes a puzzle is simpler than you originally intended for various reasons, and you feel the need to add another small puzzle for that location, or add an extra step or two for an existing puzzle. This is where tester feedback is absolutely vital, which I'll talk more about later.

4 - Even in highly polished commercial games I've seen this plenty of times - there's an obstacle of some sort, but it makes no real sense that it should be there. Occasionally, the game doesn't even attempt to make an explanation as to why this is the case. I try to think of the general setting obstacles in the initial design stage (albeit it is a very iterative process) because adding something later on is, I think, where these incongruities often arise. Something is there because the game designer needed to add a blocker, not because it actually makes a great deal of sense in terms of the overall storyline.

5 - To me, the real key to this is having good testers, and communicating with them effectively as to what did and didn't make sense to them (and allowing for the fact that different testers will obviously have different sets of things that make sense or not!). This is often difficult to do via written communication only, and sometimes I've not been able to understand the issue until they sent me a gameplay video or I've had a chance to actually chat to them. This happened with one of the puzzle sequences in CD3 - we had communicated several times, and I'd made some adjustments / added pointers etc, but until we did a Discord call and he talked me through it while actually showing me in the game itself, that I truly understood the issue.

Additional comments:

I've always liked the idea that a game should contain enough hinting to give the player enough information to solve the puzzles, as I dislike having to look up hints to progress (albeit I dislike being stuck in one part of a game even more), and I try to incorporate this in a multi-stage way, to allow for the puzzle to be solved by those who like their games on the tougher side, but also if someone is struggling, the game allows the player to receive some more pointers. I've tried to do this in a few places in CD3, so will be curious to see how people find it. (I'm fairly convinced there will be the normal groups of people saying it's too easy or too hard!) If in doubt, I would always tend to err on the side of making it easier, since I don't want players to become frustrated and give up on the game.

One final comment I have is mini-games - yes, I know these are pretty much love-them or hate-them parts of adventure games - I feel they're a nice addition as long as 1/ they fit the story and 2/ aren't so difficult or out of line with the rest of the game that they just hold up or annoy players. For these I have a pretty simple strategy - I prototype them until I'm happy with how they play, then get a couple of testers to look at them in isolation to make sure they're understandable and completable, then I add them to the game and put in final art / sound. This seems to have worked pretty well so far. I create them as a room in the project itself so that no importing is needed, and if I decide to get rid of the mini-game, all I need to do is delete the room (or just never have it be accessed in the game).

Anywhere, there's my tuppence worth!

I'm using 3.6.1 for CD3, so will either stick with that or move to 3.6.2 - for any future project, I will very probably hop over to 4.0.

Thanks for this. I plan to use the full list, as I think everyone who's contributed deserves to be recognised for their amazing efforts.

Looking back at puzzles even in games you loved (and maybe still love) is an interesting experience. I won't answer your question about my process / design here as that's more Critics Lounge stuff (or happy to discuss it via DM). Puzzle "difficulty" is extraordinarily difficult to gauge.

Back to the game itself, having enjoyed your previous games (albeit I don't think I solved all of the puzzles in Tunnel Vision!), I have confidence that you will create a game with more balance than (I felt) Myst had. 

Most intriguing!

I must admit to not being a Myst fan, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one 

Thanks mate, glad you had fun with it!