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After making 3 games I gave up on gamedev, utterly frustrated with the amount of effort required, the failure to connect with the general audience and the media. A failure much of my own making. I made my games with little consideration for trends in gaming (the rise of the ever impatient letsplay community), zero strategic approach and just as much patience for the press, and honestly, mostly obsessed with endless soliloquies that don't go anywhere. But throughout all that I found AGS itself a great, versatile tool. A tool for something beyond gamedev. I started using it to make music videos. Difficult as it was, it was such a joy working around the limitations and learning new things to create visual f/x. It also facilitated my transition into webdev - in which, again, I pursued the gfx/vfx side of things, with the side-goal of code optimization. 3D graphics in pure html. Vector graphics. Especially the latter gives me quite the rush - since it lets me create art and animations in pure code, no assets required. It's fascinating - and so weird! For years I've found myself yearning to write stories - and yet completely paralyzed when faced with the hostile blank page every day. And even more depressingly, trying to "get out there" with my works - and failing; the more miserably the more effort I put in. Nowadays, I'm SO much happier, learning stuff like PHP and trigonometry for my own pleasure - with no particular plans to showcase them anywhere.

Well, I don't know what your standards are exactly if my performances made the cut I will forever be equally puzzled as I am nostalgic, voicing Nick being the starting point of my splendid career in VO

Hypothetical conversation at The Asylum:

Exec #1: What movie do we copy next?
Exec #2: Aladdin?
Exec #1: Done that already.
Exec #2: Beauty & The Beast?
Exec #1: Yup, done that one, too.
Exec #2: Hm... It's been a tough year... Gotta dig deeper... I hear this Sharknado flick is trending!
Exec #1: Yeah! Awesome! I've already got a title: Sharknami! Get on it!
Intern: Wait... Isn't Sharknado one of ours?
Exec #1: Uh... Oh, yeah, it is.
Exec #2: Your point being...?

Wow, I just realized that it was 10 years ago (to the day!) that I started on my first AGS project - and joined the forums a couple weeks later. I'm still here, checking in a few times a month at least, just to see how things are and feast my eyes on some pixel eye candy. I hardly ever play anything these days anymore, I'm perpetually either too busy or too tired for an intellectual challenge of this kind - especially since my work these days is all about problem-solving anyway. But I've made some good friends here - and co-workers, too, who've helped me get my games done (coding tips, seriously amazing music, and the beta testing; props especially to Tabata!), and who asked for help in theirs (including my first voice-acting gigs!). The spirit of helping out just out of kindness helped me restore some faith in humanity. I owe the AGS engine a lot, too. It was my introduction to programming, and helped me greatly to learn the logic of code: the need for structure, the neatness. It made a life-long dream of making my own video game possible. Served me quite well as a video-editing software, too! Finally, a couple years down the road, the experience gathered in AGS helped me get into web design. It's a whole new world, and a beast of its own, but at some base level the environment seemed familiar - and really fun!

So if you ever feel like sticking to a genre that had its glory days in the early 90's is niche, know that there's a guy out there programming 3D objects/animations and vector graphics in pure HTML (and occasionally PHP loops) - in WordPad! What kinda troglodite freak does that? And that was back in June or so. You don't even wanna know what I'm doing right now!

As for grievances:

SO MANY YEARS I WAS DISILLUSIONED

All disillusionment pales in comparison at my horror at the discovery that this isn't really Chicky:

Years and years of gathering the guts to confess love - only to discover the object of my undying affection was in reality a Jemaine Clement lookalike 

I finally learned to lean into the absurdity of the situation of writing with/against an AI that is both very creative and super random. What followed is 100% "zero ducks given" story starting off from the basic premise of weirdest dream I had - and it gets weirder, with our mutual effort.

Spoiler

You are a frog made of cigarette smoke. You live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and you sing funky tunes. You have no friends, but you do have a girlfriend named Mandy who lives in your mouth. One day a man from the United States submariner walks into your trench. He's been to the surface for several minutes and he misses his wife and kids. He tells you his story.
"I need your help, frog," he says. "If you sing that song you can make enough noise to wake the entire world."
You burst into the funkiest tune yet: "Get uppah! Get on up!", you chant. And the whole world rises. Soon all the people on the surface are awake and dancing. The man takes you outside the trench and plants a big kiss on your fuzzy forehead. Then he gets back in his submarine and leaves. The world is safe.
You decide to marry Mandy in the United States.
She prefers Aruba.
Your honeymoon involves scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. You both find a pink coral crab the size of a dinner plate and you name him Peter.
You decide to adopt Peter.
He has many, many kids.
One day you see a news report about a massive undersea cavern being discovered off the coast of France.
You want to move there but it's become too hot a commodity, way above your paygrade, and so you settle down off Costa Rica.
You don't ever want to leave.
The Carribbean is a place of wonder, with an undersea world of molten glass fish and paper dolphins. They swim around and sing samba.
One day you're snorkeling off the coast of Vieux Fort, a small coastal town in Vieux Fort and you swim into an underwater cavern and swim through a hole in a rock wall and suddenly find yourself
in the inverse space, where solid matter is air and air is solid. You walk around the space, touching the walls and floor. It's so incredible that you have a full-blown anxiety attack. You run out of the space as if you've seen a ghost.
The experience is both haunting and magnetic. You're confused and scared, but oddly fascinated by what you've just seen.
You can't leave that space, and you're stuck in it.
You hear the samba outside still playing.
You push through, and suddenly you yourself are no longer smoke, you're solid matter. You are flesh and bone. You grab a rock and beat your head against the solid wall. You bleed from your head, but it doesn't matter.
This space won't let you leave.
If you can't beat them, join them, as the saying goes. So you decide to stay - and venture deeper into the world of inverse matter.
One day, you see an orangish yellow sun shining on a massive rock in the distance. You can barely make out something else lying on that rock... it looks like a large, pale man.
You fly closer. As you do, you notice that the pale man is missing his left eye. He's wearing a cowboy hat and a black t-shirt with some sort of tribal symbols on it.
He is God.
"I'm here to save the world, like you wanted," you say.
He raises an eyebrow. "You're a pretty one," he says. "You want to be my bride?"
You laugh.
"No. I'm already engaged."
"I've been everywhere, done everything," he says. "It's all so boring now. It's time for me to finally settle down and have some fun again."
"Well, have it your way, God. I'm off. Byeeeee!"
You turn, fly back to your body, and wake up.
Well, that was a silly dream.
You get up from the beach chair you're sitting in and walk back to your house. You grab a cold drink out of the fridge and collapse on the couch to watch some reality TV.
After an hour or two, you fall asleep again, this time for good.
And then, once again, you wake up. This time, though, you're in an entirely different place.
You're lying on a massive bed, surrounded by strangers. A man stands over you.
"Huh?" you say.
"I'm God," he says. "And this is thebedroom."
You stare at him in shock. Then, you grab him and push him off of the bed. You punch him in the nose, and he falls to the floor with a thud. You look around and see that you're in your childhood bedroom, which is filled with props from your childhood.
You grab the biggest baseball bat you can find and run into the hallway. You find God standing there, looking at you.
"Oh, that's right. You don't like to fight," he says.
"Changed my mind", you say, and swat him down.
You punch him in the throat, and he dies. You go to work on the others in your room, who are standing there with shock on their faces. When you're done, you check the doorway to see if God is dead. He's not. He's just unconscious.
You grab him and pick him up by his shirt collar.
You throw him into the sun, which should do the trick. But it doesn't. You're in a time loop, sent back to when the world was still fresh and new. Every so often, God needs to be punched again to reset the world.
You swim backwards against the flow of time - to the beginning of everything, and past that, uprstream, right into the Big Bang. You're not strong enough to stay there, but you see yourself continue to swim back to the present. The other yous are fighting in the past right now, and you have no idea what will happen to them.
The past, and the future split into countless streams, and the present you is flowing in the wake of them all.
Maybe, if you're very, very careful, you can survive long enough to punch God into oblivion again.
This loop has been going on for what feels like an eternity to you.
You are stretched across the whole loop multiple times - but your body doesn't rip and tear. You live through the torture. You fold in on yourself. You continue to hold on, with all your might.
With all your being, you punch.
You find yourself in the present once more. You see God lying on the floor. You sit up and swing again.
God is no more.
This time, you hold on. You survive. After the torture, there is a peace that soothes your mind.
You find yourself outside the house you grew up in. You hear screaming inside. You try the door. It's locked.
Inside the house, you see the others. They are fighting the forces of Hell.
You pick up a gun from the floor.
You fire it and it bends the fabric of time. You reload and shoot again. You watch as demons are shot down. The shotgun fires over and over as you mow down hordes of Hell's army.
You feel a wave of calmness coming over you.
God is dead. Hell is defeated, at least here on Earth.
What's next?
Paradise!
You laugh maniacally. You feel a rush of joy.
This is it. You've done it. You survived. You beat the odds. You're happy.
You've won.
This is the feeling of satisfaction and joy that fills your heart. This is the feeling that's going to keep you alive, that's going to see you through this, that's going to see you victorious over death itself.
You laugh as you pump your shotgun.
"Get uppah! Get on up!" you shout, firing.
The last demons fall to the ground.
You're alive. You've beaten the odds. You survived. You've won.
Now, you can finally be happy.
You laugh as you pump your shotgun, and watch the last of Hell's minions fall to your fire.
You raise your shotgun one last time, and smile.
Then, the world ends.
...and begins all over.
"Come on!" you say.
You walk down the hallway, shotgun tight in your hands.
"Time to die, demon!" you shout.
You hear a scream. When you turn around, you see a group of people. They wear the armor of the Varsakken family, and seem to be working with demons. They must be from the future.
One of them flies forward with a scream.
You fart at him and he turns into glitter.
You walk forward, but more of them appear, along with demons. The battle begins again.
You fart and belch in their general direction and they are instantly obliterated, all of them. You fart again and feel your stomach muscles contract, causing you to vomit. As you continue to vomit, time resumes.
You are dead. You were killed by the temporal terrorists of the 22nd century.
You have died and your adventure is at an end.

[close]

Meanwhile, I just got "And then I wake up." F you, game 

Fascinating! I've only just started, and I'm waiting for the AI to really get creative rather than just shyly following my cues - but the very exercise of imagination in the form of a game with someone/something else is a reward in itself.

Oh yeah, my bad, should've specified that these are screengrabs - made with Bandicam - and not a video file generated by AGS itself. Still, fairly easy to do - if plagued the technical difficulties stemming from overloading the CPU and memory by the screengrabbing software (at least on older specs, like my computer at the time)

Maybe it needs to be calculated or measured…

Oh damn, that one sent my brain into overdrive! I've been busy doing some geometry trickery in pure HTML/CSS, culminating in creating a rough 3D sphere - and now you got me wondering if the same would be possible in AGS. Not just code-wise. I'm more concerned about my CPU/GPU not going ablaze from the effort I'm not promising anything, and even if I do make something it's most likely not going to be a game - but the idea's been planted

[EDIT] Kinda. I've created a few music videos over the past few years - but had to use external screengrabbing software.

...and Maniac Mansion. Preferably with visuals matching DOTT.

I'd prefer the opposite, actually!

I was thinking the same thing: DotT in the style of the original Maniac Mansion!

Ooh, what palette is this? I'm loving how soft and warm the hues are compared to my beloved, ghastly EGA

Would be pretty hard to make steel molds that way Instead, we feed the 3D data to a CNC milling machine, which then cuts the mold out of blocks of steel.

Oh, just to make it clear: it wasn't a five-minute thing, it was simply something I did in one sitting, in the evening, and chose not to worry about little details - while fully aware it's far from perfect. It doesn't have that dynamism and charm of the original cartoony Zniw. These short evening sculpts are sort of a rapid prototyping - which is very different from more ambitious attempts, which tend to take waaaay longer, require much more research, trial and error, and revisions - like this:

(which I'm still not perfectly happy with)

As far as casting goes, that's not what we do, actually. I'm talking automated, rapid machine mass-production of identical plastic items by injecting molten plastic into steel molds. It's a regular factory - if small - rather than an artistic enterprise. Coincidentally, casting was what my fiance (the real-life Magenta) and my sister did in college, they both majored in sculpture.

Arjon, I'm surprised you even remember that! Nope, actually alllll of my plans for Gray went absolutely nowhere. Same with Magenta, too, and Monty. Not a day goes by without me thinking about either, with so many ideas - but I'm physically burnt out. If anything, I might start making figurines for others, more marketable IPs of AGS fame? Here's a lazy quickie 3D sculpt I did of Zniw: 

Blondbraid, I'll definitely check these - though I might also investigate the classic approach of assemblable models. Because one of these days I might actually go there, maybe? I work at an injection molding company, owned by my father - and so far we've only been making boring practical stuff. I'm 40 next month, so I want to do something new and bold and wild! 

These are magnificent, Blondbraid! Especially that last one. How do the joints work? Did you model them after solutions used in commercial figurines or did you make some creative use of the 3D printing capabilities, like printing an object inside an object rather than snapping them together once finished.

I'm only starting my fun with 3D prints and have yet to try to color them or give them movable body parts. Here's my first - done with the help of my brother-in-law (he's the printer whiz, I'm the designer):

Duke Nukem Forever: development commenced in 1997, completed in 2011
Sleuth: "Hold my Big Blue Cup..."

But that's actually inspiring! Just like your invitation to voice another character made me dust off my mic and do some voicework again, maybe one of these days I'll excavate one of those latent ideas and make a new game.

In any case, looking forward to some sleuthing!

Fitz, you have to remember. Feige and co. are not making these films just for the comic book fans. They're making them for the masses.

That may be the issue with film adaptations of beloved/iconic stories in general - be it Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones, which the masses loved but fans had beef with over simplifications and pop-ifying. Not to mention basically any video game movie - average movies at best, with little to no respect for the original. I know that, and part of me has accepted it - but the kid in me still waits for the movies to lock in on that particular bit of the 90's that my childhood was. Oh well. At least the teenage Mortal Kombat 2 fan got his perfect movie version of Baraka:

Most of the MCU movies (that have a specific basis in the first place) are loose adaptations of comic arcs from the 90sâ€"00s or even later, though.

That may be. Still, I feel completely detached from it since it's just not the Marvel I grew up with - which was mostly the adult Spider-Man of the McFarlane era, and X-Men from Claremont onwards (post-Phoenix, and into the Jim Lee era). I revered villains such as Venom and Hobgoblin, and even at the age of 10 or so I considered Green Goblin campy (and I liked that infamous Captain America movie, so that says a lot about my standards back then). The Avengers seemed archaic - an impression furthered by the cheesy TV series. I'll admit I might be biased because of that alone - but there are just so many things about the whole franchise that either do nothing for me (the supposedly iconic cast) or just inexplicably irk me (the whole political thriller vibe, agents and offices, or pompous royal figures).

Actually Netflix did that themselves, possibly in retaliation for Disney announcing their own streaming service, and they cost a lot of money. Disney was surprised by the decision.

Huh! I wrongly assumed the House of Mouse was the big bad. My bad.

What do you think? Is this for real or some kind of stunt?

Nothing out of the ordinary. These big studios would rather choke the gold laying hen - or at the very least break all its bones - than give it over to the other studio. Disney killed the Netflix offshot of the franchise - with zero regard for how popular Daredevil and Punisher were. Because it's not about what fans want. Oh well... At least I'm not very sad about Spidey not being a part of the MCU - which I find heavily overrated. Try as I might, I don't care about the Avengers - the team or the individual heroes alike. I was actually enjoying Endgame way more than I thought I would - but then the climactic battle happened and it was just every bad thing about the whole franchise, times 3000 So I'm not really looking forward to their take on X-Men - which used to be my favorite Marvel team. Fox murdered it - but really, can MCU, with their fixation on the 60's canon, give me anything I - an 80's/90's kid - would want to see?

I think I'm just bored of the decrepit, kitschy classics being portrayed in the straighforward, superserious way, reiterating stories already told. I'm having way more fun with the sillier ones - like Deadpool, taking the piss out of everything, or Guardians, Ant-Man or Spidey. which take many, many liberties with the comic originals. Homecoming basically tossing the whole 60s canon and skipping over the origin story was the most progressive thing the MCU had ever done. Vulture was also by far the best MCU villain so far. Very meta.

Speaking of meta - Amazon's series "The Boys" does many brilliant things. I had zero expectations, thought it'd be bland, human-centric stuff like Agents of Shield or Powerless - but oh man, it's something else!