AdventureX 2019 - Nov 2nd & 3rd

[Ali]

AdventureX will return to the British Library on November 2nd and 3rd. The full announcement is here

Tickets will be on sale later this year, but you can currently apply to exhibit or speak at the event. If you've been to AdventureX before, you'll know that it's a celebration of narrative driven games. We often accept classic point and click games, as well as IF, VNs, exploration games and experimental interactive narratives. Exhibiting is free.

Check out the Reasons to Exhibit at AdventureX for more info. Let me know if you have any questions!

EDIT: Now with working links!

[Privateer Puddin']

Woo! Going to try make it this year.

[milkanannan]

Wish I could go. Maybe some year down the road.

[milkanannan]

Friendly suggestion: you guys should create a mailing list for the site.

[Ali]

You can join the AdventureX mailing list here: https://adventurexpo.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f579adbfa1e12de662063e578&id=fdabd2739b

We livestream the talks, so you can still participate from overseas. Here's one of the talks from last year that Kotaku picked up: https://kotaku.com/developer-shows-how-to-write-good-game-dialogue-using-b-1830797912

[Ali]

^BUMP^

The deadline is this Sunday, so if you're sitting on a cool demo, now would be a good time to get an application in.

[eri0o]

My game has advanced a lot but I don't think submitting again makes sense, so I am thinking to just go to check things out once tickets are available

[Ali]

It's a bit hidden in the small print - but from this year on we aren't accepting the same game more than once. Sorry I didn't make that clearer in advance, but I'm glad you didn't spend a lot of time preparing a submission. Hope to see you there!

[shaun9991]

I've submitted Sumatra: Fate of Yandi!

Now crossing fingers and toes 

[WHAM]

Arr, am too late to this party, but I might book flights and come out anyway as a guest.
Been a long time since I last got to travel to the UK, and AdventureX sounds fun! Just came across a few photos I took in the 2012 event a few nights ago.

[Ali]

Yes, I'm afraid the submission window is closed, but tickets will go on sale in the not-too-distant future

[milkanannan]

Totally going to one of these someday!

[Ali]

Hello! Just a reminder for everyone who couldn't make it to AdventureX this weekend, that you can watch the talks by joining us on the livestream:

https://www.twitch.tv/adventurexpo/

[cat]

Stream is working, now Dave's talk is starting 

[Ali]

The stream works for once!

[cat]

Nice talks by Dave and Hannah.

Not much interested in the next ones, maybe I'll join again for "Building Emotion-driven Games" later today.

[shaun9991]

AdventureX was so amazing this year! Big thanks to Ali and the organisers. Just keeps getting better and better. Was great catching up with quite a few of the AGS crew

We were lucky to be demoing Sumatra: Fate of Yandi and had lots of lovely feedback.

Here's a picture of our stall -

[imgzoom]https://i.ibb.co/m68Zj22/yandi-stall.jpg[/imgzoom]

[fernewelten]

The first talks have appeared on YouTube by now, in particular the Dave Gilbert (surviving a sort of writer's block) and the Hannah Flynn (marketing for adventure game developers) ones. https://www.youtube.com/user/AdventureXpo/videos

[Snarky]

I watched a few of the recorded presentations. Great stuff! I thought this one was particularly inspiring:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRfNtvFVRo

[Ali]

That's an excellent one! Though it is from 2018. But still, a very helpful talk.

[Snarky]

Hah! It came up on YouTube autoplay, and I didn't notice it'd skipped back to 2018.

[fernewelten]

As an aside, don't you feel, watching the talk, that the AGS dialogue system could be immensely improved?

Even though the dialogue in the talk is quite small, it still already has several branches and sub-branches. The AGS dialogue system, on the other hand, only allows one set of alternative answers at a time. So each AGS “dialogue” turns out to only be a “dialogue fraction” in reality.

In order to reproduce the dialogue of the talk, we end up with a bunch of “dialogue fractions”. Each “fraction” only holds a smithereen of the whole dialogue. It's quite hard to get a bird's eye overview of the _whole_ thing.

Although we can introduce folders in the AGS Editor's dialogue tree, the respective “dialogues” still need unambiguous identifiers. So we probably end up with a bunch of names like dRachel1, dRachel2, dRachel21, dRachel22, dRachel23, dRachel3, dRachel4. When we work out the dialogue gradually, we might find that a step would need to be added in between dRachel21 and dRachel211. Then we'd either need to rename lots of dialogue fractions, taking care to update their references in code at the same time, or invent a dRachel21a to avoid that renaming. This makes either for a huge hassle, or a huge mess. Or we avoid the numbers in the first place, then we start out with a naming mess from the get-go.

Another, separate issue:The talk argues convincingly that 3 is the correct number of dialog options so you should always start out with exactly three. But even then, the need might still sometimes arise to add in a fourth dialogue option. Let's say it needs to be added between the first and second existing one.

In the cockpit, we can only add in further options at the end, so after doing that, we need to move options @3 and @2 down by one place using  copy-paste. Then subsequently, the script part of the dialogue editor refers to the options by number, not by name, so you'd afterwards need to peruse the whole script and change all the @3 to @4 and @2 to @3.

Um ... 

[Snarky]

Yes, I agree that it's bonkers that each node in a conversation should be a separate "dialog." I've never really written complex dialogs in AGS, but if I had to, I would definitely not use the built-in editor, but first try the Dialog Designer plugin, which might help a little.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that three is always the right number of dialog options. The talk really only concerns a particular type of in-game conversation: the dramatic (interactive) cutscene that moves the plot forward; and it's implicitly assumed that there is one fixed story that cannot be significantly affected by player choices: the beats of the conversation always stay the same. The same rules don't necessarily apply to more gameplay-oriented dialogs like for example when you're interviewing a character about a collection of clues you've gathered, or if it can branch off into genuinely different directions.

To put it another way: insult swordfighting wouldn't work (or, it wouldn't be the same puzzle) with only three comebacks to choose between for each insult.

[Ali]

Also, Jon subsequently published Heaven's Vault, which only has 2 dialogue choices at any point... but I think he's right that there's something generally satisfying about 3.