MAGS April: "Time" (CLOSED)

[Sephiroth]

Hey there,

I wanted to comment on each game but people seem to have pointed out the most obvious. I really enjoyed playing them, and was surprised by the quality of the games even though the authors didn't seem to have enough time to add everything they wanted, so I'll definatly be waiting for expanded/complete versions! I still have to beat concurrence, it should be easier now that I get the controls  :

Code: ags

I have to reduce points for lack of manual and use of music from a Troika game

I love(d) troika games, and I don't really like the use of this either, but, nevermind, really it didn't take the fun out of it, just deserves to be mentioned. Btw did you know one of the team members at the old Troika Games was called Chris Jones? 

[AnalogGuy]

Hey there,

I wanted to comment on each game but people seem to have pointed out the most obvious. I really enjoyed playing them, and was surprised by the quality of the games even though the authors didn't seem to have enough time to add everything they wanted, so I'll definatly be waiting for expanded/complete versions! I still have to beat concurrence, it should be easier now that I get the controls  :

Code: ags

I have to reduce points for lack of manual and use of music from a Troika game

I love(d) troika games, and I don't really like the use of this either, but, nevermind, really it didn't take the fun out of it, just deserves to be mentioned. Btw did you know one of the team members at the old Troika Games was called Chris Jones? 

LOL! I have never even heard of troika games and I certainly never take music from somewhere else! I am composer and I specially made music for this game! 

I have my own studio with full of synthesizers, effect processors and other tools and I specially compose only my own music with my own unique style. I spent hours with this project and I didn't do that in order to be accused of using someone else's music!

[WHAM]

LOL! You must be kidding me!!! I have never even heard of troika games and I certainly never take music from somewhere else! I am composer and I specially made music for this game! 

Unless you are saying you made the music for City of Thieves, I believe you.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=43192.msg578109#msg578109

[AnalogGuy]

LOL! You must be kidding me!!! I have never even heard of troika games and I certainly never take music from somewhere else! I am composer and I specially made music for this game! 

Unless you are saying you made the music for City of Thieves, I believe you.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=43192.msg578109#msg578109

lol... damn, I misunderstood. He should have designed his phrases better.

[mode7]

misunderstanding - although ptp WILL do the music for dualnames troica ^^

[WHAM]

Perhaps using the code tag instead of the quote function confused us all.
I trust you, sir ptp88, shall show mercy and forgiveness to poor Sepiroth this one time. 

[mode7]

Ok I give my two cents on the entries:

15mins:
My favourite so far. Short and easy puzzles. But great presentation nice music and quite funny. Also best use of the theme.

City of thieves:
Cool idea. I DID like the lock picking sequence. Much more fun than the one in oblivion. Rendered GFX work for me too.
Screams to be a full game

Essence:
Nice animations. The engine is also working quite well. My only problem is that you cant skip the intro after watching it 3 times (after dying 3 times) I gave up. Will try again- promised!

OSD 3d
I already wrote my opinion in the thread

Run away
Are the levels procedurally generated? This is quite impressive - the scrolling is a bit anoying. As said before more of a framework than a game.

Lurking horror
I did but the dying animation was well worth it. Cool atmosphere. I really WAS scared.  Begs to have a little more atmospheric BGs.

Overall the amount and quality of this months mags is extremely high. Will be a though vote

[Sephiroth]

Ah well, I should have used the quote, sorry for the misunderstanding ptpt88, my comment on Concurrence had nothing to do with it, it would have been clear if I used quote and named the game I was referring to :p

Anyways I just finished playing and casted my vote, thanks for the great games!

[arj0n]

Since everything has been summed up already now I can only say this:

Huge THANX for the great entries guys!

This mags had an exciting tense already due to the deadline 'issues'.
So even when there was no game released yet, the theme (TIME) did really fit this mags 

[Rocco]

I will post my 2cents about all entrys tonight.
when is the voting deadline (the next one.  )

Arj0n: Please can you alter the zip pack with the updated version from City of Thieves?
So i guess i have time tonight, to look at the other entries. 

MAGS April 2011 pack (7 games): direct download

thanks, Arj0n. 

bigthanks for your comments.  

City of Thieves
> Not a fan of 3D models turned into sprites, although this is one of the better ones
> Mouse control is less than ideal for this type of game, keyboard control would have given
much more feel of urgency and preciseness to the game (see Yahtzee's Art of Theft)
> GUI seems to function a bit strangely. The buttons don't all seem to react the same way
> I have to reduce points for lack of manual and use of music from a Troika game (that music is holy! Using it anywhere else than the original game is sacrilege!)

well there is actually a halfbaked keyboard control implemented,

WASD -> move player
G,L,U, ->  AGS standard keys for switching mousemodes
so its actually possible to play the game with keyboard and mouse combined.
my aim was also to make it fully playable with keyboard,
but after thinking about it, i didnt really know a decent solution to pick inventoryitems with the keyboard and act with them on the hotspots near the player, but i will look into this..

the music issue:
two weeks ago, i started thinking about the music, my first intention was to use a remix from They stole a million.
So i searched and found one, then i email the author about the permissin to use it, but never get an answer.
as the game evolves i realized, that the They stole a Million Theme won't work anyway,
cause its more a fun-sounding and wont approach the feel of the game.  
Vampire:Bloodlines is one of my all time favourite games, and so i knew the music would fit very well to the game.
And it does, especially for the theme when the police is nearby.
I was also under heavy pressure to get a music in the game, at all.
I started includeing sound and music on monday as well, so there wasn't much space for wrong decisions.
AndI'm pretty happy with the result, and sorry i dont want to sacrifice Troika or Vampire:Bloodlines, i see it as an obeisance to them.
Not to mention that this music is only used for the mags version of the game.

Manual:
The basic infos about the minigames are in the readme, the inventory gui in the bottom was introduced in the intro,
and to change mouse.modes with the right cursor key isnt that unusual in AGS - Games.
Which control infos are you missing?  

> GUI seems to function a bit strangely. The buttons don't all seem to react the same way
Please can you point out for me, what you mean exactly?

[Rocco]

sorry dopplepost. 

[Rocco]

Here are my 2c about the games

15 minutes:
Well this game is almost perfect, the concept, the style, the fonts, the biowareish talksystem,  so well polished and fit together like a charm, no doubt my vote goes to 15 minutes, it was so much joy to play, congrats this is real gem.
If i look with the magnifying glass for critism, the only point that i would mention is the lack of a few soundeffects.


concurrence:
really great presentation, are the graphics drawd by yourself?, the controls are really good and similar to prince of persia 1, at least so far i can figure it out, cause my main criticpoint is the lack of a readme with the exact keycontrols. So i get to the vines and stucked there, i gave up, after hitting all keys on the keyboard but didnt manage to go over this obstacles. What brings me to the next point, which is maybe related to the fact, that i didnt see more of the game, but i cant see the Time Theme in your Game, cause except the quote from Einstein in the beginning, there was no relation to the mags theme, maybe this will appear later.


In essence:
Well, the intro.... i cant stand it longer then 3 times, but what i see so far was very promising, cause at game start it reminds me on Who dares wins or Commando, so i was a little bit dissapointed, as there was no meaningful opportunity to use the shootgun.
i struggled at the tanks, maybe i missed a later section, where it come in use.
So it was only running to right until you die.

OSD:
Ok, so there is nothing more to be said.

Dave Miller 30.4.2011

RunAway:
I liked this concept very much, one of my favorite AGS Games is  Forklift -> http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42094.0
which a somehow similar approach, from Technocrat. So it was funny, to run a bit around an blew some things up, but it was obivious that this game needs a lot more work to be finished. Hope you will continue this concept. I got a game crash while playing:
in "room1.asc", line 853
Error: NewRoom: room change requested to invalid room number -1.
 

Lurking horror
The atmosphere was very well captured, but i didnt came very far, and im not that patient in the moment when im stuck,
cause the work which i laid back for this MAGS, has to be done now. 

[hedgefield]

Wow thanks Rocco, that's some high praise Glad you enjoyed it.

Incidentally, I put up a new version fixing the bug WHAM encountered: http://bit.ly/mGwSvH

And now that I've had the time to play through the other entries, here's some more feedback.

Concurrence
Loved the art style and the animations, very fluid and very true to it's inspiration! Congrats also on making it just as frustrating as it's inspiration I think I died about 40 times at the wobbly rock bit before I gave up. If the controls were a little more forgiving this would make a fine full-length commercial game no doubt.

Of The Essence
Great game aside from that intro business. The direct keyboard control worked extremely well and I had a ot of fun dodging bullets and ducking into craters. Didn't make it to the end but if you ever make that intro skippable I definitely will try again! Liked the art too, the little mans were very nicely designed. A full campaign with more varied gameplay would kick ass!

OSD3D
A very interesting idea, I've never considered making a 3D game like that. Must've been quite a headache too, syncing both sides to eachother. Sadly my eyes are inverted or something because when I do the cross-eyed thing everything goes backwards instead of forwards. This happens with other 3D stuff aswell, for me I need to have it inverted for it to work. But nice idea nonetheless.

RunAway
Took a try or two before I got the hang of it but then it was quite enjoyable. Sometimes the randomly generated map makes it a little unforgiving to go the wrong way as I found myself trapped on the wrong side of a fence or tree several times. But it's something I haven't seen before and behind the basic graphics and interaction it reminded me a little of the fun I had playing the Commandos series.

Lurking Horror
I'm a big fan of horror games so I quite enjoyed this one. The atmosphere is super important with this genre, and you got it down pat right away. I then realized it may not be the smartest to play it right before bed so I left it for further exploration during the daytime.

City of Thieves
Excellent game, reminded me a lot of this game I played back in the day where you were a sneaky mustached fella doing burglaries around a free-roaming cartoon town in a very similar manner. I think it was by those Jowood fellas that also did the Neighbours from Hell games. Once I got the hang of it the lockpicking game was very cool, and the tension of searching around with the cops outside was nicely done. Having to turn off the flashlight was a nice touch, although for burgling purposes you might as well leave it off since you could see everything just fine without it. The flashlight corona also looked a little strange since it overlays across the background, but ofcourse realtime lighting in such a way would have been impossible, so still a good solution. Agreed that it would make a great full-length game too.

Again, nice job everyone!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I don't see how the game is buggy apart from that. Could you be more precise.

The two doors, mainly.  The first one I couldn't get through (tried using the bar on it/playing with the computer) and then I reloaded a save and it was magically open; the second one, no matter how fast I was the door would always prevent me from moving even if it was well above me, even if I was ducked and tried rolling through (which really should work).  Once again, I reloaded near the door and just walked through it, but had this not been possible I would've abandoned the game to be honest.  The doors are pretty much the serious issues aside from the edges that need to be addressed.

With that in mind, I still voted for your game so that should give you an idea of how impressed I was by it!

[mode7]

Thanks for pointing this out ProgZMax. The first door is actually a puzzles you might have missed. That you still could go trough after loading is a rather serious bug. The one with the second one is a serious game breaker. I'll hotfix that when i get home today.

The platforming issues i will adress next week. I want the engine to be functioning perfectly before progressing in making the game.

[arj0n]

Concurrence:
I only had serious problems with the 2nd door, the timing is too tight.
Still, the platform edges could use an improvement.

[Atelier]

What a month. Seven games and a record breaking MAGS!

The 37 votes cast are as follows:

Entry	Votes	Breakdown
The Lurking Horror by Diath	1 vote(s)	2.7%
Runaway by Matti	0 vote(s)	0%
Of the Essence by Wham	3 vote(s)	8.1%
OSD 3D by Studio3	5 vote(s)	13.5%
Concurrence by mode7	9 vote(s)	24.3%
City of Thieves by Rocco	9 vote(s)	24.3%
15 Minutes by hedgefield	10 vote(s)	27%

Congratulations hedgefield!


However, we're still not done.

As soon as mode's Concurrence was featured here, it got an explosion in the amount of votes (the article had 8,768 views when I checked), and the votes probably would have carried into the hundreds if I hadn't closed voting. This means technically mode is the winner, by a huge majority, but it wouldn't have been fair to count these votes because not all the games are featured on a popular website (Awesome response though mode, I'd definitely suggest going commercial on it)!

So these results are from the last vote statistics before that article was posted.

Adios.

[Diath]

Congratulations Hedgefield, a deserving win! I thank whoever voted for me. In my eyes, I made my second published completed game and that's what is important to me. I have toyed with the thought of adding voice acting to the lurking horror, but only time will tell how that turns out. But Congratulations to everyone that made a game in this competition!

[hedgefield]

Cool! I'm honored that people appreciated 15 Minutes this much while the competition was so strong. And on my first MAGS too! Thank you everyone for voting and congrats to the other participants for finishing their fine games (and even getting them on Kotaku, nice one mode!). That makes you all winners in my book.

[TomatoesInTheHead]

I had a really hard time voting on this one, thanks to all the participants for all these completely different games! Congrats to you, hedgefield, and the close second winners!