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Voting has started and lasts until Friday, 8:45 AM GMT. You can vote for two entries, and the candidates are:

Bluke4x4: Warning forever
DanielH: Beneath a steel sky
Eggie: Rageball
Jack Sheehan: Dead rising
kaputtnik: Traffic department 2192
Krazy: Zworx
rock_chick: Runaway
TwinMoon: Sam 'n Max hit the road

________

Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
No, it's the eight fortnightly writing competition!

This fortnight's rule: Pick a video game or computer game (it doesn't matter what genre or length or professionality it is as long as the game exists) and make a story that has the same title as that game has.

Apart from that, there shouldn't be any links between the game and the story except for the obvious ones (if you write a story called "Police Quest" you'll probably have to have police involved in some way, but you shouldn't make a game about Sonny Bonds).

A silly example: You write a story called "The legend of Zelda". The plot for that story could be the tale of an entomologist searching the Amazon rainforest in his hunt for the legendary Zelda bug -- an insect nobody until now has been able to prove that exists.

Post your story here, or link to it. All contributions should be in by September 29th, 9 AM GMT, but if anybody needs more time we'll see what we can do about that. The following 48 hours, we vote. Everybody can vote, and if four or more contributions are posted each person gets two votes.

No word limits, no style limits, no genre limits, no format limits. Decide for yourself what you want to write, we'll be happy to read it anyway :-)

Okay, so I didn't go to Mittens. That's not the point.

But I read Dilbert comics. And today's strip [for future reference: August 25th 2008] was so coincidental that it's scary, in an AGS way.

Here it is.

[The Key]

EDIT August 27th: All the votes are in, and the winner is Jack Sheehan. Congratulations!

You're free to start a new fortnightly (this one will hopefully be without forum downtimes), and I'll squeeze your name into a script as soon as I can.

Thanks to all participants!

____________________

It's the sixth round of the Fortnightly Writing Competition! Hurrah!

This fortnight's theme: The Key
The word "key" has many meanings, and keys are also well-used inventory items in adventure games, so why not devote a writing contest to them?

Rules:
- Write a text about the abovementioned theme.
- Post your story or link to it in this thread.
- All contributions must be in by August 17th, 23:59:59 PM.
- Voting will take place the following two days.
- No word limits. Two words, two million words, you decide.
- No style or genre limits. Fiction, non-fiction, haiku, Shakespearean playscripts or none of the above, you decide.

Prizes:
Worldwide fame.
Okay, not really "fame", but hear me out. I'm not terribly good at drawing pixel trophys, so I have another idea.

I am a professional writer, and for a while now I have been writing comic book scripts for the Danish publishing house that makes most of the world's Donald Duck comics. You may think that Disney comics are childish and lame, and you're entitled to think that, but in Europe, they're huge. In Norway alone, the Donald Duck weekly comic book is read by almost 20 % of the population every week (and I hear it's even bigger in Finland), and Disney comics are published in tons of countries -- so far, I've seen my stories published in 14 countries from China to Brazil.

And I'm sorry if this feels as if I'm bragging, but I'm just mentioning it to add weight to the next paragraph:

If you win this competition, I will put your name in an original Donald Duck script. I will give a background character your name, have someone call him or her by that name, and if you want to I can also try making him or her look like you in my sketches to the artist based on a picture.

If you're very fond of your anonymity, we'll think of something else.

The name will most likely be changed in most translations, but with a little luck it won't change too much, and if it's printed in the United States, they normally don't change names from the original script. And when the story is first printed (hopefully already next year), I will buy a copy of the Norwegian edition and mail it to you. How's that for a prize?

... oh, and you also get to host the next competition, of course.

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who wants everything in my games and other works to be as perfect as possible. I want all my facts to be correct, I want my characters to follow the laws of physics, and so on, and so on. But can we fix EVERYTHING in our games? Given tons of betatesting and lots of new releases after the game is actually released, many errors can be fixed when found, of course.

But then, there are those errors it would simply be too much work to fix, or they are impossible to fix without seriously damaging the gameplay. I'm dealing with one of these right now, and I'm surprised to notice that I don't WANT to fix it. I probably could, but I don't see how I can do that without at the same time wrecking much of what I want to do with this game.

The thing is: I let my game use the system clock to figure out what day it is, so that the date in the game is always the same as the date in real life.

Now, in the game, one of the characters is said to have her 24th birthday "tomorrow". Yes, I'm aware that won't make sense if the player chooses to play the game over several days, but I choose to ignore that -- that's not very important.

The problem, however, which occured to me when I tried to calculate this person's date of birth (which is mentioned at a point in the game), lies in the Gregorian calendar.

Now, in 99,997947 % of the cases (yes, I did the math), this is not a problem. Today is August 2nd 2008, so the date of birth is August 3rd 1984. If I play the game December 31st 1996, the date of birth is January 1st 1973. If I play the game February 28th 2008, then my character was born February 29th 1984.

But what if the system time is set to the year 1924, 2124, 2224 or anything like that (not 2024, that's fortunately a safe one), and it's February 28th? If today is 02/28/1924, that means tomorrow is 02/29/1924, and that means the character must have been born on 02/29/1900. And that date doesn't exist, as years dividable by 100 and not by 400 aren't leap years.

The way I see it, there are three ways to fix this problem:

- I can drop the whole system time idea and set the game time to be a given date instead. But I don't want to do that. I think using real time in the game adds a level of realism, and at the same time it makes one of my puzzles somewhat harder, and I don't want to get rid of that.

- I can add a script so that IF it is 02/28/2124 or another tricky date, the character's birthday is said to be "today" or "in two days" instead of "tomorrow". But it being "tomorrow" really suits the story, and I don't really want to give it up.

- Or: I can add a script so that IF it is 02/28/2124 or another tricky date, the character's AGE is not 24, but 20 or 28. I'm leaning towards that one, but it just feels... wrong, somehow.

So I'm seriously thinking of leaving this "bug" in the game. It's not like it's a fatal error -- it will be problematic only three seperate days in the next four hundred years, the closest being more than 115 years into the future, and even WHEN it occurs, it doesn't make your game crash or anything, it just displays a date that doesn't exist. And of course, my little MAGS game will be long forgotten in 115 years, so this will only be a problem if a player actively changes the system time to FIND this error.

Knowing that it's in there drives me crazy, perfectionist as I am, but I don't really want to fix it in any of the possible ways. So... I'm making a flawed game, and I'm fully aware of it.

Anyone here with similar experiences you want to share? How small and unimportant must an error be for you to just ignore it?