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Awesome news! I loved the previous two Dan & Ben adventure games.

OpenQuest was me, about twelve years ago! I'm amazed people have kept it alive so long. Surely someone else can do something better that's written in the current version?

Thanks so much for creating OpenQuest. It's helped me a lot with learning adventure game programming - on multiple engines even. Thanks so much for your open license on it as well.

I'm the person currently running http://www.adventurepuzzledesign.com/ and archiving the OpenQuest AGS and SCUMM binaries and source code and I also converted it to the Wintermute engine a few years back.

It's a great demo for learning adventure game programming - it's small, but it has an inventory, verb bars, dialog tree that changes based on choices of dialog options, it has a custom verb and actions attached to it, it has two rooms and states that change in the rooms based on actions, inventory items that can be combined and modified, an intro and outro, and a cool little twist on the "reform an item from its pieces" puzzle.

That's what made it so attractive to the ScummC team and myself to convert it to other engines, as it's a great intro to adventure game design in general.

If there's still a spot open, I'd love to go.

The 5th of March sounds great.  I was just about to post in here that I wouldn't be able to release it today since my mom got tricked by a phisher and I had to move off of the Windows partition.  Since the AGS editor is Windows only I haven't been able to get into it and I won't be able to do so until I can get back into Windows safely.  The extra few days should allow me the time to reinstall Windows and get the game finished.

@JenniBee I like your Edgar Allan Poe; what's that on his left though?

Thanks. The person whose character the being on his left belongs to had an avatar of an anenome with sunglasses.  I was told that I could do anything with the body, so I went overboard. It's part anenome, part chicken, part giraffe, and part crocodile.  And it's going to have a big part in the plot.

[JenniBee]

JenniBee: Yes, that sounds fine. As long as nothing tangible/physical that was created before the competition started is used, it will probably be ok. It's hard to restrict mere ideas that people had before the competition - to what extent will the concept art be used?

OK. good. I'll get started on this ASAP then.  I needed something like a timed contest to get myself in gear (I always work better under deadlines).

The game is going to feature people who post on the Double Fine forums.  They told me what they wanted their character to look like, and I drew a sketch, colorized it, and posted it in the forums.  Then they had their say if the colors and look were right, and I updated it until they were happy with it.  The game style is inspired by Day of the Tentacle, so it will be lower resolution than what the concept art would work as sprites, since they're pretty big, so they're not suited to be just dropped in the game.  I'll have to make pixel art based on the concept art of the characters, so all assets actually used in the game will be new.

Examples of the concept art:

Granted.  You are now bound up in a rubber band which is below room temperature.

I wish I had a hoverboard.

I have an interesting idea for a game, and I want to base it on a forum game I said I'd do at the Double Fine forums.  The question I have is, I already drew concept art for characters for the characters based on the forum people in that thread.  However, they'll all be non-player characters, and I haven't converted them to sprites since I hadn't settled on which engine to use.  I also never even came up with the story when I started that thread, as I wanted to base it on the character ideas, and I never came up with a story that would fit them all until I read the theme of this contest.  I also never started one iota of code of the game, and I never came up with a player character design until yesterday (which I still haven't scanned and converted yet).  So, would that be OK to use?  Since even though the concept art for characters based on the forum people is started already, everything else (including actually making those characters sprites for the game) will have started this month, story idea and all.  If not, I guess I can see if I can come up with something else.

I'd like to join in on the fun too, if I'm not too late.

But don't despair. Next March, the rights to all the games revert to their original creators. I know many of them (perhaps all) are planning on releasing their games to the public for free when that time comes. I know I am.

That's good to know.  Can't wait to get a chance to play at least most of these games.

Until then, I'm sorry you missed the sale. But thank you so much for promoting us over at Mixnmojo (still one of my favorite sites on the interwebs) and helping to make our fundraiser a success. 

No problem.   I'll definitely do the same if you decide to do it again, although next time I'll be sure to donate myself before the bake sale ends.

Is there any way I could still buy these games?  I feel a little silly, I meant to pick these up and I promoted them on mixnmojo and on my blog, but I forgot about it until the bundle was over. :/

If a ScummVM engine were used as the main codebase for AGS, you wouldn't have to worry about bloat.  ScummVM has the option at compile time to turn compiling of engines off.  It would be very easy to have an executable only for AGS games.  You'd only have to run ./configure --disable-all-engines --enable-ags which would give you a small executable only capable of running AGS games.

This executable could be packaged with the AGS editor and an all-inclusive binary could be distributed through ScummVM.  That way you'd get all the benefits of ScummVM (multiple platform support, backends are independent of the engine code meaning the AGS engine developers don't have to worry about maintaining the individual platform ports, scalers, etc.), and you wouldn't have to worry about extraneous engines that aren't needed.