Messages

[every thing]

Hey guys, it's been a while.

I was feeling nostalgic today and digged up my old back-ups to listen to AGS-related music I had composed back in the day. For the past years I've been composing mainly for band purposes but now I felt I'd like to try something else for a change.

I graduated a couple of years ago and am now officially a bachelor of arts and media, specializing in website and graphics design. However, the timing was a bit bad, seeing how fast the scene develops, and I have been left pretty much without a suitable job. Companies nowadays want people that can do every thing and there's no shortage of those. Thinking back now it feels I was super lucky in being applied to my school in the first place because there were so many applicants. I'm not complaining, obviously. And anyway, I do have a part-time job which I love but the amount of hours I work per month isn't really enough to keep me monied up.

So my questions now are: is there market for commercial music in the AGS scene? Are there any developers who would pay for soundtracks for their games? I see a lot of commercial games coming out of the community nowadays and it's very cool to see, so I suppose there has to be some market for music as well.

I would perhaps need some pointers from composers who have gone commercial, mainly about how much to ask for the music and such (if it's not a Great Secret). I will also try to get some samples of music I have composed in the past online (as in, got to get my portfolio back up, note to self...) so people can hear what I'm capable of. This feels like something I could pull off, so why not give it a go!

Thanks for the answers in advance!

Hi, not sure if anyone remembers me anymore, but just wanted to weigh in and cast my vote on Italy. For me personally Italy is one of the countries I've wanted to travel to for a long time and Mittens there would be great. Getting there from the northern countries shouldn't even be very expensive. If the rent of the villa/house was reasonable, I'd do my damn best to go.

Obviously this is way too early to say "I'm going!", but I'd definitely much rather go to Italy than Holland. Also Croatia (as suggested by Gary) would be a great country to have Mittens in. Let's hope I will be very rich next summer... I am "rich" now, but wasn't when it was time to decide whether to go to Mittens Miami or not. Bah!

Greetings.

Haha Davy. You rock, man!

June and July? I'm out then, I'm afraid. I kind of assumed the meet would be in August, so my plan was to work in June and July to earn money for it. There's just no way I could otherwise afford such a trip.

Oh well, I guess this means I will get to work one more month and spend more money on useless junk!

Hi there, everyone. And m0ds!!

I'd like to volunteer to be the musician for the project. For me, Pleurghburg was, in many ways, one of the major inspirations for my old game projects and I actually tried to get some of the same atmosphere for Goldlagoon back in the days. I'd love to compose Pleurghburg inspired tunes again, lately it just have been me and my guitar music-wise... I really need to get back to this whole composing-on-a-computer stuff!

So yes, if no one else (more professional musician) takes up on the offer, I'd love to do the sountrack... personally I love the idea of a Pleurghburg movie and would love to see it become reality!

Davy, you rock.

But you know this already!

I will come.

Options 2 and 3 look the best to me, but if we are 16 or less we might as well go with the first option. As long as we don't have to sleep in tents! It would be nice to have a big room/area where we can all gather to socialize and stuff, as far as I remember the campsite didn't really have anything suitable?

I don't really mind if it is not in the middle of Miami, as long as it's not too many hours away from Rapids Water Park!!

Holy crap!

Hello Squinky, welcome back! Good to see you again, it's been a while. If/when you get anything done and need some music, you remember who to ask, right?

JBurger's is...

Spoiler

I Robot = The Alan Parsons Project

[close]

I would say JBurger's is

Spoiler

Paranoid Android by Radiohead

[close]

Moustache = no beard.

Haha, I get your point, but... no! Just bare moustache doesn't suit me, I'm sorry. I've tried!! Here's me about a year ago, complete with sorry excuse for a moustache + beard.



Another thing is, it takes ages for me to grow facial hair... damn youngin! However, I'm planning to grow devil's moustache + beard one day!

[4x]

My laptop's resolution is 1280x800 and whenever I play AGS games I get the ugly blur on the graphics. UNLESS. I set the game resolution to 640x400 and turn on the 2x nearest-neighbour filter. However, it would be simpler if there was just simply 4x nearest-neighbour filter so that I wouldn't have to meddle with resolutions the game wasn't designed for. Would it be possible to add that option? Personally, I don't like to play 320x200 with 640x400 resolution because it looks ugly when two different resolutions are mixed when a character is scaled, for example.

Or has this been taken into consideration in the latest version? If so, whoops!

I finally got round to play this. What can I say that hasn't been said yet? The game looks pretty, it has nice art and plenty of animations. The music and sound are also good, the background music was so catchy that it didn't get repetitive even though most of the time it was just that one tune playing. The idea is very nice and very well executed. I did get stuck a couple of times and thought some of the puzzles could have been made differently though, but nothing too serious. I had fun playing it, and that's what matters.

Nice work, keep it up in the future, the Ivy and team!

Hahaha, that's amazing! I like how people in my school might spend MONTHS on short films that turn out to be 5 minutes long in the end, whereas you managed over 30 minutes in a WEEK. And to be honest, this film is so much better than most short films that get produced in my school. Fantastic work, m0ds and everyone! If you ever put this on dvd, I'll have a copy, please.

Oh wow, what a blast from the past. I remember enjoying this game when it first came out, though I found it quite difficult then and never finished it. I will give it another go soon.

Oh, and welcome back, Hud!

Everyone is allowed to join our group, too. It was mentioned in the first post, yes, but I thought I'd mention it again in case people missed it.

http://www.last.fm/group/AGS

Pet Terry,

Do you think that I would get a gun just to harrass people with long hair in bars? 

Y-yes?

No, of course not. I just thought I'd share my story, seeing that we're discussing guns here. As CJ said, I don't see how a gun would have helped me in that situation.

I've also considered becoming registered to carry a concealed handgun.  Why?  Because of protection.  Do I need it?  Who knows.  But there are a lot of crazy mofos running loose in America, and as I've stated before, I've become less and less at ease.

Wow.

A couple of weeks ago I was returning from a rock festival with my best friend. We had had a fun day and before going back home we decided to go to a pub for some drinks. We were staying at a smallish town near Helsinki and had been to that pub several times before, it's a nice rock pub with nice atmosphere and it has always been fun sitting there with friends.

We got our drinks and went to sit to an empty table in of the corners. Seeing that it was a Sunday night it wasn't very busy there, I think there were only about five other customers besides us. We had been sitting there for about 10 - 20 minutes when a group of three very drunk and loud men came in and sat to a table right next to us. I told my friend that of all the empty tables they had to choose the one closest to us and she agreed, she found it annoying as well. It was obvious that they would attempt to communicate with us sooner or later.

Yes. Shortly after the group had taken on that table they started asking me about my long hair and appearance in general. That's not something you hear often in a place like this (because most of the customers are long haired rockers) and usually I would come up with witty comebacks and stuff, but for some reason my instinct told me not to do that this time. So I tried to answer them as politely and briefly as possible and just ignore them as much as possible. Eventually the group was about to leave, two of them went out and one came to our table. He asked us if we had a problem of some sort and proceeded to lift his shirt, revealing a gun tucked into his pants.

(It's quite amazing how many thoughts can cross your mind when you're endangered. "That was it? This is the end?")

The guy then insisted me to come out and seemed like he was about to explode when I kept declining. Did he want to kick my ass or blow my brains out, that I don't know. But apparently he was really annoyed at my appearance and taste in music. Fortunately, he didn't lose his temper and just left, after which we told the bouncer who called police immediately. No one was hurt, but it was scary leaving the pub a couple of hours later and my friend had to go see a doctor a couple of days later because she couldn't sleep after the incident.

So... it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what's my stance on the matter? That incident was quite possibly one of the scariest moments in my life and only strengthened my opinion on handguns. If I had had a handgun with me, it wouldn't have made me feel any safer.

Pessi, Magintz, Creed, Pessi and myself. Photo by m0ds.

Pessi and Pessi, eh?

(also, hah! if I didn't know that's me in the pic I probably wouldn't recognize myself!!)

It's indeed almost exactly 4 years since the first Brittens and the birth of Mutant Monkey. I still remember the enthusiasm in everyone involved and how it seemed like it was going to be the best game ever, too bad the project died for various reasons shortly after Brittens. Something that has happened to (nearly) every AGS project started at a meet ever since!

I had actually forgotten how the title  for the game was born, so thanks for reminding, Tom! I remember we went around the full circle and everyone mentioned a thing that was to be in the game. If I recall right, I said the word "banana", inspired by CJ's now famous explanation how to peel a banana the correct way from the night before. It was a very unimaginative choice I must admit, seeing that Tom had already said "monkey", but it made it to the game nevertheless.

Pessi started drawing concept art and storyboard almost immediately and it was great fun just watching him doodling. As the images in the first post show he was a really talented fellow, it's a shame he is not around anymore. Older members also remember his helpful advice from CL.

As for the tune I composed... that was possibly some of the best stuff I composed at the time. Influence of m0ds' early music is evident, but my own style can be heard too. I never bothered to finish the piece because the production of the game halted, but it's still very nice and indeed funky, as Tom said. Nowadays I would probably remake it completely and go for a more orchestrated style, but this could work nicely during the end credits, for example!

If you can find the original design doc pages, please do post them, Tom! I'm sure there's lots of stuff in there that I can't remember anymore. The idea was fun and would have worked well, I would still play it too!

Okay, the voting is over and uh... the results are interesting. Let's see.

Third place! (one vote)


Dualnames
Questionable


Second place! (two votes)


Akatosh
rock_chick


First place! (four votes)


TwinMoon
ShadeJackrabbit

Congrats to everyone, and thanks for entering and I hope everyone had fun. ShadeJackrabbit and TwinMoon, it's now up to you two to host the next one!