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Yes. Wouldn't be much of an editor if you couldn't do that . The layout will be similar to Pamela.

That's great! If I may make a suggestion about the implementation of this: Instead of having those excruciatingly annoying draggable vertical phoneme bars like Pamela (which are quite painful on the eyes) how about if phoneme placement and re-positioning were handled by simple clicks?  For example, you could have the full phoneme list displayed  in a constantly visible menu, up top (or left, or right, or wherever, really.) And whenever the user wants to place a new vertical phoneme bar, they'd simply left-click the phoneme they want from the menu, and then left-click again on the waveform to indicate exactly where they wish to place it. If they accidentally placed the phoneme bar in the wrong position, then a simple left-click would re-position it to the current mouse position along the waveform.

Left-clicking directly ON a phoneme bar already positioned along the waveform would allow that phoneme to become the active one that can be re-positioned (meaning 2 phonemes would not be allowed to occupy exactly the same space, like they currently can in Pamela.)

Left-clicking or Right-clicking on phoneme bar letters positioned on the waveform would allow you to change the currently assigned phoneme (just like Pamela.) 

Right-clicking directly ON the phoneme bar would delete the phoneme (again, just like Pamela.)

I think a simple, non-draggable placement method like this would save incredible amounts of time and frustration!

Since the plugin can already find the usage of audio files in scripts, it should be easy to get the text...if it's already in the script/dialog.

Nice! Will the tool also allow a user to type their text in manually if they wish, rather than grabbing it automatically from the game script/dialog? As sometimes I've noticed with Annosoft, that you have to intentionally misspell a word in order to get the phoneme selection to look just right. Though, I suppose these kinds of  touch-ups would likely be few and far between, and could probably be performed manually with the editor.

Looks pretty similar, yeah.  And yes, the numbers after Pamela phonemes represent stresses. Pamela was originally designed to assist with lip syncing for another program called "Magpie", which makes use of stresses. However, since AGS simply holds the phoneme in place until the next one supercedes it, stresses aren't needed in AGS .pam files and all of them can simply have 0 at the end.

- perhaps they're used if you also input a source text?

Speaking of which, I don't suppose that feature is available in the free source code that Annosoft offer? I know that one of their commercial SDK's allows you to open a wav file AND also type the line's text in order to have both methods work together to calculate the best phoneme placement along the waveform.  This method seemed more accurate than plain on-the-fly lip syncing in Annosoft's program.


--EDIT--

Forgot to mention that the ZH phoneme is one that I hi-jacked for the "mouth closed" frame. In both Pamela and Annosoft it's used for a 'Z' sound, but since 'S' covers that (and Pamela doesn't have a default "mouth closed" frame), I reserved ZH for the "mouth closed" frame instead.

Note that Pamela also has a 'None' phoneme that displays if you forget to assign a phoneme letter to the bar. In this case, I also made unassigned 'None' phonemes revert to the "mouth closed" frame.  Just some things to keep in mind when doing the Annosoft>Pamela phoneme conversion.

How did you come up with that phoneme list? Trial and error? It seems to differ just slightly from the Preston Blair mouth shapes (see here for original, here for an alternate version, and here for 3D version).

Yes, this was completely trial and error. I didn't base the visual mouth shapes strictly off the Pamela sample ones, nor off any other set. I just figured out the absolute minimum amount of frames that could be used to cover all phonemes and still look convincing. I merged some of the vowel phonemes. Rather than having individual phonemes for each of the 5 vowels, now 3 phonemes cover them all (A and U were merged. E and I were merged.) The above list was the final result that I came up with. For Al Emmo, there were actually 9 phonemes in use (an additional T phoneme), but I decided that it could be dropped to bring it down to only 8. The resulting mouth animation is virtually undetectable, as S covers T very well.

Keep in mind that this is strictly from a Pamela/AGS perspective and doesn't take into account which Annosoft phonemes currently get assigned to each Pamela Phoneme in the conversion process. You would probably need to first compile a full list of all the Annosoft phonemes, compare them visually, and figure out which mouth frames look similar. Then you'd need to group all of those Annosoft phonemes into the  A, W, E, S, F, L, O, B, and 'Mouth Closed' categories, so that Annosoft and Pamela are both working with the same "AGS" phoneme set (if that makes sense.)

Would it make sense to have two default phoneme setups, simple phonemes (for pixel art) and extended phonemes (for hi-res or pre-rendered art)?

To be honest, I don't think it'd be necessary to have a seperate set of phonemes for high-res and pixel-art portraits. The mouth frames tend to move so quickly that you don't really notice how many phonemes there are. Looking at the Graham one I posted above, you'd probably be hard pressed to tell that there are 8 phonemes involved by just casually looking at it. 

I guess this is a good argument as to why it'd be ideal to allow people to add more phonemes if they think they'll need them for higher res pre-rendered portraits. After all, no sense in limiting people to one standard.  But personally speaking, I don't think having two defaults would make a great deal of visual difference. People tend to not look at the lip movements closely after a while either.

And I didn't include the "Preferences" section in the .pam file.

I think AGS can get by without the "Preferences" section in the .pam file, but Pamela needs it to locate the directory of .wav file.  Maybe the directory could be written to the .pam file based on where you opened the .wav file from.

I definitely want to add an editor for .pam files which also shows a preview of the speech animation.

That would be an excellent addition. Would this editor be only for preview purposes? Or would it also allow you to move phonemes around at will and change them to other values like Pamela's editor?



Anyhow, here's the full phoneme list from Pamela. It shows which of the 8 selected "AGS" phonemes I have each Pamela phoneme revert to. Perhaps this could be considered for usage as the 'default' setting, but you could also allow users to tweak, change, add and delete phonemes as they see fit.

Note that the table below encompasses ALL existing Pamela phonemes. This is exactly how I set them up in AGS's "Lip sync" section:

0:  ZH/None
1: AY0/AY1/AY2/AA0/AA1/AA2/AH0/AH1/AH2/AE0/AE1/AE2
2: W/OW0/OW1/OW2/OY0/OY1/OY2/UW0/UW1/UW2
3: EH0/EH1/EH2/CH/ER0/ER1/ER2/EY0/EY1/EY2/G/K/R/Y/HH
4: S/Z/IH0/IH1/IH2/IY0/IY1/IY2/SH/T/TH/D/DH/JH/N/NG
5: F/V
6: L
7: AO0/AO1/AO2/AW0/AW1/AW2/UH0/UH1/UH2
8: B/M/P

Those graphical frames in order are:

0: Mouth Closed
1: A frame
2: W frame
3: E frame
4: S frame
5: F frame
6: L frame
7: O frame
8: B frame

And here's an example of a dialogue portrait with those 8 frames in order:



Hope this helps.

Wow, very nice work, Smiley!  I've tested it out briefly and it's pretty impressive. At the moment it doesn't work when loading the generated .pam files into Pamela, on account of some of the letters being lowercase and others not having a number after them. I'll post some more about this tomorrow.  (Pamela only recognizes upper case letters, although AGS probably isn't as picky.)

Oh, one thing that would be handy is to have an option to offset all the phonemes to play a little earlier. The reason being that when speech is lip synced on-the-fly, the program has to process the sound first and then generate the letters. But in real life, people visibly move their lips into position before the vocalizations are produced.  So having the ability to offset the phonemes in that manner would really help it look more natural.

Great work though! I'll post more info on the complete phoneme list soon.

I can certainly vouch for the fact that it takes a very, very long time to lipsynch lines for an AGS game. A faster and easier way to do this would be most welcome!

I had previously looked into these Annosoft programs, but they seemed very pricey. I never knew that they also offered a free version of their source code. Nice find!

With automated lipsycnch, you're probably not going to get as accurate results as you would from manually syncing the lines yourself. Background noise and bad quality recordings can result in phantom phonemes being added during an automated process.  But, of course, you could always go back and tweak them in Pamela later on (if they're indeed going to get output to .pam format.)

That Annosoft lipsync program also has tons of phonemes (a lot of the transitional ones) that are entirely unnecessary for a 2D AGS game.  I've done  fair bit of experimenting in regards to getting decent looking results in AGS with a minimum amount of portrait frames, and you really only need 8 phoneme frames in AGS to have convincing lipsync animations. I use the following Pamela phonemes to represent the visual mouth frames, and would suggest that all of the redundant phonemes in Annosoft's program revert to the most relevent of the 8 frames below (or if you want to use more or less phonemes, this aspect could even be entirely tweakable):

ZH = (Mouth closed frame)
AY0 = Mouth in A position. Used for the letters:  A, I, U
W = Mouth in W position. Used for the letters: Q, W
EH0 = Mouth in E position. Used for the letters: C, E, G, H, K, R, Y
S = Mouth in S position. Used for the letters: CH, D, J, N, S, SH, T, X, Z
F = Mouth in F position. Used for the letters F, V
L =Mouth in L position. Used for the letter: L
AO0 = Mouth in O position. Used for the letter: O
B = Mouth in M position. Used for the letters: B, M, P

This source code looks promising, though. Hopefully somebody will have luck turning it into something that can be used to simplify this time-consuming process!

I think ambient sound drops automatically whenever speech plays, so as not to potentially drown out the voices.

What volume level are you playing the ambient sound at? If you play it with the volume parameter set to 200, then the ambiance should still be audible whenever speech plays alongside it. Of course, then you may need to re-adjust the ambiance track in an audio-editing program in order to get the levels sounding right in the game.

Can you email the savegame to me at chris@himalayastudios.com

I'll see if it crashes on my side. If not I'll try to get passed the crash for you, save the game, and then send it back to you if you like.

Room124 is the first comic cutscene, and it appears that the game is crashing at the following line (line 411):

Code: ags

mouse.DisableMode(eModeTalkto);

I'm really not sure why it would do that, which is why I suggested asking CJ here at the Tech forum.  We haven't had any other reports of this crash prior to this.

Seems that most people would probably look in a menu launcher for such a feature, rather than in the in-game options.

There's a menu creation program called "Auto Play Menu Studio" by Indigo Rose. Unfortunately, it's not free. But it's useful if you want to include a 'download file' option like this on your menu launcher. You can set your game (or menu) up so that a registry key is created if you install the version of the game which doesn't include the voice pack.

Whenever the launcher is loaded, it'll first check the system for the existence of this registry key. If it exists, then the launcher would show a new button saying "Download speech pack". (You'd point the button's scripting code at a specific URL where your speech pack resides).  Once the speech pack has been successfully installed, you'd have its installer delete the registry key, so that the next time the launcher menu is loaded, it'll know not to display the "download music" button again. (You'd have to remember to make the main game's un-installer be set up to remove the registry key too, if it exists, regardless of whether the speech pack was installed or not.)

If you don't want to mess with the Windows registry, I think the program also allows you to do the same thing by dumping a .dat file to the directory.

I'm not sure if there are any freeware menu building programs around that do the same thing, but I've used this one, so I can vouch that it works pretty well for this purpose.

If you want to draw straws, then sure, you'll find lots of stuff you can use to twist around in an attempt to turn public opinion against any given team to make them look vain or arrogant. If people like to spend their time reading through the fine print on websites to say "Ha! look what dirt I found on these guys!" well, good for them.  I'm not complaining about constructive criticism of the game. I'm complaining about the mob mentality and the ridiculous conclusions that people draw.

That said, this will be my last post on the subject, because it's just going around in circles, and I've already said all I wanted to say. So ciao!

And you're not going to stop people posting things on the internet by telling them to give it up

And where exactly did I tell anyone to give it up?

Every thread? You see, its those delusions of grandeur than just rile people...

There's two threads about Al Emmo, both are filled with the same stuff. So yes, every thread.

No. If so many people have told you this then maybe it's time you considered the possibility and stop being arrogant/dillusional, cause people claiming they are amazing and ain't gets into these kinda trouble when they produce something.

I wasn't talking about being perceived as arrogant. I was talking about different people complaining about various technical aspects of the games we've released to date (KQ remakes included). For example, some people disliked the plot changes in KQ2VGA+ and the fact that collaged backgrounds were used. Conversely, despite complaints, most of Al Emmo's reviews have still given it an above-average rating, and the game is selling fairly steadily outside of the core adventure gaming communties with little to no backlash. This can be put down to different strokes for different folks.

Listening to criticisms doesn't necessarily mean listening to everything thrown at you. It means weeding out the genuinely constructive stuff from the bullshit and using that valuable feedback to finetune things. This is why it somewhat surpised me that the lipsynching, diaogue pics were pretty much overlooked in Al Emmo, when those improvements were a direct result of negative feedback that we tried to improve upon from KQ2VGA+.

You don't like that you're game was received badly by some people? Too bad, accept it and move on. You can't change their mind by posting about it on a forum, they played the game and they didn't like it. The only way to change their mind is to make another game and hope they like it.

Yes, and all of those criticisms were noted the first time around when they were mentioned many, many months ago. It just gets a little old when every single thread on the AGS forums seems to re-hash the same old points. We've heard all the criticisms already - points taken. We're looking into them. But repeatedly smacking others over the head in every single discussion with the same arguments is like flogging a dead horse.

Company founders, Britney K. Brimhall and Christopher T. Warren, previously established AGDInteractive, LLC (formerly known as Tierra Entertainment), a company which nearly single handedly resurrected classic adventure gaming.

You call this factual?

I didn't write that. Britney said she designed the site from a pre-existing template which she created for another company. The page still contained the other company's text. Our own company text was quickly typed-over some of the existing words to serve as a space filler when the page was being designed. This page was accidently uploaded with that line of text left in place. It was changed as soon as it was pointed out to us.

This is a good example of how things get blown out of proportion and such assumptions are made. Despite explaining this many times, people continue to drag up. The situation was resolved, why bring it up again?

more over you dissapointed a lot of people with some real problematic issues in the game: (voice acting, 3-d cutscenes, portraits...).

KQ2VGA+ included all of these features too, and Al Emmo improved on them significantly (i.e. lipsynched portraits, character & enviromental models in the cutscene movies). To jump from an award of "best game" to "worst game" when such improvements are given major attention (even if they are not deemed totally perfect) is quite a large jump backwards. We're talking about complete polar opposites! The commercial factor must hold a heck of a lot of influence in the voting system... yet if most voters didn't play the full version, then how could that possibly work?

1. Attitude does play an important role! Keep it in mind

1) Yes, it does. Though some people feel that thier sensitivities have been offended by extremely trivial and often imagined things. And when you are at the receiving end of the pack's verbal jousts, people will hold you accountable for every little detail you say, while conveniently forgetting to apply the same netiquette to their own behaviour. Things get blown way out of proportion. Not everyone is going to like you as a person, nor your games for that matter. And that's fine. You can't please everyone, and I don't expect to. I really don't care to get tangled up in all the forum politics and arguments as I consider that a big waste of time that could be put to better use. There will always be people ready and willing to tell you that your work is crap, and beleive me, I've become well-accustomed to it over the last 7 years. This doesn't bother me in the slightest. I prefer to focus on the simplicity of just making games.

At the same time, this doesn't mean I'll refrain from defending certain actions or comments just to ensure that I stay in everyone's good books. I talk about what I believe is factually correct, not politically correct, and I'll only ever react to someone in the same tone that they have first spoken to me. I don't go out of my way to be rude to people. I guess you could say that attitude begets attitude. Unfortunately many people here accuse others of something that they themselves are equally guilty of. However, one thing is certain; spite will only continue the vicious cycle on all sides.

2. The other alternative would be to have the game for free, or not to include commercial efforts to the AGS awards

2) Like voting for games on the main AGS Games page, perhaps it would be fair if voters could only vote if they had actually played the full version. Otherwise, how is the vote valid? Academy Award panelists don't judge the Best Picture Oscar based on viewing only the 2-minute trailers of some movies, while viewing full screenings of others. By the same logic, voters should not be able to vote for best backgrounds either, unless they have played the full version so that they have an overview of the entire quality. I think it is better to exclude commercial games from the runnings (at the developer's wish) if such a confusing loophole exists.

That is the case with most penis awards. In this particular case it was a case of the community getting back and "taking revenge" on a game that promised a lot, made by extremelly talented people who have given us to fabulous remakes, one of them an extraordinary game in its own right, and that not only fell flat on its face, you had to pay to see it fall. This lack of imparciality seems to surprise you. It shouldn't, it's human nature. I say again, you hurt people, people will hit you where it *hurts* - re, your game.

3) With all due respect, I honestly don't beleive that is the case here. I can tell genuine criticisms apart from spiteful ones, and the reaction to the game here in the AGS forums has been far harsher than in many other places on the net. As you said, people will take their votes out on perceived 'attitudes' of the team, even if they haven't played the full game, as a way of extracting revenge. If this is the case, then the voting system is flawed. The game's are supposed to be what's being judged here. As I said, I don't care about receiving a P3n1s award (though, I think it should be called a "Chonky" instead). What concerns me more is the fact that the voting system loses its credibility if people can use it for such purposes.

If you want to stick to your last comment, go ahead, but it hardly puts you in a good light.

Aw, come on... it was just a light-hearted joke! If the community can't take them, then it certainly shouldn't be issuing them in the first place! 

So if I understand this correctly, then essentially the P3n1s award's voting criteria consists of any or all of the following:

1) Disliking members of a dev team and overlooking the game itself.
2) Disliking the full version, despite the fact that the majority of voters didn't buy/play it, yet are still able to resgister votes for a demo in place of the full game.
3) Releasing a game that falls so far below accepted quality levels, that it's production can only be taken as an intentional act of jest on the part of the developers.

If that's the case, then I can't help but notice that the voting criteria is a little skewed... in which case, so much for the credibility of any other AGS awards. :

On the other hand, if the whole thing really is meant to be taken as a bit of light-hearted fun, then I'm sure you won't mind me suggesting that you can take the P3n1s award and stick it up your As$!

Geez, where's a goat when you need one?  I'm sorry to dissapoint you, but the game's selling just fine; even though we're in 2006 and despite the fact that it's a retro title. And how do you know that I don't grow mushrooms on the side?

I am very very curious, and I know I'm asking for spoilers - but what exactly in Al Emmo could differ enough to warrant a new storyline? Is the game less linear than it seems? It sure looks fairly linear, at least as far as what you mean is concerned.

There's not a whole lot in the first Al Emmo game that could vary, but subsequent games, could refer back to your actions in the first game in order to see how you solved particular puzzles. A common complaint about QFG5 is that if they were to make a QFG6 with the same hero, then QFG5's save file would have needed to save data about which characters died, which ones lived, who the hero saved, who he married, and whether he became king or not. But since the savegame file doesn't save this data, QFG6 would need to start from a clean slate and, again, assume that the previous games were played through via the most optimal path.

In Al Emmo, there are a few little things that can differ:

*SPOILERS*
-Whether you find the Casino or not
-Whether you win the jackpot or not
-Whether you find and play through a specific long (and another longer) hidden Easter egg
-Whether you picked up certain red herring inventory items. (For example, these may be useless in the first game, but could carry over into the next game and be useful there).
-Which optional conversations you experienced. (For example, there are several different conversations you can have with Rita, depending on how many times you meet her).
-Which solution you used to solve the dog at gate puzzle (2 solutions)
-How many different flowers you offered Rita

...and so on.
*END SPOILERS*

There's also a fair amount of dialogue in the game that can vary slightly, depending on small actions and things like that. I expect that the possibilities will become more apparent as more games are released containing more variable puzzles and a more variable storyline. For now, we just didn't want to bite off more than could be chewed, so we've kept the variable aspects of the first game small.

In addition to Erpy's original post. I believe I did mention that there's a lot of talent /innovation in this community and that I think it would be a neat idea for those of us who make commercial games to also support the rest of the community by donating/paying others for the use of their mods/plug-ins/or to do custom programming work in our commercial games, as may be required. I'm not sure how there was any implied insult in my previous post, but none was intended. If anything, I intended the contrary.

Big games these days cost millions to make and commercial developers often aren't willing to risk their own money experimenting with new ideas (that may or may not be well-received), as doing so could send them bankrupt if their new, gimmicky concept falls flat. So they often 'steal' innovative ideas from indie titles, which prove to be popular or appealing to mainstream gamers without giving any recognition to the original developer whatsoever. But I think credit is due where it's earned, and that's why I'd be happy to support innovation in the fan community and encourage it.

Well, the purpose of the savegame file is similar to the way it worked in the Quest for Glory series, except instead of recording stats, it will record all of the game variables, globalints, inv items etc. 

If we do a sequel, then the savefile will be used in some way to tailor the storytelling experience to the unique way that the player played through the game. For example, (spoiler ahead) it always bothered me in QFG1 how you could kill the Baronet and not find Elsa, but in subsequent QFG titles, the games always presumed that you played QFG1 by following the most optimal path and took the liberty of mentioning how you saved the Baron's children, when you may well not have! In QFG 5, Elsa even mentions that her brother is still alive. (end spoilers)

So with the savegame file, we're hoping to tailor the narrative and perhaps some of the puzzles and accessible areas/characters/items in future games to the way the player specifically played through the previous game. It's a bit experimental at this stage, however, and would likely involve quite a bit of work. But the idea is to provide some additional replay value that spans the entire series and where, for example, your choices in game 1 may affect the outcome of a character's fate in game 4. Basically, it's intended to be a non-typical experiment in making an adventure series less linear... almost like one of those "Choose your own Adventure" books.

In another update, a downloadable version of Al Emmo has now been released via TellTale Games' online distribution system. It's available for the lower price of $19.99 and the download version also contains both subtitled and un-subtitled cutscenes, which wouldn't fit on the CD. It also contains a few minor bug fixes. You can get it here:

http://telltalegames.com/alemmo

Wow, lots of stuff here. :o Okay, first off, the reason for the $30 price tag is because that's the lowest price we could realistically offerÃ, a tangible version for (i.e. CD, case, packaged extras etc.) while still making some kind of profit. The fulfilment house takes a percentage of every sale, as does the online merchant facility (in this case, PayPal). Additionally, this was one of those titles in which we encountered 'development hell' and the game was in development much longer than we ever intended.

Trust me, we're well aware of some of the obvious shortcomings (mostly with the 3D side of things) and this was due to a few unreliable contractors we hired who charged way too much for the shoddy work they turned in. I ended up having to take a crash course in 3D Studio Max to finish up what should have been completed adequately by them. As a result, we went overtime and over budget, which is regrettable. At the same time development of this game was going on 3.5 years and we needed to finish it by a deadline. Even so, I think the 3D cutscenes in Al Emmo are more detailed than those of Sierra's most recent adventure game, Gabriel Knight 3. So that's got to count for something.

There are quite a few things that we'll be including in a post-mortem about how to do certain things more efficiently on any future game projects that we develop.Ã,  However, I think these little issues are very minor in light of what the full game has to offer. At the end of the day, we simply don't have the funding of a multi-million dollar company and we did the best we could within our limited budget to make the game as polished as we possibly could.Ã, 

I also think it's an inaccurate statement to insinuate that, because there are some minor errors/issues in perspective or whatnot, a game cannot be held to a professional standard. Companies have been getting away with this for decades. Look at Sierra's games of the 90's. Most of them were riddled with fatal bugs. Many Sierra games also had noticeable perspective errors in their backgrounds and scenes were often left unpolished with gaping holes in the coding. Some events not even handled at all.

Yet, these Sierra games were considered professional because they were released by a multi-million dollar company and designed by pre-established designers. Do riches and reputation honestly trump fatal crashes when it comes to professionalism in the eyes of consumers? I certainly hope not!Ã,  Furthermore, point out ANY game (Keepsake, CMI, GTA:San Andreas... even HL2) and I could mention any number of similar issues or errors in artwork/perspective/animation. These are games and such issues are a given, regardless of budget; whether it be bugs, graphics, animations, voices -- every game has some minor quirks.

I think you'll find Al Emmo to be far more stable than any Sierra release. And any minor perspective errors in Al Emmo's backgrounds are no more noticeable than those in classic Sierra games.Ã,  Nobody starts off as a professional in any field. The only way to get there is through hard work and practice. Every professional was once a rookie too. At some point, if you do want to attempt a commercial endeavour, you need to just try it, take the feedback in stride, and try to use any criticisms as a basis to improve your work. People aren't born professionals, they only get there through practice, learning from mistakes, and a lot of experience.

Earlier in this thread, I noticed the discussion about how money paid to us for Al Emmo would/would not help other indie game developers and the community in general.Ã,  If it counts for anything, a percentage of each copy of Al Emmo sold is being donated to Chris Jones.Ã,  There's also a vast amount of talent in this community and some people have done amazing things with the AGS engine and pushed it beyond its normal limits. If we ever made enough money from Himalaya Studios to sustain this as a viable business, I'd love to be able pay/donate/employ people in the AGS community for custom work or the use of their modules/plug-ins etc.

The adventure gaming community, as I see it, is a self-sustaining one, but the genre does need support and encouragment to be able to survive in the commercial arena. If even adventure gamers themselves start becoming overly cynical at any commercial attempt because it costs too much or because it doesn't have the same polish as a multi-million dollar title, then yes, they will porobably buy games like HL2, and this will assist the FPS genre to flourish. There's nothing wrong with that, I bought HL2 myself.  But most adventure development companies are not as large as Vivendi/Valve and you can't expect those kind of results from something like an AGS adventure game! It all comes down to supporting the genre so that it will be able to offer you bigger and better things in the future.  There will be little hope for the genre's commercial survival if we all expected HL2 quality adventure games, but were not willing to support potential developers so that they could reach that level of expertise to make such an adventure game.

I haven't played the demo of the Shivah yet, but I will gladly buy it for the very reasons I just mentioned. I'll support the adventure gaming community by (re)making free games, by making commercial games, and supporting other commercial indie games. Because that's what I'm passionate about. I want to see this genre rise again and I'll put my money where my mouth is to prove it.

Bottom line: We're not charging $30 because we're greedy. We're charging that much because we need to break-even and make some profit from three years of non-stop work. We had to weigh many factors into the final decision on price and such a decision wasn't reached quickly or easily. Every imaginable aspect was considered thoroughly.

Finally, there will actually be a downloadable version of Al Emmo available soon for around $20 USD. By offering it as a download, we're able make it cheaper price since there's no packaging or media to deal with.

The only review I'm aware of so far, is here: 

http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?index=774


JustAdventure also had a review of the game, but their link seems to be dead now.