Messages

Congrats Eric!  It was fun.

How did I miss this thread?!?  I think employing anybody is a bit of a stretch with only 20 gold pieces to our name.  I agree that the priority should be revenue: either tax the peasants or get trade back up and running.  Since the traders seem eager to pay taxes, that's probably the path of least resistance.  So....

EMPLOY an EXPEDITIONS EXPLORING the land

+1 on this, unless it's not that simple.  Otherwise.... >ADVERTISE for HERO. 

[@ Miguel:]

@ Miguel: Even old blind ladies with janitor fantasies deserve a bit of lovin'; but from what I'm hearing you'd rather give them some under-the-bus shovin'! 

@ Eric: My one trick pony and dead-beaten horse have both served me well; but the way you stroke that serpent is going to send you straight to hell! 

Vote Republican.  Just... hold your nose while you do it.

In all seriousness, however, I think you mean how to vote for games on the AGS main page?  Just click the "AGS Games" link at the top of the forums and find the game in the index using the search function.

[@ Eric:]

@ Eric: I tear my moustache for manly fun, my steadfastness the cross did earn; you cry tears 'cause your hand is bandaged due to holes in your palm that you burn!

@ Miguel: The ladies love a man in a uniform, no matter how outdated; what they don't like is your globular form, which is why you remain undated!

Yeah, that bouncing clown animation is wicked amazing!  And it looks like he might actually attempt actions while bouncing around (it seems as if the player has control during this episode) -can it be?  

Even more than the graphics, I've got to admire your won't-stop-till-it's-done attitude despite the long duration and many setbacks.  Keep up the good fight, brother!

[@ Miguel:]

@ Miguel: The ladies love a man that stands out above the riff-raff; your strategy is to send out fleas to court them on your behalf!

@ Eric: You're all palms on manly flesh any way you cut it; can you take a moment from slapping and whacking to rebut it?

[@ Miguel:]

@ Miguel: A certain type of woman loves a man with your flair (that is, for braiding feminine back and armpit hair!)

@ Eric: My lonely hobby results in many finished games.  Your lonely hobby results only in palm-friction flames!

[Well I hope that's a malfunctioning internet bot in your pocket, then. Otherwise I've never seen anyone take so much pleasure from an imminent defeat....]

Even a malfunction internet bot could defeat the one-eyed nobleness and his partner the ant-eater!

Well I hope that's a malfunctioning internet bot in your pocket, then.  Otherwise I've never seen anyone take so much pleasure from an imminent defeat.... 

may the least worst man win!

[This is suddenly a lot like Survivor, in that our previous victims will make up the bulk of the jury who will judge us in this final round.  Aaaaand Eric stinks like he hasn't bathed in three weeks while eating grubs on a deserted island.   But mostly for the first reason.]

[Sinitrena]

....and that's a wrap for the voting.  Let me say that I was pretty impressed all around.  I really liked the descriptiveness of Sinitrena's style, and the creativity of her supernatural villains.  Special marks for embedding them within the historical fabric: I wonder how they were defeated/contained by the mid-1940s?  WHAM's blunt and laconic use of the language could not contrast more, but it was a powerful tale nonetheless.  I think he won hands down as the king of atmosphere this time around, just for the raw feeling that his short crisp sentences evoked.  Ponch seems to be exploring a theme recently.... and I must say, he's supremely adept at getting inside his protagonists' heads.  It's like he's channelling or something....  kconan's over-the-top gruesomeness reminded me of the spraying-gore horror films I remember from the 70s/80s, and the stereotypes-of-horror were a nice touch.  And LostTrainDude's psychological horror was gripping; I especially liked the ending.  Bonus marks for everyone but WHAM who picked up on the secret requirement to mention a specific car model ( ).  Good job, guys & gals!

But, in the end, we must separate the wheat from the chaff.  So, in no particular order, I give you the winners:

The golden house of horrors goes to Sinitrena, who garnered a decisive win with 11 points.  She's on some sort of writing roll, folks!

The silver house of horrors goes to kconan, who won by a whisker with 7 points thanks to his s-c-a-a-a-a-a-a-r-i-n-e-s-s!

  Third place is a statistical dead-heat between WHAM, Ponch & LostTrainDude with 6 points each, so....  I guess they all get to share in the glory equally! 

So in fact the wheat and the chaff remain united in the winner's circle after all: everybody wins!  Yayyyyy!  It's like one of those insanely egalitarian kiddie sport leagues that are all the vogue, only more interesting to watch due to the horror and the gore.... 

Be that as it may, I hereby relinquish the crushing burden of competition administration onto the worthy shoulders of Sinitrena.  I look forward to another riveting round in the next exciting instalment of....

...the Fortnightly Writing Competition!

...aaaand happy birthday, Baron! Also, happy birthday, Baron's monocle!

Happy Birthday to:

• Sinitrena
• Baron

Both are big timers of the very same FWC and both have birthdays on the very same day. What a pleasant coincidence!

Happy b-day, Baron. I hope the Monocle Fairy brings you a new pointy helmet!

Happy birthday Sinitrena!

[Miguel's moustache is twirly, his hat's a bit curly, and under his smart-looking vest he's quite burly!]

Miguel's moustache is twirly, his hat's a bit curly, and under his smart-looking vest he's quite burly!

Okay Miguel: your turn.  And since we're being gentlemanly I want you to know that I grudgingly admire three of your last six popes.

I voted for Stupot+.  I know it's not in my interest, but I think he got the better of me.  I'm really interested in this Cap'nD vs. Eric competition, since it was in my opinion very well written on both sides: thoroughly entertaining! Miguel and Adeel were well-matched as well, but I had to give it to Miguel for the breath-through-the-speakers zinger: sorry Adeel!

I'm a little confused about how there were three matches last round AND three matches this round.  Shouldn't the field start to diminish at some point?  I would say go to two matches next time and resurrect the next highest ranked insulter from the ladder (there is a ladder, right? ), or do an unstructured three-way where you just respond to the last person whoever it was (as long as it wasn't you) -it'd just be too time consuming waiting for people to take their proper turns. 

On one hand, yes. On another, I think every other gaming enthusiast will agree with me, that when you are actually passionate about games you often realize how little (very often exactly none) effort people put into finding good games. So you find yourself literally begging people to play the quality games you already found for them and still finding some considerable apathy (taste does come into this of course, but it doesn't entirely negate the argument). This kind of instances has the tendency of making the hopeful perception go away and the reality sink in. The reality being people for some reason don't like investing any real effort into getting their hands on good entertainment. Usually that results in that they end up playing things put in their mouths by the most massive PR campaigns. Which means everybody has played Skyrim but they probably haven't even heard about your game even if you shaped it after their most sacred desires. And that doesn't bode well for what you and I are talking about. Only the most devoted niche gamers would bother with scavenging over a bazillion of different niche-specific distribution services (and know about them in the first place) and these people would in most cases find what they want anywhere else. Everybody else will just wait until Steam slaps them in the face really hard with the next title that became high profile one way or another.

Well, getting noticed in this day and age when anyone can publish anything is the real trick, I agree.  It's hard on Steam, it's hard off Steam.  Cynically thinking, I suppose most people do still just consume what's easy rather than what they say they like, but a discerning few (i.e. tens of thousands) have found their way to adventuregamestudio.co.uk or adventuregamestudio.co.uk over the years, looking for a specific type of gaming experience.  Most of them have taken the risk of downloading weird ZIP files, RARs or even installer EXEs in order to get their hands on that retro point-&-click experience.  If we could streamline that process, via a Steam-like client, we could make it REALLY easy for them to play more of our games (I think this is about where Cailin's Nimbus made it, at least in conception).  But the critical next step would be to ease these players into potentially supporting our budding commercial developers: ideally through playing the freeware they would develop a taste for higher quality or longer adventure experiences, as well as grow comfortable with the community atmosphere associated with AGS (integrating the forums directly into the client -I realise this is feature creep, but our sense of community here is one of our strongest assets).  From there it is not such a leap to becoming a costumer (especially if it was as easy as just clicking something in-client), and if we could do this even at a medium scale then we would have created a springboard for our mid-range developers to take their work to the next level.
      But as compelling as the reasons are, I also agree with you that failure is a very real and even probable result (what happened to Cailin's Nimbus effort over the past few years  ).  You'd really have to pursue this courageously, in the face of a lot of setbacks and naysaying, to make it work.  And that's a lot to ask of someone who would only profit minimally from their efforts in the best-case scenario.  As I say, it's a dream....

So what I fear in this situation is: the indie developers will spread thin over numerous different distribution services with little visibility while Steam keeps growing stronger with its centralization and massive diverse-yet-unified audience. And for all its failings I think Steam benefits from being centralized and unified tremendously. And so I'm thinking maybe indies should join efforts and stay in focus together as much as possible too, rather than fighting the good fight and falling alone.

The motivation to sign up with Steam is no doubt compelling, and I would never discourage any developer from doing so.  Dave says he makes good money there , at least once they accept his games.  But it is a hassle.  And it's not really our target market, in the sense that 99% of Steam users are completely uninterested in adventure games and 0.5% are willing to try weird things but bring unreasonable expectations to the table.  And they take a big cut of the scarce money players pony up, which keeps developers starving.  The alternative, our own in-house Steam/Nimbus-like client, would have the short-term disadvantage of being small, and be dependent on the altruism of community members to be set up and populated with content.  But over time, especially if a critical mass of players could be sold on the concept, it could be an important complementary outlet to other distribution services.

To address your other points, I agree that focussing on the genre would be better than focussing on AGS developed-games exclusively, although that probably complicates the client-development process....  I don't actually know, though: you are 100% correct that my technical knowledge is hazy at best.  I just type up a bunch of code into the AGS editor and then madly click at things until it works....

[You are the bard: author of your own defeat. I am the jester, laughing as you retreat. I am the jester, but you are the fool. My palette may be old of school, but at least I'm not a high-res tool.]

Comeback: You are the bard: author of your own defeat.  I am the jester, laughing as you retreat.
        I am the jester, but you are the fool.  My palette may be old of school, but at least I'm not a high-res tool.

Insult: We come to thoughts inside your brain, if any can form against the grain....
         Your tight-strapped mask makes it a strain, for you to think of anything un-profane -or even sane!

[I don't know how much longer I can sustain this level of venom.  How long do these rounds last for, anyway? ]
         

On topic, wasn't there an AGS Steam being built at some point.  Nexus.... or something like that.  It'd be awesome if there was a distribution platform that focussed precisely on the adventure gaming audience, one with the goal of motivating AGS development (ie a bigger cut of the $ for developers) and promoting the genre rather than strict cuthroat profiteering.  But I'm not holding my breath.

What advantages do you see in this compared to just distributing adventure games on other platforms focused on indie games (e.g. Desura, Indievania)? Because honestly, having your special extra nice distribution platform sure sounds nice, but first of all, it's tremendous effort, and secondly it's hard to estimate how good further fragmenting the market really is for players and developers. Although, tying it to a particular genre may just be the thing that works. But at the same time I must say, in my opinion tying it to one single engine in particular would be a very very bad idea.

And regarding clients, I must confess, I badly want to make a Steam-like game client myself. I already wrote a simple game launcher for myself to track playtime of non-steam games. I'd use any excuse to make a Steam-like client as long as it's a good solid excuse.

Well, I'm not going to talk you out of making a Steam-like client for AGS!  So here's my thinking:

it's hard to estimate how good further fragmenting the market really is for players and developers.

It is not unreasonable to assume, given trends over the past decades taking us from a mass-consumer market to a specialized niche-market ...market, that further market fracturing will continue.  Just as in the past people would go through the effort of switching DVDs or CDs in their drives to change games, I don't think it would be such a stretch to run a different client for a different type of genre.  The motivation to do so would be entirely dependent on the quality of games on that client, of course, but if the system were properly calibrated to 1) give better cuts to developers 2) give better deals to players (i.e. by cutting out the middleman) and 3) sponsor a sense of community beyond just a commercial platform, I think it could be successful.

it's tremendous effort

Well ...yeah!  So is game making, though.  How many hundreds of hours have I slaved away at it... For what?  I guess it's just a passion thing.  Obviously you're going to do things for your own motivation, but let me set out a vision.  A Steam-like client linked to the main page of the AGS forums (from where there are several hundred downloads a week already -in the past it sometimes topped 1000).  Because this client is developed to support AGS games, publishing them is as simple as a click of a button.  No fussing around with compatibility (ask Dave about Gemini Rue & Direct Draw on Steam), pestering a middleman who's going to take a huge chunk of your profits to please please please consider your game (ask Dave....), or players who are used to the paradigms of other genres (ask Dave about the casual market....), or trawling the masses for people who like old-school point-and-click (because anyone signed up would already be a fan).  (Dave's great! ).  I wonder how much of Dave's time is spent on the non-development end the business?  If you could cut that "wasted time" out, how many more games would he make?  More broadly, developers who are just starting out may well find that overhead overwhelming, a disincentive to make quality (commercial) games.  I realise AGS doesn't have the market power of Steam, but there ARE more than 7000 forum members, and surely many more visitors.  So setting up an AGS Steam-like client would be at first an exercise in market development, but it could pay large dividends down the road: a ready market for indie-developers at the touch of a button.  This would encourage developers to make more games (because they are squandering less time on the non-development end of the business), and would also benefit players by providing them with more games.  Even now, for a mid-range indie developer just starting out, a low-cost launch environment that nets him 1000 paying downloads could be the difference between launching a game-development career (meaning many more wonderful games to play) or finding another career path in life.  As the client attracts ever more users, the potential market grows.

What about beyond just the commercial developers and the players?  Well, I think the client should support non-commercial games as well.  This would attract players to the client who might not be interested in paying for games now, but may well later, as well as provide a reason for the client while the commercial game inventory is being built up.  So the client would act as a platform for all developers in the community.  For commercial games, I think a cut should go towards the maintenance of the forums: I don't think it need be much, but people are carrying the costs for this place themselves at the moment (Chris previously, now Peder).  Finally I think the developer of the client should get a small cut, to compensate him for the effort of building it in the first place but also to encourage him to keep it up-to-date.  But as mentioned above I think the lion's share of proceeds should go directly to developers.

So in conclusion, AGS Steam-like client is a win-win-win-win situation for developers, players, forumites and the guy who builds it.   

[You didn't let a little wind get under your skirt? Even in Sussex, surely, men can't be hurt by a bit of moving air and a little cloud squirt? I'll wait patiently while you powder your nose, paint the nails on your toes and prattle about your woes.]

Comeback: You didn't let a little wind get under your skirt?  Even in Sussex, surely, men can't be hurt by a bit of moving air and a little cloud squirt?
              I'll wait patiently while you powder your nose, paint the nails on your toes and prattle about your woes.

Insult: Now we come to looks: what's the mask concealing?  Is it warts or growths or hideous skin-peeling? 
            Was your face burnt so bad that your cheek fat was squealing?  Or are you just so ugly you set the ladies to reeling? 

[Hey, you're the expert on the male backside. I was going to make a comment snide about the brown flecks on your mask I'd spied, but I guess you got them from the trade you've plied and the six last sphincters that you've pried....]

Comeback: Hey, you're the expert on the male backside.  I was going to make a comment snide about the brown flecks on your mask I'd spied, but I guess you got them from the trade you've plied and the six last sphincters that you've pried....

Insult: More on your odour: it can't be ignored.  You smell like a dead yak's juice has been poured through the natal umbilical cord of a baby skunk who grew up, therefore, to become the most putridly smelling skunk-spore; you both smell so bad that you make my eyes sore!

[Sinitrena]

It's going to be close!  LostTrainDude is sprinting for all his life!  Will he make it?  It's too close to call!  He's..... SAFE!

Excellent writing everybody.  And by everybody I mean:

Sinitrena: The Messenger
WHAM: The Door Will Not Open
Ponch T. Cow, esquire: Buried Bones
kconan: That's Just Sick, Man
LostTrainDude A Dish Best Served Empty

Wow, we've got a lot of heavy hitters out this time around, so this should be good.  Here's the voting procedure: as per previous competitions (and as explained in the original post) you can name up to three writers who you considered to have excelled in each of the following categories:

Character: You find one or several characters exceptionally believable/captivating/magnetic/unique, etc.
Plot: The story arc was very well-organized, coherent, and well-executed with appropriate pacing
Atmosphere: This is all about feeling: did the story evoke strong feelings due to excitement/humour/intrigue/wonder/emotional intensity?
Background World: The best setting or milieu for a story; a place brought to life.
Word Choice/Style: The technical art of combining words in clever or gripping ways
Scariness: The scariest piece(s) for you personally (double points for each vote in this cateogry!)

You have until midnight Oct 30 to vote.  I will announce winners and distribute candy trophies on All Hallow's Eve itself!  Good luck everybody, and happy reading.

I'm still confused about the invading ants!