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Thanks guys!  I know it's a bit of a tough-sell, the (mostly) non-graphical graphical adventure, but we really felt that a broader audience would still find the concept compelling.  Your comments make me glad we put all the extra effort into polishing the game after the competition.  Thanks for playing!

Ah, Newfie jokes....  By gar, it's been a while!

Two Newfies are out in a boat and find a terrific fishing spot.  They're reeling them in like gangbusters.  So the one Newfie opens up a can of paint and marks a great big X on the side of the boat. 
"What's that for?" the second one asks.
"I'm marking this here fishing spot so I'll remember it for next time," the first one replies.
The second Newfie smacks the first one upside the head.  "That won't work, stupid!  What if we bring a different boat next time?"

The winner of April's MAGS competition (theme: distorted senses) has finally been optimized for general release!  It is a short game (about 10 minutes) in the survivor horror genre.

STORY: A top secret experimental military facility has a primary power failure.  Marina, a plucky young soldier, wakes up in the middle of the crisis, injured and disoriented by the absolute darkness.  Recalling her training, she must make it to the Shelter before her commanders invoke protocol 13.  Along her way she uncovers clues about the fate of the facility as she grapples with her own evanescing sense of self.




Concept, writing and programming by Baron
Backgrounds, animations and GUIs by Kastchey
Superb music by Doc Savage
Beta Testing by Arjon, Tabata, Cleanic & Selmiak

DOWNLOAD

You are Casey Myles, an aspiring crime novelist working a day job at a crummy department store to pay the bills.  Then, one day, something sinister happens in Ladies Underwear.... You must now use your wits (and as many everyday objects as you could possibly conceive of) to beat out mall-security for the glory of solving the mystery!

Ponch doesn't not live in no country for old cows.  Try to unravel that nest of lies!

Bulbapuck leaves me hanging like a yo-yo, like all the time.

OUT OF THIS WORLD !!1!

If I read the first post correctly, I think what Sane Co. was getting at was making a code of letter combinations that could be sent between AGS games via IRC, much like the AGS awards ceremony (where mouseclicks sent coordinates as text and moved one's avatar on other games), but creating more complex interactions.  Furthermore, I think he wanted to discuss the possibility of hardwiring this logic into AGS itself, so that the code would be consistent between users instead of various developers creating their own.  Thus AGS would recognize that a "pt" command would mean "play talking" animation.  As far as this goes, I think it's a good idea, but the standard commands would be much more intuitive if they were parsed as existing AGS commands (maybe with a symbol in front of them for differentiation), since that's a new language that many of us already know.  For example, %player.Say_("Nope") for me is much more intuitive than pt"nope".

hafuwithto

[LTGiants2000 for first:]

These things take a while to build up steam.  I suggest everyone vote for 1st, 2nd & 3rd and we give points accordingly (3 points for first place vote, 2 points for second and one for third).  Otherwise we'll have a hard time differentiating the ranks with so few votes.  My votes:

LTGiants2000 for first:  The range of voice work was brilliant.  Without knowing in advance that it was a one man recording, I'd never guess that both characters were voiced by the same guy.  The "gimme some of that rootbeer" bit was hillariously unexpected, given that it was zombie rootbeer that they had found.

CaptainD for second: Amusing writing and entertaining accent.  If only the words were more intelligible at the very beginning I'd say this would have a shot at first.

charlescreations for third: I'm sure it's supposed to be Sean Connery as Dr. Jones Sr., but to me he sounds like he's picked up a hint of an Indian accent, which somewhat spoils the effect for me (I don't mean to be hurtful if charlescreations actually is from India: I just mean he's got to work on his Scottish impressions).  Nevertheless, a valiant attempt.

I think it's bad form to vote for yourself as well, but we need as many votes as possible so I implore the other entrants to speak up.

What do you call a camel with no humps?

Spoiler

Humphrey

[close]

Take that, low-brow jokesters!

I finally found a quiet moment to throw something together: VOILA!

Thank you, thank you!

I couldn't have done it without my team.  To be more precise, I probably wouldn't have done it without my team: time is such a precious commodity for me these days.  But I'm glad they were so keen on the concept to put in all the (free) work to make it a reality.  I plan a few tweaks and polishes and then I intend to release the game to a wider public (ie more than the fourteen (?!?) people that play MAGS games).  Thanks to everyone who voted for Wages of Darkness, and thanks to Cogliostro for providing some stiff competition!

As a side note, I like the idea of voting with an essay, but on the topic of the games.  Yes, such a process will inevitably yield some ugly truths and probably more than a couple elaborate falsehoods, but the feedback would be invaluable for a developer keen on building a better game.  Plus it would be immensely entertaining to watch the debate rage one way and then another as each voter tries to outwit the arguments of the one that comes before.  I guess I've just got a soft spot for the good old days of the Roman arena....

Oh man, this would be awesome for organizing a team, especially if it could be dynamically interacted with.  The actual design might need permissions so it couldn't be edited by just anyone, but to have different team members be able to leave comments or check off tasks would be hugely useful. 

Just glossing over your proposals so far, I don't see a lot of thought put into organizing animations.  It'd be great to plan them out in advance to get a sense of the scale of a project. 

Also internal links would be awesome:  So you have a list of inventory items with descriptions, but it'd be great to be able to click on it and see where the inventory item is used in puzzle design, for example (or vice-versa), link puzzle aspects to To-Do list, etc.

Since it's still May 5 my time and I had an unexpected hour to myself, I went ahead and made the option to watch the intro more explicit.  I also added in a few sounds that I'd wanted to track down but hadn't beforehand, and fixed a few stray pixels and hotspot label bugs.  I hope that's cool, contest wise: if not, I'll re-upload the old version.

[Wages of Darkness]

Introducing..... Wages of Darkness


Distorted Sense: You are visually impaired due to a power failure, and therefore must "feel" your way around.  Your sense of self is somewhat distorted as well.

Gameplay: Right-click to "feel" out what things are, Left-click to use/interact/take anything.  You can set difficulty levels at the beginning or change them throughout the game.  You can't die in Easy mode, you will eventually die in Difficult mode, and you will probably die frequently in Intense mode (only accessible through the in-game menu for the time being due to issues of symmetry).

The Team: Art by Kastchey, Music by Doc Savage; Writing, Scripting & Voice Acting by me.

Download: The game is available HERE .

I had hoped to make a custom display function and find a few more sounds, but it's looking like I'm not going to have the time before tomorrow evening so I'm just releasing it as is for the competition.  After the voting I'll hopefully work myself up to adding the extra features.

Enjoy!

EDIT MAY 5:  Well the deadline hasn't technically expired, so I made the option to watch the intro more explicit and, since I found myself with an extra hour this evening, I added in those extra sounds.  Hope that's not breaking any rules.  This is my final submission for the contest.

Domino never actually did take an arrow to the knee.  It struck him in the head in such a way that he believes that it struck him in the knee.

[EDIT MAY 3]

If Baron doesn't enter, it'll be a win by default, and folks are gonna break out the torch 'n' pitchforks.

Oh, I'll be making an entry.  We're past the point of no return.  How much polish it will be lacking is another point for conjecture, but I'll definitely be posting a game.

EDIT MAY 3: Well we've done our last round of beta-testing.  There's a few more things I want to implement, so I probably won't release the game until pretty much the deadline (I assume it's midnight my local time on the 5th?), but we've definitely got a fully functional and fairly well-polished game here!

Thanks for all the interest.  I've got a crack team assembled now, so I think we're good!

Although I'm a little slow with seconding it, I think Sane Co.'s Voice Acting Competition sounds like a great idea.  You could have fun, hone your skills, and not invest a tonne of time: the perfect contest!  I don't think the lines need to be terribly lengthy: short and sweet work for me.  Even just themes would work: two guys exchange insults -go!  A kid loses his candy -go!  Scolding wife is angry about trivial thing -go!

There's no way to unravel what's been made when (unless it's blatantly from a game that's already been released): MAGS has always been run on the honour system because there really isn't any other way to logistically police it.  If Icey says it meets the MAGS criteria, I'm happy to compete with him.