Messages

Great work!

The sprite has to be done in MS Paint, and according to the following guidelines;
...
And no pixel-art.

no Gimp??

not even pixel-art?
... but good luck to all who take the challenge

Well, I thought I wanted to encourage more experienced artists to leave their comfort-zone and try something new, as well as encourage beginners with no previous experience with more advanced advanced programs to give it a shot. There has been some questions regarding the palette and brush tools, and yes, brush tools are allowed. As for different palettes in different versions, there is no problem as long as you stick with the default palette in the version you are using.

I'm happy to see so many entries, keep up the good work!

[Mandle]

My first vote goes to Mandle for writing such a tear-jerking story about real-life events, a very strong story indeed.

My second vote goes to Baron, for bringing back memories of Spirit, if nothing else.

Also, happy you liked my entry, Kconan! I must admit, I was hesitating to post it since I felt the theme and subject matter were too close to Mandle's entry,
but I'm glad someone liked it.

@ Blondbraid : I'll be glad to come back to Stalingrad - so to speak - no matter if we play sniper, spotter or a commissar.
...
When this MAGS competition is over, there'll be an update of Black Morph to fix the problems that have been reported. I'll probably stop working on the game afterwards because Selmiak wants a complete overhaul of the game that I disagree with.

Happy that you liked my concept!
Also, Black Morph had some great ideas, it wold be fun to see them expanded upon in the future.

I also think that the poll in this competition felt fast and easy to use, I like it.

I've seen Jim Sterling's videos on the matter, truly baffling what some people try to charge money for. 
Did no one working on Steam think selling this kind of garbage could hurt their image?

At the same time, I'm worried that their new system might make it harder for honest indie developers who want to release their games on steam. Higher fees, like Dave Gilbert mentioned, could deter struggling indie developers but might not stop those who just want to peddle shovelware as long as their potential profit is higher than the fee. Higher fees might stop a few bad games from being released, but it won't make up for lack of quality control.

Cool to hear Neofeud is to be released soon, it will be exciting to see what it's like after following your posts for so long!
And while changing expressions on the portraits can help characterization, you can also read a character's intent from
words and voice-acting. 

I wanted to try and come up with an original idea for this sprite jam, as well as challenge people, so I hope anyone is willing to try this.

This time, you can draw anything you want for a sprite, any character, item or motive you want to draw.

Deadline is February 27th, which I hope is plenty of time, no rush.

There is only one catch.

The sprite has to be done in MS Paint, and according to the following guidelines;

It has to be drawn with your mouse and keyboard, no tablet, pen, pad or stylus used.

You can only use the default colors in the palette that show up when you start paint.

And no pixel-art.

Nice entry, DBoyWheeler, lovely colours!

Ooh, I like that background.
Funnily enough, I've never heard of Aaru. I've heard a lot about Egyptian mythology and how they have to go through those trials to reach the afterlife, but I've never heard anything about their afterlife (basically what happens after the trials). And I've never noticed that until now.

Second that! It's also great to see that you picked a different theme.

I'm hoping to make my own entry soon enough.

I do! The concept sounds really good, and it's interesting to see the stories of the secondary characters from Sniper and Spotter. I'd play it!

Great to hear that you liked it, I'm thinking about beginning to work on it again once I'm finished with my current AGS project.

[A broken man]

I guess I first got the idea for this story when I read a book about German prisoners of war by Guido Knopp, I don't know the English title but the original title is Die Gefangenen.
My original idea was a much longer story about a man coming home from a long captivity and struggling with ptsd, but when I saw the theme of this contest, and thought about writing
about a person being broken, I decided to take a part of my story and make it into a short-story, maybe I'll make the whole story in the future.

The story and characters are fictional, but I have taken a lot of inspiration from accounts in different historical books and documentaries.
I did my best to handle the subject matter respectfully and to be as accurate as possible, but I'd appreciate your thoughts and opinions on my entry.

A broken man
Paul was in a strange fever dream, drifting back and forth between memories. Sometimes he was a small boy in his bed and his mother was reading a story to him, sometimes he was in the trenches with Dieter and sometimes he was in Gerda's arms. His mother was reading that story about the one legged tin soldier again, the one that ended with a little boy throwing the tin man into the fireplace because he had only one leg and was a broken toy, Paul didn't like this story. He asked Gerda why a pretty girl like her would chose a lanky young man with dark hair like him instead of someone blond and handsome, but Gerda just ran her hand through his hair and said that she liked his hair. He and Dieter were eating in the canteen with their fellow soldiers while Dieter blabbed on about his theory on how soon enough the allied would see who the true enemy was and join forces with Germany to fight the Soviets, then he and Dieter were walking through the Russian countryside. The fever turned it all into a strange haze.

He awoke to Leah squeezing his shoulder and telling him to wake up. He opened his eyes and saw the face of a woman with wistful brown eyes and steaks of grey in her hair. A living saint that woman was, Paul had no doubt about it. The SS had come to her village and started rounding up people, killed her son when he tried to run, and when she screamed at them they had fired two shots into her stomach and left her for dead while her husband and the others were taken out into the forest and killed. She had every reason in the world to hate him and his people, yet here she was, serving as a doctor in this Soviet camp and nursing German prisoners of war back to life. He asked her once why she did this, but she merely put on a sad smile and changed the subject, and that was it.
This time she was waking him up to tell him about another doctor, who would examine him and determine whether he could work or not. Leah did not speak German all that well and broke a lot in Yiddish, sometimes also using words in Russian, which Paul did not recognize, but he understood that much.

He rose from his bed tottering like a newborn foal, for while he had gotten slightly better lately, he was still weak from the fever and dysentery. He reached for his bundle of clothes, some paltry rags that barely resembled a Wehrmacht uniform anymore and a padded jacket, but Leah said he wouldn't need them, he was only going to the next room, and wearing long johns and a long-sleeved undershirt was enough. He followed her to the door and she opened it for him.

Paul felt a vague sense of dread entering the doctor's office, the walls painted in an almost nauseating white and green and very detailed anatomical charts hung on the wall. The only decoration, if you can call it that, was a picture of the black and white face of Stalin against an aggressively red background hanging above the doctor's desk. This doctor was also a woman, but she had a cold, stern look in her eyes. While barely casting a single glance at him, she told him to undress. Paul obeyed, but the cold in the room made him slow.

The doctor rose from her desk and moved towards Paul. He did his best not to think about his underwear, which was lying on a small stool just behind him, or look her in the eyes. He was ashamed, but not just because she was a woman and he was a man, but also for the state he was in. His hair had been shaved off in a futile attempt to combat the lice, and now he had short stubble on his head as well as his chin, since he hadn't been able to shave lately either. He also had trouble keeping his food due to the dysentery, and had lost a lot of weight as a result. Now he weighed only about forty kilo and was little more than skin and bone. He was not a pretty sight.

The doctor pinched and squeezed his arms and thighs and his rear, before she took out her stethoscope. The cold icy metal against his bare skin made Paul's heart beat faster, and when she finally took it away from his chest she almost immediately placed it on his back to listen to his lungs. She told him to cough and he did so, but only managed to produce a weak hiss.
Then the doctor took out a thermometer from her pocket, and Paul was worried at first but relieved when she placed it in his armpit. For a few seconds he mused how absurd it all was that he, as a soldier, had been on the battlefield, facing tanks, mortars, machineguns and many horrors of war, yet here he was, trembling at the thought of a doctor putting a cold thermometer somewhere he didn't want her to. The doctor took it out, looked on it and made a note, then she told Paul to open his mouth. He had already opened it, but she grabbed his face with her hand, forcing him to keep it open, and held up a bright flashlight with her other hand. He did not like this. He got a flashback to when he was first captured, when a Red army soldier stinking of cheap liquor had forced his jaws apart with his hands, looking for gold teeth. Paul didn't have anything of metal in his mouth, but one of the other prisoners was less lucky. The Russian had bashed his teeth in with his rifle and then ripped them straight out of the poor man's mouth, and ever since then, Paul didn't want anyone to touch his face. But the doctor cared little for Paul's feelings on the matter, and moved on to shining the light into his eyes and ears.

At long last she was done with her examination and let go of him. Leah, who had been waiting by the door, walked up to her colleague and they began talking to each other in Russian. Paul didn't understand any of their talking, and instead stood there waiting with his arms wrapped around himself, wondering when he could put his clothes back on, wondered if he could go back to his bed when they were finished, and he wondered if he would ever be able to go back home again. But all of those things depended on what Leah and the other doctor decided. He felt very vulnerable and exposed, and didn't know what to make of any of the two women's words and gestures, they could be saying anything and he would not know. There was no clock in the room, and Paul had none of his own either, for it was the first thing that had been taken from him when he became a prisoner. Then they had stolen the engagement ring with his and Gerda's name on it, then ripped off all emblems and epaulets from his uniform, and then another soldier had taken his boots, and if it hadn't been for another Russian throwing him a worn pair of shoes, he would have been forced to walk barefoot. Strange, how every time he thought he had lost everything, it always turned out that he had one more thing left to lose.

It felt like it had taken forever when Leah finally faced him and spoke to him. "I talk to her, and we agree." she said with her usual accent, the other woman watching her every word. "You are too sick to work, you are too weak. If they make you do hard work, you will grow worse again, and you get worse, you will die." Leah paused for a moment to think. She was good at being a doctor, but bad at explaining her work. "Me and the other doctor, we write you down as invalid. Your sickness has made you, what is the word? Helpless, no, wait, incapacitated! You are incapacitated by sickness, so you cannot work." Paul stared at her, and started to feel like his knees was about to give way beneath him. Leah must have seen his unease, she told him he could get dressed again. He could not get his underwear back on quickly enough, while in the meantime Leah told him that this could mean that he stood a chance to get sent back to his homeland the next time they extradited sick and injured prisoners of war. "See, being incapacitated could be good, in a way…" she said while he struggled to button his undershirt, but his head was spinning with the other, first word she had used. Helpless. He struggled and failed to hold back the tears. Leah thought he was crying from joy or relief at the prospect of one day being sent home, and later on Paul would indeed feel that way too, but right then and there he didn't feel happy, or relieved.

During their stay in the camp he and the other prisoners had been forced to do hard, back-breaking work all day, every day. Maybe some of the prisoners deliberately worked slow due to fatigue or in some attempt to spite their guards, but in the end of the day they had been told that every man had a quota to fulfill, and failure to fulfill their quota would lead to their already meager rations being reduced. The quotas, based on the work of a young and healthy man, were of course impossible to fulfill for starved and weary prisoners, yet Paul had worked until he collapsed, desperate for the promise of just a little more bread. And now, what was he? An invalid? The limited resources of the Soviet Union had led to a strict system regarding who was prioritized when it came to food and medicine, soldiers first, then civilians, and only after that prisoners of war. Now that it was determined that he could not begin working again, he was a at the bottom of that chain. Would he last until the extradition? Even the thought of going home didn't help him, for in the last letter from Gerda, the one where she had written she was pregnant, he had been able to deduct through the censored parts, she had let on that times were tough at home too. The last thing she and their child would need was another mouth to feed, and he would be a burden to his family. If he couldn't work, what kind of man was he?

He felt broken.

I must say Mandle, your story moved me to tears, it's very touching.

Strangely enough I began writing on an entry with a similar theme before even reading your story,
but I think it'll need more work before I post it.

I've played both Shunday, Black morph and Hyde and seek, and while the puzzles of Shunday really weren't my cup of tea, it was sort of a fun idea with making counting on your fingers a puzzle.
Hyde and seek also had some frustrating trial and error, but the punchline at the end had me giggling. 
Black morph had both interesting game mechanics as well as excellent pixel-art, it would be cool to se it made into a longer game.

I'm sorry I never managed to make an entry for this month, I got busy with other things and never made much of my concept, the one I described earlier with the commissar getting mistaken for a deserter,
but I have been thinking about making a regular AGS game of that concept instead, if anyone thinks it would be worth it.

Great entries, Mandle's entry reminded me of the Hemingway short story and DBoywheeler's was both sad and heartwarming and Danvzare's was funny and creative in its own right. I have an idea myself, I hope I can post it in time!

Thank you everyone! 
I mostly made the sprite because I wanted to share a link to a story Iove, but I'm happy that you liked it! I'll try to come up with something as soon as I'm able.

Thanks for the kind words everyone, and while I won't add any mini-games I do hope the puzzles will be enough gameplay for the game,
like I wrote in an earlier update, rather than have separate areas with different puzzles, this game will all take place in one village
where all tasks ties into one big task, hopefully without feeling underwhelming in comparison. I suppose I'm going for a structure similar to this fairytale.

Wow, those caves look good, with very fascinating shapes and I like the glowing sparkles!

Pregnant thief!  Sounds like a fascinating character.  Can't say I've come across one before.

A pregnant thief? Hey, that's neat - but now your game definitely needs a morality system!

> Give her a small sack of potatoes (paragon +10)
> Just let her go (paragon +1)
> Arrest her (renegade +1)
> Shoot her on the spot (renegade +10)

Glad to have piqued your interest! 
While the outcome of the encounter will be pretty limited (it has to be something both the protagonists can agree on after all), the player will have some choice on how threatening they want to be.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to respond, but I have been a bit busy lately, part of that time has gone into working on a hidden-object type of mini-game for this game, which frankly, is kind of garbage. Sadly I could not see that it was a bug-ridden failure on a design, game play and artistic level until I've already built it. You know it's bad when even the one designing the game thinks a puzzle feels weird and out of place, so I decided to cut it.

But I do have some progress to show, and two new screenshots. Here you can see a little shed:

And here you can see the same little shed after Olga and Ivan has visited:

Spoiler

[close]

I only got around playing the game now, but I must say it's a nice game and I hope it gets awarded, if not for the best art and graphics, then at least for being the sweetest game of the year! 

I thought it would be fun to add a MacGuffin into the mix, so here I present the book of Thoth,
said to contain powerful spells written by the Egyptian god himself.

I chose to draw the book of Thoth because I really, really like the story behind it, it's a timeless tale with all the ingredients for a great adventure and I'd love to one day see someone try to make a game adaptation.
Here is a link for those who want to read it!

Great, as always! I'm using a few of your tracks in my current project, however quite a bit of work remains and it will probably be a while before I can release the game,
but your music is inspiring and really helps build atmosphere!