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Janet and I will be renting a car, so add us to the list.

As it says on the site: "Includes worldwide shipping." So, we'll definitely be shipping to Germany, and the cost will be nothing.

The official press release is going out in a few hours, but the pre-order is now live! So click over here if you want to snag it early.

Well holy crap!

This is something that Janet and I were going to tackle after we released Resonance next month, but it looks like you beat us to it! We'll definitely be picking your brain about this.

Slightly off topic question for Dave;- How much of a hassle is it when a free title switches to commercial? Does all the 'not-for-profit' (as opposed to public-domain) material used go through clearing or get replaced to avoid any copyright issues?

I did this once, back in 2006, with the Shivah. It was originally freeware, but then I decided to sell it as a way to see if this whole "selling games for a living" thing was even possible. At first, I had both the freeware and commercial version available, but it wasn't long before I realized that I would have to take the freeware version down.  If I was serious about doing it for a living, I couldn't give it away.

As for the assets, as long as everything in the game is original than you are fine. But if you used any copyrighted stuff (music or images), then you are in trouble. That's the main reason why I couldn't bundle the original freeware "Da New Guys" alongside the new commercial one. The original had way too many copyrighted things in it. The game even starts off with the characters watching Teletubbies.

-Dave

Well let's put it this way. You put a free AGS game on the AGS website, you could get thousands of downloads/players. You put a commercial game on the AGS website, you might get a few dozen (if you're lucky). So it's just a matter of numbers. But putting a pricetag on it doesn't automatically mean that it will make the press rounds. The developers have to push the game to the press themselves.

So yes, if your game is free less people will KNOW about the game, but more people will actually be PLAYING the game. For commercial games, the opposite is true.

I'm "The Man" now? Uh oh.

/goes off to play loud rock music and drink heavily

I spend a LOT of time pushing the games I write and publish. It's incredibly important for a commercial game, because there is so much more at stake. If you just make a game, put it on the AGS forum, and leave it at that -  nobody is going to care.  Especially if it's from a designer who hasn't released anything before.  It's true that putting a pricetag on something gives it a lot more mainstream attention, but I wouldn't say it attracts more players. Freeware encourages more people to download and play, because they are risking nothing. For commercial games, that's a lot less likely. Nobody is going to buy your game without reading about it first. A commercial developer NEEDS to market it and push it.  Especially if they want to make mortgage payments that month!

That isn't to say freeware games don't require you to do any marketing, it's just that most freeware developers don't bother or even need to. Marketing is practically a fulltime job in itself.

-Dave

edit: One other thing to probably note is that it's a lot harder for a commercial game to get attention, so it NEEDS all that publicity. This forum is a prime example of that in action. Check out the Game Announcements forum, and look at the threads for any commercial games. They are significantly shorter than the threads for most freeware games. It's not that the commercial games are bad, or the freeware games super awesome, but the commercial games have a heck of a lot more to prove before someone will give it a look.

Played this all weekend. Lovely game that's dripping with atmosphere! I'm at the beginning of Day... 6, I think. Looking forward to playing the rest.

Um, wow. I didn't even realize this was happening yesterday. Thanks for nominating and voting for Gemini and Blackwell! It made my morning.

-Dave

It took two months to prepare my Steam pitch and they accept it with one sentence. Almost a letdown. Almost.

[So make sure only one person has control over the editor at a time.]

Be verrry careful when doing that. Text files can be merged pretty easily, but ONLY commit the text files. Don't commit the whole project. CRM files or AGF files can not be merged, and it will screw everything up. So make sure only one person has control over the editor at a time. Not doing that leads to nothing but trouble.

ASC/ASH files have always been in plain text, I believe. My wife uses textpad all the time to edit those. It's the CRM files that are gibberish, so don't touch CRM files except with AGS gloves!

[edit - dang it, Sslaxx! You beat me too it. :p]

Been ages since this thread was updated, but I figured I'd pop in to say that this game is still being worked on and being published under the WEG label.  Victor (Pinback), Jim (Dualnames) and Mark Yohalem (who's not on this forum, I think) have really been working hard and the game is almost fully playable.  We are aiming for a Fall release. Say, October-ish.

I'm not exactly unbiased, but this game is really something special. Bleak and beautiful all at the same time. And the soundtrack composed by Nate Chambers of Bubble Pipe Media has been beyond sublime (samples here).

Right now we're in the midst of finishing up and promoting Resonance, but once that's finished you'll be hearing a lot more about Primordia. So stay tuned!

edit: and yes, for all of those who donated money on Pinback's site we will honor all the deals made.

[The Dresden Files]

On Dave Gilbert's reccomendation I've also been reading through The Dresden Files books - fairly standard gumshoe PI novels except the main character is a wizard. It started out kinda cheesy but I'm up to the 4th book and the series gets more compelling. One thing I find kills the immersion is the amount of trouble Harry Dresden gets in. He absolutely has the worst luck of any character I've read, and the way he goes from mishap to mishap makes me wonder why the author felt so compelled to beat him up so much.

You're only on book #4? Oh, Harry goes through much worse... 

Hey! This is awesome. I love that you can include custom "say" functions, but is it possible to also provide an option to put the speechfile number in another parameter?  Your custom say function editor only allows you to choose the character name and the text string. Normally you'd include the speech file number within the text string so this method would be fine, but we don't do it that way.  For example, our custom say function looks like this:

speech(cJack, "Hello, my name is Jack", 475);

Where 475 is the speechfile number. Since we can only specify the character and the text string, the filenumber doesn't get picked up.

Is it possible to make that change? I was *really* excited to see this plugin as we've got thousands of lines of dialog to deal with, but we can't use it.

Also, I saw in your readme that we'll need a special license to use it for commercial games. PM me with the details, if you could.

-Dave

We use a subversion network (SVN) to collaborate on our projects. It can get a bit complicated, though. Only one person can work on the editor at one time. Several people can work on scripts (asc/ash files) but they have to remember to ONLY commit those asc files and nothing else.

["If you’re an indie adventure fan, keep an eye out for [Resonance] â€" it’s looking pretty special."]

Rock Paper Shotguned!

"If you’re an indie adventure fan, keep an eye out for [Resonance] â€" it’s looking pretty special."
-Rock Paper Shotgun

Hey everyone! Janet and I have been rejiggering our plans, so we should be able to stay the whole week. So Disco, bagsy us one of them "for two people" rooms!

Well, the game is on my laptop and I'll be bringing my laptop to PAX. So technically yes, I suppose! But is it going to be exhibited? No it won't be.