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About the same as in the uk...Preparing a 3rd and 4th Jab... People are now smelling a dirty big rat....

I think people don't realize it's a betting game and expect all or nothing results with everything. Solutions might not work out and new plans have to be developed, but most people still have to participate, even in the necessary mistakes along the way. To refuse to get vaccinated and then either a) be a free-rider if the virus is eliminated in spite of you, or b) go "I told you so" if new problems arise (or if it doesn't work because of people like you) is a pretty annoying strategy.

EDIT: I mean the generic "you", not you personally of course .

Got my second shot of Pfizer on Friday. Was a little feverish and very tired yesterday, nothing pleasant but also nothing horrible. Seems to have gotten better overnight, will see how today goes.

There's a lot of anti-vaccine scepticism in my country, the government has been confused and inconsistent with restrictions and communication around COVID, and nobody takes them seriously anymore. There is a steady supply of vaccines now, but it seems we won't get past the 70% threshold because people refuse to get vaccinated.

https://dark.netflix.io/en  -  helps keeping track of people and relationships. You can choose season and episode to avoid spoilers. I didn't need it, but I binge-watched, which really helped, not too much time between episodes, so not so much stuff I could forget from one episode to the next or from season to the next.

That's a really well-made website! I think I could have made sense of it if I had been more invested, but the endlessly labyrinthine nature of the plot started feeling silly to me - it seemed to have reached a point where everything that could have been done had been done at least three times and nothing could surprise me anymore. I still respect the show, but if I want a story in the form of a Sudoku puzzle, I'll finally finish Obra Dinn instead . Actually, come to think of it, Dark might be one of those rare cases of a story that would work better as a game.

This looks so good, even though I fear for any artist who puts this much time into a project!

That's a well founded fear :/. Some time ago I was catching up on your and Grundislav's podcast, and the part about people who get too ambitious with their first project, quickly burn out and never finish was scary. Well, at least I've got the jam games now, we'll see what happens with this one. Not giving up on it just yet, but might take a detour to something much smaller first.

Good luck with the development! I'll try out Off the Clock soon(ish).

Thanks, let me know what you think when you've had the chance to check out OTC!

@Honza - I’ve been thinking of watching this. From the trailer, it seemed a bit like DARK, which is the best thing to come out of Netflix so far. Based on your review, I will lower my expectations. But if I watch it, I’ll share my thoughts.

By the way, everyone watch Dark.

I really enjoyed the first season of Dark, kept watching through the second, but then I gave up on it halfway through the third season - it became too convoluted, I realized that most of the time I had no idea what was going on anymore . Katla is similar to Dark in tone and atmosphere, but the story is much simpler and more straightforward. The plot could probably be condensed into one episode of Outer Limits.

A lot of people seem to enjoy Katla, it has surprisingly good reviews - so maybe give it a try regardless of what I said. There's a lot to admire about it if you can get past the way the characters (don't) communicate or even think clearly.

Has anyone seen the Netflix show Katla? It seemed great at first: a slow-burn, psychological sci-fi mystery with amazing atmosphere and cinematography. BUT...

The behavior of the characters in the show is *insanely* illogical and stupid. I'm not a stickler for these things, I'm usually perfectly fine with suspending disbelief and just enjoying the themes and atmosphere when logic takes a back seat. But this one takes all the frustrating contrivances from mystery shows like Lost and brings them to an entirely new level. People *never* ask the most basic questions. Nobody has a coherent conversation about anything - it's always a variation on "vague comment - vague response - pensive stare - leaves without a word." Ridiculous and disastrous misunderstandings ensue because none of these people seem capable of forming a sentence. It literally had me yell at the screen a few times, and then wonder if this is supposed to be some sort of dream reality, or if they are intentionally trolling the audience. I haven't been this frustrated with a piece of entertainment for a very, very long time.

Anybody with me?

For those interested: The following is the list of games that ranked #1 to #5 in at least one voting category.

Spoiler

[close]

Just two corrections:

#4 in Mental Engagement is Nebraska Smith (not Darts 2).
#4 in Characterization is Coffin Valley (not Anamnesis II).

Looking good, Honza! Love the attention to detail - every art piece you post looks so polished!

Also, is it just me or do you really like drawing naked people partially hidden behind objects? 🤔

Hey Patrice, thanks! And yeah, I kinda recycled that gag in Off The Clock. But twice is enough, promise to not use it again any time soon .

I'm loving Telwynium so far, feels like being a nerdy 90s kid and playing Dungeons and Dragons again . Haven't had a chance to play any of the AGS games yet, but looking forward to it. Trappist and Nebraska Smith have caught my eye in particular.

I still don’t get why they limited voting to only people who entered. I’m sure a lot more people would bother playing the games if they were able to vote.

I assumed it was because it would give too much of an edge to people with established fanbases?

Honza's Long in the tooth is one posting in the database away from half-way securing my vote for best AGS Demo at the next award show. Dammit, I want more!  Great humour and top-notch art and animation.

Heh, thanks! There is much more substance to the story, what I managed to squeeze out for the jam is just a stub really. That's why I haven't posted it here, hoping to finish the whole thing soon-ish. But yeah, there is more .

So I've decided last minute to join Adventure Jam on Game Jolt and I'm looking for a kind soul who could help me out with coloring. I'd send you a psd file with animation frames and the first frame colored in, you'd copy the color layers and color the remaining frames. Like this:



It could save a ton of time - who knows, maybe I'd even meet the deadline this time! Any volunteers?

I'm considering it, but I'm afraid I won't have enough time over those two weeks.

I just realized I haven't made any updates in almost a year, so just to bump this a little bit and show that this project is still alive (and to celebrate finally breaking a long procrastination period), here's Mirabelle walking:



Some bigger news and updates hopefully coming soon-ish (but no deadlines or promises, apparently I'm not good with those ).

Well, "strength", "will", "beauty", "kindness" are feminine in Russian, lol, while "intelligence" is masculine and "wisdom" is neutral (I think??) checked in the dictionary, and it's feminine again. Does this even mean anything?

Same in Czech, except "intelligence" is also feminine here . Isn't it that personality traits are mostly feminine in general?

I fail to comprehend what do they even mean by "male words associated with competent, skillfull, etc". In gendered languages adjectives are gendered too, and each of these traits would come in both male and female form. So they are talking about some nouns then? Are they refering to e.g. professions and occupations traditionally be used in a male form? Or do they mean some idioms, like "ugly as N"? Well, I'm bad at guessing.

Ugh, now I'm tempted to actually pay for the article to find out what exactly they did . The way I understood it, they checked the proximity of positively charged words to gendered words (eg. "ugly woman", "he was lucky"), and found out there were statistically more negative associations with feminine words in languages which also happen to have gendered nouns. But you're right that it's pretty vague and I wouldn't draw any dramatic conclusions from it, I just thought it was interesting.

By the way, reading the last paragraph:

Future studies could explore whether other stereotypes, not considered in this study â€" such as weakness vs power, home vs career, or perceptions of emotional versus rational decision-making â€" might show different patterns of gender association in gendered vs genderless languages, the team suggests.

... I just realized both "weakness" and "power" are feminine in Czech, "home" is masculine and "career" is feminine .

But on an unrelated note, I recently read an article which I would strongly reccomend in this thread;
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/men-women-books/
Researchers let a machine read and analyze 3.5 million books and analyze the positive and negative words used to describe men and women, and I quote:

“The algorithms work to identify patterns, and whenever one is observed, it is perceived that something is ‘true.’ If any of these patterns refer to biased language, the result will also be biased. The systems adopt, so to speak, the language that we people use, and thus, our gender stereotypes and prejudices,” says Augenstein. She gives an example of where it may be important: “If the language we use to describe men and women differs in employee recommendations, for example, it will influence who is offered a job when companies use IT systems to sort through job applications.”

That's some seriously worrying implications as algorithms determine more and more of our everyday lives. 

Looks interesting, the hour's too late for me to sift through the actual study, but bookmarking . Here's some pretty cool research on a related topic, might be worth checking out: Gender Prejudice Is More Common In Languages With Grammatical Genders.

I've always wanted to make an experiment where I take a story, gender-swap the characters and see how it (on average) changes the way they are perceived. I'm sure people have done this, but couldn't find any examples. Anyone aware of anything like that?

Congrats all winners, Postmodern especially! Both Billy Masters and UWS were a lot of fun. And Zniw might have the best AGS animation ever .

We've been throwing around 10. April as the date for the ceremony, but it's not officially set.

Alright, thanks! Just wanted to make sure I haven't overlooked it .

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but has the date of the awards ceremony been set? Or will it be announced after votes are in?

My sister took me to see Švankmajer's Něco z Alenky when I was around 8 . It didn't traumatize me as much as you'd think (not even this part)... I was confused and a little creeped out, but as far as I remember some of it was interesting to me and I didn't end up hating it. But I also don't love his animation aesthetically - there's a frantic choppiness to it at times which has always felt unpleasant to me.

I was exposed to a lot of traditional Czech animation when I was little (including this national treasure - check it out for some Amanita vibes), but Disney and other American cartoons soon won me over. I loved the stretchiness and squishiness Ali is describing and tried to imitate it, made stuff like this when I was around 10 or 11 I think:



A lot of it was influenced by games - I copied some animation tricks from Aladdin, the flask drinking is from Prince of Persia, maybe there's also some Day of the Tentacle? So yeah, my perception of "good animation" had been thoroughly Disneyfied and americanized while I was still little, just through osmosis.

Listened to the whole thing too, found neither of them arrogant. Just sarcastic and mildly cynical, but I don't mind that personally . I don't agree with some of their takes - I still enjoy inventory puzzles for instance, and I think Tim Schafer is at least a decent game designer apart from being a great writer. But overall, point and clicks being so niche, it was still enjoyable to listen to someone talk about them at length in 2021.

This was the exact reason why I never played Back to The future, when I was so eager to after finding out there was a 4 episode game... even though I selected the "no tutorial/no hints", the game was still telling me "go there, look at that..." yadayadayada...    I got even more annoyed, when I found out that no matter what I choose as a reply during the intro, the game would reply and continue as if I had chosen "the correct" answer... if you going to give the player 4 options of dialogue during an intro sequence, the least you could do was alter the intro/reply slightly... running the exact same answer makes this dialogue option useless. 

I have to admit I just skimmed through late Telltale playthroughs on youtube, and I think I got the most out of them that way... the gameplay in those is so minimal and linear it feels more like a chore that keeps you from just watching the story :/.