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Yes, with several updates (they've since deleted two of my games, replaced the other two with malware and changed my name to Kastchey's). Nothing but one automated response so far.

Seems I got my Discord back though - shocked by that after Kastchey's experience, they responded and let me reset my password

It's true, both my Discord and Itch accounts are currently hacked (happened through a link I got from Kastchey's hacked account). Losing Discord history hurts, but the Itch one is the bigger disaster, hope I manage to retreive it - got all my games, access to revenue, etc. there. The fact that the hacked account is still active after *months* is baffling   

I might not be able to attend the ceremony . I'll try to at least drop in from time to time, but apologies in advance if I miss it. I asked Max Grachev who made sound to represent us though, so maybe he'll be there instead.

Many thanks to everyone who nominated! Especially excited to see both Mother Tiabata *and* Sister Ava in the Best Character category... unless it's a devious plan by Dr Noriko/Walter Gilman to divide & conquer . Congrats to all the other nominees, will be looking forward to the ceremony!

Wonderful graphics, visuals, animations and music! The overall ambient felt great.

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I also feel like some of the information that was given at the end could've been found by playing.
I felt like "Well yeah, if I did have that information before."

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A had great fun playing this great little gem!

Thank you very much, happy you enjoyed it overall!

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I think most of the information should be there throughout, at least to the extent it would be in a typical Agatha Christie mystery. With some small exceptions, I did my best to not have Tiabata use any clues you didn't have as well (you were her "eyes and ears" after all).

About that final scene... I'm a sucker for the "genius detective who's always ahead of the Watson character/reader" trope, and I feel like game mysteries tend to be somewhat bland exactly because you have to design them so that the player can figure them out step by step, so you lose the effect of the detective connecting all the dots in the final "gather everybody" scene. So the idea here was to try to get that effect - give you some agency by letting you identify the killer, but then have you play Watson at the very end. I get that it's frustrating for some people, but it was by design, making the reveals more gradual would have ruined the kind of finale I wanted. Now that I've got it out of my system though, I think I'll try to make the ending more interactive next time .

At least you can still try to guess passively for yourself even when your character can't, as if you were reading a mystery novel. I've seen some people more or less figure most of it out just before Tiabata's reveal, so it's doable .

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[Please consider for:]

For your consideration:





On a distant desert planet, a crime has been committed. As Mother Tiabata and Sister Ava set out to solve the mystery, they soon find themselves facing an impossible conundrum: how does one murder a god?

Shards of God is a retro hand-painted point and click murder mystery - think Agatha Christie in a fantasy/sci-fi setting. It was originally started as part of AdvJam2023, and the full game was then finished within two months.

Check it out here:
ITCH | AGS database

Please consider for:

• Best Game of the Year
• Best Freeware Game
• Best Short Game
• Best Audio
• Best Visuals
• Best Writing
• Best Character (Mother Tiabata)
• Best Gameplay

Just picked it up!

Great, let me know what you think!

Version 1.2 of Shards of God is out! First, a word of warning: YOUR OLD SAVES WILL NOT WORK IN THE NEW VERSION! Now that that's out of the way, here's (some of) the new stuff:

• A clever autosave system which creates separate labeled saves throughout the game's story. Even obsessive types shouldn't have to worry about saving manually anymore (the option is still there though!)
• Mother Tiabata now acts as a hint system. If you're stuck, she'll nudge you in the right direction
• Volume controls!
• More interactions give meaningful responses (eg. using items on characters), and one puzzle has been sliiightly streamlined
• Some small changes and additions to dialogue. For instance, the lamp puzzle is somewhat better motivated now, you can ask Radina about Plint leaving, etc
• A few cosmetic changes to backgrounds (can you spot them?)
• A fancy new Mac launch screen, courtesy of Nahuel! That readme file should be harder to miss now

All in all, if you haven't played yet or feel like revisiting the story, now's the time!

With Nahuel's help, I tried using the script Laura linked and at first it looked like it did the trick:



But then it turned out the files were still not executable, not sure what I did wrong. In the end, Nahuel ended up changing the flags for me manually, so the issue is solved now. Thanks everyone for responding, and especially Nahuel for sacrificing a ton of his time to help me out!

I got this report from a user who downloaded my game:

I'm unable to run it on Linux... After I set the 'execute' permission, it fails with the message: "Shards of God/data/ags64: Permission denied", and I can't figure out what permission it needs.

I don't have Linux myself and have never used it . What should I recommend they do? Thank you!

Thanks ^^ Not sure how I missed that. I thought I had

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examined all, multiple times. Maybe it was triggered by talking to the priest only after examining the room - ie it didn't matter if you had examined everything in previous attempts? Anyway, thanks, I will do the rest now.

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Game is great, by the way 

Thanks, glad you're enjoying the game!

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Examining the carving at any point in the game counts, but I guess it's easy to forget to right-click each picture.

[close]

I am stuck. How do I

Spoiler

create some background noise, after I've given the priest the scroll to examine?
I have to suppose that after I extract the rod, I will use that in the machine at the forge, to create a knife version - which likely was the murder weapon

[close]

Did you

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examine the center-left carving and speak to Catalus about the fact that it needs renovation? You're right about the rest!

[close]

[Credits:]

On a distant desert planet, a crime has been committed. As Mother Tiabata and Sister Ava set out to solve the mystery, they soon find themselves facing an impossible conundrum: how does one murder a god?

Shards of God is a retro hand-painted point and click murder mystery - think Agatha Christie in a fantasy/sci-fi setting. It was originally started as part of AdvJam2023, and the full game was then finished within two months.


Check it out here:
ITCH | AGS database

Credits:

Written, drawn and coded by Jan Vávra

Music by Paco Diago

Sound by Maxim Grachev

Enjoy!

I'm finishing a short game that I want to release this weekend, and I would like to do some last-minute testing before I publish. The game should be ready for testing tomorrow (Friday July 14th) and then I want to publish as soon as possible - by Sunday at the latest, but preferably even sooner. If anyone happens to be available in this short time frame and would like to give it a go, please DM me here or ideally on Discord (http://discordapp.com/users/Honza#8830).

The game is called Shards of God and it's a fantasy/sci-fi murder mystery. You can check out
the game's itch page and a video playthrough of the demo.

Thank you!

Copy-pasting this from the actual game page, because it deserves to be said more than once:

This was absolutely gorgeous, well designed, well executed, just a brilliant short adventure.

Hey man, cool game! LOTS of scenes to walk in for two weeks work, very impressive. And the kind of settings I like, with weirdo statues and fungi and things. Also you had an interesting idea behind your story which I always appreciate. Great stuff all around. 

Thanks guys, really happy you enjoyed the game!

Art and animation were beautiful, I can't wait to see the full graphical remake.

Thanks again good sir . The basic remake of the jam version is finished, now the plan is to keep adding more content until it can pass for a full (albeit probably still shorter) game. I've been posting screenshots on Twitter if anyone wants to check them out: https://twitter.com/hnzvavra. Here's one of those:

[2)]

2) As a workaround: call SetVariableSpriteFont AFTER you set the glyphs. This does not seem to cause any problems, as the plugin is smart and creates a new font internally if it was not created with "SetSpriteFont" yet. But because the SetVariableSpriteFont is called afterwards, the plugin already knows the glyph metrics and so can already calculate text height upon registration.

Great, I did this and it works fine now. A very quick fix, thank you!

If you can send a game, that would be wonderful; if not, maybe I could try emulating this case in dummy game (but I would need to know some specifics about the font setups).

Great, thank you! I can't do it right now, but I'll upload the game later in the day and DM you. Is it ok if I share the current build of the full game or do you want me to make a test game just to show the problem?

@Honza which sprite font binary are you using? If you built, how was it built?

Apologies for my non-coder ignorance, but I don't know what you mean by sprite font binary . I'm using this plugin, I simply follow the instructions given in the thread.

This setting is for backwards compatibility; some TTF fonts require automatic adjustment in order to be displayed "correctly" in AGS. More information about this may be found in the manual: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/UpgradeTo36.html#ttf-fonts-behavior

I had read this part of the manual before I posted. What confused me was that the font I'm using isn't a "TTF font specifically created or adjusted for older versions of AGS" and it still required the setting to display correctly. For some reason, when I import this font at nominal size 19, the "do nothing" option assigns height 4 to it. I've now experimented with more fonts and they don't seem to have the same issue, but the problem with the sprite font persists.

Judging by the screenshots, the font height is not calculated right. I would need to investigate this in a test game.

Is this an offer? I can upload the game somewhere and share it if you'd be willing to look into it, but I don't want to waste too much of your time, so also feel totally free to ignore me.

Of course, as it's called "TTF font adjustment" it only affects TTF fonts. Sprite fonts are not TTF fonts and should not be affected by this setting (if they are - that's a mistake).

Sure, I wasn't trying to point out a mistake in the setting, just to clarify the issue. I suppose my question is why this setting is necessary in the first place and what can be done for the sprite font to work properly?