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Formosa: I stole and modified every bit of my graphics for my game from vecteezy.com and personal license use clipart sites. It's a major help in hitting the deadline.

I'm bashing away hard at my own game, wanted to make good progress before I popped up.

"Lord of Darkness Light" - You're an evil wizard, and those bastardy bastard heroes have chased you to the top of your tower.  And just before you locked yourself in your laboratory, their stupid spellhacking cheating bastard of a good wizard cast Continual Light on your eyeballs.

You are blind.

Before they bash the door in, you must touch, talk, taste, smell and listen your way around your lab to concoct a Continual Darkness spell to restore your sight.  Hurry!

Gameplay: Like it says, you're feeling and sensing your way around through magical ingredients, implements and creatures.  As you figure things out, a "memory" of what they look like will appear.  Short, one room game, hopefully will be fully voice acted if I have time.

I don't want to release more than the title and a simple screenshot, anything more is spoilers.   Haven't even worked on the GUI's and menus yet, so this isn't the final look.

Aw, super cute! Rif is so expressive for low-res animations, very well done!  I got so excited at the end, then remembered the title and wished there was more!

Love the graphics and a new 2D adventure game, but uggggh the mechanical mini and arcade games.  "You can't open this door until you solve my pipe-rotating-and-placement puzzle!"  I know it's an age old argument, but those usually seem to take the place of thinking of genuine plot-driven puzzles.

Thanks for the support, it's appreciated.  I think since NY was the first US epicenter and we largely flattened the curve, everyone's inappropriately relaxing.

It's like watching an inflated balloon - we pushed a finger down on NY, so the lazy people are ignoring that the balloon is inflating everywhere else with increased pressure.

It's like watching pincers close back around us.

Small victory update: the Mayor of my area stopped by our building, saw all the people without masks, and had the Governor's office call to tell everyone to mask the f*** up. Some are still being children about it but a much higher percentage are complying now.

Which is good, 'cause Wednesday the US topped 50K new cases in a day.

Update: Blah, disregard. I have a good idea but it's not something I can make in three weeks, at least not as a playable game instead of a story on rails. Good luck everybody!

[BUILDING NURSE]

I work a high public contact point at a main government building in upstate New York.  It's been effing nuts watching the idiot Karens and Kens overrun the U.S, denying masks, denying the virus is real.

Our building posted signs all around the main lobby requiring everyone to wear masks and social distance in public spaces.  But privately, the people running the building tell everyone, it's up to you, it's not mandatory.

And in my area, they posted an informal sign saying "masks aren't mandatory, but gloves are" - which makes even less sense, because one pair of gloves all day is the same as not wearing gloves at all.

I'm the only one on my team who wears a mask every day as I interact with the public.  My supervisor is a "damn government is just trying to control me, f*** Cuomo" guy.

The entire housekeeping staff pull masks on below their chins to fake compliance, and every day give me passive-aggressive jabs about "masks give you cancer!" and "masks kill you with carbon dioxide poisoning!" and other BS they don't understand the real science of.

Worst of all - the BUILDING NURSE is a mask denier.  She actively discourages people from masking up.

My wife has the same problem - she works in a non-medical-care department for a major hospital nearby.  Her whole department, including the bosses, tries to hide that they don't wear masks, even AFTER a couple COVID infections, one in their department, one in the child daycare on the floor below.  When inspectors come through, the bosses pretend they'll comply, then tell everyone to just wear them for the day and take them off again tomorrow.

My wife wears one, but her coworkers try to shame her daily into taking it off.

I'm at the point - if anyone coughs on me on purpose, I'll treat it as attempted murder and defend accordingly.  Anyone spits on me, they'll be spitting teeth.

I thought AI Dungeon was really fun just as a "crazy sandbox toy" but not for any hope of a real story.  It's like how adventure games have problems with "guess what the author was thinking" puzzles, only in AI Dungeon the author is schizophrenic and three days into a meth binge.

You can't predict anything that's going to happen - type that you want to say hi to someone, and AI Dungeon is 90% likely to respond with, "You scream in their face, shoot them through the lungs and tear their arms off."

I can only guess it's because so many people use it to play out violent ideas, so the AI just GIGO's what it thinks humans are all about.

I don't know if I'll have time, back at work even as the U.S. gets swamped with COVID. :/ But I just had a really interesting idea for this that I'm going to explore and see if I can make a good game out of it.

I'd be happy to help, if you still need it!

Searched the forums, and it doesn't look like anyone's posted this yet...

Have y'all seen this site with what appears to be every single background of every Sierra game?

http://www.sierrawallpaper.com/

I tried all those options first...changing Top/Left only moves the entire button, and Height/Width only moves the lower right red dot, while the other 3 dots can't be moved.

I think part of the problem is my buttons have a Mouseover image (a glow that extends outside the normal button edges), so there's a transparent edge to the button Image.  The other 3 red dots are at the edge of that transparent space.

Just wondering if there's any way to move the red dots to the visible corners of the buttons.  I can rework the buttons so they don't have the glow outside the box, I just like the effect.

I'm editing the existing Iconbar GUI from the Sierra template, replacing the Walk/Look/etc. buttons with my own graphics.

With my new GUI image, my buttons are further down/to the right than the original buttons.

But I can't figure out how to move the red dots marking the edges of the old buttons.  I see the lower right dot will let you resize it, but can't find a way to re-center the dots over my new buttons.

Do I have to drag and drop new buttons from scratch to do this?  Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks for your help!

PM me too please!  I'm rushing through MAGS right now but if you've got a week or so, I'd be happy to test when I can.

Oop, realized you already released it - still happy to post test?

Update: disregard my extra days request...I reached too high, no chance I'll finish in time.  On the other hand, having a total blast and will definitely finish within a couple weeks.

Congrats JackPutter!    And awesome job everybody!

Not sure I'll make the deadline now, had to take a few days for pandemic-related stuff. :/ But I'm having so much fun making this that I'll finish even if not for the competition!

Wrote the full plot/puzzle script overnight, now to get down to work!  The title is "Not My First Apocalypse: High Ground", using characters and world of an animated podcast I've been developing. The game's an animation heavy idea, but I plan to steal as much artwork as possible and the protagonists are already made. Fingers crossed!

Update 4/14: Plugging away like crazy building the game, but super happy with how it's coming out.  I'm having a lot of fun patching together the art and NPC's.

I finally had a good idea 9 days in, lol.  Might not make it in time but I'm going to see what I can do. Props to Slasher for finishing so quickly and wow, super cool of Tycho to offer a prize! Good luck everyone!