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[Dreamscape: Silent Serenade]

Not super happy with how it turned out, but better a half-finished, unpolished entry than no entry right?

Dreamscape: Silent Serenade
Download here (v.1.1)

In a dystopian world where dreams are shackled in service of an eldritch cosmic god, a small group of rogue dreamshifters are fighting for their right to self-determine.

Content warning: mature language (mild).

Download here (v.1.1)

Edit:
v.1.1: Fixed the bug with the game crashing after you entered certain rooms near the end of the game

I'm hoping to be able to do the same. Super tired and struggling for time, but hey, got plenty of coffee!

[The Weird thing under the bed]

Thanks so much, heltenjon. This really helps.

Using similar guidelines hightreason uses for his $10X Adventure Game Challenge (I think they're spot on):

* The Weird thing under the bed Is it an adventure game?

I'd say so. It's a form of unusually structured visual novel.

* Katura's Chronicles These games of Marion's are visual novels. In my head that is a subcategory of adventure games, so I haven't changed anything.

Yeah, I'd agree.

* Menial; a Utopian Bagel Simulator This is a hybrid of several game genres. So: non-adventure or not?

To me it felt primarily like a visual novel with some extra elements, so I would say adventure game.

Just my opinion though.

[1. The Awards]

Ok guys! First off, I would like to thank you all for all the responses, every single one. It's really uplifting to see that the community is still interested in and attached to the Awards and the ceremony.

The changes we decided to go ahead with this year are as follows:

1. The Awards:
Best Game of the Year
Best Freeware Game
Best Short Game
Best Non-Adventure Game
Best Demo
Best Audio
Best Visuals
Best Writing
Best Programming
Best Character
Best Gameplay

As you can see, all the visuals will be merged into a single award. Same with the audio awards. Gameplay and puzzles have become a single category.
Best Short, Demo, Programming and Character all have their fervent defenders, so we have decided to leave them be, at least for now. We may revisit the topic together again next year, should need be.

2. Ceremony date:

The ceremony will take place in March. The doodle for the specific date will be set up much earlier this time, around first week of January, so you can plan in advance to attend, if you wish to. The nominations phase will happen in January, and the voting in February (give or take a couple days for the team to set the next stage up).

Shortly after the ceremony date is revealed, I will start looking for presenters and streamers. Please consider volunteering, the more the merrier and it really helps a lot!

3. Games list:

The games will now be eligible for specific categories based on their database entries. This should make the nominations easier, as the lists of values will only include the actual eligible games.

We are happy to accept volunteers to sift through this year's database and let us know if any of the games are misclassified in the following categories: Non-Adventure, Demo, Freeware, Short.
Please PM me or cat if you think you can help.

4. Nominee assets:

As we have eliminated specific categories for visuals and audio, there will be little need to ask the creators of the nominated games for assets. We will either self-source the required assets, or accept optional contributions in the form of screenshots and avatars, should you choose to supply any.

In Scrum there is a saying: If you can't finish your sprint in time, make it shorter.
The reasoning is, a shorter time frame is easier to plan, track and execute. I think making MAGS two month long could have the effect of dragging on and being more demanding. I'd rather go the other way round and make a MAGS theme where you have only two weeks to finish your game and the rest is reserved for testing and improving.
Or, we could have another OROW.

Scrum typically means something related to your day job, so you get your regular 8h of paid time per weekday to plan stuff out For me at least, it works a bit differently when it comes to hobbies. It's more like the wider time frame, the higher the chance I will squeeze out the few days I need to release something playable. A day here, another day two weeks later, a couple near the end of the month. Just different schedules and lifestyle, I guess.

This said, it's just me. If someone is up for kicking off OROW and people feel excited to participate, why not

Same. Makes perfect sense to me.

I could use the extra day too, thank you kindly for the extension!

Why, it should be an annual thing! Once a year, we could all look forward to a great deluge of hastily assembled games given a second chance at life!

I shied away from suggesting this myself, but I had similar thoughts. "Finish your MAGS entry" every December!

I started late, but the theme is too inspiring to pass on...

Not sure if I will get anything playable ready by the end of the month, let alone finish the game, but we'll see.

Or, if you want to avoid advanced scripting, you can try abstauber's CustomDialogGui module:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/module-customdialoggui-1-9/

Yes please! These should happen more often.

Setting the question of what is fair and what is not aside, I think the biggest practical issue is that while trying to distinguish between "commercially competitive" and "hobbyist" games may be easy in some cases, it will become highly arbitrary in others.

If we want to try streamlining the process to make the client quicker to produce for the Awards team and the nominations easier to digest for the community, we probably want to steer clear of anything that requires heavy moderating or in-depth research, and is very prone to be disputed.

40 minutes is hell of a lot of gameplay for a MAGS game, and interactive movies are fun. Don't give up!

For me, announcing the theme earlier would help. I only get so much free time a month (not unlike nearly everyone else here, I bet) and there's a constant battle of priorities, in between work, parenting and other random (but important) stuff. I may get 15 hours to work on a game a month, or I may get zero. Having some extra days would increase the chance I squeeze out those several hours I need to finish a small game.

The themes are good and I almost always remember to check them on day 1. More often than not, they spark an idea that I like and I feel I could use a distraction from the long term projects (not just games... I have an unhealthy amount of hobbies and the shiny bauble syndrome). So in my view at least, there is nothing wrong with the competition itself. It's just me and my lack of time. And sometimes focus.

We have a vast selection of trophies to reuse, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Category intros are a separate issue though, because they feature the name of the award, and are animated. They were made by selmiak so if he's up for updating them, great. If not, we can perhaps substitute them with idle graphics.

As for keeping and ditching specific awards, if we feel that there are things the opinions are heavily split on, we can do a poll afterwards to decide on these few specific items. The good news is that we have a consensus about the awards that create the biggest bottlenecks during the prep stage (animation, character art, voice work) being simplified into more generic categories.

cat, yes, I believe you have captured the key points perfectly.

To provide an alternate opinion, "programming" is often quite visible in AGS games, because of how engine is focused on particular gameplay and offers little to no foundation for another. Hence it's quite easy to notice something that was programmed from ground up as opposed to games using built-in behavior.

Definitely, but only if you are very familiar with the built-in behavior, and possibly also with modules and plugins made by other authors. Best Programming would be an outstanding category if we had a judge panel system and could pick our experts. It is a lot easier to make an honest judgement on visuals or storyline, because all of it is on the surface, made for the player to enjoy. There's no misjudging (or refraining from vote) due to lack of programming knowledge or familiarity with AGS.

While I do see the logic in putting programming in with game design for streamlining purposes, it does seem a shame not to shine a spotlight on those games which do incredible things under the hood, especially if a game has a dedicated coder who isn't the lead designer.

I get that and I agree, but streamlining isn't the only reason. Best Programming is one of the awards that seem difficult to judge for the general audience, and while real programming gems do often get nominated, they rarely if ever win this award.

Why "Original" in this category and none of the others? Do we have any AGS games where the story and writing are not original? (Remakes, I suppose.) And what will these new categories mean for the rule about original music?

Remakes, demakes, fan games. But it wasn't my intention to suggest any changes to this part of the rules, it's just how I happened to word it. What I intended to suggest was a set of compact, more generic awards.

I don't like the "Best Game Design" category. This is too similar to "Best game" and I think both awards would go to the same game. Instead, I would keep "Best puzzles". It's about adventure games after all.

That's a sensible and viable approach, too. I personally like the more generic category better (maybe "Best Gameplay" if "Best Game Design" sounds too much like a Best Game duplicate), but that's just me.

Not sure about "Best short game" (my favourite). While I think this is a very important category for game makers, the lack of votes in recent years shows, that it is maybe not important to players. If everyone is strongly in favor of Best Puzzles - sure, why not.

I do love both Best Short Game and Best Character, yet I think they don't (or no longer, perhaps) work well enough. As you noted, Short Game is getting very little interest during the nomination stage and Best Character is kind of like Best Programming - categories that (in my perception, perhaps I'm wrong) get more default voting that others. Maybe it's time to kill some of our darlings for a healthier voting and ceremony prep process..

[Best Game Design]

Having a selected panel of judges to nominate or reveal winners is an appealing idea in many aspects, but it probably wouldn't work in our small, semi-active community. Like cat said, it's enough of a challenge to find 5 community members willing to discuss the committee awards for the given year, where the only requirement is basically "be a fairly active community regular, capable of civil communication"

I would definitely like to try making the nomination and voting process somewhat easier to digest. Scaling down the amount of awards is one way to do it. It would also yield an extra benefit of having the ceremony time, the amount of presenters required, and the number of resources to be collected and prepared significantly reduced.
There are some problems tied to it, e.g. less awards means less games get the spotlight, and an even higher chance the awards would be dominated by a single game. But maybe we could think of a way to address these specific potential issues.

So here's a very minimalist version, built upon LimpingFish's suggestions:
Best Game Design: Puzzles, game mechanics, GUI design, game flow, overall enjoyment.
Best Visual Design: Backgrounds, GUI graphics, animations, sprites.
Best Sound Design: Music, sound effects, voice acting, how it all plays together overall.
Best Original Story and Writing: Story building, world design, character design, dialogues, writing quality.
Best Non-Adventure Game: (unchanged - it still feels distinctive enough to keep).
Best AGS Game of the Year: (unchanged - the alternative might be splitting into Freeware and Commercial like LF did).

Thoughts? I do realize this looks like a rather radical change, but more generic categories are also easier to interpret and understand (Best Gameplay and Best Puzzles, I'm looking at you two!).

Is there any way to get statistics of games made in AGS per year, at least ones registered in database?
It may be curious to see the graph and compare how this number changed over the decade(s).

Actually, you made me curious... Here it is.

Good to have you here, Vitaliy! Best of luck with your pet project. 15 minutes per day may not seem like much, but slow paced progress is still progress.