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Voted!

Thanks for pointing us to the credits page! I would normally use something like "originally by Chris Jones, further developed and maintained by Crimson Wizard and a team of dedicated contributors", but it's a great suggestion to use the full list.

Congratulations to the nominees!

Great thread! I love well developed characters.

From An English Haunting, my absolute favorite had to be Little Tim, followed by the shoeshiner boy. The wits and tenacity of those kids!

I remember nominating Stormwater this year so it was definitely there before, but I cannot see it now either.

The game was added on the 31st of December so perhaps something went wrong with the cutoff date/time stamp on the new page?

One thing I noticed today is that I no longer seem to be able to vote for more than one Best Character from the same game. It accepts the two of them, but when I save and revisit the page, only one of them is there.

Yes, I can access and modify my nominations. Everything looks good.

A bit late, but... For your consideration:

Use It All (Or Forget Your Ball)


by Kastchey and heltenjon

Once upon a time, there lived a young princess, pure at heart. One day, she went into the forest and alas, her precious golden ball, the treasure of her kingdom, was seized by a monstrous amphibian that dwells inside an ancient well!
You are the princess. You're a bit too lippy for your job's standards, but as long as your prince charming (who is yet to show up) can't hear you, all is good. You can pretend. It's even less about the stupid ball now, because things got personal. You need to go and show the frog who's the boss around these woods.

Consider for whatever you wish, but it's a short game, it's got some nice hand made animations and heltenjon came up with some pretty vicious puzzles.

The music and some of the source sprites have been (legally) acquired via itch, so might be worth keeping in mind that not all the assets were made exclusively for the game.

Download here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2813-use-it-all-or-forget-your-ball-/

So, I messed up and forgot to add a game in time, despite the reminders. It's a MAGS entry from February 2024.

Any grace period for procrastinators..? 

This looks beautiful. Can't wait to play it.

I think we can trust the participants to use their common sense.

This is so impressive. You just keep raising the bar for yourself (and for everyone else, damn you! ).

You're a star, eri0o. They did reply and Honza got his account back.

Months and multiple support requests with Discord, mind you. They're useless.

My most recent request to them that hasn't been fed to the bots yet is to delete my old account, as all attempts to recover it so far have failed. I fully expect them to decline on the basis that I don't have access to it or the email currently associated with it (duh), but we will see.

Looks like Honza's Discord account might have got hacked, everyone please be wary of any DMs from him.

[is]

I feel you. I hate doing walkcycles too. And the back view is the worst.

What I've learned over the years is, the only real way of managing it is doing tons of walkcycles, until you have dragged yourself through this torture enough to start getting the hang of it. References and templates help, but in the end you will always end up drawing a large part of it yourself, because your template doesn't have a flowing cape, or a puffy dress, or the posture and dynamics is not quite right, or you need the character to be limping or whatever else. If you need something very specific and you feel you absolutely can't get it right no matter what, or just looking for a template, you can try browsing the assets store on itch.io. There are tons and tons of animated characters there, many are free to use or very cheap, and allow derivative work.

I don't think I have ever limited vertical movement because of the walkcycles, but if you get tired of it, you can consider switching to a different design, e.g. use a floating or teleporting character (if it makes sense story-wise, of course), or drop the third person view altogether and use first person perspective.

@cat , thanks, that helps!

The one question that remains is, if someone actually squeezes out the time needed to update any of these ancient articles, not necessarily the minorities one but any outdated article, what is the best practice for publishing the update? Do we just go ahead and do it, since the previous version can always be restored if necessary? Or should the updates be pre-approved by moderators before they are posted? In case of a full update that replaces almost everything, where should the previous article go?

@Vixie_Pixie , welcome to the forum. Thanks for bringing the outdated content to the community's attention What might be important to understand is that, well, we're a tiny group, at least compared to giants such as Unity or even Godot. Everything that happens is community driven and while we do what we can, there isn't that much spare time and effort that can be streamed into extra activities, like running additional events or making extensive updates to the resources and documentation. This said, if you're happy to contribute something yourself, let us know what you've got!

I think the way the wiki functions, older versions of pages are stored as older versions, and they wouldn't be visible directly unless you checked the history of a page. Would that be a sufficient level of "archiving"?

If that is how it works, then maybe it would be fine for both the people who want to see the up-to-date content, and the people who want to preserve snapshots of the old community for the sake of AGS history.

The thing is, when someone goes to the AGS Wiki for the first time and chooses to view an article on minority representation in adventure games, they are looking for an article on minority representation, not a piece of AGS history. It's irrelevant. And similarly, if they want to know who was an active community member 20 years ago or how the discussions were structured back then, or just take a trip down the memory lane, they would be looking for archived threads or pages on AGS history specifically, not articles on random unrelated subjects.

If outdated archival discussions and inside jokes from 20 years ago hold a sentimental value for someone, it shouldn't be just wiped out. But we should ensure it is preserved in an adequate place and form, rather than disguised as AGS-endorsed substantive content.

I can never get enough of games placed in dystopian post-apocalyptic worlds, and this handful of screenshots shows some really in-depth, intricate worldbuilding. I love this. Fingers crossed for a finished product one day!

If someone was willing to write a more accurate, up-to-date and useful article on something that was covered two decades ago, would we not want to replace the dated, inaccurate and partially offensive content with the new version?

And if so, where would the old content go, if we think it should be preserved as part of AGS history? Is there an archive of sorts?