Messages

[Ben304]

OK, time to wrap this up. Two great entries - Ben demonstrating how to use a few frames to good effect and Matti producing a nice smooth animation (which looks a lot better since you fixed the two frames ).

Unfortunately according to the rules I have to pick a winner, and after much deliberating one entry finally edged ahead...


First place goes to Ben304!


Silver runner up goes to Mr Matti!

Thanks for the entries guys, and over to you Ben!

Happy birthday Dan!

I'll extend a couple of days until the 18th, let me know if that's not going to be long enough. Should be good enough for anyone who hasn't started yet to make something quickly... yes?

Anyone? Three days left...

[Comments]

Warning - long post ahead!

As for the comments: I'm not sure how easy it is to change the voting site. If you can leave comments there (like said before) and make these visible after voting so you'll have the number of votes and the comments it would be a nice addition. At the moment it's just anonymous voting and that's it. There's no feedback or result (other than who won) after the voting has taken place which would give me the feeling of 'why should I vote at all...'. ?

A bit more statistics and motivation would be nice. The comments during voting shouldn't be mandatory though to scare people off.

This discussion's been going on for a while and I'm getting slightly uneasy about where its heading. It wouldn't be fair for me to complain if Dual decides to make any changes and I didn't say something though, so here are my opinions:

Comments
Personally I never really thought too much about commenting during a competition, though I can see the point that it might influence voting. I love getting feedback on my games and I wouldn't want to discourage comments, but now we've got the shorter voting time to make way for theme submitting days why we can't leave off commenting until the two days at the end of each month (after the competition's finished but before the next one starts)? If the thread gets locked before you get a chance to leave some feedback why not just PM the author? After all who's the comment for, people who read the MAGS thread or the person who made the game?

I don't really see the point of having comments on the MAGS site (except I suppose as an alternative games database only for MAGS games) and I've no idea if its even possible. Personally I only ever go there to vote anyway. If people want feedback they should submit their game to the completed games thread and/or the AGS games database. If they don't think it's good enough for either of those, they could post in the Critics Lounge, or just PM Leon to commission a review!

Why not follow the example of some of the other competition threads - comments like "Wow, that was great" or "Congrats on finishing, it was really fun" seem innocent enough and could be made during the competition (they encourage people to play the games but not necessarily to vote on them) but leave off the in-depth analysis and comparison until they voting is over.

The only other thing I'd add is that if people do post in the completed games thread or make an entry in the database it seems reasonable for people to comment there even while the competition is ongoing. Obviously you can't really (and probably shouldn't) compare the entries if you're doing this.

Statistics
I strongly agree with Klaus' method of running this: never show any results other than "This person won". No total votes, no ratios and definitely no "Won by x votes". Part of the idea of MAGS is to provide an easy way for people to get into AGS, and a lot of people on these forums started out with a MAGS game (I've got three games to my name and they're *all* MAGS). Imagine a first time entrant who's just spent 25-odd days working hard on an adventure game which they submit and they get told that nobody voted for - that nobody liked it. That's hardly encouraging.

I also wouldn't want to see the total votes, especially if its as low as Tijne said. If I'd have thought that only 20 people would have played Breakdown (and I've no idea how many did during the competition) I probably wouldn't have bothered making it. Is it seriously that low? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss as they say, and imagining your game being played by loads of people all of whom enjoy it is a lot more encouraging and rewarding an experience than knowing the hard statistics. Then again, that could just be me

Ok, if a vote is particularly close between two games it's fair enough to say "The votes were really close this week...", and Dual could confidentially tell someone in their congratulatory PM that they did much better than the other entrant if he wants to, but that should be kept between him and the entrant not posted for all the forums to see.

***

Sorry for the rant.

Ah, happy belated birthday, Buckethead!

Tell me to stop sitting in an empty TokBox room and go make my game.

I've been looking at Synfig Studio recently as a free alternative to Flash, and that can do it (tutorial). Looks like quite a steep learning curve though, and the software isn't particularly user friendly yet. Still, it works with vectors and tweening, so you could potentially get quite a smooth animation from relatively few frames, then export as a series of .png files to edit externally.

Otherwise there's several different graphics packages out there, some of which will allow you to do animation, though I think most are commercial. There's a list in this thread. The free version of Graphics Gale for example will let you animate in a series of frames, although it won't let you export to a .gif file so you'd have to finish your animation then export each individual frame manually - though at least you'd be able to preview the animation while you were working on it and use onion skining.

Firefly? Flight of the Conchords?

Ooh, missed this. Looking great Ghost, liking the art stlye. You going for the record of number of simultaneous games in production?

[Theme]

Theme
Archery! Your animation must show someone or something firing (or attempting to fire) an arrow with a bow. The type of bow and arrow are up to you.

Rules
- Your animation must follow the theme above.
- No size, colour or frame limits.
- You may animate the supplied sprite, modify and animate the supplied sprite or draw and animate your own sprite.
- All entries must be posted in this thread by the deadline below.
- The host of the competition will judge the winner.

Supplied Sprite

Remember you don't have to use this sprite, you can draw your own!

Deadline
All entries must be in by the 16th of August

I was afraid of this. I'll see what I can come up with.

I am so mature its unbelievable.


2x

I'd be slightly cautious with Demo Quest, it was written for a much older version of the editor, then adapted to work on the later versions so the code in there might not be 'best practice'. Not saying you shouldn't use it, just bear that in mind. Also, when I was starting out with AGS I would have called Demo Quest complex for the amount of interfaces etc it covers.

Open Quest is the only other one I can think of, but unfortunately I think the download link is broken. Somebody might have a backup and be able to mirror it for you though, especially if you request it in this thread.

If you haven't found it already, there's also the tutorial and scripting tutorials in the manual.

[Can I use this music in a Student Film? Commercial Film? Stage Production? Flash Animation? Instructional DVD? Relaxation CD? Slideshow?]

I've used Incompetech before, there's some great pieces on there.

It's licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0, which basically means you use it how you like as long as you credit the author.

Can I use this music in a Student Film? Commercial Film? Stage Production? Flash Animation? Instructional DVD? Relaxation CD? Slideshow?
Yes. Anything and everything - as long as I get a credit. The only thing you cannot do is sublicense or relicense. (That means you cannot sell or redistribute these as a royalty-free collection.)

How do I place a credit for this music in my project?
    If your project has only one piece in it; you can credit it as "Music: Kevin MacLeod".
    If your project has many pieces from different people, you can credit me as "(name of the pieces of music you are using) Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)".
    If you'd like to include the full license for legal reasons, you can do the following: "Title Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"

    It is important that you replace the word Title with the Actual Title of the piece that you are using!

Congratulations to both of you, the games were really well made and I enjoyed playing both of them (what is it about advertising that makes you think of death?). I was a little worried there wouldn't be any entries after the MAGS special last month, so it's great to get some competition. Good luck with the next theme Tijne!

Hah, I just started a mini series on my blog about how I went about making my last MAGS game.

Best advice I can offer is to know your limits and work to them. The very first thing you need to do is work out exactly what you want to put in the game, what that means in terms of art/coding/testing etc and how much time that will take. Then draw up a plan of how long to spend on each part (preferably with some spare time just in case) and stick to it! Worst thing you can do is change your mind in the middle of the project.

Sounds fun, good luck!

Ah, I've just figured out what it is - I've got objects sat on top of the background, which I hadn't updated the graphics of...

This is what happens when you start working on something after ignoring it for 3 months.

Sorry all!

Hey there, I just came across a strange bug in AGS 3.1.2 SP1. I imported this image...
http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk/uploads/Background.png
as a background to my room. It shows up fine in the AGS editor, but when I ran the game some of the detail on the bricks was missing - screenshot of the relevant part of the screen:
http://www.onedollarproductions.co.uk/uploads/ingame.png

The game is 640x480 32-bit, and I was importing the background over an existing one if that makes a difference. It does this windowed, full screen and in both Direct Draw and Direct 3D.

Any ideas?

Happy birthday to you, Sir Bicilotti!