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The arms look a little stiff to me. The lower arm and the hands should "swing" a little more. Apart from that, it's really nice.

Probably. As long as nobody reports a bug that magically gives players ten thousands of points in the end game calculation, I can only assume that this was done by cheating.

The Mandle Barrier has been broken a couple of times. Three people have scored more than 2000 points, which would get them more than 500 XP. One has scored 45000 points, which is impossible and can only be explained with cheating.

I never got around to make a MAGS game, but I always loved to watch the competition and play the games. You did a great job hosting these competitions, Atelier!
Luckily we won't have to worry about the future of MAGS, because Stupot is an excellent choice - good luck to both of you!

[Rogue State will be released on October 16th!]

ICYMI...

Rogue State will be released on October 16th!

So, in case anyone else is interested: The solution for Theora videos in AGS seems to be playing a silent video and having the audio as a separate .ogg file. This way the video stutters a lot less. And even if it still stutters a little, the audio remains intact and the timing is still correct. The video keeps up even if it has to skip frames.
So even if the video is slightly choppy on some systems, we can get rid of the annoying audio dropouts.

I'll do a couple more tests, but so far this seems to be the best solution that doesn't depend on any installed codecs.

I didn't know this plugin. Looks interesting, though I guess it will only be useful for the Windows build.

The camera zooms and parallax layers in the video can't be done in AGS at this resolution, so the intro would have to be a lot simpler without a video. We've dropped the framerate a bit, which makes the video playback more stable. 15fps is too low though, the camera movement doesn't look good this way. But I think with careful testing we can find a compromise between video quality and smooth playback.

This has nothing to do with Allegro. The AGS manual says that AGS plays anything supported by Windows Media Player.

The mouse works very well in Linux for me, but it always did. It seems the acceleration problems only affected Windows, and in Linux it works exactly as before.

Changing mouse sensitivity from the script allows developers to add a mouse sensitivity slider in the game. This has the benefit that if you change the slider, you immediately see the result and can make quick adjustments - instead of leaving the game, starting winsetup, changing the settings, starting the game again etc.

And since you never know if the game will run in a different resolution than the windows desktop, it's of course a good idea to be able to change the mouse speed, because the mouse movement will sometimes be different than on the desktop. So in my opinion it's best to change the mouse speed from inside the game. For Rogue State, if I had both, I'd implement a mouse speed slider in the game's settings menu and ignore what is in winsetup (which is only available for Windows anyway).

That depends. Does the current version still have different mouse speeds for different display resolutions?
If the mouse moves exactly like on the desktop, regardless of display resolution, than a mouse speed setting isn't needed, at least not in in winsetup.exe. The possibility to change the mouse speed from the script might still be useful.

It's pretty bad unfortunately. I don't know why, but the built-in video playback just doesn't run smoothly, at least for high resolution games. On some PCs even the audio stutters. Other video formats work much better, maybe because they are not played by AGS? Of course the best solution would be to improve the performance of the built-in OGV playback, because it doesn't depend on any codecs being installed, but for now we'll try our luck with H.264.
I don't know much about Windows codecs, is it safe to assume that the H.264 codec is installed on current Windows machines?

Is there a way to check from inside AGS if a video has been successfully played? (I don't think so, because PlayVideo doesn't return anything.) This would allow us to use H.264 and have a fallback OGV if for some reason it doesn't play.

Don't laugh, this is serious!
The game has been in Beta since June, and thanks to great feedback from our testers it has improved a lot since then. It feels like it's really coming together now, and we're very close to the finish line.

Meanwhile, here's another soundtrack preview:
http://www.problematic-music.com/download/NeverReallyOver.mp3

I can confirm that the mouse movement is a lot better now, and that lower (display) resolutions make the mouse pointer faster.

This is excellent news! So to get it straight, if I set al_win_mouse_accel_factor to 0, I do get the mouse driver acceleration like the Windows dekstop, but I don't get any additional acceleration from Allegro?

Dave is absolutely right about followers. Fake followers won't buy your game, and people who follow you because you look popular (because of fake followers) also won't buy you game. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about marketing and PR though. This is important, and it can be a big relief if you have some people who do this for you, because it's an unbelievable amount of work. But this is more or less what publishers are for, so you might want to look for a publisher if you are really convinced of the quality of your game.

I have been approached by a few social media marketing companies offering to handle hyping / buzzing Neofeud up, guarantying a thousand new followers per month and such. Here's an open question to any fans listening: do any of you have experience with such campaigns? Would you recommend a company such as Silver Spook games and specifically our Neofeud project bring such a marketing company into the relatively shoe-string-budgety fold at this point?

Such campaigns can be really helpful, but not during an early stage of development. You want the hype when you need it the most, and this is when you run a Kickstarter or try to get your game through Steam Greenlight. This is when marketing companies can really help. If you run a marketing campaign now, most of the target audience will have forgotten about it by the time you run a Kickstarter, start a Greenlight campaign or simply release the game. It's really important to get the timing right.

One other thing: I am considering starting a Kickstarter, or another method of creating sustainable funding for the project, so that I can continue to live inside of the $1400 studio w/ no utilities that gentrifying megatropolises like Honolulu, SF, and New York continue to prove. (We're based in the former.) So please, Kickstarter, Patreon, funding advice is super welcome! I really want to take this project to completion, if at all possible.

Kickstarter campaigns for adventure games aren't as easy as they were a couple of years ago. There were quite a few excellent looking campaigns that didn't reach their goals this year. However, Kickstarter is still the most promising crowdfunding method for indie games, but it's a lot of work. If you don't have a large fanbase, you'll probably need a good marketing campaign to spread the word. For the same reason I don't think a Patreon will get you any money, unless you have a large and faithful fanbase. If you are unknown, a Patreon won't help.

I have it on Steam, so I guess it's their port.

Well, their old Linux ports still seem to work. I just played The Shivah, and it doesn't have any sound issues at all.