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What is wrong with the MAGS site anyway, and why haven't people put up a mirror site yet? It's not like mirroring is hard these days.

What I don't understand is just because he went over the planned $400,000 budget, doesn't mean the rest can't be profit.

It does mean that the one party making a substantial profit is Kickstarter themselves. After all, they get 5% of all donations, and all they need to do is keep their servers running.

Wham made a Let's Play video of Indiana Rodent, too. Yay! Turns out you can complete the basic game in about an hour, not counting finding all the hidden stuff.

Wham made a Let's Play video of Indiana Rodent, too. Yay! Turns out you can complete the basic game in about an hour, not counting finding all the hidden stuff.

I had that last week, but eventually the "1 new" disappeared. The forums are acting strange and laggy for quite a while now, could be the usual hijinx.

It appears to be caused by a server overload that causes one database table to be updated, but another not to be updated. This issue should disappear once you get at least one more message, and click the messages button.

Don't be stingy, look at all these great rewards!

Pledge $15,000 or more:
Dinner with Tim Schafer and key members of the dev team.

Pledge $20,000 or more:
Dinner and BOWLING with Tim Schafer and key members of the dev team.

Pledge $30,000 or more:
Picture of Ron Gilbert smiling.

Pledge $35,000 or more:
Undoctored picture of Ron Gilbert smiling.

Pledge $50,000 or more:
Become an actual character in the game.

Pledge $150,000 or more:
Tim Schafer (that’s me) will give last four remaining Triangle Boxed Day of the Tentacles, in original shrink-wrap.” (Limit of 1) (Holy crap, what am I thinking? I only have four of those!)

What the...

Yeah, Kickstarter is pretty cool. Recently, Rich Burlew (creator of the popular Order of the Stick webcomic) wanted to raise money to put his older books back in print, and he raised 1000% of the amount he needed in little more than a week. Yes, that's one thousand percent.

Some thoughts on skill.

First, looking through the card set there are some really good cards (Wall Swap comes to mind) and some really bad cards (e.g. anything that reduces your income). This is not always reflected by the cost. Ideally, bad cards would be cheap to play, and good cards expensive. Conversely, expensive cards should be good. It's okay if a card that's twice as expensive is also three times as good.

Second, once your income gets high (which is easy with a bunch of income boosting cards, and it starts out that way in certain game types), the cost to play cards become irrelevant. It's pretty easy to end up with, say, more gems than you could ever need. This reduces skill factor, and could be mitigated by reducing the amount of income boosters.

Third, you cannot really influence what cards you get, and this increases the random factor. Tactically speaking, playing a card is pretty much always better than playing nothing and discarding one. It would be interesting if, instead of discarding one, you could discard three or four cards simultaneously: that way, you could get rid of cards you don't need quickly.

And fourth, with two colors dedicated to increasing walls or towers, and one dedicated to reducing them, you'll most likely end up with a "big tower" or "many resources" victory. To make an assault victory viable, offensive has to be stronger on average than defense (note that Magic deliberately chooses this option).

$.02 and YMMV, of course.

That's like it goes in life (even when playing cards) - you don't always get what you want!

It would be interesting to see if it plays differently if the cards act as a deck of cards (that is, every card is in there once, and if you play a card you can be sure that your opponent doesn't have it, and you won't get a copy of it until the stock is reshuffled).

Trying to destroy the enemys tower in certain game types is not the best strategy.The fact there are multiple ways to win gives the game a helping hand.

Yes. I have the impression that the average blue card adds more to your tower than the average green card reduces it, so if this impression is correct then assault is statistically not a very good strategy (although it depends on the exact goal values). I find that I usually win by maxing out a resource.

It doesn't run on my computer.

Since you seem to be using a verbcoin, please add keyboard shortcuts as well. They can save the player a lot of time.

[enemy AI]

I really want to extend on this, and enemy AI defenitely is top of the list.

I'd be happy to help you with that if you need it; I have written several game AIs in the past.

Heh, the computer keeps playing Wipeout on himself 

Is Kings Quest 4/5/6 worth getting?

6 is great, even by contemporary standards. 4 is okay. 5 is a piece of crap. Yes, it's the first adventure game ever with CD music, VGA graphics, and voice acting; but design-wise, it's a piece of crap. Heck, we ritually burned one of its gameboxes at Mittens, a couple years back.

6 and 4 have a number of walking dead situations, but in 5 almost every single puzzle is a walking dead if you do it wrongly. It's a POIsonous game!

Ha HAH! My spies told me that this would be the topic, three weeks ago!

Anyway, I'll put up the February guidelines tomorrow so in the meantime I'll leave you guys to it

I can't find them

Thanks for your comments

Is that inspired by any particular game btw? Super Mario Bros games for example don't have such exactly relative speed to the duration of running.

Well, as I recall Mario doesn't instantly stop when you release the direction button, but instead skids to a stop a few pixels later (neither does Sonic, or Quote from Cave Story). So based on that, I made it so the speed increases (to a limit) while the button is held, and it decreases to zero when it's not. I'm aware that Mario doesn't do it exactly in this way, that's why it's an inspiration rather than a direct copy.

I tried a playing a bit in the hard masochist level, I gave up soon, though I did manage to get a blue cup in that level (which I didn't manage at all in the first play).

Congratulations on being the first (other than myself) to complete Medium difficulty! Or at least the first that posted about it. Well done. As the name suggests, Hard mode is intended to be hard, but you can also find blue cups on Medium level if you search around a bit.

mario clones we have more than enough

Really? How many AGS platform games do we have, anyway?

I'm aware of Platformerius, 1213, Art Of Theft, and Indiana Rodent. I'm sure there's a few more out there. Does anyone have a list?

That's nice to see; AGS can always use another platformer. Indiana Rodent supports this project

Considering how well the Bake Sale turned out, I'd be interested in this one too.