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This game is a trip and a half!  In a good way!  5 thumbs up!

I'm not getting any sound during the intro cutscene, though, just FYI.  Not sure what's going on because there's music and sound throughout the rest of the game.

YAYYYYYY!  Downloading now!  Canceling all my hot dates with the internet and Fallout 4 for the next week to make room for the UM.

Best Character: Kconan
Best Plot: Sinitrena
Best Tone: Kconan
Best Background World: Sinitrena
Best Style: Sane Co.
Most Substantive: Sinitrena

@Sinitrena & Kconan: The secret to my story is you need to read it while crossing the streams with ecstasy and special K.  Hehe, no actually it's just too cryptic, obscure, and Thomas Pynchon-gonzo batshit for its own good.  The essence of it is the eclectic musical artist / internet phenomenon Trevor Something, who is known for his remixes / mashups of various 80's and 90's synthpop (and later horror soundtrack) music is being attacked by The Social Justice Warriors or the Feminazis as they are sometimes termed.  The SJW is basically the collective set of individuals (largely women) who spend a lot of time on the internet, and especially social media, attacking ranting and complaining about things which they dislike.  This can range from things like white male dominance in society to misogyny of guys in general to the absence of strong female characters in books/games/movies to a lack of minority actors playing minority roles, instead giving all the roles to white people -- AKA 'whitewashing' (they knocked Ridley Scott for casting Brit big-namer Christian Bale as the Egyptian Moses, for example, in Exodus).  Sometimes the ranting and raging is warranted, but sometimes it can become kind of unreasonable and recklessly damaging. 

This trigger-happy indescriminate blasting is what I was trying to bring out with the bit where Trevor says the goddess "looks nice", then she reacts by calling him a misogynist, then he doesn't say anything, and she calls him an uncaring asshole.  You can't win.

For example, over-focusing on the one "Prima Noctem" comment that Robert Downey's Iron Man makes in Avengers AoU.  The SJW called it "a pro-rape statement", and "revealing of Whedon's secret hatred of women".  There were calls by big names in the SJW sphere (including famous girl-geek site The Mary Sue) for a boycott to the film, made by Joss Whedon: a well-known, die-hard feminist, and really the INVENTOR of the strong female protagonist, at least where TV is concerned, in his 90's hit show Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  It was later revealed that Downey ad-libbed that comment and it wasn't even in the script.  But the social media hypefest had already taken off, all of the Tumblrinas and bloggers and Tweeters looking to score some followers and points jumped on the bandwagon bashing the director and film and Whedon ended up taking a major beating nonetheless.  (I'm not a huge fan of AoU, but the amount of attention that went to this tiny one-off joke was ridiculous.) 

It's like the most angry, man-hating Women's Studies class, manifested in Web 2.0 collectivist-sensationalist journalism, with a kind of Reign Of Terror mob-outrage.  It operates on a similar tribalistic rage-endorphin bug in the human psyche as Donald Trump's rants on why immigrants, blacks, and poor losers are what's wrong with America.  There's no policy, no rational thought, no discussion -- just the pure animal rage at a perceived injustice, shouting all the other even-tempered candidates off the airwaves.  And it's fed by the lazy, unscrupulous, or desperate media, journalists, talking heads who want to sell eyeball time to advertisers.

Anyway, long story short, the minor deity here, the goddess of the Angry Internet Girls, has turned her rage to Trevor Something, for no particular reason other than he is a convenient target and is kind of a womanizer (he says so in his songs).  So the joke is they go through his various albums, videos, etc. and rip it apart.  Trevor Something Does Not Exist has a lot of 80's cyberpunk, Matrix, Blade Runner, Phil K Dick references.  The fitness thing with the Olivia Newton John and Madonna reference is referring to the common occurrence of 80's fitness models showing up on the covers of a lot of Trevor Something and other Synthwave artist Youtube song-covers.

The last "world" with John Carpenter is referring to Trevor Something's most recent album, "Death Dream" which is hugely inspired by master horror director John Carpenter's self-composed soundtracks, who's signature is simple Casio keyboard themes, ominous bass lines, and a lot of repetition.  (I.e. the "Halloween" theme, "The Thing" theme, "The Fog", etc.).  There is an entire sub-genre of the retro/synthwave genre dedicated to horror-soundtrack music, and in fact one horror-music artist is named "Carpenter Brut". 

Anyway, hopefully it might make a bit more sense.  I will say, this story was written lightning-fast and ergo half- or even quarter-baked as I jammed it out in about 2 hours between 1 and 3 AM.  Any further confusion I will take the hit for and chalk up to caffeine deprivation and working overtime on Neofeud. 

Thanks Gurok!  Yes, I was trying hard for that ancient 80's technology look (That phrase makes me feel so old!).  Lots of rust.  The blue I can't explain without spoilers

I'm having decision paralysis, and find it a common occurrence, in looking for a game to play. 

Talk about what you're playing right now, recommend a game, etc..

The last thing I played was Bitstream, which was a tight little gem.

Awesome game!  Definitely deserves the featured spot on the AGS site.  The audio and visual effects are brilliantly used.  When you have that CRT monitor with text scrolling, is that like a series of full-screen images animating?  Which of the effects are things you do with manipulation in AGS or are they pretty much all created outside AGS?

I use Imgur.com personally, works pretty well and it's fast!

@Monsieur OUXX: Looks great!  Those coals are really smoldering, if that's what they are!  Excellent color scheme too.  So the palette cycling is not visible yet?

I don't want to set the world on fire-

Eat your heart out, Fallout 4. 

Yeah, go ahead and throw it up there!  The more art, the more to BURN! 

Hm.  What was the other competition you made the background for, Frikker?  I don't personally have a problem with you submitting a background you made for another competition, but just know that it may rub some of the community the wrong way. 

Awesome trailer man!  The music and the video totally fit.  That's not all done in AGS is it?  If so that's a lot of good work!

Woohoo!  Yeah this sounds like a blast! 

Pixel brains are awesome.

Frikker: The background I made for the Phone booth competition I did make during the time of the competition with the theme in mind, though I am planning to use it in the game as well.  I guess if the other competitors are ok with it we can admit it.  Or you could be like MONSIEUROUXX and bow yourself out. 

Trevor vaulted his Casio and the tattered remains of his green sheet into the timehole, diving mic-first.

It was coming.  Coming like yesterhour's poorly curated social media self.  Like the divine wrath of a million offended and surrogately-offended millennials.

An edge of cloth was caught on the cookies-and-cream colored spike of VHS static.  "FUUUUUUooooAAAAUUUUCK" Trevor's voice pitchbent in and out of tune, dodging the ninjastar blizzard cast by moldy magnetic video tape.  He yanked himself free plunging through the screen.

The sky was the color of CRT channel 3, the timestamp in phosphorous-white Terminal font screaming at him.  00:00.

They were on him, and close.  Sprinting across a paralellogram of neon #FF0000 gridlines vanishing toward dead-LED black.  A golden isosceles hovered above like a holy low-poly mirage, an Illuminati pyramid, tiered with aliased black lines, as if rendered by the Doom engine.  Climbing to the top, Trevor stood before the God of Death, chiseled of 280 tessellated triangles in the shape of a Jackal-headed man.  Trevor fell to his knees, praying.

"Couldn't be BOTHERED to cast an actual *Egyptian* as Anubis?  SO boycotting this whitewashed crap." 

The major deity Anubis shattered like God in an undergraduate Nietzsche seminar, the shards blown away into a null infinity by the gales of rage. 

"Oooh, baby, baby, baby!" Trevor shielded his face from the hail of geometry with his Mask of Anonymity.  He punched eject, Sony VHS hi-fi servos spinning him through timespace.  "It wasn't my fault!" Trevor thought to himself.  Trevor's only non-white friend was a Syrian ex-pat East Ender, and he'd quit his Molly-hustling gig, fled to Syria for $700/month and a wife.

Trevor shouldered through a titillating army of blinding fuschia leggings and a veritable zoo of animal-print leotards.  Toned legs, windmilling arms doppleganged by video echo into many-armed Hindu icons of health and tackiness.  Led by the Goddess of Pop, in her Jean Paul Gaultier armor, veined biceps throbbing like the heart of a virgin.  Trevor hid behind her iconic cones, haloed by a Vaseline-lens glow. 

"Why do all these women look like Olivia Newton John in that Physical video?  #UnrealisticExpectations"

"Has he ever even SEEN a real woman outside of porn?   For all his womanizing pervert lyrics he probably IS a virgin."

The gym evaporated like a bad dream, the legion of fitness angels falling apart into a tangle of svelte nylon gams, flabless slap-on-braceleted arms, descending lifeless and plastic as parts of Barbie dolls dismembered by goth girls on Christmas morning.  Trevor leapt desperately from limb to limb like they were loose Mario platforms, the crumbling sexy stairway to the music video title card.   

"You're probably fucked up and broke up with your new boyfriend!"  An internet-consuming wall of flame war immolated the limbs like a wax museum in the Dresden Firebombing, nearly disintegrated Trevor into non-existence, but he faded out as the video cut to commercial.  Trevor gulped as he felt his forehead, the edges of his Robert Smith forelock singed off.  It'd crashed his New Retro Wave.

"What the hell is his last name, anyway?  Someone get Anonymous to dox him."

Trevor slipped, fell on his ass, sliding through a pool of red high fructose corn syrup, to the fountain of eternal death.  Pinheads and Kreugers tearing faces off and lacerating claymation flesh with fishing hooks for all eternity.  Jason and Michael Myers stabbing an endless supply of topless hippy chicks, potheads, and booze-guzzling jocks, locked in a slasher's arms-race.   Trevor threw down his Casio into the fountain, surfing the vertical tsunami of exsanguinated teenager blood up to the visage of Lord Carpenter, emerging from the eternal Thunderstorm of Horror Climaxes in an eerie green light. 

Hanging ten on his Casio SA-46 keyboard he toed-out a sawtooth synth riff that was reminiscent of the Thriller theme.

"Sick groove, dude!"  The Lord Carpenter's face boomed, and hummed out a haunting, repetitive bass line. 

"OMG this is so much violence against women.  This is basically mental-rape.  Where are all the strong female psychopath antagonists?  So much underrepresentation!"

"AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!"

The sky-filling Carpenter head exploded like it was pregnant with a Titan-sized chestburster, bloody glaciers of cheek and teeth falling like meteors into the suburban neighborhood below.  Trevor did a 180 on his Casio, barely dodging the red-streaked comet of Lord Carpenter's schnozz.  The head gave birth to the face of Trevor's nightmares, the minor goddess of the Tumblrina Feminazis. 

"SO I'M JUST A THROWAWAY 'minor' GODDESS?!?!  ALL I DO IS CHASE A 'NICE GUY'?!??  THIS IS THE KIND OF CHEUVENISTIC CHILDISH MALE FANTASY STORY THAT RUINS SOCIETY!  THIS STORY DOESN'T EVEN PASS THE BECHDEL TEST: IS THERE EVEN ANOTHER FEMALE CHARACTER WITH *A. SINGLE. LINE. OF. DIALOG.* TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN TREVOR?!?!?!!!  #LostFaithInManity."

The raging, fairly average-looking female face with arty makeup descended to swallow Trevor whole, and he fell, crashing into a pile of picked-clean bones that used to be a Kurt Russel or an Arnold or some other mythological-status, pop cultural male figure.  Other than Tom Hardy <3.   

"I thought you might like it here, you're goth right?" Trevor said, limping away from the mass grave of manhood.

"OMG YOU JUST *ASSUME* THAT I'M 'A SCARY CHICK' CAUSE I LIKE TO DO BIG CAT EYE MAKEUP!?!?"

"Uh, no!  You look nice today?"

"OMG MEN ARE SUCH PIGS!  I'M SICK OF BEING HARASSED!!!"

"(Ignore)"

"SO WE'RE JUST INVISIBLE TO YOU?!  I NEED ATTENTION TOO, ASSHOLE!"

A non-genderedly grey Samsung S6 case the size of an aircraft carrier swung down to squish trevor like a fly, and he rolled into an uninterred zombie grave.  The earth quaked, dirt and nail polish falling into his mouth, choking him.  He stared up, gasping for air at the S6's feed.   A flashflood of butthurt tweets tagged #TrevorGate and #TrevorShouldNotExist that threatened to wipe his internet-famousness from the internet.  His Youtube videos were torn down by bizarre copyright takedown notices.  All his Synthwave friends were unfollowing.  New Retro Wave even cut him from the playlists. 

"NOOO!!!!!!"

Still in horror land, it was incredibly dark, and Trevor had a last-ditch idea.  He tiptoed into a creepy, cobwebbed-filled abandon suburban house, slipping into the closet. 

There was a creak, creak, creak.  Trevor shivered, peeking out through a crack. 

He threw his green sheet over his head, color-keying himself out of the shot, invisible.  "They'll never find me now!"

"Trevor... are you there?  Trevor?  Why didn't you call me back?  Trevor?  Do you still love me."

It was there, in the room.  Impersonating his last summer lover.

"You're searching...  Searching for somebody."  Trevor whispered to himself.  Creak.  Creak.

"Jesus, save me!"  Trevor screwed his eyes shut and whimpered into his mic in terror-ridden prayer, but he was shit out of American Gods.   Then he remembered... the green sheet, it must've been stained red by the blood...

Black nails painted with silver ankhs ripped the sheet off his head.

"JESUS?!?!  WHY IS IT WE'RE ALWAYS FORCED TO PRAY TO A MALE GOD-

"AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"


(And that was how Trevor Something came to Not Exist).

Thanks for the tips, ThreeOhFour, I will definitely check out those Infocom game.  I don't claim any guru-hood or encyclopedic knowledge of gaming history, and I'm from Hawaii which has a very J-oriented geek culture, embedded in a heavily Americanized mainstream.  Adventure games never got quite as big as in places like the UK, certainly not when I was at the age to be able to handle them.  (I got my NES at 5).  Story-wise, I was all about the Fallout(s), and Deus Ex, and I kind of circled back through the college and post-college years to the modern point-n-clicks, the LucasArts and Sierras. 

I do remember interactive fiction being a hot thing at a certain point during the honeymoon phase of the "amazing computer" in the 80's.  Around the time of virtual reality and the Power Glove as I recall. 

OK FINE FINE FINE!  This will be 500 words or less though.  I need to set that hard limit, and I'm posting it here to make sure I hold myself to it.  I'm also going to set a time limit of 30 minutes.  Readysego!

EDIT: Fail.

Great listen, there!  It's always enlightening to hear from the AGS vets.

On the topic of audience expectations of adventure games, and the stereotype that p-n-c adventures are generally a series of silly puzzles- I do tend to agree with Grundislav that the gaming market of the pre-2000's had a very different set of expectations of games.  Games were things that had "gameplay", that you blew $20 at at the arcade after homework (or while skipping homework), were centerpieces for sleepovers, and mom made eggs and waffles the next day when you woke up at 11:00 PM cause you were binging on that Final Fantasy RPG or swearing at each other over Golden Eye, or getting the shit scared out of you by Resident Evil. 

Games were things you played.  Games were for fun.  Being too much a gamer "nerd" was generally frowned upon and could get you swirlied. 

If you wanted a serious story you read a book.  Or watched a movie, maybe.  That was just the cultural millieu of the time, at least I saw it.

It's true that a lot of the adventure games had great storylines, and a lot of players played for the stories, but by and large they were story LINES.  The armature set up that the designers put the "meat" on, the meat being the gameplay. 

It seems to me to be a recent development that games exist as delivery mechanisms for stories.  It's telling there are adventure games nowadays that get labeled, by both creators and players, as "interactive novels", "visual novels" or "interactive fiction".  Point-And-Click Adventures PERIOD.  Dropping the "game".  This wasn't a thing 20, 30 years ago, as far as I know.

It would seem an outgrowth of the ubiquity of gaming, and computers in general, such that staring at screens hitting buttons all the time is not something you get swirlied for, but everyone from prom queens to jocks to successful businessmen/women and even novelists and filmmakers do to exist in modern civilization.  (William Gibson would call it the "eversion of cyberspace"). 

It's not Warner Brothers, Marvel, the President or the Pope who has the most subscribers, the guy with 10 billion views is Pewdiepie, a guy who makes his living letting other people watch him play games.

So you have this mass migration to the world of games, where all the eyeballs and the billions (what is it, a hundred billion industry worldwide?) and it's only natural that a large percentage of these are people who are not into "gameplay" but love story, are writers and directors, and want to push games in that direction.  So we get a lot of focus on story, story, story. 

How can we tell a better story?  How can we develop believable characters?  Why don't certain games make me care about the characters?

I honestly couldn't have given less of a shit, and I'm guessing most people don't either, about the story of Super Mario.  Fantastic game.  I don't need to know how Mario is a down-on-his-luck Italian plumber who always dreamt of opening a spaghetti place, has a crush on a high town WASP debutante who loves pink, and is on a journey of self discovery in the sewers after being laid off during the Reaganomics-era downsizing.  I jump on the angry vampire-mushroom thingies and throw turtle shells at Little-Shop-Of-Horrors plants and all that other Jap-Gonzo-shit that goes on in Mario because the *gameplay* is fun as hell.  I don't need to care why the characters are doing the things they are doing because it is just fun to do the things.  This is a turn-key argument for a whole lot of games.

Now, I say all this being a writer, as well as a game-maker.  I love stories.  I enter that story competition thing on the AGS forums every chance I get.  I am a recovering sci-fi writer-holic. 

I don't want games to not take story seriously, at all.  I chose adventure games and AGS in particular, BECAUSE it lends itself to storytelling, and the audience seems more literate than the average genre.  I loved every single Wadjet Eye game I can get my hands on, and can only hope to aspire to that level of quality storytelling in a game some day.   

Still, I understand where the point-and-click adventure naysayers and complainers are coming from. 

It's possible to just start calling all of these games "interactive visual novels", or "interactive films", but there's a reason we don't, and I think it has at least something to do with the branding that the term "game" still carries.  Like you want to move products on Steam, and Steam sells "games".  People type into Google and look for hashtags with "games", "adventure games", "point and click adventure games".  PC Gamer and Rock-Paper-Shotgun reviews "games".

The branding, and the baggage.  Like that multi-millionairess widower aunt that is a real controlling bitch who criticizes your silly indie films but who you need to butter up and beg for funding every time.  Gaming is a cruel mistress.

This is getting really long, so I will now stop. 

Thanks for the great podcast and good luck with Shardlight, etc!

Thanks Fitz, Blondbraid, and Selmiak for the feedback!

@Fitz: Yeah I know how that goes, I have serious gamedev OCD.  Now that I have a timetable I find it at least a bit easier to short circuit the infinite loop of, "This could be WAY BETTER if X!!!" when it really won't make that much of a difference to the player, especially not for the amount of effort required.  It's easier to think like a producer when you need to, with the Sword of Damocles of that release date over your head. 

This is indeed a one-off anim, although I think I'll need to borrow frames and such for some future animations to save time. 

I thought this read *Guess the Movie Titties* and was immediately disappointed. 

Yes, Neofeud will be full of these over-the-top, insanely detailed animations, whether they kill me through insomnia and arthritis or not. 

I can't help myself getting carried away with blowtorches and Retrofuturism, Nintendo Powerglove cybergadget awesomeness.