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Awesome!

I've been pretty squeezed for time/energy as of late, but I will throw (shoot?) in at the last moment so no one wins by default.  Can't promise anything extensive, but it will have a pro/antagonist who uses their own stored kinetic energy to fire a weapon(s).

Looks stellar!

I need to know what the HAL button does!  Like, does it bring the ominously maleficent dysfunctioning AI online?  What purpose could this have in a point and click!?  I'll need to pre-order and Kickstart this just for that! 

If it's just a Hotdog And Lasagna drone-delivery button or something, I'm going to be really sad though.  (JK, I love hotdogs!)

Keep up the good work, Slasher!

@Fitz: Thanks! Yeah, it took a while for this to come together.  I have been watching some digital painting tutorials recently and just realized that I have no idea what the hell I am doing when it comes to painting, or at least, it is completely different from any of the tutorials.  I have a general vision of what I think the scene needs to be about based on the story, "An underground hangout for a gang of robots in a junkyard" and then tend to paint bits of lighting first, and play a sort of Rorschach Test on myself.  "What is this supposed to be; a piston?  A bar table?  An Atari arcade box?  Ok!"  This method, if it can be called a method, just seems to work for me, for some reason. 

Also, good luck up there in Poland.  Hopefully things won't descend STRAIGHT to the world of Elysium up there. 

@AnasAbdin: Thanks!  Lighting is one of my favorite parts of design.  I'm planning to do a few custom-lit character animations, for when the characters step out of daylight and into this dark 80's-neon cyberpunk dive.  Like, dark figures with stylized fluorescent highlights around them.  Even if this will probably be a ton of work, it will be a whole lot of fun too, if I can pull it off!

By painterly, I just mean less straight lines and matte colors, and more like you hand-painted everything with a brush and ink.  More random non-straight lines, gradients, etc.

You have a bunch of straight-line-tool black that are paint bucketed in, everything looks very exact.  Lines are going to be perfectly straight across objects, so if you throw in one sudden jarring alteration -- like the table with legs out of alignment with the top and the wall -- then it just kind of looks like you screwed up or got lazy. 

Maybe I just don't like Cartoon Network's art style.  It's possible! 



In Primordia, one of my all-time favorite point-n-clicks, you've got almost no straight lines.  But the entire world is stylized with wild paint strokes that look like melting wax, and the entire world perspective is fish-eyed and subjective, so a weird perspective here and there doesn't look out of place.

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"It's not like I'm using. It's like my body's developed this massive battery acid addiction."

Go with the second if you have a short game with a highly specific theme.  It will stand out, due to, as mentioned, it HURTS to play.

Maybe make the game a rumination on living with fibromyalgia and/or synethesia.

If you're going to do a warped perspective, maybe make it slightly more consistently dysfunctional, or you'd need to alter the art style IMHO.  The MS Paint, highly digitized, straight-lines-n-fill-colors doesn't lend itself to fish-eye type views.  Have to go more painterly, but that is more work.

I find this Scorpion creature, uh, highly attractive!   



I give you Head Lock, the antifreeze-addicted robotic assassin, who is not alone at the bar because of his menacing appearance, but because of his paralyzing social anxiety disorder. 

The second one looks like the ASSEMBLY art I was forced to generate in COMP SCI 301 in college in a language once removed from binary.  I may be slightly biased.

Being deep into neonification of my setpieces of late myself, I say go with style #2. 

Although story and atmosphere you're going for in the game are probably pretty important. 

Looks good though, good luck either way!

@Fitz: That must be quite the emotional rollercoaster!  What country are you in exactly?

@selmiak: I hadn't heard of ttip but it sounds a lot like the TPP!  Which is not so good!

Also, here's a very early stage "Process Shot" of a place metonymously and mysteriously named "The Arcade".

Don't want to give away too much, but let's just say the bar 'tap' literally taps into the counter of the bar.



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Thanks Fitz for the comment and really getting the look that I was going for!  There's some direct inspiration from scrapland futurescapes featured in Elysium, with the cast-off, necropolis remnants of Los Angeles being taken over by favela sprawl, slum dogs, revolutionaries, and artist-gangsters (like Die Antwoord). 

Here I'm definitely trying to capture that near-future, refugee-overloaded Earth.  I hadn't intended it when I began working on this section of Neofeud but it's been frighteningly topical over the past few weeks with Europe "struggling to cope with the march of misery" and Donald Trump's bombastic anti-immigrant rhetoric rocking the media.

I'm pretty shit at archery so this story should be terrible interesting.

I finished the game but there seems to be a weird bug in the gameplay. Mind if I PM it to you?

SHADOW

The bug has been fixed, along with a few other issues having to do with the final bit involving unintentional fire-crossing.

Hope it works ok now!

So I've decided to revisit an oldie-but-goodie of the point-n-click adventure games, Dreamweb, but have tried to do it in an irreverent and funny way.

I've never actually completed the game myself, so the frustration is all real!

[embed=960,720]http://youtu.be/BYa4wKUv0CU[/embed]

[SilverSpook]

  Finally, the bronze lifeboat of buoyancy goes to SilverSpook.  If I were not the contest administrator your piece would have certainly got some votes from me.  I'm not saying it was the best piece, but the word-play and concept were fantastically clever.  I don't have enough room to cite all my favourite excerpts, but a few include:

I missed competitive retro-gaming from my 8x10 coffin apartment in The Shelter...
The fuzz be crossin' our quanza streams and shit...
After being transcranial-magnetically-tortured for subjective millennia, his skull-chassis would be mounted on a skymansion wall, next to the taxadermied heads of Siberian tigers, cloned mammoths, and liberal senators.
...known thenceforth as ‘The Kill Shot War', for the technique of the resistance fighters who held their firearms sideways, gangsta style.

...and so on.  I also thought the character of Proto-J was funny enough, but the alternate reality where he becomes El-Presidente easily made him my favourite creation of the competition.  On the down side, the piece was hard to get into and I had to read the beginning twice to really understand the set-up.  It's not that the beginning was any more densely written than the rest, but it was a bit overwhelming right off the bat without the reader having any bearings to keep him involved in the story.  Also, the characters perceive the "bubble" that they are stuck in as more of a threat than a source of salvation, which doesn't quite jive with the theme of "lifeboat".  But I critique because I love: great work!

...The Fortnightly Writing Competition!!

Wow, thanks Baron for the thorough and uplifting feedback!  Thanks also for really trying and soldiering on through my often-convoluted, overcompressed writing style!   I often don't know quite know how much explanation to retract from a given story to hit that sweet spot of "poetic yet intelligible" but your comments are invaluable in this regard.  Thank you also for picking up on all the little turns of phrase, wordplay, and sometimes obscure reference jokes/satire!  It makes the often exruciatingly isolating act of writing bearable.  (It's excruciating for me, anyway!)

The "gangsta robot" Proto-J is also one of my favorite all-time characters, and if I could make an entire AGS game just about him, I surely would, and possibly will.

@JudasFm: Really liked the light-as-sanctuary concept, and it gave me a very... Pitch Black vibe, as in the Vin Diesel sci-fi movie in the Riddick franchise.  The suspense was well-maintained, with the little descriptions of sounds from the dangerous darkness thrown in here and there.  I was thoroughly creeped out!

@Sinitrena: Probably the most solidly, airtightly wound and unwound yarn!  Straight and lucid detective fiction of a high caliber!

Thanks all for a great competition, good luck on the next!

Thanks AnasAbdin, it only took me all week to do it!  (Kind of kidding but also not really!)


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Best Character: Sinitrena
Best Scenario: JudasFm
Most Suspenseful: Sinitrena
Best Writing Style: JudasFm
Cleverest Ending: JudasFm

If you're going to have a lightning flash in there, you've got to put a bit more glow / illumination around it.  Lightning is like God's Kodak camera flash.  At least the clouds around the bolt itself should be lit up like an upside down birthday cake.

Also I'd say everything looks pretty good, very moody. 

Just my opinion, but I'd say think about what your game is really about, what is your special sauce, and try to sell that harder in the screenshot.  You don't want to suffer the "hundredth-best Indian restaurant" syndrome.  Post-apocalyptic games are a dime a hundred-dozen nowadays so you really need to differentiate and hammer out your niche.  My two cents anyway, maybe you've already got your customer base pre-ordering faster than Deus Ex diehards salivating in front of an E3 expo Humanity Divided trailer.