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Ah, yeah that is good to know. Does anyone here play adventure games on their tablets?

Interesting; let me ask you this then: would a game being available on Mac be influential in whether or not you buy it? As I understand it, most AGS games don't appear to work for Mac, unless I'm mistaken.

Are there many folks who play point and click adventure games who use Macs? Do any of you personally use Macs?

I'm of course on a PC and only have access to Windows but I'd be interested to know if there's a significant percentage of Mac users, or if it's very few to none. Thanks!

Silver Spook Podcast #10 - Spinnortality: a game where you, "Run a global megacorporation. Manipulate culture, destroy governments and become immortal."

In this episode, Silver Spook speaks with Jamie Patton, creator of Spinnortality, a groundbreaking cyberpunk strategy game in mid-Kickstarter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq4HSVOAAGc&feature=youtu.be

Spinnortality website: https://spinnortality.com/

Spinnortality kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

Follow Jamie: https://twitter.com/james_d_patton

Just made this new Neofeud cover art for Itch.io (where Neofeud is on sale, by the way!). Let me know what you guys think!

EDIT: If you've been thinking about it, Neofeud is 33% off this week on Steam!



I will also be streaming live on Thanksgiving at 2PM Eastern Time! Join in! https://www.youtube.com/user/twiliteminotaur

Yeah I was just thinking of a soft-serve ice cream machine but serving some sort of mango-orange sherbet!

But yes, looking amazing! As a guy from an island with actual erupting volcanoes on it and who lives on a cooled lava flow, I can say that the depiction looks pretty accurate!

Updates are looking good! Best of luck with this.

Thanks Kyriakos! it is a lot of work for sure, but I'm glad that I've got at least one out there.

Well, here's a the latest work on a new and extra cyberpunkish character design:



And here's the livestream while working on her:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKvBhECPRP0

Greetings cyberspatials!

I'm happy to announce that I'm currently in the process of fleshing out the world, characters, and story of:



Here's a brief excerpt: "Queen Sybil The Good, First Comrade of The Egalite Cooperative, Breaker of Chains, Neofeudal's Bane, Mistress of The Multiverse" #amwriting

Secondly, I am currently attempting to get Neofeud ported to Mac!



If anyone has interest in a Mac version of Neofeud, please let me know as I'd like to gauge the interest in a Mac port before I commit too many resources there. If you have a bit of time and the right hardware to test a Mac port, also let me know, thanks.

@Blondbraid: Yeah, the social safety net would be great. Unfortunately I'm from cyberpunk dystopian US where the safety net is being thrown into the gutter, college education is insanely expensive and a new form of mass-slavery / peonage / wealth confiscation, and you need to work three jobs to live beyond a subsistence level. The people who take risks in the US are those who have rich parents or trust funds to fall back on.

We were living basically in a closet, and were literally homeless for a period of time during the development of Neofeud, and I was working another job the entire time.

I'm actually intrigued enough in the underlined portion to be interested in potential future projects with you (and/or your team) over the next few years.

Thanks for soldiering through that novella of a post! Unfortunately I'm not quite at the Gabe Newell, nerd-baller level of revenue, so I can't yet shell out cash to indie devs, but I am certainly trying with all my might. I will keep you in mind for the future, though!

This may be slightly off-topic, but on the 'we indies need to stick together' / networking note; I am currently trying to port Neofeud to Mac, and if anyone has done that, I'd be interested in talking. Perhaps in message so as not to clutter this thread.

I recently posted about pretty much this exact topic in the Adventure Gaming section of the RPG Codex.

My game "Neofeud" is (apparently) the one large-scale commercial game released this year using the AGS engine, and I've gone through the 2017 indie game wringer / Steam "200+ games per month flood" gauntlet, and these are basically my thoughts:

Thanks for the shoutout! (This is the creator of Neofeud) I have to agree that the 'Great Flood' of games has meant a bigger denominator splitting up the attention provided to each adventure game. Being a one-person developer myself, that has proved incredibly challenging. I like to joke that simply being a fiction writer is essentially a public display of delusional schizophrenia, in that you're inventing grand lies for hundreds of pages, flipping between personalities (characters) all day long, and then people shell out cash for your recorded insanity. Being a solo indie dev where you're jumping between writer, artist, programmer, musician all day is like that, but magnitudes worse!

But the hardest part, for me at least, has been the business and marketing hat. I literally spent eight hours or more every day for the last two months sending out press requests to over 1,000 websites, youtubers, streamers, bloggers, etc. as well as posting to social media, sites, etc.. A lot of the indie press' response has been, "We have a thousand indie games on our plate right now! But we'd love to get to you!" but there have been some articles such as this one on IndieGames.com.

Unfortunately, I believe that article there was the biggest media splash Neofeud has had yet. I have been throwing the kitchen sink and everything short of a demonic ritual sacrifice to get RPS to cover my game, and after several pitch attempts I doubt even WannaCry ransomeware could help me get a signal boost from PC Gamer. And it's fine. I understand.

Add to this the scourge on the indie and small-scale game landscape that is asset flipping, which has caused some players to be turned off to the entire Unity *engine*, let alone taking a chance on some small, as-yet-unknown indie point-and-click-adventure, and it's just made the already tough nut of a sustainable adventure game business an almost adamantium shell.

I absolutely have hope for the adventure game genre, though. I had essentially given up on not only game development, but games generally, around 2013. I had worked for a couple mobile game companies, and a retired Microsoft executive who moved to Hawaii to start a game company. (I'm from Hawaii -- fun fact, unlike most mid-life crises which involve splurging on Lambos, when Silicon Valley types see a grey hair, they move to Hawaii and start a game company.) Unfortunately, making The Next Flappy Bird, or working on the next Texas Hold'em, where the biggest creative input we had was, "Do you think Suicide Jack's knife would look better in the left ear, this version?" along with the backstabbing and layoffs that came when the LA big fish came down and hostile mergerized the place put me off game dev for a long time.

But then, sometime around 2013, having resigned to teaching*, office drudgery, and possibly aspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters, I played a game called Primordia. It blew my frickin' mind open. And then I read that it was created essentially 'on the side' by three guys, and the bits of neural tissue and skull that was left of my mind, also exploded. I said, "You know what? If three guys can do this in their spare time, I bet one guy/gal could do it all if they set their mind to it." So I went down to part-time at the dayjob(s), and cut a deal with my wife to give me a good year and a half to take one good shot at a commercial indie game company, and got to working 12 hours a day. As an aside, my #1 tip for any aspiring indie developer is to marry a Canadian, because anyone else will divorce your sorry ass when you tell them you're going to go make video games for a living.

I will say, hands down, the best games I have played in the last two decades have come from teams of ten or less, and often one. All the Wadjet Eye titles, Primordia. I don't know how many were on West of Loating exactly, but I'm guessing not a lot. This is my opinion, of course, and though I actually started out in the 3D FPS and 'immersive sim' space (my biggest project before Neofeud was a Deus Ex 1 mod called Terminus Machina), I am now a die-hard adventure lover.

It has been absolutely a tough gig, trying to get visibility as a small fish, but you know what? I wouldn't trade indie dev for ten million dollars and tech lead at any AAA studio or almost any other job. I've worked in corporate / government monstrosities -- I actually made an entire game about it called Neofeud, hah! -- and I can tell you, even just having made the rent money** with revenue thus far from Neofeud, I have never been happier in my life. I have met the most amazing, dedicated, passionate people in the adventure game and indie world. I feel constantly supported and loved, rather than soul-destroyed and filled with self-loathing, that I was at the former places. I would be happy to make enough from gamedev to pay for a roof, food, and maybe get some brakepads for my squeaing 1994 Toyota, but all the rest of the money I would be throwing back into paying other creative and passionate folks to join me in a small team, and funding other indie projects.

Because I don't want to live in a world that is filled only with toxic military-industrial complex propaganda FPS's, asset flips, infotainment, 50 Shades of Grey, et. al..

There are so, so, so many games coming out right now, and it's indietopia... and it's also a nightmare to sort through. Steam doing away with Greenlight and adding Direct was a good move. But ultimately I feel it's up to these global networks of passionate creators and fans to boost the signals of these countless hidden gems. They are out there, I swear, so many of them, it is just a matter of finding*** them and helping them be found.

I am absolutely hopeful.


*Teaching has been immensely rewarding, and I continue to do it. Doubly so, as I was teaching 'at-risk' youth in the inner-city where I lived, who really needed it. I do still continue to teach, I help home-school my two kids along with Mrs. Silver Spook, and provide a STEM / robotics education guru of sorts to families in the community where I live. If anyone is considering it, it is highly, highly recommended.

**I am also freelance writing on the side to make a little extra cash right now, and trying to grow some food on our little homestead out here!

***To that effect: immediately go and check out The Journey Down 3!

With a brief addendum, given a month and a half more hindsight: I do believe that creating a sustainable, financially viable studio is quite, quite difficult, even if you have a high quality indie game. I recently spoke with Mark Yohalem of Primordia, and he has a good point that there are indie games coming out nowadays on par or surpassing Primordia on platforms like Steam at an astonishing rate, unlike 2012 when you could count Greenlit releases on two hands each month, let alone adventures. Mark is also correct that making enough money to sustain interest is one thing, but there are a lot of great indie games being released with literally less than a dozen *purchases*. Even if you're not worried about financial viability, if no one is playing your games, it can be difficult to continue shouting out into the darkness.

The competition is just extremely fierce, and in my opinion, the onus is now on creators to really build their own brands, or hire someone to do so, have network / premier Twitch/Youtuber connections to find and cultivate those markets. The game (no pun intended) is changing at lightning fast speeds, nowadays, both on the indie and the AAA scene.

I also have two separate interviews with Wadjet Eye Games' Primordia and Technobabylon creators respectively, and this topic is hit on, with a variety of insights, in both podcasts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECLA5PVCcgM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqiAvh0p81A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFJFtJjxs8s&t=25s

Silver Spook Live #27 - Neofeud II, Venezuelan Cyberpunks, AI-Generated Digital Heroin.

In this episode, I discuss some ideas that came up during my chat with Mark Yohalem writer of Primordia in the podcast this week, including the rapidly evolving nature of the game industry, the eerie rise of F2P, microtransactions, arena-style spectator-e-sports and the impact on adventure games and other narrative, single-player games, why VA-11 HALL-A Cyberpunk Bartender Action is possibly the most cyberpunk game based on its origins, and much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqiAvh0p81A&feature=youtu.be

In this episode, Silver Spook speaks with Mark Yohalem, writer of Primordia, a legendary sci-fi point-and-click adventure game and a big inspiration behind Neofeud.

Mark and yours truly discuss the State of Adventure Games which somewhat resembles that of Schrodinger's Cat (never quite alive or dead!), Primordia and the making thereof, Mark's exciting new 'mythological, mid-apocalypse RPG' in development with Wormwood Studios,  some insider game-dev shop-talk, Unity vs Adventure Game Studio pros and cons, Mark's and my favorite cyberpunk, the difference between depressing and melancholy, the psychological selling-points of post-apocalypses, why appellate lawyers may be cannibal shishkebabs in said apocalypse, and much more!

Wormwood Studios (Mark's indie game company): http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/

Follow Mark on Twitter: http://www.wormwoodstudios.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeQCojPR38M

In this episode, Silver Spook discusses the problem in the game industry of the norm of "crunch time" -- extreme, often unpaid overwork -- that causes physical and mental health problems, exploits workers financially, even causes divorces and children with absent parents, while executives continue to make millions or billions. What it is, why it happens, and some potential pathways to changing this damaging and exploitative practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ4ndfekZhg

In this episode, I implement some item interactions in Dysmaton, fix some walk-area/walk-behind issues, implement an infrared vision mode for a scene.

Silver Spook also discusses crunch-time, unpaid overtime, poor-mental/physical health norms plaguing the game industry (especially AAA), why they should be changed, and some ideas on how they could be changed.

Mrs. Silverspook and I are about halfway through this and are loving it to death!

Yeah, Neofeud is becoming a reality, except ironically, it's the human females who are property and the immigrants who are all still slaves in Saudi Arabia, while the "Hot White Robot Woman" has "rights".

Just give it a few years. We'll have the Gortzel-Takeda consciousness test out there to turn more people into pets and livestock soon, along with the non-hot robots.

Of course, this is nothing new, if you're a minority/immigrant/marginalized person in much of America, which is another big point of Neofeud.

Cyberpunk dystopia is here, it's just mostly ignored by mainstream media. But the pockets of suffering are growing and will be everywhere, soon, and we'll all be joined with the defective robots.

More Dysmaton work, plus, to get in the Halloween spirit, Silver Spook cosplays as a character from Neofeud!

(I have the video set to jump to the part where I enact a scene from Neofeud, in the voices I played for two of the main characters; Karl Carbon, and The Six Billion Dollar Baller. )

https://youtu.be/qltKyDFXx38?t=1h31m54s

Thanks, Blondbraid! I have also just recently seen that video, and I'm glad that both Neofeud and Dysmaton seem to have dodged the biggest cyberpunk cliches (neither of the protagonists are detectives or hackers, for example!).  Also, having a group that actively fights for the rights of the marginalized people (sentients) is a theme in Neofeud, and I'm looking at working more of that sort of material into Dysmaton.

I do strongly believe that writers, game devs, film makers, etc. need to make cyberpunk *PUNK* again. But I guess it's the never-ending paradox of living in an actual cyberpunk society dominated by a corporate/political elite -- the cyberpunk reality itself "will never be televised" precisely because it is against the interests of the elite who run the corporations that fund, market, and distribute the books, games, movies. Public Enemy is still "fighting the power", but they will never be televised, because they aren't "fit for popular consumption" (could destabilize the elite-manufactured consensus reality). So we only get gangsta rap trash that glorifies consumerism, getting 'bling', pimping, boosting cars, etc..  Same thing on the punk end (mall-punk is just about getting drunk, having sex, break ups)

But there is always the indie scene, and that's always where real punks of all stripes will always be.

The (cyber)punk game revolution will not be AAA, bitches! It will not be lootboxed, Massively-Multiplayer, or featured on game sites!

Yeah, the Tyrell "Future Palace" vibe was definitely something I was trying to allude to, there.

In other news, while doing work on Dysmaton, I will be live, in costume, AS NEOFEUD CHARACTERS tomorrow, at 4 PM Eastern Time!

One of these two main guys that I voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3GX7kHRK-Q&t=6s

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