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I played WoW for a few months back in 2006, until I was forced by proxy to quit due to abysmal latency on the server I had been playing on, after moving to Japan. As MMOs go, I can certainly see why the game has been so successful, but I've never been much for the whole MMO experience. It can hold my attention for a limited amount of time, but it becomes very apparent very quickly that it's a static world and no matter what you do, there will never be a true final goal.

I think that my motivation for playing games kind of makes me predisposed to disliking persistent online worlds - I like the epic feel of going forward through a dynamic world and making permanent changes through advancement of a larger plotline. Once you realize that destroying the enormous threat to the universe is ultimately not going to make a lick of difference to the world (Since every other of the millions of players in the game are going to eventually do the same thing, and the moment you step out of your instance, that event is right back to where it was before you started).

It's kind of like the hidden treasure on Melee Island in the first Monkey Island game. "Remember, there are other pirates on this Island, so go easy on the treasure. Leave some for the next person."

That said, I do enjoy multiplayer games, and can have fun in an MMO, but they just don't last for me. That said, if WoW went Freemium, I'd probably download it again.

I've got the current version of the new site implemented as my default link for AGS, myself. Anyone who doesn't want to search around for it, the link is right here.

There are still some unimplemented features (marked with a TODO), but it does the trick, the site feels good to browse and I think the design is pretty solid. If CJ decides to change it to the site default, I would be fully behind that. The old/current site surely does what it needs to, but I thought that with all of the community input that went into the new version regardless of their likes/dislikes, it's good and someone ought to be browsing through it.

Is it bad that before reading GreenBoy's explanation I thought that the protagonist in his entry was Peter Molyneux? All it needs is a downtrodden zombie Milo.

Tim Langdell, for those who aren't familiar with him, is one of the more high-profile "Copyright trolls" that has been a thorn in the side of the very industry he claims to be a member of for many years.

He is the CEO of a "game company" called "EDGE", and although he hasn't released anything that uses the Edge name in years (Which is necessary to maintain a copyright - intent to use), he claims rights to any game that utilizes the word 'Edge' in the title, as infringing on his company name. He really worked his way into the spotlight a few years back when he sued Electronic Arts over "Mirror's Edge", and was also involved in long term litigation with a company called Mobigame over their title, "Edge", an iPhone title that was taken down by Apple due to said claim.

In his defense of the ownership of the copyright, he has cited ongoing game development projects, but the only materials he has are years old, and don't hold up in court.

He really smacked the beehive though, recently, when he decided that he wanted to have another go at EA because they refused to back down to his attempted bullying on the Mirror's Edge name (Demanding licensing fees for the use of the name). EA bit back and recently not only were victorious in beating back Langdell's claim that they owe him money for calling their game Mirror's Edge, but the courts as of yesterday ordered that his copyrights be revoked, therefore giving him no grounds to stand on against Mobigame and other companies that have been attacked in the past.

Mobigame is possibly going to pursue litigation against Langdell, and he also faces charges of fraud.

@Calin Leafshade - Thanks so much for the recommendation, Calin - I'm really glad that the game's been so well received. It's been a small, mostly unmarketed release, but it seems people are enjoying it. I really do enjoy this in contrast to the hectic nature of large-scale things. I just hope that everyone's enjoying it.

@Fitz - I used to play the guitar, but mostly I just listen to what's in my head and translate it to notes in my music program (all by hand - I couldn't even begin to dream of playing the piano). I really enjoyed the music in Whispered World as well.

@theo - Thank you very much, it was my girlfriend's favorite animation as well.

Just wanted to note my intent to participate in this one. I don't know how much I can get done, but I'm starting early this time. Already wrote down my plot and main puzzles and have my resource list worked out, so I'm well on my way. Hopefully we see something of a turnout on this one.

@Peder Johnsen - Thank you, Peder, I really appreciate the kind comments, and willingness to give it another shot as well. I think I've managed to make some huge improvements over the original and I really hope that you enjoy it.

@Virgil - Thank you very much! I spent a lot of time on them, even though they're by definition not very detailed.

@Khris - Much appreciated! Simple is definitely a keyword in the entire execution of the game. And I'm really glad it could give you a little creativity boost as well. I've always found that playing something new that I enjoy gives me a lot of inspiration to do more.

@Fitz - Arigatou, it was definitely a labor of love, and keeping everything thematically similar was an interesting task. Trying to avoid dissonance and keep everything in a single palette, while conveying a sense of children's storybook visuals was a really great learning experience. And many, many thanks on the music. It was surprisingly easy to compose once I got through the first bar.

@Sslaxx - Thanks! I don't know if superlatives like that quite fit this humble project, but the praise is very much appreciated.

It depends entirely on what it is that you want to do. If you can set a specific career goal for yourself it will be much easier to end up in the job that you want to be doing.

You said 'Indie' developer. Does this mean that mainstream game development is out? If so, then it's a matter of continuing to build your skills (and your bank balance) until you have the resources necessary, both human and financial, to start a small, short-term project. I absolutely agree with Dave -- as he is a true sage of the indie industry -- that the most time you want to be spending on a project is 6 months, especially in indie. At my company, we've even done large-scale commercial packaged releases with comparably tight development schedules (Though it largely also depends on the scope of your project and how many people are involved).

If you want to get into corporate game development, you'll want to decide what your endgame is. I want to be a producer/director, so I got into the game industry in testing a few years back, and continued to develop small indie projects. I also found that the year of experience I had in sales/recruiting, actually, helped me as well in learning to manage and work with schedules on time-sensitive projects. Now I'm working as an assistant/associate producer at a gaming company here in Japan - Fun fact: My AGS game projects were one of the deciding factors in my hiring.

If you want to work in art, build a portfolio of art in varied styles, both digital and classical, if programming, get your hands on some of the available engines and get your feet wet - saying you have extensive experience with developing independent projects in the Unreal engine looks great on a resume, and the engine is now free to download and learn. Sure, you won't have access to proprietary dev kits, etc., but that's not expected of a freelancer at least right off the bat.

Just bear in mind, when you work on games full time, gaming is also a full time job. I know it's a stupid thing to say, but it's as much a 9-to-5 as any other business, and you don't have room for burnout or exhaustion. That said, it's one of the funnest industries to work in, and it's packed full of great, awesome and like-minded people. It's a job that people do because they're passionate about it.

And that's the last thing - never lose your passion for it. Be ready for grind, be ready for the un-fun stuff, and it will be all worth it when you get the chance to play your finished game, and every time you get a positive comment from someone else who has played it as well (Though on the internet, positivity can be a rare commodity, so learning to be a little thick-skinned helps, too).

Darius - feel free to criticize if you like. It certainly is what it is, but I'm still happy to hear what people liked and didn't like about it, so that I can better myself as a game creator.

Thanks for the feedback everyone - it's nice to see people enjoying something you poured your heart into. I really like doing independent work, as you get a lot more honest and direct feedback than with commercially distributed games. And this is a labor of love anyway.

@bicilotti - Thank you very much. I thought that by not adding in speech or other unnecessary text, the game allows the player to focus more on other, and in this case more important parts of the experience. I wanted to get my point across with movement, sound and where absolutely necessary simple representations of concepts.

@Bulbapuck - I'm surprised anyone remembers my Demo from back around the beginning of the year. I announced it and it was kind of swept aside by bigger, more ambitious projects. I hope you enjoy playing it - it's very minimalistic, but was a blast to make.

@mode7 - Glad to hear the style is appealing; I was hoping to go for something of a 'storybook' feel to it. As far as your MAGS game is concerned, pure coincidence, but great minds do think alike (and all things considered, it is a pretty common theme). Good luck on your release! Looking forward to seeing it.

[The Story:]

SpacePirateCaine presents:

(Kuma Story)

Kuma Story was originally created as an anniversary gift to my girlfriend, Da Young (to whom this game is dedicated), for our 3-year anniversary. It grew to its current form in time for our 4th and I have created a non-anniversary edition for everyone else as of today. I’m happy to say she enjoyed it very much and allowed me to continue with the game, and share it with the rest of the world. So this is our Gift to you.

The game is meant for a less hardcore adventure gaming audience, so most of you should find it to be extremely easy (A seasoned adventure gamer may take less time to read this post than to finish the game). The concept revolves around a series of small, self-contained puzzles where the protagonist, "Kuma Bear" is doing nice things for his girlfriend, "Cinnamon Bear".

Please note that what little text there is in the game is generally in Japanese. There is nothing specifically important written at any point as Kuma Story is intended to be a short, mostly text-less adventure game, playable and accessible by anybody in any language. The choice to render the existing text in Japanese was made as it's the common language between myself and the person the game is dedicated to.

Outside Kuma Bear's home, and in a windy field

Please download from the AGS Database entry, viewable here, or download it directly from Mediafire.

The Story:
It’s Kuma Bear’s anniversary with his girlfriend, Cinnamon Bear. He is hoping to surprise her on their anniversary with a small present, but doesn’t have anything to give to her yet. Help Kuma Bear find something nice to give to Cinnamon Bear, and a way to surprise her with it.

Playing the Game:
The game interface is meant to be very simplified - only consisting of 'walk' and 'interact'. Not all objects in the game can be interacted with, but most of the important objects stand out, so they shouldn’t be hard to find.

Left click: Kuma Bear will walk to the specified location
Right click: Kuma Bear will interact with the specified object


Credits:
All art, animations, music, story and scripting: Luke "SpacePirateCaine" Rideout
Special Thanks to Shane "ProgZmax" Stevens for scripting advice
Massive props go out to Chris "Pumaman" Jones for creating this amazing engine.

If you have any comments, questions or criticism, I would love to hear from you all. Thank you for downloading and playing, and I hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.

Hey folks, long time no see. Haven't really had time or energy to participate around here much recently, but saw this today while checking for industry news, and thought I'd share - you may need an account at Gamasutra to read:

Best Of Indie Games: Here Comes a New Challenger (Gamasutra)

Game Pick: 'Eternally Us' (Ben Chandler and Steven Poulton, freeware)
"Eternally Us is a short adventure game that tells the story of Fio and Amber, two friends who have known each other since childhood. An incident occurs that separates the both of them while they were feeding birds in a park, so it is up to the player to help reunite the best buddies together again."

The featured screenshot was immediately recognizable. Here's to AGSers making big waves!

Links to IndieGames Blog.

I'd really like for there to be some proof of life on Mars. For humankind in general, this is very unlikely to have all that huge of an impact - until the general populace can witness with their own eyes said life, I don't imagine it very likely to even shake the faith of people who religiously believe that life is unique on Earth, since faith would likely lead most to deny that the reports are accurate.

It's as likely as not that the only life we're likely to find on Mars would be a handful of extremophiles which are capable of living in the hostile environment of Mars. Still no intelligent life, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction for those of us who believe that statistically, there must be life elsewhere, considering the size of our universe. I have doubts we'll ever see any that aren't microscopic, but between Mars and Titan, we may conclude that life is far more likely than originally suspected. If as many as 3 locations in our solar system alone are populated, then there are likely to be lonely primordial soups elsewhere waiting to evolve.

Assuming that space truly is infinite, and there is some way to travel on the interstellar level that doesn't mess with the theory of relativity, then it's also likely there is a species out there that has the capability to do so. Whether they would be able to find us is also very unlikely, but at least it could be inspiration and spark a little more interest in some good science fiction, which I do so love to read.

Just to put in my two cents, and ignore the larger debate going on in the thread, I wanted to say that I'm an infrequent migraine sufferer, myself. I fortunately only suffer one, maybe two a year (Though they tend to come at inopportune times. I managed to find myself in the middle of one on Christmas Eve six or seven years ago).

In regards to reflexology and acupuncture, I live in east Asia (Japan, with a fair amount of time spent in South Korea), where these practices are very common and relatively highly regarded. I, myself, haven't used them nor do I practice them but my SO swears by acupuncture, and has an acupuncturist she visits from time to time when the headaches get bad. The effects may or may not be psychosomatic, but she seems to find relief from them, so I am glad she does it.

That aside, I'd like to address more specifically the migraines themselves - assuming she is suffering migraines.

In my case, I have learned to recognize the warning signs of an upcoming migraine. I start to lose peripheral vision, and certain spots within my line of sight, often near the center, become 'blanked out' for lack of a better term (I'd describe it as limited blindness, where I lose sections of my vision, but my mind attempts to fill in the blank by extrapolating from surrounding sources). If I find myself talking to someone and being unable to see their face except at an angle, then I know I'm in for a ride.

When you feel a migraine coming on, the best idea is to get somewhere dark (and in my case cold), to lay back with your head on something soft and gently apply consistent pressure to the point where your neck and skull meet. It seems to help relieve some of the building pressure. I find it usually best to try to sleep, because your day is shot anyway, and better to be unconscious through the worst of it.

An excess of caffeine or physical exertion seems to be the leading causes for me. Your friend should avoid any unnecessarily rigorous exercise, outside of her normal routine (If she already runs on the treadmill or does the 30-day shred, then just ratchet it back a little, perhaps), and try to stick to water instead of coffee or other drinks.

Not sure if any of my advice will be useful, everybody has a unique body and some things work better than others for different people, but can't hurt to try... At least not any more than the headaches.

Alright, I'm home. Have been for a while, but didn't jump right on top of it. But I'm all about the learning.

So, as a picture is worth a thousand words, let me start by saying this:



You will note that there are two sets of red lines that converge at 2 points on a single, horizontal line. Not all of the lines are perfectly aligned, but by and large, you can see that the room very much still follows 'the rules'.

Now, even though each of the vanishing points is a good 2/3 of a whole screen off to either side of our actual game screen, you can see that it still looks a bit squished. Fortunately for this picture, it doesn't suffer for this - as a more 'cartoony' looking game, the brothers Schlaepfer can get away with a little creative license in the way that lines look. You can curve some lines slightly to fit your purposes, but all in all, if you don't at least try to follow the rules, things are going to start messing with your mind.

Now, I'd like to point out a few glaring issues and also offer hypotheses as to why they happened. First being the stairs. That area to the right of the cauldron with a very steep line that doesn't go anywhere near the left VP. Why? Well, I can think of two reasons: one is that because of the discrepancy, your eye actually is naturally attracted to it. Most people don't envision VPs, so it looks 'wrong', but you can't be sure why. That will certainly help when you're looking for the exit from the room and can't find it. The other being that if he followed the rules, the whole stair area would be very small and cramped, and encroach on the dolphin statue's space. Sometimes you need to make a concession in order to put emphasis on something.

The other, and less of a big issue, is the table on the bottom right, with the picture on it. In this case, the table firstly could theoretically be on an angle - since we don't have a point of reference, we can't be for sure - and secondly, the table, if following the rules completely, would take up too much foreground space and start detracting from playable space. It's foreground filler.

Anyway, the point I've been trying to make is that good backgrounds come from knowing how to make one.

Now, you are saying you don't really want to learn to make backgrounds, and if that's the case, no problem at all! But you did post the background in the Critic's Lounge and ask for critique - so that's what we're giving you. Ultimately, if you're happy with it, then that's all that really matters, right?

Bigbrother's background there from Apprentice uses 2-point linear perspective, instead of 1. Generally, I encourage first-time background artists to stick to 1-point because it eliminates half of the work involved in perspective drawing - that, and if done incorrectly can have some very strange effects, and can be very difficult to use as a functional game background. If nobody beats me to it between the time I leave my office and get home, I'll show you how it follows the rules, and how it breaks them the right way.

BB has a very well-established background in both realistic and exaggerated images (like the one you cited).

To put it extremely simply, though, 2-point linear perspective, instead of assuming that facing walls are either directly facing the viewer, or directly perpendicular to their line of sight, that the viewer is looking at the room at an angle (as deep or shallow an angle as the artist wishes).

The main issue with 2-point is that in order to really achieve a realistic effect, the vanishing points on your horizon need to be far, far apart, which is exceedingly difficult to do by hand or on a computer. It doesn't have to be, but the closer the VPs are, the more of a 'fish-eye' effect the image is subject to.

"Maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all..."

NEXT: "Oh, so that's where I left it..."

Very well made character art, Jim. Looks like you've managed to put together a well-established character template and run with it. It's almost sad to think that you have no intention to use these in a game, but I'm sure that you'll put the skill you've gained in the process to good use.

Might I suggest one extra step that I use often in my own art? It's easier to notice when a character has a drastic lean or seems unnatural if you flip an image horizontally - It's best to do this frequently during the creation of a character. Another rule of thumb when drawing a human is to keep in mind that in order to maintain balance, a human needs to keep their feet on either side of their 'center of balance'. If a person leans forward, they compensate by pushing their bums out, bending their knees and otherwise making sure that the amount of weight surrounding their center is equal.

There are some ways to do this in drawing, and during action shots it can be harder with more weight being distributed to one foot or another, but if a body is too far behind or ahead of the feet, it will naturally look like a  character is falling over. In an idle standing stance, you should likely be able to draw a straight line from the top of the head to the area between the feet.

Progz fixed the overweight character by changing the legs to a wide stance, the other option would be to draw the left (Right side in the image) leg in further, to create a sort of bowed stance.

And as a side note (With the exception of Haloa's edit), what adult content are you referring to?

Ahoy there,

I've taken a look at the room, and I don't really think the color scheme is nearly as hard to deal with as others have said. The problems I've noticed with the room, primarily, are some perspective issues here and there, that if fixed, would make the room feel a lot easier on the brain.

Your table shows some perspective, but generally speaking most of the items in the room are a bit out of whack and could use a little tweaking. The biggest issue I see is in the staircase - it looks as though the bottom flight is nestled right up against the wall, but then it inexplicably turns left to create an almost escherian 'impossible' extra flight of stairs. Unless your wall is curved or very oddly cut, you wouldn't likely be able to see the stairs beyond the turn.

Aside from that, a lot of your objects have parallel lines when they should be all going towards a consistent vanishing point (If you're not familiar with this term, let me know and I'll elaborate).

Sometime back in the first quarter of '09 I drew up a pair of animated tutorials about linear perspective, that might help you see where the problems are:


Simple One-point Perspective


Bookshelves in one-point linear perspective

The image seems to be coming from a pretty high angle, so it's not a problem that you can see the tops of most items, but some things - like the top of the couch, for example - you should be able to see the top of but can't. If you get stuck with any of those points, let me know and I'll see if I can whip up a paintover sometime soon.

Final point of critique, which has been mentioned also by Kconan, the room looks very empty - I think you went in the wrong direction taking the umbrella holder out - what the room could really benefit from is more clutter and items sitting about - books on the bookshelf, maybe a magazine or two on the table, potted plant - bring back your drapes over the windows, just play with them a bit until they seem more drapey, and so on and so forth. At the moment it doesn't really come across as lived-in.

[Edit:]

I really like having the link to the voting pages there individually, but I thought I'd take it a step further and provide links for easy download and access to all of the MAGS games this year so people wouldn't have to take that extra step. Enjoy!

Steamsquares
The Secret Plan 1 - Running to Stand Still
Soul's Quest
A Place Without Frontier
Writer's Blocks - Tech Demo

The order in which I posted is slightly different from Dualnames's, but I've doublechecked, and this is all of the games. Enjoy!

Edit: Some of the links seem broken, I am working on finding valid links. If anyone has links for The above, unlinked files, please let me know and I will link them.

Edit #2: Dual has added download links to the first post, so I've gotten rid of mine, keeping only a list of the as-of-yet undownloadable games. I'm fairly certain I have a copy of 'A Place Without Frontier', as I was the topic-creator that month. I'm searching for it and will upload it to Mediafire temporarily if I can find it.