Messages

[or]

Technical Information:
"It should be noted that the catalog, as a
PDF file, does not copy any information
or your website" - I'm not sure if this is supposed to be "of"?
"Youtube" should be "YouTube".

"Technical information" on the section's title page should be "Technical Information", same with "biographies"; or at least the titles on the title page and in the headline of the pages should have the same capitalization.
Also, shouldn't it be "Composers' Biographies", with an apostrophe?

Besides that, I only see the misplaced "landscape" icon cat already mentioned.

I like it!

Btw, there's also a difference between Alt+### and Alt+0### (with numbers larger than 127), Alt+0255 gives me the letter "ÿ" (y with diaeresis), unlike Alt+255. Alt+169 gives me the "®" (registered name sign), Alt+0169 gives "©" (copyright sign), and so on.
The version with a zero in front seems to be ANSI (the non breaking space is 160 there; characters may depend on the local codepage, so could be cyrillic or whatever), while the version without a zero in front is DOS ASCII.

I got that "Chicky Chicky Ah Ah" Theme stuck in my head everytime I see you posting anywhere


Since I didn't want to post that off-topic sentence only, I drew something for you:


It's Chicky-Chicky, the running zombie chicken from the movie "Zombie Chicken Run"!

Tough shape, nice entries so far!

btw, does the calendar work yet?

Hm, maybe you can use a text annotation tool instead of really filling out the form fields? Foxit has such a function, though it might add a watermark to the pdf in the free version. In that case (that is, if I don't confuse the two), there's another pdf reader called PDF-XChange Viewer that can do it without watermarks.

Don't know if that would help...

And not all finished games may reach the quality standards.

Though when I look at the list of interested people, I doubt there will be many low quality games coming out of this, just too much awesomeness in there!


Colour me interested (in yellow) in the distant, distant hypothetical future, when/if my skills in graphics, storytelling and puzzle design are anywhere near a commercial quality standard...

Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday!

[Number 6]

Number 6, I really like the idea of a big ghost train cave entrance head floating in space, and the expression on its face is pretty.. expressive

[No 2]

No 2

[Tales of Otubania]

Humbly asking you to consider, at least to play if you haven't:

Tales of Otubania
(it's not as bad as it sounds)


(it's not as bad as it looks)

This short, comedic game features random, computer-generated, thus dadaistic setting/story/puzzles, which is quite original and will make you vote for it!
The game was released back in 2010, but wasn't added to the database until 2011, so it couldn't be part of last year's awards. And that's why I want to bring it back up here.
Tales of Otubania is fully voiced with (only) my lovely voice, and the dialogues, monologues, comments and characters are intended and said to be funny, also there's much to try out besides the direct solution, almost every silly action and interaction gets a different response.
(bad things: some annoying flaws in the gameplay, like having to use exits instead of walking to them, and inventory has no visible hotspot (it's always the center of the icon), and as you can see, terribly simple, but hopefully still working graphics. Well, and illogical puzzles, because they're generated by my very own Artificial Non-Intelligence)

But don't take my words for it, listen to what these enthusiasts said in the comments section on the games database page:

"[...] above average."
"[...] understandably weak [...]"
"[...] worth the time it takes."
"whimsical [...]"

It was rated with 5 Cups by the AGS rating panel, 2 of which are even blue!

Games Database entry
(the comments are in fact not that bad!)

Completed Games Announcements thread
(including some more infos about the making-of)

Download

There are even two "Let's Play" videos of the game available on YouTube, one by our very own community member Domithan, the other one by someone who found it somewhere else I think. That being said, I'd of course appreciate if you play the game yourself!

Should I recommend some award categories in which I'd happily see my game getting nominated?
Well, here you go:
* Voice Work
* Non-Player Character
* Dialogue Writing
* Original Story (in the sense of an original idea for this experiment, and some amount of creativity to fit a story to the puzzles and setting given by the story generator)
* Joke Game (if this category is chosen to be included)
* Innovation (decided by the commitee, but still!)

The thing I hate most is that I can no longer be logged in to YouTube with one account and to Gmail with another account. I don't want to use the same account for everything, and their "multiple sign-in" thing doesn't work (yet?) as promised.

> Try to read at least memo.txt and skim through the Work folder before the battery dies!

Nice shape, I can already see a couple of things in there

Four months to fix a link? There are peeps who make a game in that time. Or even ten.

I wish I was one of them. 

Me too, I also wish you were one of them!

[Camden]

My vote goes to Camden.

Tough choice again this time!

Funny and creative!

Sometimes I found it a bit hard to follow the text and looking at the scene at the same time, I think voice acting would add much there! But since there was nothing essential in the text, I may have only missed one or two jokes, so I'm good.

Solid work

[graphics]

I feel like this should be a new thread because the other one is "cluttered" mainly with posts about the actual experiment and might be better used for discussions about a fourth part of the Draculator series now. If you feel otherwise, m0ds, please merge the two threads if that's possible.

I also hope that you, Baron, don't mind if I start/continue the discussion here, don't want to appropriate your topic and idea, but I've put some thoughts in this and want to share them before I forget everything.


So, we got that experiment done now, and I think we can all agree that the product turned out great, probably much better than most of us expected. Still, from a theoretical point of view, there are several issues in the process to discuss - not meant as criticism of the actual process or anyone who took part of it, since it was always clear that the realization will differ from the idea and that in the end we wanted a finished game and not cancel the game because one of the swarm development criteria was not met.


E.g., there was the idea of "not more than one hour per person", this request was clearly not met. Well, we have no thousand people here to sum up to 1000 man-hours (or whatever the game required), so there had to be more time per person, of course. Still, some contributed much more time to this (and we're all happy about it, of course!), especially Baron, so we have to ask how much it was actually swarm development or if it was in some parts more like a traditional game development process with a bit more discussion and some minor help from others here and there.

I think Baron will have a bit more to say about the particular propositions for the experiment and their respective realization.

Then we have the question: Was it worth it, in terms of efficiency (not in terms of originality of the product - that was definitely worth it)?
Swarm development requires some extra time for polishing and streamlining graphics, Ali's artistic guidelines were not that much enforced than they would probably be if there were only a few graphic artists.
Then there's extra time for discussion and organizational overhead, managing who does what and what is still needed. Time we didn't count that much (since we're all 24/7 in the forum reading and discussing things anyway 8)), but that should count. I don't know what time a game of this length/complexity/quality needs with a traditional game dev process (for a non-supernatural develeoper/team, not Ben304), and we can't really calculate or even estimate what time we all together needed for this one, my guess is that it took in fact longer than it would have the traditional way (which is not bad of course, since it was only an experiment, and we had some times where not much or only some discussion was done).

Still, we saw that graphics are pretty swarmable, backgrounds, sprites, animations and portrait pictures were drawn by many different people. It would have taken much longer if only one or two guys had done all this on this level of quality. There's the question however how much this is parallelizable and how much time we actually saved or could have possibly saved. If I don't know the character sprite (and have no very detailed description), it's hard to draw the portrait picture, if I don't have the background, it might be harder to draw the character sprite to fit in the environment and general mood of the location (?).

Music for different rooms/situations could be swarmable, but in the end all the (used) music was done by Jackpumpkinhead. I'm not much of a musician, so I don't know how hard it's here to diminish a clash of different styles if different people compose music. It's not as easy to streamline musical pieces into one style like it's in the graphics department were you can adjust palettes and "just" push some pixels, correct shading/dithering and so on. But it's probably worth to discuss which analogons there are for composers - like changing instruments and effects, adjusting measures and beats, and/or whatever, I have no clue. But I think it's worth mentioning that we saw that only the composer himself changed his piece after some suggestions, whereas graphics were (sometimes/often?) directly changed by other people (e.g., the first room). There's always an issue that you hesitate to alter other people's work because it might come off as "Your work is not good enough. There, I can do it better."

Sounds: We may have treated this one with a bit few enthusiasm, I mean, there are good sounds in the game, but only at the very end of the production they were gathered and added, though there was a list of needed sounds there for a long(er) time. It's maybe a bit of a boring task to just search sound bits on the hard drive or search for free sources on the web, and in many cases it's not feasible to record the sound by yourself (you know, powering up your big laser cannon just for one shot...), so that may explain the lack of enthusiasm there. Still, we got some good sounds and in no way do I mean to disrespect the work of the people who got them together.

Voice acting: I'm glad we added this, it adds so much to the atmosphere - and humour - of the game. In terms of swarm development though, there's not much that can be changed. It always has to be done near the end of the development, and the voice of one character can't be split between different people, so we have to go the traditional way there. (Or are there any ideas swarming around?)

Coding here was mainly in one hand, or two, but only one at a time, or something. It is hard to maintain the overview of what's happening in the code with many people changing small bits, but with all the open source programs we have a pretty good assurance that it is possible. So that's definitely a point I'd suggest for the next round of the experiment to make more swarmy. It will produce more errors, but it will hopefully also help to find some more and to fix them faster. It will probably need a code repository with SVN or something similar to keep track of and integrate all changes, but there are some free and relatively easy ones available, so that should not be the problem.

Story writing - I'm bad at this (see my game ). What we did was giving a small premise (bionic vampire marine, or something), then gather some stories and mix them into a big one, extending, changing or leaving out some parts on the fly as the development went on. Is there a way to divide story writing into smaller bits from the beginning? Also, puzzle design, ties into story writing, I don't know anymore how exactly the puzzles came together here.

Dialog writing should be easy to split among many people, though there's also some effort needed to streamline them, in terms of structure (e.g., there should not be one dialog with several dialog options and another one with pretty much no options) and in terms of style, speech, humour, personality. We made the decision not to use any dialogs where Merrick has to talk (i.e. where the player had choices), so that made the thing much easier (but gives us less experimental insight on this part). If I'm not mistaken, dialogs were made only by a few people, right?

That's probably also an issue: Some tasks seem boring to many, like writing, reviewing the writing, proof-reading, GUI design, streamlining/polishing things, sound effect search, coding maybe...



Lastly, about the continuation of the experiment:
In my opinion, we should not start it until next year, after the Bake Sale is done and some labour force and attention is freed there.

Another question there: Do we want to continue the experiment with another Draculator game? Yes, because everyone wants to see it and yes because it's easier to reuse assets and story/character bits, but no, because it will not tell us so much about the swarm development process as a fresh new game could do, where we again have to swarm-develop the story and graphics. So maybe we should split the thing: Develop a Draculator IV game with only slightly altered development process and develop a fresh new swarm game (not at the same time though) with some drastic changes in the development process as a continuation of the experiment.

There I'd suggest trying and failing from the other side of the process: While here, Baron took the usual (?) sequential/hierarchical game development process and split everything apart that can be done in parallel and in single bits (top-down approach), let's just do everything in parallel, whether it makes sense or not, then refining and refining (and also tossing ideas or even assets away during the process) until everything fits together to a whole thing (bottom-up approach), so basically anarchical chaos that evolves to something playable without (much) guidance. Then we'll see what is maybe doable that we didn't even try in this first round, and see what's absolutely impractical.

I'm PUNdering if this would be the right reaction!



Okay, back to the game: Looks really good and will fit with the quality stuff in the Bake Sale pun-dle, I mean, bundle. I was fearing that we would have no completed games in the meantime if everybody pushed their release date back to be part of the Bake Sale, but with The Visitor being released now, the wait will not be too hard

You're the pun king, Ponch!