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I spent new years eve running around somewhat intoxicated and without clothes. Good times. Happy 2010!

Thanks Oddysseus, we're hoping to get more recorded after christmas!

[What is Pabstrum?]

What is Pabstrum?

Well, yours truly started playing the guitar a couple of years ago. Sometime in 2008 I wrote my own song. Since then I've written quite a few more. I started calling this music project of mine Pabstrum.

During this past summer with the help of our fellow AGSers Petteri and Ishmael I've started recording some songs and composing more of them. Now we've finally come to the point where we can produce some pretty good quality stuff so I thought I'd post a link to our newest creation titled All Those Bad Things.

You can find the song on my MySpace page here: http://www.myspace.com/pabstrum

Or alternatively you can download an MP3 file, which doesn't have MySpace's bad sound quality: http://www.pabstuff.com/recordings/Pabstrum%20-%20All%20Those%20Bad%20Things.mp3

Pablo - Lyrics, composing, singing and acoustic guitar
Petteri - Bass
Ishmael - Electric guitar and all the mixing/editing/magic

So yeah, I noticed a bunch of other people shared their bands here a while ago so I thought I'd jump the bandwagon. Enjoy and please share your opinions!

Edit: I feel like it needs to be mentioned that even though we're all Finnish this is in fact NOT a metal band.

If only things had gone a little different we'd all be posting on The Whale Tamer Forums.

Damn, I really love the look of this game! I just replayed DOTT a while ago but I never actually got around to finishing Maniac Mansion. I'm sure this game will change that though.

Damn having all these ideas! 

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Thank you for this link. It's always interesting to hear what old school game developers have to say!

I noticed it, i just left it for the fun of it Vincy!!

You left a broken link in the blog entry because you thought it's fun? Man, you're easily entertained.

I'll give these a read later, it's always interesting to hear what AGSers are up to.

AGS meets have become suspiciously private. Either that or they've become so mundane that nobody really wants to talk about them anymore.

I really like it! You guys are pretty good.

Thanks guys!

Just watched through the demo. Amazing writing and very atmospheric art AND the audio is good too. All in all I must say this is the most promising project I've seen in a while.

There's always room for more sci-fi adventures in this world. This one looks amazing!

[ Arj0n ]: The "Help and Support" text is just a placeholder.

I'm glad you've picked this up again! What bothers me here is that none of the pages (except the home page) are aligned properly with the righthand panes. Also I think the different portions of the Games-page need more distinct borders so it looks less like one big blob of text. Maybe the white boxes that Mazoliin mentioned, maybe something else. Otherwise I'm liking it! The layout works well!

Maybe make a pop up with bigger shot if you hover?

Seconded.

Ps. The "Lucky dip" feature is LONG OVERDUE!

Lovely style! Can't wait to try it out! Keep up the good work!

Why not make your own webdesign instead of using a free template? Right now it seems really unprofessional and downright boring. And since you're using Joomla and have been working on this for so long I don't really see a reason for why there's no content on there yet.

A lot of the functions of the site just are broken and need fixing.

How did you manage to break Joomla anyhow? It's a CMS! You shouldn't have to worry about the tech side of it, that's the whole point! The title image with the trees is wrongly scaled by the way. At least in Firefox. It looks really ugly like that.

I won't register since nothing on the website suggests it's worth it yet. Keep working on it though, I believe it's gonna be a fairly good website once you get it cleaned up!

Why would anyone want to break your system or try to play without the serial when all one has to do is distribute the game with the serial number in a text file? All you've done here is what so many game developers have done so far, add a serial number to your game. And since you can use the same serial number on as many computers as you want there's no piracy protection here...

I suggest getting a huge number of people to beta test it, and get them to make a note of any items they couldn't get the "correct" name for right away, or couldn't recognise right away. Then you could add more synonyms or change the graphics accordingly. Might be easier than trying to second guess what people will or won't try to parse.

Or better yet, code a system that dumps everything the beta tester types in that doesn't work into a text file and then have them send this text file to you. Makes their job easier and you get definite results quicker.

[Make a better website!]

Those weren't the biggest mistakes you made. But first, let's review the mistakes you think you made...

1) What? NEVER use an engine you made by yourself? Why the hell not? The whole professional games industry is doing it and they're making a lot of commercial progress. But of course if you can use some other engine that suits your purposes that's fine.

2) It is true that 3D game programming takes a while longer but if you're not programming the engine yourself it shouldn't be too big a problem. 3D graphics don't take longer to produce than 2D ones if you know what you're doing.

3) The vast majority of commercial PC games are being developed for the Windows platform. Though you might find that some Mac and/or Linux users are buying your game the amount of them compared to the Windows users will most probably end up being very small.

Anyway, the biggest mistake you made is that nobody gets what you're talking about. Your marketing skills are very lacking. You need to elaborate more!

- What is this game about?
- What do you do in the game?
- What is the genre?
- What kind of gameplay is there?
- How much does the game cost?
- Where can we get it?

These are just a few things people will want to know. And you need to be specific. At least don't try to phrase your answers in the form of a political metaphor.

You also need to ask yourself: Why would people buy my game? What makes it so special that they will be interested? I gotta say, personally, I'm only interested because the way you're marketing it makes me very very confused and I want to know what the heck it's all about in the first place. But I would never consider buying your product. Not with the little information you've given us. Make a better website! Put some concrete information about the game on it.

I would also suggest you keep quiet about your personal life when you're marketing a game. Quite frankly nobody cares (everyone has their own problems to deal with anyway) and it'll just put people off and nobody will want to purchase your product.

Eggie: When clicking on your link, for some reason, I return to this thread! (??) When I saved it as "save as" I got a file which has the extension mp3, but WMP won't play it anyway!...

Copy the link's URL and paste it into the address bar.

Eggie, you made me pee my pants. In a good way.