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That is hot, ProgZ!

What about The Cloak?

Nik's right.

And even if the game were freeware and you weren't making money off of it, you shouldn't be distributing someone else's music without permission anyways.  So, trying to get by on a flimsy technicality by releasing the music pack as a separate, free, download, wouldn't work anyways.

Contact the copyright holders.  If that's not possible or they decline, there are lots of sites with public domain music or music released under various licenses that may allow you to include the music in a commercial product at no charge.  Search around.  Otherwise, there are lots of composers around on these forums that would probably be able to help you out for a small fee.  That gives you the added benefit of telling them the type of music you want rather than having to search endlessly through the web until you find something resembling it.

Good luck.

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Edit: Another AGS game that deals with religion (or at least myth) is What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed. The upper half of the screen retells the story of Izanagi and Izanami from Japanese mythology, and is intertwined with it in a complex and very cool way. It doesn't really deal with faith, either, but it seems authentic even in its revisionism.

Heh.  Funny you should mention that in this thread.  The use of the Izanagi myth in the game was inspired by a PM conversation that I had with Dave while I was still planning Linus.  He told me that he was thinking of using some Korean mythology in a game (he was living in Korea at the time) and I thought, "Hey! I'm living in Japan, I should work some Japanese mythology into my game!"

Congrats again Dave.  The things you're doing are amazing!  Good luck!

Also, I think it should be Spooks the fish instead of Uncle Ernie in Best Supporting Character.

Thanks again to the organizers!  And congrats to everyone!

The P3N1S award is just a chuckle.  It has no real meaning whatsoever because there are no rules to guide what you should nominate.  Some people nominate the games that were unintentionally bad, some nominate the intentionally bad, some just nominate what would be the funniest game to get the award.  It's just whoever you think deserves a P3N1S.  And since there were lots of games that got 1 nomination, a few that got two, and only two games that rose above that, we're not looking at a unified forum consensus here.

Take it with a chuckle and brush it off.  It doesn't mean that the other awards are broken or have no merit.  It just means that three people wanted to give you a joke award.

And on the whole arrogance subject, which may or may not have had something to do with your nomination, some people gave the Herculean Effort boys some crap for having the slogan "it's not easy being the best."  And that's just being sensitive.  However, I have to admit, your website, even in its current revision is still a bit pretentious.  I can understand why some people would be a little riled up by it.

Well, I didn't finish 2010: World Of Chaos, but I still know it's a terrible game (but ain't in the games DB so isn't eligible).

Yeah, and what the hell, Yodaman?  Did you delete it?  You were totally going to get an award!

I find it better, as I mentioned above, to combine Walk and Interact together into one mouse button and leave look to it's own mouse button.  This allows the player to look at things like the floor that you wouldn't be able to look at in your version.  But the distinction is small and would come down to the taste of the designer.  Or, if the designer is nice, he could allow the player to choose between these in an option menu.

In Linus I combined interact and walk into the left click (if you click on an interactable, it interacts, if you click anywhere else, it's a walk) and made right clicking just walk.  I did this because I didn't think that a look command would add anything to the game.  So I just stripped it out.

Also, let's note that it's been almost three months since anyone said anything negative about charging for this game here.  One person dug the thread up to report a bug (which could have been done via PM) and suddenly the argument starts again, only this time, there's only one side arguing. Seriously, stop beating that poor dead horse.

I assume that you're talking about the interface cursor's usage and implementation rather than its appearance.

I have some problems with the traditional Sierra and Lucas-arts interfaces.  Too often, it feels like these interfaces are obfuscating the gameplay rather than adding to it.  Having lots of verbs to apply to different objects may seem like a nice idea, like it's giving the player added control over the game, but games rarely use this interface to its full potential. 

For example, in any game using the Sierra interface, you have a look cursor, a walk cursor, an interact cursor, and a speak cursor.  The look cursor serves an obvious purpose: giving the player additional information about his surroundings.  The walk cursor is also important.  But there is really no reason for interact and speak to be separate.

Usually, in a game, you can use the interact cursor on an object to pick it up or use it in an appropriate way, but using the speak cursor on it results in a standard "I don't talk to inanimate objects" message.  Similarly, clicking the speak cursor on a character launches a dialog, but using the interact cursor on a character results in some useless "I can't just go around touching people" comment.  So why aren't these two cursors just combined into one?  The only thing that would be lost would be a bunch of (probably unfunny) responses.

In essence, Sierra style games could be easily streamlined into Walk, Examine, and Interact.  And I forgot about inventory.  If a game has an inventory then using the inventory item as a cursor also serves a specific purpose.

The Lucas Arts GUI has the same problem, only to a much larger degree.  For example, if there's a character blocking your path in the game, you can give, open, close, pick up, look at, talk to, use, push, or pull the character, however usually only look at and talk to are going to result in anything other than a poor attempt at humor.  And in the instance of inventory usage, there's rarely a need for the distinction between "Give inventory item to" and "Use inventory item on".

Again, the complicated interface is well intentioned, in that it's trying to offer more control to the player, but it rarely adds more possibilities to a situation, it only adds more default comments.

For that reason, I'm a fan of the simple left click walks or interacts if you've clicked on an object or character and right click looks at anything.  It just seems to me to make the gameplay a more natural experience without adding an unnecessary extra barrier between the player and the game.  Though, I'll readily admit that there have been games that have used the extra verbs or cursors well.

In summary (I totally didn't intend to make a post long enough to need a summary) the Lucas Arts and Sierra interfaces can be great when used well by the game designer, but more often than not (especially in an amateur game) it's not used to its potential and actually takes away from the game.  If you're not sure what kind of interface you want for your game, write out several examples of the types of puzzles that your game is going to have and think about what is really necessary to make those puzzles work.  I hope I made sense... 

Spoiler

Hey, free tie!

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Spoiler

Press the display button on the right side, when the little mannequin pops out, she's holding the candle in her hand.  You need to click on the candle really fast to grab it.  You only have a second, but it's not that hard.

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Dave,  I don't have any specific suggestion for the video problem, but big congratulations on that nomination (edit:) and being asked to speak at GDC!  That's extremely cool.  I went to the GDC and awards ceremony several years ago and it was really fun.  Good luck!

I wasted a ton of time on this one day a few weeks ago.  Finally beat it.  The game may have been tweaked or more levels added since I played, but here's my general strategy guide:

You can get through the first seven levels using nothing but a few cannons.  Try to use as few as possible for each level so that you're left with as much money at the end of the level for interest.  After level seven, use your wood to research fire.  Then sell all your cannons and start building an array of fire towers in the middle of the map.  Don't bother upgrading for now, just build more and more.  Again, try to use as few as possible to maximize your interest.  Don't worry about killing bosses on the first round, if you have to sacrifice some life, it's fine.  Use the next two woods to buy extra interest.  Start raking in the cash because you really need it for the last few levels.  At level 28, use your wood to research water and start adding a few water towers spread out evenly throughout the level.  You might want to upgrade the waters a little to add more splash which is useful.  By the last few levels you need to spend like crazy and fill the map with fire towers.  Upgrade the central towers once or twice.  Before the last level starts, buy all the extra lives that you can afford since interest in meaningless and let the slaughter begin.

Fun game.

...who will almost certainly say no.

Platformerius is an open source platformer made with AGS that you can look at and modify.  No matter what you do, though, an action/platformer game in AGS is complicated and will require a lot of scripting knowledge.  You might find that a different game engine would be a better starting point for your project.  One more natively geared toward action games.  It's definitely possible, as has been demonstrated, to do it with AGS, but it's going to take some work.  Good luck, though!

auriond, I think the game is much more playable now.  (Not that it was unplayable before, just that it flows much better now)  It's really looking great.  Nice work.  The one thing that I noticed this time that seems a little off is the number of inventory items showing at once.  After picking everything up, my inventory had gone onto a second row, but the second row doesn't show unless I scroll down.  But it looks like there's plenty of room to show a second and third row without scrolling.

Keep up the good work.  I'm looking forward to the finished product!

Reactor 90210?

So, I'm listening to the SkypeCast (thanks MadReiska!)(and well done SSH et al.) and I noticed that you named Reactor 09 as one of the nominees for Best Animation but the voting page lists Trilby's Notes in its stead.  What's up?

And thanks to everyone who voted for Linus, and thanks for the honorary best title award!

I know, too many baby pics.  But Emi was being a clown last night and I had to post these.  For some reason, she just picked up a diaper and decided it was a hat.

I don't expect you to change anything for this year, but what's with Sunday?  If you had the awards on Saturday at 8PM GMT then it's mid-Saturday afternoon for Americans and early Sunday mornings for Australians (and us few Japan dwellers).  Early Sunday morning is much better than early Monday morning thanks to work and school.  I'm sure the Aussies would agree.

And I'd ask people to remember TiLTOR for best non-adventure.  This game is way awesome.

When I first joined, I worked on a game slowly for about five months before I canned it. 

Then I made my first finished game, Anna, in seven days.  I have no idea how I worked that fast.  I only remember my wife being angry that I stayed up all night...

My second finished game, What Linus Bruckman Sees When His Eyes Are Closed, took about eight months.  It's only a one room game, like Anna, but is considerably more complex.

In between the two, I programmed Spooks in six weeks.  But that was fast because The Ivy had been doing all the designing and art for months before I got going.