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I might have something in the works. Should be up in a few days time.

[One More Fathom]

For your consideration I present: One More Fathom

Developed during a single month period for the prestigious MAGS contest, a puzzley diving simulator about diving treasure while battling oxygen deprivation, angry seaweed, idiotic fish and your very own greed.



I would like to present this game to be considered for the following categories:

• Best Freeware Game Created with AGS
• Best Character: The FRIEND
• Best Gameplay
• Best Non Adventure Game Created with AGS

Somehow I am also reminded of Supaplex, along with Boulderdash. Always fun to see people do something out of the norm with the AGS engine!

That's a good point! I just uploaded the video raw from Twitch, so it's long as heck, but I just added timestamps so you can see where one game begins and another game ends.

In case anyone wants to take a look, the whole stream was recorded and uploaded to my Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKMe6IZ82bI

["WHAM plays his own games and does developer commentary for them"]

Special "WHAM plays his own games and does developer commentary for them" -stream tonight at 16:00 UTC (19:00 Finnish local time).

https://www.twitch.tv/whamtheman

Feel free to pop in and see an old man grumble about how bad he has been at making games since 2007!

It's not quite how I remember the scene, but...

A side path of the Police Quest games: Blue Force, has a scene on a boat and even a cutaway scene that shows you the interior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4Ydw5smt0&t=618s

(Link has timestamp)

[THIS IS IT! This is the game!]

I never played it myself, so I might be remembering this wrong, but isn't there a "severed head in the fridge"-scene in Police Quest: Open Season? (1993)

I thought I knew of all the Police Quest games, played them myself, but I seem to be wrong since none of this game looked familiar. Well, at first.

THIS IS IT! This is the game! I remember that walk-to icon, and the severed head in the fridge, and the "lady" (I thought it was a scary old lady cannibal type thing) hunched over a body, turning to face the player character and I think there is even a fail state where she kills the player character. Looking at this now, it's a lot brighter and lot less scary than it was back then, but if you think about a little kid who doesn't understand the language being spoken, seeing context-free glimpses of this on a flickering CRT monitor in a darkened room, you can probably imagine how this might have had an effect.

A lot of my memories are a little off, and I think my imagination filled in a lot of stuff, much of which I must have made up during the following week of nightmares and sleepless nights. But that all makes sense now.

Based on a skimmed longplay of the game, I don't think the boat scene I remembered is in this game, but I feel like the cursors and UI icons were the same, so perhaps a different game in the series I have missed or forgotten since then.

Thank you so much for this!

Also: holy hell that is a long time for a person to be burning alive. Not sure I ever saw that bit, but if I did, that probably didn't help.

I went over screenshots of the suggested games and don't think any of these fit.
The 1989 Friday the 13th is too old and crude visually. Harvester feels a lot closer visually, but doesn't match any of my memories when it comes to the scenes, perspective etc (I watched almost the entire game played through on Youtube, though. That was... an experience.) Dark Earth looks too fantastical, as the game I recall was definitely grounded in modern reality. Sanitarium I've actually played much later, but the perspective and style is off. I am 99% sure the game I saw as a kid had a more traditional adventure game perspective with lower fixed camera angles.

EDIT: I know I'm grasping at straws in trying to find this game. I've looked at a ton of games already and none seem to match, so either this game is really obscure or my memories are too off for me to match them to an actual game. If it makes you folks feel any better: this thing has haunted me for almost 25 years now, so if you feel annoyed at trying to guess this, guess how annoyed I am with the whole thing! 

Ah, sorry, I should have described the visual style better. This was in the days of Windows 95 and I think the visuals were going for a very realistic 2D sprite based look. It was definitely set in a modern setting, and the tone of it felt grounded, horror-oriented and serious. For the human characters at least, it might even have used digitized actors for the sprites, though my memory is a little hazy in this regard. I also THINK the game used a variable cursor type, so the cursor would cycle between modes for walking, interaction and examining things.

I think Ex Mortis is too new, and Manhunter: New York looks too old. There was definitely a player sprite on the screen for most of the gameplay, though the fridge I seem to recall being a closeup.

This is all very hazy, but the reason all of this has stuck with me is the fact I had nightmares for a solid week after that experience, so a whole load of little details, like the stilted animations of what I believe to be a cannibal character of some sort, are imprinted in my memory.

I've been digging around for old adventure games, but can't find anything that would seem to fit either the boat scene I recall, or the kitchen / cannibal scenes, though the more I think back to them, I have a feeling the boat scene might not be the same game at all. Or at least it was from a far less moody and scary part of the game, if it was the same game. There is also the added challenge that if there was any text, I was too young to know a word of english back then, so I can't say what was going on.

[watched]

Back when I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I spent some time at a daycare while my mom was at work. That daycare had some older kids, and they had a PC, and they played games on it. And I watched.

Now sure, they played cool games like Silent Hunter and Heroes of Might and Magic, and I loved those, but there is one game I remember most vividly. And here's the kicker: I have no idea what that game was. Or even if it was just one game or two. What I do recall was that it was a point and click adventure game. And I'm hoping someone might figure out what game it is and tell me so I can go back and see it with my weary adult eyes and put this bogeyman to rest.

I can recall three scenes:
- A scene based on a large boat, where the male protagonist could walk around and enter the boat. I seem to recall that the boat could be explored both externally and internally, and that the side of the boat would be cut away to reveal the interior.
- A scene in a kitchen of some sort. There was a severed head inside the fridge that freaked me the hell out.
- A scene with an NPC, most likely a cannibal of some sort. This one got to me the most. The protagonist entered through a door to find what I seem to recall a room with a bed, and atop that bed was a bloody corpse. Hunched over it, and animated in the act, was a character (I seem to recall thinking it looked like an old lady, but this might not be accurate at all) eating said corpse. This character would turn, approach and kill the player character, at which point I fled the room so I have no more details to offer.

Any ideas would be greatly welcome!

Sadly work and other projects have sunk my project, with only the most bare-bones wall-climbing minigame and some placeholder graphics existing so far. I also don't see enough free time in the coming weeks to put anything of value together, so it seems I am out of this one.

In the hopes that it amuses someone, here is the synopsis of the game I had in mind:



Basically I just tried to think up as many scale-puns as I could and stuffed them all in a very silly story.

Good luck to everyone still in the game!

I have a silly idea and have begun writing it down into a design doc. Let's see if it manifests into a game!

EDIT: Prorotyping mechanics for scaling a mountainside, but that's not all the scales this game is planned to have.

Most laptop keyboards are easy to swap out, but in my old job I've also come across models where you had to pull the whole machine apart, pull out the motherboard, and only then could access the keyboard and connectors underneath the casing. I'd imagine more modern laptops are easier to work with, though, and I'd recommend looking online for guides for exact steps on disassembling the machine far enough to replace the keyboard. It's amazing how many detailed video guides there are out there these days, and all you need is the exact model number of the laptop (found on a sticker on the bottom of the machine, usually) to find a lot of information.

Good luck!

I played, streamed it on Twitch and even wrote a review of it on my Steam profile: https://steamcommunity.com/id/whamtheman/recommended/1042490/

Long story short, though: I didn't like it very much. I expected more puzzle solving in the vein of Myst, a chance to rake my brain and feel challenged, but got something so watered down it often felt like I was playing a short and simple kids game.
Then again, for people who are new to both Lovecraftian mythos and puzzle games, this may well work as a soft landing into the two genres, so it's not all bad and I can see there being an audience out there for it. Just not what I was looking for.

Haven't found the time to write, and truth be told I don't really have an idea, either. If I come up with one last minute, I might  give it a shot, but...

Sorry EjectedStar! :C

Dammit, I just wrote a pirate and shipwreck themed story not that long ago, and a space-shipwrecked story a while before that! Now I need to come up with yet ANOTHER shipwreck themed story!
WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF!? 

[@ WHAM]

Out of curiousity, did anyone bother to read the upside-down text or did you all jump right to the easier to read version?

I gave up on the upside down text after the first line of it. Would have worked much better if I had the text in a physical medium and could easily turn the page, but on screen it was a royal pain in the arse.

@ WHAM - I think the story has potential, but like other readers I was confused as to who was who.  I was also a bit confused at the band manager's motivation: what does he get out of lesser attendance at the lounge?  Or is he trying to bankrupt the joint so he can take over entirely?  Voodoo jazz zombies aside, something just doesn't fit....

A clumsy attempt at 'show, don't tell'. Did you notice that aside from the undead band, the patrons were changing as well? I wanted to imply that the manager was using them, enchanting their minds with the music so that they return to be bled of energy, their minds made pliable for him to control and manipulate. Such was his reputation, and his effect. I didn't want to just give that explanation out in the story, since it felt like explaining it too much would break immersion, as we were viewing the story more from the viewpoint of the three unnamed mobsters, not the band manager. I wanted him to stay something of a mystery.

Wha - Oozed atmosphere. I could smell the smoke wisps in the air, the clinking of whiskey glasses, and all I could imagine were the 'weasels henchmen' from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Unfortunately a lot of the 'deal/magic' was implied and we didn't get enough meat to the story.

Considering how much I love that movie, the weasels may well have been a subconscious influence, but I think I mostly drew my mental image of them from an episode of the 90's tv show Millennium. They could really have done with more character, though, and in hindsight I regret not giving them proper names in the story. Not sharing their names was intended to show how well the three knew each other, how they were reconizable as individual parts of an organization by their traits rather than names, but again: this fell short due to crude storytellin on my part.

Live and learn.

Congrats on the win, EjectedStar, and I look forward to the next contest! I'll have more time now that I'm on my summer vacation, so hopefully I can do better!

To me it feels like a continuation of the Steam PC idea. That was to bring cheap but effective gaming hardware to the masses, allowign easy access to Steam store and library on purpose-built hardware, expanding the PC playerbase to more casual players who couldn't afford proper gaming PC's. That never took off, and now Valve seems to have spotted a new growing trend in the form of portable gaming as presented by Nintendo and Google, and Valve is hoping to find the sweet spot in that. It's like the Switch, but 'for the grown-ups'. But that only makes sense if those grown-ups of the target audience don't already have a gaming PC, or if they are willing to downgrade their experience for the sake of portability. If enough of these Steamdecks get out into circulation, though: it will be fun to see what modders can do with the hardware!