Messages

[playing the games yourself is always going to be the better option!]

Glad to see my videos finding a potential use! I'm hoping to cover all of the entries of 2025 so you'll have a full set next year.

In case someone is confused by the context of my videos: I stream MAGS games on Twitch, mostly for my own entertainment. During those streams I get to both react to the games as I experience them and try to provide commentary on them from the point of view of both a player and a hobbyist developer. I try to point out interesting or odd designs, features and quirks and occasionally think out loud on how something might be improved or altered in a way I personally think might be better.

The videos I make are not trying to be objective reviews, nor are they always complete playthroughs, so as I always try to say when linking to them and as Stupot says above: playing the games yourself is always going to be the better option! You get to experience the game yourself, react to it yourself and form your own opinions of it without a hairy Finnish man talking over it!

Hmm, there are some very good arguments being put forward on what to vote by. Tough call, tough call...

[Artifact]

Here we go again! I played all four games, even managed to beat one of them within my self-imposed one hour time limit, and now you can find the videos of my attempts below. While I'll always recommend you play the games yourself, if you just can't find the time then this might be an option for you:

Artifact
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCGtbyj0rJ4

Bière Américaine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BXCzkagPP0

One Million Years Dungeon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjTvmo2pnhI

Skrexeval's Quest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW01BZC-X9Q


All in all I found it funny that 'breaking the rules' was mostly interpreted here as just going back to how games used to be back in the olden days, before design evolved to be more kind, gentle and accommodating towards the player. In many ways these games were a fun romp back to the good old days for me and I struggled to really find many ways in which any real design rules might have been broken! If anything, these games could all have been much more mean and creative with how they violate the player's expectations. Because of this I'm kind of struggling to decide how to vote on these. Do I vote for the game I feel is genuinely the best designed entry, or the one that breaks the most rules of game design? Hmmmm...

I'm planning to do my usual MAGS Twitch stream this Thursday at around 17:00 UTC, playing all the games released to see if I can beat them. So if you'd like to come see me fumble my way through your contest entry live, feel free to join up! Videos of each game will be put up on Youtube as well and linked here later.

https://www.twitch.tv/whamtheman

You can't see it, but I'm doing a little happy dance to celebrate!

I did try to stream both of the other contestants to make my usual videos of them, but couldn't make up enough material of them to warrant proper videos this time. Mazzled seems like an interesting concept, but with just the one level there wasn't much to show. I think I see the concept of Mystery Mansion Mayhem, but when I tried it out I mostly encountered non-functioning interactions and placeholders, and without direction on what to even try to do, I got a bit stumped. From what I can tell the concept is a randomly generated murder mystery game that can provide replayability and variation, which is a really interesting concept, but in its current state there just wasn't enough to show off.


Now, a brief look back on my own project:

As I always do, I set myself some challenges for this project. The first one was to push myself to draw more unique characters and walkcycles, though in the end I had to cut all non-player walkcycles for time. Another challenge was trying to see how many variations of a single relatively simple room I could pull off, using the same base image as the background and just overlaying assets on top of it, with the goal being five distinct variations. The fifth iteration ended up almost totally being cut away for time, turning into a brief cutscene rather than a properly interactable scene. Originally the final scene was intended to be a way to reflect on all the past scenes and see how they influenced one another.

Finally, I also took up learning a new graphics tool, Asperite, to replace the aging Paint Shop Pro I've been using, since PSP suffers of massive issues on modern systems and regularly crashes. While I still can't quite replicate all of my past workflows in Aseprite (especially gradients are tricky to work with, and it lacks the tool for creating feathered selections, which I use extensively to create light and shadow effects quickly), I think I'll try to adapt to it in the future and see what I can do. I think its built-in animation editor can be really powerful if properly adopted into the workflow, but in this project I didn't really use it, since I'm used to drawing my animations on a grid-style spritesheet and eyeballing things from there.

So, a lot to learn and a lot of time pressure!

All in all I'm really satisfied with the end result, especially since I had other commitments to deal with and could effectively only work on the game for just over one week of the full month.

This is such a cool idea, and it's very well implemented, too. Recommended play.

Thank you, much appreciated!

It's great to see people have found the game fun enough to try multiple times, even though there might not actually be all that much to replay. I think I may have accidentally created the illusion of far more extensive selection of story paths when in fact there is only really one major one.

Spoiler

I replayed to try to get the girl, and save the brother like 4 times and gave up.. I couldn't get either of those   (gave back the flask, tried to not give her the blanket, skip some dialogs...  Now I'm just feeling like I'm playing this like a Larry game.)

[close]

Reply:

Spoiler

Can't save the brother, unfortunately, so I'm sorry you wasted time on that one. You can get the girl, though, but it might be tricky. All I can really say is: try and be nice, but don't push things too hard.

[close]

Spoiler

The candle light effect was very cool too, I kept trying to see where it looped, but I couldnt...  cheers!

[close]

The magic trick is: it doesn't loop!

Place of Importance by WHAM!

Spoiler

Is there a way to get the girl? I had her throw up and go to sleep.

[close]

Spoiler

Yes there is, but you may have to suppress your adventure game instinct a little bit. And yeah, I can see how the timers might be annoying if playing the game over several times. I designed the game as a single playthrough experience, where the first time through is each players 'true' path, since I personally don't like to re-play games after finishing them. Hubris on my part, I know, but I also just really like the idea that some things happen over time, naturally, and are not completely bound to the players actions.

[close]

I wouldn't get anywhere near live produce like that without at least an A-10C Warthog available for close air support. Too risky otherwise, and we should never forget the hard lessons of the Wild Broccoli Incident of 1997.

..I did want to point out what was probably a bug while I'm thinking about it.

Spoiler

I made hot chocolate drinks and gave the girl a cup before spiking it with alcohol. Then when I spiked the remaining cups with the licquor, the girl got sick without drinking another cup.

[close]

Thanks! I'll put up a fix for this after the MAGS voting ends for this round. Not a major issue, but a good example of the kind of thing that slips through the cracks when rushing to finish a project.

I didn't make it in time before voting this time, but I've still played all of the contestants. You can find the videos of my attempts below.

Bad to the Coral
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThUlS3EN6gE

Botos do Diabo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VQLdGkUQBc

Gill Bus Party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXX9kLzSAtM

I don't have an actual release of my own this year, but since I've been doing videos of MAGS games lately, I could expand that into this: once the nominations are published I'll make a list of the games and try to play and record as many of them as I can to try and raise awareness and give people a chance to get a look at the nominees even if they don't have the time for proper playthroughs of their own.

Here's "Mazzled!"

The downloadable zip is busted and doesn't contain the actual game executable. You've probably made changes in AGS after compiling the game, so the compiled exe is gone.
Simple recompile, zip and upload should fix that up for you!

I feel your mistake here is believing the the score range of "3 cups" magically makes the two games equally valuable, which is not the case.

And to remind you: while you and I 'waste our lives' to make games, so do the volunteer reviewers 'waste their lives' playing these games, assigning scores and writing short reviews for them. I still have games here that never received a score or review.

We know what is going on here: you completed a project and released a game, and someone out there took the time to play it and review it and to assign it a score they felt best represented its general quality amidst other releases on this site at this time.
 
That effort, for you and the panel, is valuable and means something. Be happy for that!

The reviewer writes to inform the general audience of their views and opinions. Whatever the game developers intent was or wasn't doesn't really factor into that. If the reviewer feels that the audience might be looking for something (High art? Ultraviolence? Addictive gameplay? Infinite replayability? Whatever, it doesn't matter) and won't find it, then informing the audience of that can be useful. The reviewers own views and expectations will always colour the final opinion and wording, at least for as long as we have volunteers spending their own time and effort to provide these scores and reviews, and the community don't pool up money to hire paid reviewers who follow strict technical guidelines and absolute professionalism (insert your own joke about the integrity of modern day paid-to-work games journalism here).

As for increasing the number range of reviews, I don't see much point. It'd throw off all existing reviews since the values wouldn't convert 1 to 1 and, as noted in my previous message, that just leads to a new "average" score emerging arbitrarily, and then we'll just have someone else complaining that their piece was rated "only a 7 out of 10" while a game they subjectively see as less valuable or less good was given the same or similar score and they then feel upset.

The scores provide a general guidance, and as the old guidelines state: a game with 2 or 3 cups is worth playing. This implies that a 4 or a 5 is a standout and a score of 1 is reserved for games that suffer from some major issues or shortcomings that make it too difficult to recommend.

Since reviews are always subjective, when using a 5-star (5-cup) system of grading it seems pretty human and natural for a lot of games to end up with a score of 3. I feel this mostly comes down to reviewers, whether it be the AGS panel or individuals, being polite. A 3 is a solid effort that doesn't stand out. A 2 would be a weak performance but the reviewer felt it had some merit, while a 4 is exceptionally good. A score of 1 is usually reserved for either personal issues (this game has X and I don't like X so I'll give it a 1 out of principle) or in the case of the panel reviews a genuine belief that the game lacks any considerable effort or skill in its makeup. Meanwhile a score of 5 is practically a superlative, reserved only for rare and special occasions where a game achieves the kind of quality seen as appropriate for premium commercial grade games.

A game can be scored outside of these norms, even if it generally falls under one, if it has a specific feature or quirk that stands out, but that's the exception and not the norm. One exception I think is easily given is one of trying to encourage new developers, scoring their first efforts more generously and using that review and score not so much to showcase actual quality of a game, but to highlight the effort of finishing a project for a new developer. Fun fact: my first game has this exact panel review: "A good first effort by a new game author." 3 cups.

This whole "3 cups is average" conversation reminds me of some internet outrage of old, where a Nintendo Zelda game was reviewed as a 7 out of 10 and some people were furious at the "low score". It's not a low score, it's average, the average just happens to have crept up in a nominally 0-10 scoring system over time.

[A Place of Significance]

A Place of Significance
A short game about a simple cave and how we, humans, perceive it across various time periods.
Developed for the December 2024 MAGS contest.

Download link: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2814-a-place-of-significance
Want to play without downloading? Here's the game on itch.io: https://wham.itch.io/a-place-of-significance

• Single button user interface (both mouse buttons perform the same action).
• I finally took the time to figure out how to use the AGS dialogue tree functionality in this one!
• Multiple playable characters.

My game is finally out! It's had woefully limited testing done to it, but I hope it will survive your playhtroughs without too much issue:

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2814-a-place-of-significance

I wound up having to use .wav format audio, which ballooned the game size considerably, so as to avoid issues with audio not looping correctly. Sorry about that!

Much appreciated! That should give me some time to wrap up a few loose ends and to try and playtest the game a bit more. I'll probably turn the assets for the segments I won't have time to properly turn into gameplay into a small epilogue instead, so a bit less of the effort already done goes to waste.

Considering the December circumstances of having Christmas holidays, post-Christmas bloat and New Years all eating into work time, is there any hope for a 1-2 day extension?
I'm pretty close to having my game sufficiently functional, after having to cut some content already, but I've got to work on the 31st and someone once told me it was advisable to sleep for more than 3 hours a night.

I am BADLY behind schedule, and have two of potential five scenes functionally completed with 5 days to go, but I'll try to have at least 3 done by crunching like mad, before slapping on some royalty free music and a few key sound effects right before the end.