Messages

Perhaps using the code tag instead of the quote function confused us all.
I trust you, sir ptp88, shall show mercy and forgiveness to poor Sepiroth this one time. 

LOL! You must be kidding me!!! I have never even heard of troika games and I certainly never take music from somewhere else! I am composer and I specially made music for this game! 

Unless you are saying you made the music for City of Thieves, I believe you.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=43192.msg578109#msg578109

[The thing Studio 3 made]

I have now decided who to vote for.
Also: my two cents on each of the games (in no particular order).

The thing Studio 3 made
> Meh. Too complicated for me, I couldn't grasp the intricate battle system in place here
> Great story, though!

15minutes
> I like the idea here, very goddamn much! Yesss! I will have to invest more time to this game.
> I got the game to bug out quite badly within the first minute =( Seems a little unfinished, or perhaps just lack of testing
> Funny as heck!
> I blew it =(

concurrence
> So it's prince of persia / another world. I sucked at all these games, and this was no exeption. I got stuck, and eventually got frustrated after dying a gajillion times. Haven't finished so far, might keep trying. =(
> Still, the little bit of the game I got to see was pretty as heck! Really lovely art
> Buggy and unfinished, though I would love to see the final version. With a bit of polish this game could be really awesome

RunAway
> An interesting idea, but hampered by crude control scheme and uninformative graphics. I hope you will keep developing this one in the future, though. There is a good idea here.

Lurking Horror
> Good atmosphere and the quality of animation earns you back all the points you might have
lost due to simple character sprites, and you still end up in the green!
> I've gotten into creepy stuff like this lately, and I have to admit I loved the theme. Needs more creepy tall people! =)

City of Thieves
> Not a fan of 3D models turned into sprites, although this is one of the better ones
> Mouse control is less than ideal for this type of game, keyboard control would have given
much more feel of urgency and preciseness to the game (see Yahtzee's Art of Theft)
> GUI seems to function a bit strangely. The buttons don't all seem to react the same way
> I have to reduce points for lack of manual and use of music from a Troika game (that music is holy! Using it anywhere else than the original game is sacrilege!)

@ Selminak

Good to hear you enjoyed the game and the story! I wanted to use this game to give some background to the universe I use in my other games (Infection) and it's good to know someone actually read / watched the stuff.

About controls: I'm so used to QWERTY keyboards (never seen any other kind of keyboard in my life), that I hadn't realized that Z could be difficult for people. I usually use Z, X, A and S as action keys along with space. I'll have to think about this in the future. I could try to add a new feature in my next game, which would allow players to customize keys...

About unskippable intro: I wanted to cerate a new talk function myself, using timers and GUI elemets. I made the mistake of using the same timers to adjust other game events as well, which caused the game to bug out if I allowed the dialogue in the beginning to be skippable. Either I would cause bullets to stop mid-air, or characters would talk, talk talk, then wait for a while and THEN start moving, making the scene look very silly. I opted for the easy solution instead, as the deadline loomed over me. I won't do it again, promise!

Getting hit should not change your direction, however  taking cover will reset you to facing down. I could blame the deadline, but will instead admit to being lazy and drawing just one taking cover frame, instead of making four. However, I can't really see why this is an issue in the current game.

Controls should be more obvious - I wasn't even aware you could duck or shoot until I read selmiak's comment above.

This is why the readme.txt is named the way it is. 
I often cleverly hide secret stuff like the instructions and controls there, along with other information, story details and credits. I'm evil that way!

Not the first. "Hello, Neighbour!" had them. So does AGDI's version of KQ3.

Damn and blast! And I was so hopeful! 

Had a quick try at all the games. Good stuff in here. I'll write short few sentence reviews on all of them and post here. At the moment I feel very good about two games, and will give those two a lot more time before deciding on who I will vote.

No changes in the game itself, just the commentary and source files. I felt it was good enough, and I was afraid I would break something 

[http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1426]

Download from this link:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1426
Don't forget to give deedback! good or bad, it's always welcome!

Of the Essence
Can you escape impending doom? Run! Run for your life!





For the record: I won't be expanding this game any further than it is on release. The reason for this is, that this game was more of a proof of concept game, a way for me to show myself that I can do keyboard controls, rolling gameplay etc. I also had to cut a lot of corners to make this game work before deadline, so my original plan to make it sort of modular and easy to add more levels got lost there. A lot of people have asked me to expand and add better controls, but I'm afraid I will have to disappoint them here.

What I will do is take the skills and tricks I've learned here and put them to good use in my future projects, hopefully allowing me to make even better games.

If I am not mistaken, this might also be the first AGS game to feature achievements! Correct me if I am mistaken!  


I was mistaken

[Of the Essence]

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1426

Of the Essence
Can you escape impending doom?



If I am not mistaken, this might also be the first AGS game to feature achievements! Correct me if I am mistaken!  
I was mistaken... 

God I almost had a friggin' heart attack! No backups and AGS gave me an error how it was unable to compile the exe due to "currupt memory". One reboot later all seems well again. Phew.

Will post the actual game in a few hours, the competition looks tough, though...

Last day of the MAGS! Excitement builds!

Status:
Squashed or chose to ignore all reported bugs yesterday, started addin a new (small) feature. The ending of the game is still unfinished, I will have to simplify it a little. Added all sound effects I could, still could do a lot better.

Looks like I'll be working all the way into midnight tonight, again...

But my game is not finished yet... 
I'm looking at working on this until around 2 or 3 o'clock in the night to actually add the ending to my game, among other things. Plus I've already had to drop two thirds of content from my original plan, even with the extended deadline.

It ain't all roses on this end either, Rocco, my boy

I have to agree with Hudders on this one. Since one of the basic ideas behind MAGS is to practice working with deadlines, I think there should be a hard limit to how much extenstion there can be. We all could make better games if we just had more time. This will not change even if we get 10 days worth of extra time. 3 days seems enough for me, since everyone was aiming for the 30th anyway (weren't we?)

I think it was about time! All fundamentalists and terrorists deserve what's coming to 'em!

UPDATE: Just sent the beta to a few people for testing. Will use tomorrow night to finish up the outro and fix bugs, maybe even add some pretty graphics too!

Even with the extension it will be a close one, but I am hoping that some time tomorrow I will have my game as ready as it will be (I had to cut a LOT of content from my original vision, but oh well) and I will be able to playtest it properly during late tuesday and wednesday. I will release just before the deadline just to squeeze out as many hours of playtesting as possible. The game is now 95% playable and the end cutscene is not done.

I know this game looks bad but my upcoming game will be better then any game I made & it will be longer.

If you KNOW your game / games look bad, why release them? Why not test them, find ways to improve them and then, AFTER making them GOOD, release them.

Making good progress, the extension really saved my ass this time. Got 95% of graphics done, 90% of gameplay mechanics are working and I have working cutscenes etc.

I believe the game will be beta-worthy some time tomorrow and I will have monday and tuesday to fix any issues that arise.

Stealing something and paying for it afterwards is still stealing, i wouldn't brag about it.

The fact that someone else put the music on the internet does not make it free to use as you please.
It is my understanding that the minimum you must do in a situation like this is credit who the music originally belongs to (Squaresoft / SquareEnix), ie: "Music: Final Fantasy IX Boss Battle theme (property of SquareEnix), used without permission"

Even then its a bit shady, but as long as you are not making any money off of it, the lawyers will let it slide. Then again, if you start charging money from people at some point...

(The above may be incorrect and if someone else is more familiar with copyright law, feel free to correct me)