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While I tend to try and limit the length of my own stories in this contest, I see no reason to ask others do the same.
However, at the same time, I feel it only fair that the readers and voters might decide to focus less on stories they feel are overtly long, which then means those stories might have less of a chance of earning votes from such readers.

[Mandle]

It was a close one this time around! Each of the stories got their fair share of love, but in the end we have a winner!

1st place: Tut-Tut by Mandle
2nd place (shared): The man of the stairways by KyriakosCH and Ice Under Fire by Baron
4th place: Ben’s Rum by Sinitrena


Thanks to everyone for participating. I hope you all had fun with the theme.
Looking forward to what you come up with for our next fortnight, Mandle!

[5th March 2021 - 23:59:59 UTC]

Votes must be submitted by the following deadline: 5th March 2021 - 23:59:59 UTC

Tonight! Quick! Hurry, hurry! 

The best part about asking for quotes and saying you'll take some time to think is that the folks trying to sell to you will sense that you'll be comparing their offers to others. 
Depends on the store in question, but they might try to make some special offers and cut you a good deal, though don't expect miracles here. PC hardware has notoriously low profit margin for retailers, so the most common way they try to entice customers is to offer discounts on extra stuff, like peripherals or games or such, since these have a far bigger profit margin they can afford to do discounts on.

Especially if you are considering expense as a high priority, then some pre-built gaming PC is likely your best option. Sure, you might not get the most absolutely optimal rig, but the key with pre-built mass produced gaming PC's is that the fact they are produced in bulk makes them cheaper than the sum of their components would be if bought separately.

Here's what I'd do in your shoes: find a couple local electronics stores and pay them a visit. Know what your price range is and tell them this, and that you want a gaming PC (I am guessing a desktop PC, and that you already have mouse, keyboard, speakers and a monitor? If not, consider these as added expenses.) Get a few recommendations, have them print these out for you or email them to you, and take a couple days to think and compare. I can even take a look if you get some recommendations, point out potential issues and give suggestions. You can also look at the computers they recommend, list out the components and go online to see how much it would cost to buy them separately.

Another thing to consider: pre-built computers come with a Windows operating system included. Unless you planned on pirating one or already have a license, this is also a considerable expense when building a PC separately.

Yes, depending on where you access the site it's either called the AGS games database or just Games.
Though that is kind of a valid point: when adding a new game to the database you can choose a resolution for it, and the information is displayed on the game page, but that doesn't seem to be available as a search criteria even in the category search, which is the closest we have to an advanced search tool.

My experience with desktop PC parts is that their costs vary a lot depending on the exact place you live, and things like cases have expensive shipping. Overall I would figure out what is the price of things locally first and find out where other people in your area are getting their parts - there may be some not that famous place that sells parts at an affordable price.

Building your own PC can become a more expensive hobby than Magic the Gathering.  Have fun.

Precisely my reason for recommending looking into local PC stores that might be able to recommend parts, configurations, and provide the service of building the thing for you. Sure, if you enjoy the experience of building a PC (which, I admit, has a lot of the same charm as building Lego) then picking and choosing a case, a power supply, a motherboard and all the rest and putting it together with your own hands can be a fun experience, but if you're just looking to be practical and frugal, then a paid service might well serve you better in the long run.

What is your main reason for wanting to build your own PC?

If it's because you want to have the fun and challenge of learning to do it yourself, then I might be able to give some suggestions based on past experience, as well as suggest some resources you might want to look into. For instance, websites like cpuboss and gpuboss provide a good way to practically compare those components, and should give you the tools you need to decide between items in your price range.

I'd also suggest going Intel / Nvidia instead of the cheaper AMD / ATI manufacturer route when selecting components. You might get slightly less bang for your buck, but both my personal and professional experiences, as well as anecdotes from friends in recent years, suggest that you're far less likely to run into reliability and warranty issues with the slightly more expensive option here.

However, my experience nowadays is that if you can afford a proper desktop PC, especially if it's one kitted out for even medium-tier gaming, then the price of having it professionally assembled and installed is the least of your concerns, and might well save you some trouble down the line. At least in my part of the world the assembly costs a fraction of the price of components, and provides a 3 year warranty that covers all hardware issues, whereas if you build the machine yourself and it breaks, a lot of the troubleshooting is left up to you and only individual components can be replaced on warranty, after you have identified the problem, removed the faulty component and sent it back to the place you bought it from.

Just noticed a fun quirk in the AGS Games Database.
If you set the game resolution as "other" rather than any of the pre-defined resolutions, the game page displays resolution as just "HD".
Since there is no way to write in a value yourself, this might seem a bit off, considering in the case of my latest game I selected "other" because the resolution I used was slightly smaller than the smallest available resolution on the list.

Now my 320x180 game is listed as "HD". 

We had many hours of fun playing Talisman, with the City and Dungeon extensions, and Dark Future, the Mad-Maxish dumbed-down version of Car Wars.

A friend of mine has an old 80's copy of Talisman in Finnish and it's a real fun thing to play. Mostly since none of the Tolkien -style fantasy translations from english to finnish had been standardized, so the names of things and monsters are all over the place, and thus absolutely hilarious.
The expansions were never published in Finnish, so my friend has scanned the English ones, photoshopped their pieces, cards and such with Finnish text, and printed them on cardboard so he can play it with is wife. Very wholesome!

Here's a temp build for next patch: https://cirrus-ci.com/task/4901340306472960
you may choose download either installer or archive.

Please tell if this works for you, and if it suddenly causes more problems.

Yes, this seems to fix the issue for me, and on a quick test I didn't notice any major issues other than my antivirus (F-secure) giving a really ugly error when I tried to compile my game. It seems to recognize the editor as a ransomware application and blocks is, so I had to exclude the folder from being protected by F-secure to get around that issue. Not sure if that's relevant at all, but felt I should mention that just in case.

Huh, I'd never heard of Battlegroup until today, but looking it up now it seems rather interesting!

For me it would have to be NetHack.

Back in the days we had an early Window 3.11 computer, but no internet connection. My mom was also adamant that no games were allowed on the computer, because it was only for work and study.
I read in the Finnish "Pelit" (Games) magazine a number of articles about NetHack and, despite the crude visuals, the wealth of systems and details mesmerized me.

I stole one of my moms empty 1.44 megabyte diskettes and snuck it to school with me. There I waited for our weekly one hour visit to the computer class, where I downloaded NetHack, put it on the diskette, and snuck it back home in secrecy. I hid the game in a folder on the computer and played it for countless hours while home alone. Maybe the fact I had to be so secretive about this forbidden form of entertainment added something to the experience, but the sheer level of detail and possibility in NetHack was staggering to me at the time. Teaching my pet cat to steal spell scrolls from shop, learning the ins and outs of worship and favours, reaching Minetown for the first time and discovering friendly NPC's other than shopkeepers, getting my first wish and using the gaming magazine wish guide to get the best armour in the game early... So many experiences, and so many things I still wish modern games did.

That gaming experience led to me interest in games evolving out of the early console games on the Sega Megadrive, led to me growing increasingly excited to read about more new games in magazines, led to me learning how to use early internet, and led to me growing interested enough in games to, eventually, try and make my own simple games.

Game is released: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=58887.0

Download link.

DOWNLOAD >


I can't seem to add the game to the AGS database, but will do so if the page becomes functional for me again. Done a while ago.

I seem to be getting a "File not found" error page when I try to add a new game to the AGS database.
URL: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/add/

I can input all the fields properly, but when I try to press "Add game" in the end I get the error.

Any idea if this is some kind of issue with my input on the page, or if the page for adding games is just down in general?

EDIT: Tried again after sleeping overnight. No error this time around and game added to database successfully. No idea why it didn't work yesterday.

[One More Fathom]

One More Fathom


DOWNLOAD >


Treasure awaits below the waves, deep in the Graveyard Chasm. Dare you dive deep enough to find the most valuable treasures, and are you wily enough to return to surface before air runs out and it's too late?
One More Fathom is a push your luck game of diving for treasure and becoming filthy rich, and maybe, just maybe, also finding a little something more...

Maybe you'll even make a FRIEND on the way...

Beta 2 released to testers today. The game is now complete and will go through one more day of bugfixes and testing before final release on either Saturday evening or Sunday.

I have two features that were planned for the game that ended up being cut for lack of time, but these were both minor features that should not greatly impact the game. So far the feedback from testers has been surprisingly positive, so I hope things will go well once this thing is fully out. Will make a finished game thread on release. SOON!

Much more elegant than my solution. My code was just copied as-is from the original code that sets the button graphic in question, so it was the quickest solution for me (and required zero brainpower to perform).
Also: yay! I feel useful for having reported an actual bug for once, rather than just doing something wrong myself! 

First evening of testing resulted in 15 bugs fixed and 2 minor improvements being made.
And while this may be ill-advised, I'll try to add one more missing feature today before calling the game finished.

This is definitely a bug in the engine. GUI visual representation does not sync with actual data right after save is loaded, only when forced to by some event.

I think the temporary workaround may be to "tweak" gui a little in on_event with eEventRestoreGame, for example change it position by 1 pixel and back immediately.

Yeah, I figured as much. As there is currently only one element that bugs out for me, I set up this in my GlobalScript to handle the issue:

Code: ags

function on_event (EventType event, int data)
{
  if(event == eEventRestoreGame) {
    UpdateNavMap();
    
    if (gSuitLevelScan == 1) {
      btnNavMapFaceplate.NormalGraphic = 162;
    } else if (gSuitLevelScan == 2) {
      btnNavMapFaceplate.NormalGraphic = 27;
    } else if (gSuitLevelScan == 3) {
      btnNavMapFaceplate.NormalGraphic = 28;
    } else {
      btnNavMapFaceplate.NormalGraphic = 29;
    }
  }
}