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I doubt the TSL team would revive it. By now they've probably forgotten about it and are thinking about their next projects.

You could not be more wrong.

Oh, my bad. I hate it when I badly word what I want to say and people use it to pull my arguments apart.

But even if that were to happen, I doubt the TSL team would revive it. By then they'd have probably forgotten about it and working on their next projects.

As for the "spineless" thing, I didn't want to offend you or anyone who's actually boycotting Activision, I was just making a remark on video games boycott movements in general. It's perfectly feasible for someone to completly boycott a company, but how many boycotters will remain at the end of the year, when Starcraft 2 and the next WoW addon will come out? Most gamers are fickle like that. Me the first, for years I hated Eidos and if I look at my bookshelves, there's more titles published by Eidos in it than any other companies.

Now if Ken and Roberta Williams personally wrote a letter to Activision  on behalf of the TSL team that gave approval of the game then the company may be willing to change their minds, or at least go back to the negotiating table.

I don't think so. All Activision care is protecting the profitability of the KQ's brand. I don't think they'd change their mind no matter who would back up TSL.

For the petition, as if the rather low number of people who signed it in the wake of the announcement wasn't a sign of failure, I doubt Activision would be open to discussion even if it reached its target number. And forget boycott already, there's not enough KQ fan for it to work, even if there was, gamers are completly spineless when it comes to boycott and ~65% of all Activision's profits comes from WoW and you're not gonna stop these folks from playing that game.

TSL has 2 chances of survival:
Activision would need to get a new CEO that would like to relaunch these old franchizes and use TSL as a diving board to promote it as several people in this thread pointed out.

Instead of trying to convince activision with petition, it's TSL you should try to convince to rework their game, no matter how difficult that would be.

But even if that were to happen, I doubt the TSL team would revive it. By now they've probably forgotten about it and are thinking about their next projects. You should do the same. TSL was not the first KQ fangame project out there and it won't be the last either.

You have traditionalist on one side and innovators on the other.

In this debate, it's not traditionalists and innovators. It's people who want to keep the puzzles aspect in adventure games on one side and people who want to remove them completly and create visual novels/puzzle-less games on the other.

My personal definition of an adventure game would be a brain teasing game where the puzzles are deeply interwinded in a story. Remove the story, the context, the situations where the puzzles are solved, and you end up with puzzle game. Remove the brain teasing aspect, and you end up with a visual novel.

Game creators have the right to put no puzzles in their adventure games if they want to, but I reserve myself the right to not play their games if that's the case, just like I do with many puzzle-less IF games and most visual novels out there, because I want to play games, not read or watch them, I want to be challenged, I want to make decisions, I want to accomplish goals through very specific rulesets, because that's what bring me into the game medium in the first place.

However, that doesn't mean I'm an old cranky adventurer who want to USE TRINKET ON GIZMO his way out of every situations, I'm always advocating for people to find new, innovative puzzles mechanics, like those found in Loom, Full Throttle, Ace Attorney, The Shivah or Gunmute, both to bring a wind of fresh air in a gameplay stale genre and also to allow new stories to be told in the genre. If you create a new mechanic to replace the classic "use items on items" mechanic, go ahead, as long progressing in the game still requires my brain, and not just some brainlessly stumbling around, talking to everyone in hope the game will progress, I'll have no problems with that. Where I'll have a problem is if you remove the brain teasing aspect and replace it with absolutly nothing.

To me figuring out a plot twist, or discovering who the killer might be was always more fun than going from point a to b, while collecting this or that, in order to get past here to there.

The problem is most adventure games are completly scripted, linear and the goal is more to assist the detective while he deduces who the murderer is rather than letting you find who the murderer is. Guessing a plot twist before it happens is not a gameplay element to me. Were someone to make a murder mystery kind of adventure game, where you actively got to collect clues and use your brain to find the real murderer and avoid accusing an innocent, some sort of more complex version of Where's An Egg, now that would be completly different. Even more so if said game could generate a new murder mystery everytime you restart the game.

I stumbled on a second walking dead. I was walking in circle for a while, I finally looked at a walkthrough only to discover I needed to carve a second crutch to solve my puzzle, unfortunately, I can't carve anything else than dolls. I'll wait for the updated version before replaying the game.

As for the game, it's always a pleasure to see the crazy adventures these silly vikings and their doll carving and flower planting buddies get into. I can't wait to finish this episode and for the next one.

You're right. That's what I said also (but hidden...) :-(
I'm afraid you have to restore a previous saved game or start again.

Oh. I didn't read it as I didn't want to spoil myself the game. In my defense however, I did search for the word "spear" before posting my message, but you mispelled it.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I can't really blame the TSL team anymore. The project started during an earlier, more simple time, there was that Lost Chapter Space Quest fangame, King's Quest 1 VGA and hundreds of never to be released fangames and remakes projects in the wild, and you thought there would be no legal problems if you made your own fangame too, it's only several years later when Square shut down Chrono Resurrection and companies became aware of the fangames phenomenon that we finally wised up, by that time, it was too late for TSL to go underground and they got sucked in that legal nightmare.

May it be a lesson to current and future fangames makers: Make an homage or simply go underground.

Either I'm doing something wrong, either your game has a walking dead:

Spoiler

If you throw your spear at the fish when the fish is too far away, you'll lose the spear and won't be able to carve a second one.

[close]

Interesting post, Jared.

I don't know for you but I suddently don't have any sympathy left for the TSL crew or at least whoever thought it would be a good idea to play russian roulette with other people's hope and work in exchange for endorsement from Activision.

On the subject of changing the character names, while it's better than trashing the entire thing, it's not that simple, they would certainly have to change some character design and record new lines to fit the new names. But if they went out of their way to be recognized as official KQ9, it's very unlikely they'll opt for that solution.

It's no rocket science:
1 - Reduce or remove your web appearance when your team is self-sufficient.
2 - Looking for official approval is begging to get your work crushed.
3 - When the game is done, release it, nothing will ever stop it, if you receive a C&D, it will simply appears on rapidshare and torrent websites.
4 - If you're so scared of legal actions, stop putting your real name all over your game and website in the first place.

Why nobody is doing this I have no idea.

The folks behind The Silver Lining sent their near completed fan sequel to Activision for approval only to receive a C&D. More info on the official website:

http://www.tsl-game.com/

I was not really interested in that game but what a major bummer.

May it be a lesson to whoever is currently working on a fan game: When your project is doing fine, remove your web appearance a bit, keep a low profile, and release your game when it's ready and on all channels so it can't be stopped anymore, and for the sake of your fans and everyone who invested countless hours on your project, stop looking for official approval.

Don't confuse realism with immersion. A game can have outlandish puzzles, unrealistic setting and a GUI that occupy half of the screen, and as long it's a fun game, your players won't mind any of that and play your game for hours. On the other hand, force your players to backtrack because the main character is too dumb/lazy to carry a ladder in their hands, get lost because there's no easy way to navigate the rooms, double or triple test every hotspots because of some arbitrary triggers... for the sake of realism and your players will quickly remember they're just playing a game. Dying from anything, walking-dead, maze and timed puzzles are also realistic, but there's a reason why they're not in modern adventure games anymore.

I must say I really like that Vukul's Vampyre Story idea, where the items are not always taken but are nonetheless carried in the main character's mind. And with a fade in, fade out effect, you can also remove most of the useless backtracking.

WHAM: I've seen this idea in action before, the game was Speculum Mortis, and it expected you to revisit every single locations in the game and interact with every objects anytime you solved or encountered a puzzle for the very reason that "nobody in their right mind would carry all that junk around/do all those seemingly useless actions unless they had a good reason". The result was horrendous.

Plus, how would the game (and the player) know when the main character got a reason to pick up an item? Would they become pickable when you enter the room where the puzzle is located? Or would you have to look at every single puzzles you encounter? Or unsuccessfully interact with each of them?

Players complained at Dave Gilbert regarding the clue combination mechanic of his Blackwell games because they could figure out the answers to the questions in the games without combining the clues yet the game didn't let them progress because the main character couldn't figure the answers, no matter how obvious these answers were to the players. I don't think making a game where this problem applied to every actions you did would be a good idea.

Seriously, don't do that. It's just games after all, there's no need for this kind of realism.

I did that a lot with my dad and my cousin back when I was young. It's been proven movies are better when you watch them with a lot of friends, I can garantee the same apply to adventure games. Plus my cousin and I ended up quoting our favorite moments and laugh out loud at all time.

Nowadays however I feel uncomfortable when the idea is proposed to me. Adventure games aren't like other games, when you know the solution to a puzzle, the challenge is gone, and whenever I replay a classic adventure game, I regret because having played so many of them with someone else, I know I wasn't the one who solved many puzzles in a lot of these games and the challenge is now ruined forever. Nowadays I prefer to play adventure games without any outside help, may it be walkthrough or friends, because I'd rather finish them all by myself and feel I achieved something than spoil myself another great adventure game.

On the subject of multiplayer adventure games, personally I'd prefer to see a game where each players are given the control of a different character, but I recognize a game where players take turns at trying a different commands, like Snarky once proposed, could also be fun. Last year a friend of mine wrote or stumbled on a script that could play IF games on IRC and we found ourselves trying all kind of silly commands in Lost Pig.

Great, for once I've actually played, if not most, at least a significant number of the nominees. Usually I have to devote several weekends to catch up on last year's games before I can cast my vote. Now I can rewatch The Wire instead.

Same here. I didn't play ATOTK back in 2007, and since it was in nomination in all categories, I didn't vote, and in 2008 it was far worse. Last year I stopped to shovel indie games in a folder everytime I was sucked in a big commercial game for weeks and I played each one of them as they were released. I only have 2 games to play but this year I'll finally be able to vote.

It made me sad, angry, depressed, and bloodthirsty.

It's just a matter of habit. Humans love routines, anytime things aren't like they're used to be, they'll feel angry. I feel sad, angry, depressed, and bloodthirsty anytime I got to use Firefox or IE or someone else's computer, even someone else's Opera since things are never customized like I want them to be, or when a program or website I use everydays get an update that drastically change its look and I can't find anything anymore.

Haha, I'm having the same problem here with Kaspersky. The computer stalls anytime I launch or quit a huge AGS games like Downfall or T-Rex and Muscle Sam, anytime a .exe, .dll or thumb.db files is extracted from an archive... And it get worse if the computer ran for more than 6 hours. Two years ago, I suggested Kaspersky to everyone I know, it had the highest virus detection rates, and could completly scan my computer in 45 minutes instead of 4 hours like Avast, next month, for the first time ever, I'll format my computer because of its antivirus instead of its viruses.

Wouldn't change anything. Many of the vaporwares mentionned here reach as far as production (aren't people asked to post screenshots when creating a thread in the GiP?), anything that has yet to reach testing phase can get cancelled for any reason, release phase for games based on somebody else's IP.

What you don't know you can't miss, personally I don't play demo nor click on any thread in the GiP forum except for a handful of creators I trust will finish their games. Sole exceptions I did to my rule is for Gesundheit, who's demo I got from TIGSource, and FoY, which is the only game that was around before I stopped to check the GiP and that's still around nowadays.

I find it less visible since I tend to ignore the 4 or 5 sticky posts and jump straight to the new topics whenever I visit the forum. But that's just me.

So what's going on with the commercial games "best demo only" problem? You guys are working on it or it will stay the same?

I can't fathom how you've reached this opinion of the rating process. Pick a gaming website at random (IGN, Gamespot, Adventure Gamers, etc), and you'll find reviews are usually the work of a single author. A single author with a single opinion.

You can't use this example. Because while all review sites use a single reviewer for a single game, there's thousands of review sites and blogs out there that will review the same game, so if you don't agree with one's opinion, you can just check another site, because there will be plenty of alternative reviews. For many AGS games, the AGS panel is the only review they'll ever get.

But don't get me wrong, as much as I wanted games to be reviewed by more than one person, I don't want you to change anything to the review panel. I've long accepted that the current system is as perfect as it will ever be. There's just too many games in the database and too much work done already, changing just one little thing could and would demoralize everyone who's been involved in the panel in the last couple of years, and in the end, there would still be people who'd complain about unfair reviews so it would be completly pointless.

There's more subtle solution.
Make, say, 20 cups minimal grade and 25 cups maximal grade. In this case you'll keep general rating concept and yet make lower grades less unpleasant.

Haha! It's funny because I had exactly the same idea yesterday. Have the second cup worth 5 cups. So we'd have games rated 1 cup, 6 cups, 7 cups, 8 cups and 9 cups, no more problems with the second cup not being obvious that it means "Worth a try", and no need to overhaul the whole system.

-edit-
Oh, as for the idea of giving more importance to the user ratings, how about ditching (or converting) the current 0-100% user rating system completly and replacing it with a 0-5 cups rating? Not unlike the system on Abandonia.com. Or would that be too much trouble for nothing?

The AGS panel rating is  is one of the most important elements for the majority of the people to select a game.

About 2: Every AGS game developer cares about the AGS PANEL opinion. That's for sure!

But not every players do.

Players care for screenshots, hooking story synopsis, the game's features, the way the game is presented, the persons who made the game, the gameplay, the price tags... The panel's opinion is just one variable that will be ignored everytime the screenshots or plot overview or every other variables will have the players say "Man, this game looks great, I'll give it a try!". I've played poorly rated games that were a whole lot of fun and critically acclaimed games that bored the crap out of me.

So, if you want my opinion, take the panel's opinion with a grain of salt, put the games back for download/in the database/on the forum, take into account the constructive criticism and ignore the unconstructive one, keep on making games and never forget that it's impossible to please everyone and just like there will be people who won't like your games, there will be people who will like them, who will want to play more of your games, and stopping to submit your games here or in the database will only make it harder for them to find and play your latest games.

It's your call, buddy. What do you honestly think will hurt your games more? A panel review a lot of people don't give a shit about, or that from now on your current and future games will be even harder to find?