Messages

"Do you think landing on the mars and disovering ice will help us redirect or destroy deadly asteroids?" Going to space certainly will help if that's what you want, and there are projects that address this problem specifically.

"Do you really think the possible impact of an asteroid is a serious threat to mankind?"
It's a serious, but unlikely threat, it will happen again, perhaps not soon, but we should probably learn to deal with it at some point don't you think?

"So your point is: Money doesn't matter on earth, but going to space is important??"
No, I think money is important on Earth as well as in space. I think spending 0.6% of the US budget on doing enlightening and inspiring things in space is justifiable.

Lets not have another argument about if space exploration is worth doing, we had one in the moon landing/hoax thread and it was ridiculous enough there. The biggest benefits that have come from space research investment are fairly obvious (eg satellites), but if you think it's not worth the money, fair enough, that's something people could debate forever. When you consider how small an amount of money is spent on space compared to other less productive things though, perhaps it will seem less of a waste. Personally, even if nothing earthly had come out of space exploration I would still support it, on the basis of how cool it is.

I'm not really sure what you're saying about meteors though, evenwolf... how did going to the moon teach us much about that? We could see them from here just fine. The moon landings in themselves didn't teach us any really big things I can think of, but that doesn't make them pointless.

Disclosing your details to the BPI based on the BPI's evidence gathering might be against data protection laws (although I am sure something could be worked out), but if they are doing the prosecution themselves I can't see any legal or privacy issues. Increasingly people are talking about encrypting all traffic since we can't trust our ISPs and have very few legal protections... this sort of thing doesn't help.

It's hard enough finding one person to do a rating. If it can be organised in the future a second or third pass is an option but it's probably not happening any time soon.

Yes the ratings are subjective, which is unavoidable and a good thing in my opinion. I don't want to know what games are popular in the scene, I can see the download stats and google hits already, I see the ratings as just another source for suggestions. They do the important job of diverting people away from the games they definitely do not want to play though. I was in favour of 3 levels to start with, the 4-5 cup split was always going to cause controversy, these games being the most high profile, but 5 is what came out of the discussion and it's here to stay. Good job overall.

Well you can start now, good luck, see you all in a week.

OMG it doesn't start for 30 minutes, you cheats. Why does nobody seem to understand UTC? It's the standard we always use in space!

Such enthusiasm! But you could wait for the competition to start

edit: which is at midnight UTC btw, or generally tomorrow.

Adventure games are the obvious choice, it's AGS, but I don't want to confine people to thinking about standard AG constraints (although they are fine too). I don't think there would be much point in entering a completely non story based Tetris clone because it's not a coding competition, but you are free to enter whatever you like.

Here's a last chance warning: this year's OROW starts tomorrow. Check the activities forum thread if you are interested in taking part. Otherwise sorry for the spam!

The first rule of game art for non artists should be consistency. Make things the right size in proportion to each other, choose sane, realistic colours and keep using them. You don't need to have drawing skills to do a Pleurghberg or a Yahtzee game. You just need to think about what you're doing and work in a regular fashion.

Addressing your art specifically, don't use high res if you can't draw, many good low res pixel artists can't draw. The smaller you draw the less difficult choices you have. 320x240 is the standard resolution in this scene. The scale of your objects is all over the place. Think about how big a flower is in proportion to a boy's head and how many feet tall a lamp shade is, how tall a room is, etc. Once you have drawn one room you can reuse the sizes so your characters will fit right. Colours are difficult initially and you seem to be going for a dark room effect, which isn't an easy lighting situation. Find a graphics editor with a good colour selector and a similar piece of art and copy the colours, it's a good way to learn.

Anything publically available before the competition is allowed, eg instagame, plugins, modules, photos off the internet. Anyone can use these things so it's not an unfair advantage. Reusing your own things is a bit of a grey area, the game shouldn't be a continuation of work you did before OROW, but I know people have their character templates and whatever, obviously nobody is going to get mad if you base your art off them. Just try and be fair.

Sorry if that's not clear, by that I mean you send the game to the voting organisers in private, and don't put your name on the entry, they then host the games in one place. It's meant to make it less of a popularity contest as well as a bit of fun trying to guess who made what.

Hi, there's a thread for asking for help at the top of this forum, try there.

It doesn't run all the time, it gets a lot more entries, the vote system is different, there is no theme constraint, and because of the lower investment of time you often get more unusual entries and more finished ones. It's a time limit game activity but I wouldn't want people to think of it simply as a shorter MAGS.

If you get lost in unnecessary functions, learn what they do, and you'll find a lot of them aren't so unnecessary. Being comfortable is not the way to get better at things. MS Paint is simply inefficient, and when you want to get a game finished that matters.

Serious pixel art work does benefit from a specifically designed editor, and I'd recomment Cosmigo Pro Motion. It's easily the best I've used after learning to operate it properly. For simple pixel art stuff like Yahtzee's style, where you aren't worrying about palettes, Photoshop is quite usable. It's mainly animation where Photoshop gets laborious, and where dedicated pixelling programs shine. PS is pretty good for backgrounds, even in low res.

I don't agree with people that don't think tools are particularly important. You'll make much better progress with efficient tools in art and in most other areas, and a little effort learning a tricky program can be well worth it. That said, as long as you're not using MS Paint you're not shooting yourself in the foot too badly.

Creed will probably go to Paris when some of the rest of us coming in cars do, mid week. I think Eric and Jess wanted to go then too. Probably won't be most of the group, but only for a day, so as not to split the group up too much.

[OROW V, 2008]

OROW V, 2008

Time is up. Hooray for all those that entered. We have 12 games this time, and they're all in the zip below.
download: orow5.zip (79.6MB)
Voting is now over, here are the results:

The audio winner is: Man Boy vs Doctor Sock by Ben304
Best game design goes to: How Many by AJA
The visual arts award goes to: Seed by LimpingFish
The highest writing score went to How Many by AJA

Aaand the overall winner for this OROW is... How Many, AJA's second win in a row. First time that has happened.

A special commendation to MashPotato's Beauties and Beasts which scored high in every category, winning none.

if you want to see your scores in detail: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/aga/orowv/res.txt

The authors of the games were:
Baltazar the Familiar - King Wiking
Beauties and Beasts - MashPotato
Chatroom - JBurger
Cheerful Science - Akatosh
How Many - AJA
Man Boy vs Doctor Sock - Ben304
One Week, One Room - Jon
ONNA - Dualnames
Seed - LimpingFish
Think Outside the Boxland - TheOrator
Unfinished Business - Ishmael
Wisp - SimB

Feel free to run one, I'm a bit busy right now. Whoever does it, I would strongly suggest sticking to similar rules to before. Every time one is run people ask for more restrictions or longer timespans (theme, two weeks etc). I think that's a bad idea personally and I think the reasonable success of the other ones suggests the format works as it is. The only change so far was to allow people to have multiple rooms if they really want. The point was to make people think small, not to make them worry about if an intro counts as a second room.

Actually I may as well run it, it's not much more work than hosting the games and putting up the old vote page again... I'll make a thread.

If you have a 1.5+Ghz x86 PDA, DOSBox emulation might be an option, but for most systems, including non intel macs, dosbox would run too slow for most AGS purposes.
Running Windows in a virtualised environment should give you better performance than DOSBox. The only downside is you need to aquire a copy of Windows from somewhere.