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Silly question: how long will the Bake Sale last? Will it be a 24 hour smash n' grab all you can eat buffet, or a leisurely 1-2 week brunch like other Indie Bundles?

Again, congrats to all those involved, job outstandingly well done :o

[remember to only touch in at the start and end of your journey]

All the other commenters have pretty much covered everything I was going to suggest. The Natural History Museum is a personal favourite just for it's interesting architecture

I think you'll get a handle on the public transport with the tfl website. As you'd expect, the tube (metro) lines are colour coded and simple enough to follow. I'll warn you: it's not the nicest - Barcelona is wonderful imho - and some of the deeper lines are downright disgusting. Also people are very pushy during rush hour and will force themselves into the train, even if they can't fit. Most lines have regular trains though so why not just wait for the next one?

The tube is convenient but you miss so much by being underground all the time. As Ali said, you can walk between some stations. There's also a few Overground lines which let you see a bit of scenery and may be useful for getting into London (one runs right past the top of my road  ), although check which tickets you need for these as they may be different than the metro once they get a bit further north.

As for tickets, you can buy paper travelcards or plastic Oyster cards at newsagents or at the metro stations. Oyster cards are used by touching them on special yellow readers at the start and end of your journey and can either be used Pay As You Go (you top it up as needed, no minimum spend) or you can put a travelcard on it.

I didn't know about the visitor Oyster card myself, that might be useful. If I recall correctly, it's £5 Sterling to buy an Oyster card from a ticket booth here which I think gives you about £3 travel credit. If you return it you get the £2 back, but we have lots of spare ones lying around here that my parents use when they come down to visit.

London is divided into zones on the tfl underground map: 1 being the most central and the most expensive. You save a lot of money by avoiding travelling through zone 1 (PAYG) or only getting a travelcard that only covers the zones you'll actually need. Also it's more expensive at peak times (04:30 - 09:30) than off-peak. There is, however, a daily price cap so after you reach it journeys are free. It's included in the tfl fares list but seems to have gone up since I was at Uni.

It may work out cheaper to use Oyster Pay As You Go rather than a travelcard depending on how long you are staying, but the travelcards give you less to worry about. You can use both on the metro, buses, trams and Overground in most cases. If you do use Oyster Pay As You Go, remember to only touch in at the start and end of your journey.

In most main stations this is simple enough: you have to touch on the yellow reader to open/exit through the gate. But some of the Oyster readers are on the platforms or in the connecting tunnels so it can be tempting to touch your Oyster card on all of them! If you forget to touch out or you touch when you shouldn't you get charged the full daily fare, and trust me, it's happened to me quite a few times!

The only exception is the pink readers you might need to use mid-journey. These tell the system that you're avoiding zone 1 and you get a cheaper fare. An example i've used is the one in Stratford. If in doubt, ask a member of staff.

Enjoy your stay in London. Unfortunately I don't drive otherwise I would've offered to help get you to/from the airport (it's about 30 miles from us I think) but pm me if you get into trouble and I can nag her parents to offer a free taxi

[Idea -]

Idea - gameboy
Atmosphere - gameboy
Design - DrewCCU
Composition - gameboy
Functionality - DrewCCU
Technique - DrewCCU

Wonderful entries guys=)

[The end of the.. trail]

I extend the deadline to January 11th.

Hopefully that means midnight (GMT) on Jan 11th=D

This needs a lot more love but the deadline has stolen my time so here you go:

The end of the.. trail

I had planned to mock up a HUD at the bottom and some characters but I ran out of time. You would play a wolf and in this room you find a hunter's footprints in the snow, leading to where he is hiding in the tree.

It's very rough around the edges, I know, but as my first attempt painting in greyscale then colorizing the image, i'm very pleased with the result. I'll continue working on it this weekend hopefully=D

Show your enthousiasm please!

Oh yes! I've been expecting Sherlock to come back for ages, I can't believe it took so long. Just over an hour to go - can't wait

The later date works for me! Means I only have to starve for a week after splurging the last of my salary on the Bake Sale

Oh! Another popped into my head..

The Big Blue Bundle

(how original(!))

[A]

Adventure Game Shoebox

I realise there should be an Archives in there somewhere though..

Take your time. I don't believe anyone can blame you for being distracted by the festivities at this time of year. Enjoy it while it lasts=)

I can't stay as long today - late already but i'll make sure i'm there in time to see CJ - so i'll sum up my experience so far. For me, the talks from Neil from Tinman Games and Chris Bateman were definite highlights. As was Yahtzee's message:-) The game previews were excellent (Baaaa!) but difficult for M0ds to demo when he hadn't played them before. Fun watching him fail tho;-)

I'll have more of a nosey round today, but the ones I saw that were playable - The Rail, Entrapment - were fantastic imho. It was also good to find people coming from a mix of backgrounds. Forgotten your handle already, sorry, but Damien's Chronicles of Humanity machinima looks impressive. Dodgy net connection at my B&B but i'll definitely check out the series when I get back to London.

This weekend has definitely inspired me to dust off my half baked ideas and load up the Editor again.

Huge thanks to M0ds for organising the whole thing.

Hopefully heading off to catch the train to Didcot in less than an hour so the excitement/nervousness is mounting!

How many confirmed attendees do we have now?

[Neil Rennison]

On Saturday we will be joined by Neil Rennison of Tin Man Games who will talk to us about Gamebook Adventures, his successful iPad 'choose your own adventure'  games

Particularly looking forward to this. I haven't played any of these games yet but the concept makes me all nostalgic :'(

You will be sent the newsletter

So far, this alone has been worth the ticket price. The newsletters are awesome, especially the developer spotlights. I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's one with NickyNyce I demand more! MORE!

I think I need to lie down..that's gorgeous :o

I'm going to have to rent a tux this time around..

Would just like to say that I think you can do digital painting with the iPad. I went to the London International Technology Show last month. God it was dull, but the highlight was a presentation by this guy showing some of his stuff on the iPad and iPhone. It was a mixture of finger painting and stylus drawn artwork.

I don't know anything about digital painting on iDevices other than his brief presentation so I don't know where he ranks in the digital painting iPad community thingy or who else might be more inspirational. Still it encouraged me to download the Brushes app and draw a stickman on the tube home

[The Night's Dawn Trilogy]

What a really good idea for a thread!

Sadly i'm between books at the moment although I can chomp through a whole series at a time when I do get going. I tend to read sci-fi/fantasy stuff - too many to list but i'm partway through Peter F Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy after thoroughly enjoying his Commonwealth Saga books - and i'm partial to a bit of Pratchett myself. I think I read as far as Wyrd Sisters but we have a few of the other books i've yet to get to.

The last book I read was the first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet which I bought as part of The Complete Sherlock Holmes on my new Kindle just recently. It was my first experience of Holmes/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I really enjoyed it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC mini-series Sherlock which is what prompted me to try the books (that and a bit of Kindle-fever which has subsided since I lent it to my Dad), and it was interesting to see the differences. The writing still felt quite modern and relevant. It did go off on a strange tangent in the middle with the back story but it was satisfying to see it all tied back together at the end, even if it did end a bit quickly. Looking forward to reading the rest when I get my Kindle back.

I recently picked up another book in a series I enjoy which is Lost City by Clive Cussler from his Numa Files adventures with Kurt Austin as the main character. They're silly adventure stories really, quite cliché, but I quite enjoy them as a bit of light reading. I've read almost all the Numa files - just 4 to go after this one - so will probably try his Dirk Pitt novels after this.

I'm bookmarking this to come back to when i'm actually reading something decent!

[loved]

I loved the awards last time, I can't believe it's coming around again already..um when exactly is it??

My two cents:

Custom characters - ..mmm yes please if it's possible! Not sure how it works but if people don't provide enough frames, let them suffer the dodgy animation..either that or have Duals make everyone a unique character with multiple animations - me first please - I mean, it's not like he has anything better to do!

The lobby - this would be cool but I don't think it's a must-have for the awards imho, the one room worked fine last time.

More interactions - gimme stuff to click on and play with please

Being able to toggle on/off names

*clap* - it was pretty distracting for me, maybe have the sound effect and the words above the character's heads, but not in the chatbox itself

Icons above characters' heads such as the 'talking' speech bubble already mentioned or a some snoozing zzZZs for when your away from the keyboard. Tabata's emoticons are the only thing missing from the Awards imo

Videos - That would be really cool and was something I would've loved to see last time, but how will this work? I see you said they'll run at their own speed on each client but does that mean they might fall out of sync with the rest of the show or will they be stored locally on the client machine? Basically i'm asking 'can I accidentally break it?' as I know nothing of such technical wizardry!

+1 for a reminder of the award being presented

So isn't it better the term "classic adventure game" to be changed for example to "interactive story" or something like this? Because in nowadays for the gamers we are "in the past", but for the book readers we can be "a future".

I'm not so keen on "interactive story". I think it has the reputation (in my little head at least) of being ironically mainly non-interactive, and there has been the perception that adding story kills gameplay because it can only be done with cutscenes - which is obviously nonsense. That's mainly why I like (point and click) adventure games: they bleed story from every pore without even trying

I tend to just call them "adventure games", but when people look at me confused I call them "point and click adventure games" to distinguish them from "action adventures" like Tombraider. I still have a hard time explaining them to anyone who hasn't played any of the classic 2D adventures though, and not much luck finding them in stores except as bargain titles buried under all the Hidden Object Games. Not so keen on those tbh, although they do look lovely. There is definitely cross over: I loved games like Oblivion and Mass Effect 2 which I consider "action adventures" rather than RPGs  as they're described.

I can't understand how ANYONE can look at this without saying: "Wow, this is beautiful!"

Drool...

As far as I'm concerned, we're living in a golden age for adventure games! The internet has allowed small developers to make high-quality games to delight and entertain people like us.

Absolutely! I'm a relative newcomer to adventure games so I still have a lot of classics to catch up on, but it seems we're swimming in new offerings these days. My tastes have changed - I barely look at mainstream titles these days - but i'm not exactly short of new experiences to enjoy.

Personally I don't think graphics matter so much. I'll happily play blocky low-res titles if the concept appeals. The indie scene seems to be doing very well with low-res graphics imho.

and even after all these years, WHY ARE MY ELLIPSES STILL SO NUMEROUS?!

Haha, i'm still trying to kick my addiction to commas..

[Couple of functional quirks:]

Calin has found other things to do than work on Nimbus!

:'( I sort of thought he had .. I saw the odd mention around the forums but I think I missed the official announcement if there was one. I just can't keep up with you kids, you move too damn fast.

I hope this is a 'good thing' for you Calin? That you're happy to let it go and are moving on to brighter things? Nexus/Nimbus blew my mind when you first released the preAlpha - I really look forward to seeing what you're up to next, and of course your Bake Sale game

..have created a new build with a design that fits the new design build of the AGSA website. Please download and check it out. Feedback would be very much appreciated!

Nice to see you taking this on board Peder, good man!

I'm not overly keen on the slight re-design of Nimbus to be honest. It's a bit sterile without the dreamy graphic Calin had in there before, but I understand if you're not allowed to use it. I actually like the menu button colours though, but they perhaps don't go with the AGSA website. I do like that they're now on top - this is similar to the website and allows more space in the Nimbus interface - however it does feel quite empty on the left hand side now without that column there. With the background graphic and side bar before, it kind of framed the content. Now the content seems to float in the middle of the window. I'm not really sure what to suggest though as I think too much clutter would be a bad idea.

Hmm..yeah..actually what you have is growing on me now, forget I said anything!

I'd like to see the default scrollbars go if at all possible; they're too much of a reminder that i'm looking at a website inside an application. A thinner solid colour little vertical sausage shape would look quite nice against a black strip or something depending on the final colour choices.

Couple of functional quirks:

- The width of the list of games in the games section cannot be resized. Not essential but would be nice to have.

- There doesn't seem to be any images for the games I already had downloaded. Do I need to re-add them? I installed this version straight over the old one (Ah..I bet that overwrote the folder where the local images were stored, didn't it? Okay my bad..)

- Trying to download a game that is 'coming soon' crashes Nimbus. The Access games being examples. You also can't tell this unless you are on the game's page, which I had forgotten how to get to (It didn't help that ! made it a bit of a pixel hunt )

- A visible resize handle in bottom right hand corner for the window would be nice

Some minor formatting issues on some of the game's pages here and there but all good overall though - i'm really pleased to see this is still being worked on Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you out. Don't know anything about the development environment Calin used to build this, but I can get cracking on those screenshots for the website and do some proof reading of the games pages or something (unless you've got that covered which you probably have).

Nice first article, congrats 

I liked your little analogy of multiple arcs, I hadn't really thought about it like that. My writing usually focuses on one character - the classic 'hero's / heroine's journey' - and how they are in the beginning, what their motivations are, and how they change/see things differently over the course of the story. It's almost inevitable that the other characters will be going through their own arcs, I think, but i've never planned for it as such.

The back-story of characters  can (and probably should) be more extensive than what is presented in the game.

I wholeheartedly agree. Just because you've done all the research and crafted a complete backstory for your character doesn't mean you need to shoehorn it into the game in huge monologues. If you've put in the effort it will come across naturally in your writing. That's one of the things I love about adventure games: the smallest details can really enrich their worlds and be very telling about the characters without being too vocal about it.

Yeah, feeling the pinch already and it's only early November

But to hell with it, the family's getting a lump of coal for Christmas.

Got my accommodation sorted - in Didcot itself so I can stagger back from the pub - trains booked and i've just bought my AdventureX pass. My partner's coming up to spend a couple of days in Oxford while I enjoy this thing

Well done on organising all this so far Mark, and for the website too which seems to be brimming with more adventure-gamey goodness since i last checked. On with the show!