Messages

Ok, I fixed it, I just hope I didn't screw up anything else in the process.. 

Another bug. This one crashes the editor (well, it keeps running, but I can't save the project, it just makes it crash again):

Fixed.
Quite funny actually, I wrote the exact script like you and it didn't reproduce. Then I loaded your project, added the extender and still it didn't reproduce.
But then I tried it again, only without pressing 'Enter', then it reproduced... The bug was when the extender function is at the very end of the file.

Edit: Also added a possible fix for the weird docking issue (possible since I can't actually reproduce it).

cat,

Spoiler

I think that the dialog option gets added when you have the clue you need to decipher the message.
When you click on the new dialog you get a few seconds in which you should execute the clue, though I guess you just brute forced your way by trying everything you had on the talking head...

[close]

[Jack Trekker]

Jack Trekker
... I'd just have expected more puzzles, for example somehow deciphering the hieroglyphs or stuff.

Well, actually..

Spoiler

You can decipher the hieroglyphs. That's how you know how to solve the last puzzle of the game.
I say try it again, it's actually a very nice puzzle.

[close]

[Betrayal]

Thanks for everybody that commented on our game. I'm happy people found it funny and liked the music.
I hope to polish the game and integrate your feedback (and yes, I'll put markers on the inventory items!) and then publish to the database. Though I did say the same thing on Office Shenanigans (last OROW's game) and still haven't delivered, so we'll see...

This has been a wonderful OROW, I enjoyed all the entries, and I think almost all possible results outcomes would have made me say "well deserved winners", since really (kitsch alert), everybody's a winner here!
Though my vote actually did win, so congratulations Pablo & Nemo!
And thanks to cat for being a wonderful host!

Here's my mini-reviews, I wrote most of it a while back, so I do repeat stuff that people already said, sorry about that:

Betrayal-
Really cool concept with the doors, a very creative game mechanic. Good programming skills to pull that off. The story and twist was nice (though nothing that I haven't seen before), and the execution was interesting. I wasn't quite immersed as I should have, probably due to me not getting much background info on the character and/or not enough time with it.
I believe that in a full length game you'll have more time to flesh out the character so it will probably work better.

Draconis-
Cool game, very impressed that it was programmed in one week. Level design was spot on, there were some challenging puzzles there. Nice graphics too, the dragon and the gems with their sparkling animations were very cute.
I eventually quit without finishing because I was frustrated with two things:
1. Every time you die (or get stuck) you start from the beginning of the levels. Since the levels were long, this was frustrating.
2. You die a lot and the game is not very forgiving. It seems that firing at the enemies was not always as quick as anticipated...
Hardcore gamers might like this, but if you want to approach a more "casual" crowd, then this would have to be amended by sleeker controls and shorter levels (or long levels with save points).

Girl and Rabbit-
Hilarious game! A lot of time was invested in the jokes and it shows. The slap animation is fantastic and kept cracking us up. The graphics were very good too, and the music fit nicely with them. The ending was brilliant too.
If I do have some critic to offer, is that the businessman mini-game was a bit annoying and needlessly time consuming. The concept was hilarious, but the execution lacked a bit. Making them visible just a little more time and making sure that the distribution of colors was more even would have made it more bearable.
By the way, up until playing "The Rebirth", I was sure this was Grundislav's game, just to show you how funny I thought the game was.

Fly Paper-
Hilarious! Epic fail! This is a fantastic way to go down in flames...
This game should be submitted in all OROWs from now on if you ask me, it could be a wonderful running gag (maybe use a different name every time).

Jack Trekker
A kickass introduction! Though it did set up the bars quite high, and the game itself was not of the same quality (or style, for that matter).
Don't get me wrong, though, I liked the game a lot.
It has a nice atmosphere, and nice puzzles to go with it. I'm a big fan of talking heads, and enjoyed some of the humor in the game. Although there were some inconsistencies in the graphic styles, the art was quality overall (though I would change the colors of the walls which were a bit too flashy for me).

Kanji Gakusei
Very nice graphics, and unlike some other game on this list, this one was actually educational!
The atmosphere of this game was consistent throughout the graphics, puzzles, dialogs and music, which was nice.
My main critic of this game is that the puzzles were not challenging enough (except the puzzle with the coal and paper which was cool), and since this game is more puzzle oriented than story oriented, it was vital for the game to really shine.

MI
I liked the game, voice acting added a lot. I liked the mechanism of switching between the characters and using it to solve puzzles. Though I think this was also a trap: On one hand I thought maybe you could have come up with more sophisticated uses for this mechanism. On the other hand, some of the puzzles were basically repeating the same idea, and then it seemed tiresome that you should do it over again.
So you showed some innovation but it requires some more experimintation to get it right. I think adding some more back story would have given it some more spice, I was expecting an ending scene with the monster that locked you up in the first place, I guess there was not enough time (and believe me, I can relate to that).

ODOW
I have a major dislike for first person 3D, but I bit the bullet and played the game to completion.
I was very impressed! It was very smooth, and didn't give me a headache (which is why I usually don't play these sort of games).
Some great programming, and a great proof of concept.

Sinking
This game shows great potential. The atmosphere was very tense and the back story intriguing. The gameplay has a lot of potential, and can probably be balanced more to provide a great experience. It does need work though. First, it was unclear what needs to be done, and the texts went by so fast I didn't manage to read them. Also, it wasn't clear who said what. When taking a new piece of inventory, the old inventory is thrown away, but it took me a while to understand that, I thought you shoot something downwards and didn't realize you replace your inventory. You need to find some better way to clarify that. Lastly, I would have made the character recover faster after falling down, since he fell down a lot...
On a side note, I noticed this is your second game in which you deal with a sinking submarine, which made me wonder if you have a small obsession 

Tattooroom
What a lovely game! I loved the concept, and think this can be enhanced to a much larger game, with all kinds of customers with crazy demands and puzzles rising in difficulty (or alternatively, this could be made into a fast action type of game, which you need to do a lot of tattoos fast).
The graphics were beautiful as well, and the sound effects also. I tried to think of some constructive criticism, but couldn't find any... that doesn't usually happen to me, so let me just tell you well done!

The addict
I really liked the music in this one, well done on that. The game itself was weird and refreshing. It showed some great humor, some of it was probably lost due to not being enhanced enough by the environment. For example, the entire concept of the room changing to living things talking to you (which is a great concept), could have been made more dramatic if there were proper sound effects/music transitions, and if the whole room suddenly transormed and changed style. The living objects could have been made more alive, god talking to you could have been made more impressive, etc.
I also believe I stumbled upon a bug, I talked to the cup first and got to assemble the key before talking to the urinal...
Anyways, for a first game (which was made in a week), this definitely shows promise.

The crystal ball
Again, really nice concept. Great graphics, the visual effects made the atmosphere in the game shine. This game also has some replay value, which is also a nice plus. I like branching dialogs as a main mechanic, and it worked well, though they could have used a little more polish since they were very essential to the game experience. By a little more polish I mean going over all the branches and making sure it all makes sense, it felt that in some of the dialogs you assumed they talked about stuff that they might not actually talked about yet. Maybe it's just a feeling, but a feeling is everything...
Also I felt that the move between the cop and the criminal was too sudden. First, I wasn't ready to leave the cop, I wanted to talk with him some more. And the criminal just appeared with no introduction dialog. This should be thought of, maybe wait for the user to explicitly say he's done with the cop, and then do some "oh, I hear him coming..." with some tension music.
All in all, a very nice and innovative game, with a unique atmosphere.

The Reaper + The Rebirth
Wow! What a great idea, creating two teaser games to promote a big epic game, great stuff. I also liked seeing how you shared elements between the games. The graphics in both games were stunning, the animations were top notch (and wow for that raven animation), the story and the twists gripping, and in short I'm very much intrigued to see the finished product.
I wonder if you already have everything planned, or if you were improvising a little.
My only issue with the games is that the puzzles felt a little rushed, I sorta got the feeling that you put it there for the sake of "let there be puzzles" and maybe they could be thought of more to be more challenging and/or entertaining. This was an issue I had in both games.

Played and voted!
I was also really impressed by the quality. I think it's partly because we were given time to think about the games beforehand. It definitely proved itself...
I've already wrote some mini reviews, will complete them for all the games and publish my thoughts after the results are posted.

Gord10:

Spoiler

It's the order of the colors on the panel next to the cat..
Either left to right or right to left, try them both.

[close]

frosch:

Spoiler

I believe you finished the game!

[close]

Fixed.

Spoiler

I don't know, it was visible for me. Sort of in the middle of the skeleton.

[close]

Do you want to take of your glasses before we start?

Yes, can I put them in your purse?
_____
Tell me when you want to start.. Oh wait, are you actually fighting right now?

Adeel:

Spoiler

What does the note say about the mistress?

[close]

Spoiler

She's a gold-digger! Ok, then, anything shiny in the room she would appreciate?

[close]

Spoiler

The gems on the knight's shield look nice. How can you pry them out?

[close]

Spoiler

Using the bone from the skeleton...

[close]

One general thing I noticed is that the Intellisense is still buggy.

The cache is neither reliably refreshed when saving nor when compiling and sometimes it's also wrong. For example, when I have a function oMyObject_Interact inside the function Intellisense doesn't show me oMyObject but only all function names that start with oMyObject. It happens only sometimes but it's really annoying. However, I remember I  had such problems also with older AGS versions.

So I looked a bit at the code. To quote CJ's comment inside:
// This class is a bit of a mess ... autocomplete is out of control!! 

So I've commited a fix to git, and now autocomplete will refresh from the modified script every time before showing it.
I hope it won't hurt performance on very large scripts, on my scripts you didn't even notice it...
I'm not claiming it will fix everything, if switching between tabs didn't help then probably neither would this.

The other reason for the screenshot is that I'm having a problem with the docking panels. I've arranged my editor as shown, and I want any scripts, GUIs, rooms, etc. to open as new tabs in the big part of the window when I double-click them in the project tree. However, I find that they very often open new tabs next to the "Output" tab, or new panels below it. This is not consistent, but I don't understand the pattern to it (it's not as simple as them going to whatever panel was most recently in focus). It might have something to do with running the game through the debugger; I also experienced the project tree spontaneously turning into a minuscule floating window that I couldn't interact with.

I tried to reproduce your issue, but couldn't. I tried various crazy things but the scripts always appeared as new tabs on the big window.
My guess is that it's related to something else you did that you didn't write about.

Wow Adeeel, now that's dedication!
Unlike you I managed to sleep almost a full 6 hours.. Managed to squeeze in a game with some 20 minutes to spare, which I believe is better than the last time, so I guess I improved my time management skills.
I did have to skip on some unimportant tasks, like playtesting.. Oh well..

Was sad to hear about all the people that dropped out, but am excited to play all the games that did come out. Go OROW!

I have a beginning and an end but no middle... Does someone have a nice spare middle to share?
Anyway, decided to put it aside for now, and do some drawings. Maybe I'll get some design ideas from the characters..

foreach loops create extra work for the garbage collector because they create extra references. This can be especially problematic in game programming because it can potentially create several thousand new references every second (a particle system perhaps). Also the .NET GC is non-deterministic so you can never be sure exactly when the GC will do its work which can create random usage spikes which can severely fuck with your frame rate, especially in embedded systems like the Xbox360 or a phone.

Ok, so I did a search to try and find the source. I found this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/etayrien/archive/2007/03/17/foreach-garbage-and-the-clr-profiler.aspx

He didn't explain the weirdness of what he experienced, here's what's going on behind the scenes: the compiler, when facing a foreach wants to do the best it can. So when it sees a foreach on a list, array or pretty much stuff with indexers, it will translate it to a standard for..
In the examples in the link it didn't do it for Collection and IEnumerable because they don't have an indexer, so you couldn't write a standard for loop for those if you wanted to.
In the second example the author 'tricked' the compiler by passing a list to a method accepting IEnumerable, so the compiler couldn't make that optimization, and used the enumerator which is the extra reference..
Granted, that is something we should be aware of, but it's not such a common scenario that deserves the 'beware foreach' comment..

On the other hand, foreach gives us benefits, not counting the better readability.
First, it saves from a common sceanrio where the developer accesses the indexed object more than once inside the loop.
Second, since c# is a managed language, it is also safe, so you wouldn't accidentally access somebody else's memory. So when you access an index, it actually adds boundary checks, which hurts performance. When doing foreach it knows it can skip the boundary checks. In truth, it also make this optimization in the standard for loop, but you can easily trick it, for example in another common scenario where you take the length to a local member outside the for declaration. In c++ it's good for performance since it avoids extra access to the length property, but in c# it's the other way around, and by using foreach you won't be able to make that mistake..

tzachs, if I understand you right, what you say sounds like a simplified version of my old suggestion

Yes, I guess you can say that..

Also, beware foreach loops. They have sneaky caveats, especially in game programming.

What? Care to explain that?
The opposite is true, as far as I know, at least in c#. By using foreach you allow the compiler to make optimizations so it'll be more efficient.
The only scenarios which you'd prefer to use 'for' is if:
1. You have an interest in the index as well as the object you're iterating on.
2. You want to remove items from the collection while iterating on it, then you'll do an opposite for (from end to start).

My suggestion:
1. Instead of a combo box make it a list box (with vertical scrollbar).
2. The properties pane will show the selected region in the list box instead of the combo box.
3. In the list box itself you can put the color of the region, along with its name/id.
4. The list box, plus add & remove buttons should all be placed in a content document, which means it can be floating or docked, whatever the user wants to do with it.
5. As a default I would place it in the right top pane above the properties.

Should be fixed now in git (also the folder is now last in the menu and not first).

Ok, what about this: You can use material from the internet like graphics, music and sounds, but have to credit it in-game, even if it was public domain. This way people know what was made by the author and can cast their votes accordingly.

Sounds good to me..

Ok, changed the rule:

Entries must not use any premade content except published AGS templates, modules and plugins.

It looks like I'm the minority on this one, but I do see the value of allowing public domain content. I mean, what is the goal of the competition? As I see it, have fun, create games, and maybe learn something new.
Allowing public domain will help to have more games, and allow people to concentrate on certain parts of game design, so I'm all for it.