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Still plugging away!  I finished all the basic character art and talk cycles, now I'm just working on the one shot animations.  They're not pretty but I'm finding working in retro pixel art incredibly freeing...also finally discovered my Procreate app's animation assist function that auto onion skins, so that's speeding it up.

Also got the intro done, and a bunch of the interaction responses.  I've got a four day weekend for the holiday and three day weekend after that, so it's looking good to finish, barring catastrophes!

I'm slow but progressing...birthday and anniversary are over. I realized my first idea wasn't feasible timewise, so one week in I wrote a completely different game and am having a lot of fun doing retro pixel art instead.  It's called Worlds Literally Collide, about a planet who just wants some g****mn peace and quiet in his own little patch of space.

Backgrounds are done, half of the characters are done and the other half should only take a couple hours.  Then it's just write and code like crazy.

Ah, there we go, thank you!  I didn't realize it was in that user folder, I kept searching the Compiled folder thinking it should be saved in there like the old Sierra games did.

Makes sense, I get it now!  Thanks again!

Hi all!  It's been a while since I made a game, and this is probably blindingly obvious - if I saved a game while testing my game, how do I delete it from the saved games list before distributing the game?

Thanks for your help!

Long time y'all!  I don't want to promise anything because November has become a month of birthday and anniversary celebrations.  But I need a small creative project, I've got a good idea and 90% of the plot worked out.

I'm also going to try painting my backgrounds and characters in Procreate this time, instead of rampantly stealing and modding vector art.

Fingers crossed, hope to see you at the finish line!

Stupot and Limpingfish: Sure, I get what you're saying.  I like the idea too that developers voluntarily reduced prices without it being a requirement.  That's just tried and true marketing technique - do a temporary sale to get your product out there, then return to normal price when you've driven up popularity.

Maybe I'm thinking too much towards regularly produced content like podcasts and other weekly-ish content creators, where the consumer gets a continuous, guaranteed reward in exchange for a continuous, tiny trickle of patron money invested.  I can see how a one-shot product like a game would be different...no guarantees of more content for possibly years at a time, if ever, so less incentive to financially support it.

Anyways, good luck to everybody in the awards!

Phew, got my votes in just in time!    Being honest, between the horror games (which I don't play) and the pay-up-front games, I only played and voted in a few categories I could fairly judge.

Not to get all economics-philosophical, but I was surprised by the number of pay-up-front games, too.

I'm a firm believer in the new pay-what-you-will online creative market...letting people try your high-quality game first creates way more long term fans who return to buy future games/merch/etc.  If you genuinely made something good, trust your new fans to support you.  If you didn't, you shouldn't be charging.  (Not aimed at anyone here - this is just something I've strongly believed for years.)

Maybe a requirement for consideration in future AGS awards should be free evaluation copies to anyone who requests it, with controlled download links that are shut down after the awards?

Copy-pasting this from the actual game page, because it deserves to be said more than once:

This was absolutely gorgeous, well designed, well executed, just a brilliant short adventure.

The story was wonderful, and the mood was borderline-storybook-scary without ever veering into actual horror, which I appreciated.

The dialogue was excellent, always driving driving plot forward and showing depth to the characters.

Art and animation were beautiful, I can't wait to see the full graphical remake.

The one bit with the clever game mechanic - you'll know when you see it - OH MY GOD I loved that so much.  Like every other puzzle in this, it wasn't too hard, juuust sneaky enough that when you catch on to it, you still feel satisfied for figuring it out.

Even the last couple sentences of the closing made me smile.

Jan, you've outdone yourself, which is really saying something with the quality of everything you make.

I mean, I don't mind larger file sizes...these days, 345 MB is just a few minutes of downloading on a good connection.

If it's a real concern, you can use a site like https://www.freeconvert.com/wav-to-ogg to batch convert all wav files at once to ogg, a smaller file size format.  Just upload, convert, click Download All, unzip, and swap into your game.  It keeps the names for all converted files, so you don't have to rename EGO1, EGO2, etc.

[not]

Hi everybody!  I'm looking to help other people's projects that need a deep, male bass voice actor.

I'm 39, old school theater and adventure game geek, soothing/serious voice but also silly as hell.  I made Chicken VS. Road and Damsel a decade ago.

I want to volunteer on some small projects just to relax and have fun, stuff where I'm not the sole writer/animator/artist/etc.  I can't not do something creative with my free time, but life is busier these days.  It's time to help other game creators from a minor role, and not try to do everything myself.

I made this whole cartoon below, and voice acted Brother Ormeros in it.  His lines were recorded on a cell phone while traveling overseas, these days I've got a quiet home studio, Blue Yeti mic, pop filter, foam shield, all that jazz.  Just want to give a sample of voice/acting, and show that I know how to work in these kinds of projects.

https://youtu.be/TF8Kzwla9bc

E-mail me at ghawthorne@live.com if you're interested.  Thanks!

These were posted years ago, when I was a different person...

Only one of the bunny trophies from the Kill the Bunny animation competition I hosted survived:

(Um, ignore the other two, I just copied this from the winner's trophy bar. )


But here are all three from the Rebus edition of the Quizzening I hosted:







And last, this thing, that I think I made myself after winning a trophy-less comp for something or other: 



I think I may have won one or two others that are lost to time.  Happy memories.