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Wordle 883 5/6*

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Spoiler

Interesting or evil?

I actually experimented with lots of QUE*E strings without spotting the valid one, until I finally saw it when I entered QUEYE.

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Wordle 882 2/6*

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Spoiler

I'm rereading TLOTR, so my first guess was SHIRE.

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Wordle 879 4/6*

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I'm content, but it could easily have gone badly.

Spoiler

CHAIN, PITHY, LIGHT, SIGHT.

There were sooo many other possibilities for the first letter: fight, right, might, eight, tight, bight, wight...

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Just as a sidenote, I have been toying with the idea of a module that would automatically resize the GUI sprites (technically: replace them with resized DynamicSprites) if you change the game resolution.

In most cases this wouldn't be a good long-term solution, but it might be suitable if you scale up the resolution by an integer factor (for example from 320x200 to 640x400 to provide higher-resolution fonts, while still keeping other graphics at 320x200), or as a temporary solution until you get around to redrawing the graphics.

... Or, as in the case I would use it for: when I want to make a test game based on one of the templates, in order to play around with some particular feature (e.g. as a demo/test game for a module), but I need a higher resolution.

[This is a Commercial Game]

I don't think LimpingFish is suggesting excluding commercial games from the awards

Restricting them to a single category means excluding them from the awards in general.

It'd be one thing if we had different competition classes for each category, but there aren't enough games or voters to support that.

I've just always felt that commercial games, being in the minority, were kind of, I don't know, separate from the community AGS experience; a bunch of hobbyist developers making the kind of games they want to make, regardless of aesthetics or commercial concerns

I fundamentally disagree. Indie developers making commercial games are an integral part of the AGS community, and have been for most of its history.

And in my subjective opinion, most commercial AGS games carry on the "culture" of AGS (for better and worse).

...currently says "This is a Commercial Game" in the database. Is this in error?

Yes. Heroine's Quest is and has always been free. (I believe there are some copyright issues that would make it difficult if not impossible to charge for it.)

Should concessions be made because of the engine involved?

In the AGS Awards? Yes!

Likewise, should freeware developers have to go up against a game that perhaps has, I don't know, professional voice work, or professional pixel-pushing?

In a contest about which AGS games have the best pixel-pushing and voice work? Yes!

You talk about "a bunch of hobbyist developers making the kind of games they want to make, regardless of aesthetics or commercial concerns." That's fine, but I think it's reasonable to point out that if you don't care about or strive for aesthetics or commercial (i.e. popular) appeal, you're probably not going to win a popular-vote-based contest for those things—and in fact shouldn't win.

This is not a community problem, just a "me" problem, and I don't really expect the majority to agree with me. But it's something I've always felt, and something I'll probably, rightly or wrongly, continue to feel.

I think we should drop the topic. We will not change each other's minds, and for me this is a hill I'm willing to die on.

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My argument about the current system we have was that, imo, commercial games would always have an advantage (and looking back, since 2012, only two freeware games have won "Best Game", while ten commercial titles took home the award; this despite the fact that there are far more freeware games than commercial titles added to the database each year. In fact, for each of the last two years, only a single freeware game has made onto the "Best Game" short list), and that it made more sense to have an exclusive commercial award while keeping the "Best Game" award exclusively for non-commercial games.

A few points:

There have been three non-commercial winners since 2012: Heroine's Quest, Urban Witch Story and If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers (the last two are "pay what you like" donationware, but you can choose to pay nothing). And in 2021 (so within the last two years), three of the five nominees were non-commercial. The year before it was four.

In any case, if the best games are commercial, why wouldn't they deserve to win? It's the AGS Awards, not the Freeware Awards.

Seems like every current category has its champions...

Personally I would hate to lose "Best Short Game," since those are often my favorite AGS games (but they usually have a hard time winning Best/Freeware Game).

If we keep it, I think I like "Technical Achievement" better than "Programming"—I think it makes it clearer what we are supposed to be judging. (I also like "Game Design" better than "Puzzles"; my big bugbear is having both "Gameplay" and "Puzzles," but that's an old argument.)

As for Best Character, I don't think it really makes sense the way it's currently done: it seems to pretty much default to the main character, so then why not just have voters pick the game rather than type the name? (Last year I tried to nominate two characters from the same game, but that wasn't allowed.) This is one category I think should go.

Keep in mind that doing big changes to the categories mean also changes to the awards client. Not sure, but the intro animations still include the category names.

*) Snarky agreed to update the award client if we go the simple route (i.e. only use the screenshots from the database)

Yup. We might need new graphic assets for the category intros and perhaps the trophies. On the other hand, if we lower the expectation level for the production quality, it doesn't have to be all that much work to update.

(Of course, this is all in case Dualnames doesn't decide to do it after all.)

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Also, definitely start the process earlier. Nominations in the first two weeks of January, votes until late January at the latest, ceremony (or results) in the first week of February.

I also think it should be sped up, but I think your proposed pace is too high. It pretty much restricts participation to people who have already played most of the AGS games that came out in the last year.

If we could do nominations in January, voting in February, and the ceremony in early March, I think that would be more reasonable (though still pretty demanding if you have a lot of games to catch up on). The FYC thread should start... well, why not now?

But in any case, I think the most important thing is to have a fixed schedule in advance. And last year there were pretty lengthy turnaround times from e.g. when nominations closed to when voting opened, which we should try hard to minimize.

[Best Original Story and Writing]

Best Original Story and Writing: Story building, world design, character design, dialogues, writing quality.

Why "Original" in this category and none of the others? Do we have any AGS games where the story and writing are not original? (Remakes, I suppose.) And what will these new categories mean for the rule about original music?

Best AGS Game of the Year: (unchanged - the alternative might be splitting into Freeware and Commercial like LF did).

I think the best thing for these categories is to keep the current system: One "Best AGS Game" that is open to both freeware or commercial titles, and one "Best Freeware Game" that excludes commercial entries, even if the categories will sometimes be redundant.

I think it's important to have one grand prize that all games can compete for, and while it makes a certain amount of sense to have a special category for freeware games, to preserve the hobbyist traditions of AGS, I don't see the point of a "protected" commercial category.

@Ali Usually, the ceremony WAS live-streamed on Twitch/YouTube. I know some people were either watching the stream live or afterwards the recording when they couldn't attend.
The problem is, that content that is streamed, has to be created somehow...

I take it that means you don't think you're the person to create the content/host a ceremony livestream in a more typical Twitch/YouTube format? So should we rule out this alternative?

If so, does it also rule out the "Discord call with a PowerPoint presentation" option, or is that easier to prep/host?

In regards to the ceremony itself, is there anything that could make things more streamlined?

I never looked into what you do there, but assuming you need to use extra resources each time, do you have to import everything inside the game project, or your client/server thing loads them from the disk?

Which assets do you get from the game authors? Can you get them by extracting them from the game, for example (assuming you received author's permission to use them)?

To briefly answer this:

All assets are imported into the game project, AFAIK it doesn't read anything from a server (apart from the text chat).

Any way to source the game assets is possible, and all sorts of methods have been used in the past. Asking the creators to submit them was introduced as a way to save time and get good assets (especially music, animations and avatars), but that only works if the response rate is high.

Why not a livestream on twitch/YouTube that nominees could share among their followers on social media?

It sounds similar to the "Discord voice call" idea, but I take it you mean a format more like video streamers? (Since the ceremony has already been livestreamed on YouTube/Twitch for the last few years.) I think it's a good idea, but it seems like it would demand more of the host.

I find the album as a whole pretty whatever, but I love that song.

The whole album is apparently based on her epic poem Orlam (which I have not read), and to me it seems like, just as you might expect when they all draw on the same material, all the songs occupy the same space lyrically, tonally and musically (even as some are more successful than others). I really miss more variety, and can't help but feel that it's all a bit samey, twee, and dopey in that "prog-rock tune about Gandalf" way. (On the other hand I'm somewhat glad that she's moved on from the political material of her last two albums, which I thought never rose above the banal—though when she performed "The Words That Maketh Murder" last week it felt newly relevant.)

I do love Polly, though, and even if a whole album of this stuff is a bit much for me, I'm sure there are tracks I'll come to appreciate, just as Uh Huh Her (by far her weakest album) included gems like "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" and "The Darker Days of Me & Him."

I'm old enough to remember when El-P was known not for being part of Run The Jewels, but as a member of Company Flow and one of the most revolutionary producers in the underground hip-hop scene. Kids these days!

I didn't get into it when I posted the She Wants Revenge song, but I did a double-take when I found out that the singer is the same guy who raps seven minutes of non-stop pop-culture references on "Bug Powder Dust":

Bomb the Bass (Kruder & Dorfmeister remix) - "Bug Powder Dust"

This was always one of my favorite K&D tracks.

PJ Harvey - "Lwonesome Tonight" [sic]

On Halloween I went to a PJ Harvey concert (the last show on her I Inside the Old Year Dying tour), and I haven't been able to get this song out of my head ever since. I'm not even sure I really like it.

So I've been listening to all sorts of stuff to get it off my mind...

Caroline Konstnar - "For Free?"

Her songs are always good fun, and I think tracks like this and "The Jellyfish Song" show that she's actually a pretty good singer.

In retrospect, I should not have posted here.

This kind of thinking makes me sad. We had an interesting discussion, didn't we?

The Beatles - "Now and Then"

Just out of curiosity, really. It's... OK?

DJ Shadow (featuring Run The Jewels) - "Nobody Speak"

I'm old enough that a song from 7 years ago feels like "a recent track" to me. But then I guess it's been 25 years since I first heard DJ Shadow.

I don't think any of those examples qualify as a "system" @Danvzare. Whether or not they are good puzzle design depends, I think, on whether the basic element is fundamentally interesting enough. Sure, if it is some novel piece of equipment or device (like Trilby's "grolly" or the AI mind shards in Technobabylon), a special power or spell, or some distinctive mechanic (such as decoding a foreign language or remixing music tracks or whatever), then it makes sense to build a whole set of puzzles around it. But if it's literally just "throw things to knock stuff over," that had better be really well motivated by the characters and story if you're going to base so much of your gameplay on it rather than have it as a one-off. Like, your main character is a baseball pitcher: fine.

Also, having puzzles that callback to previous puzzles, is just good story writing. It's what the final puzzles of the Monkey Island games did.

Yeah, but always with a twist. And also it was just the one puzzle callback to bring things back full circle, it wasn't a whole series of puzzles based on the same setup over and over again. (Like if MI1 had a bunch of ghosts you had to dispel, and every time you had to find some new magic root source/substitute. ... Besides, I happen to think that MI goes to the "find a quirky substitute for the ingredient in the recipe" well a bit too often.)

Suppose in point-n-click game there's scene A in which you have to get an item stuck high above you. You should use something throwable to knock it over. Then later in the game there's scene B in which you have to get another item stuck high above. Given the similar conditions I'd expect same trick to work, because it worked another time, but game does not let me, and gives some random "won't work" reply. In standard "adventure games" this seems to be considered a valid thing. In my opinion, that's not a fair thing.

I agree that this would be a bad way to stop you from solving the problem in that way. But I think it's almost worse if the game repeats the exact same problem and expects you to use the exact same solution: at that point I would argue that it's not actually a puzzle, and that it's no longer proper adventure game gameplay. As heltenjon says, there has to be something unique about each individual challenge to make it an adventure game puzzle. And I think that sets adventure games apart from for example RPGs or pure puzzle games, which are much more about solving challenges within defined systems, with basically the same challenges recurring.

And I think it's perfectly fair if in an adventure game, the first time you face this problem you can throw something at the thing and it will knock it down, while the second time you're in a similar situation, your throw misses, bounces off the wall and hits you in the head, with your character then refusing to try again. For example. Because in adventure games, scripted outcomes to specific situations are part of the game structure, while this sort of thing would be unfair in an RPG or action game where outcomes should generally follow predictable rules.

Even if you added a bunch of variations to the throwing puzzle, and combined them in different ways requiring different strategies to solve, so that each one became a puzzle within your throwing system/mechanic, I'd argue that what you end up making is a throwing game rather than an adventure game. That might be an excellent game (Portal is an example of a game that builds puzzles around a specific mechanic in this way), but it's not really an adventure game, IMO.

It's been a long time since I got it in two:

Wordle 864 2/6*

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For things that are tedious to edit in the IDE (there used to be no good way to reorganize the sprite folder structure, for example, though I believe that's been fixed in the latest version), I've sometimes resorted to editing the game.agf file directly in a text/xml editor. I imagine that should be possible for the parser vocab as well. (Just back it up beforehand in case you break something!)

Well yea I thought about this too but there is a problem I think, I mean let's suppose I open the debug window by ctrl+x but then I do 'cancel' instead of teleporting, that variable will stay true because I hitted ctrl+x

The question is if this is really a serious problem. After all, this is just a debug tool for your own use. It doesn't have to be perfect as long as you know its limitations.

I also suspect it might be possible to do a workaround by wrapping ChangeRoom() calls in a helper function. Or show a GUI with a button to reset the teleporting variable. But you haven't really explained why you want this, so it's hard to suggest the best solution.

You take this bit of your GlobalScript:

Code: ags

// called when a key is pressed
function on_key_press(eKeyCode keycode) 
{
  // ...
  else if (keycode == eKeyCtrlX)
  {
    // Ctrl-X will let the player teleport to any room
    Debug(3, 0);
  }
}

And change it to set a Global Variable (that you have created), for example callled teleporting:

Code: ags

// called when a key is pressed
function on_key_press(eKeyCode keycode) 
{
  // ...
  else if (keycode == eKeyCtrlX)
  {
    // Ctrl-X will let the player teleport to any room
    teleporting = true; // <-- Added this!
    Debug(3, 0);
  }
}

Now in the room enter function, you check whether teleporting is set, and remember to set it to false (in every room):

Code: ags

function room_Load()
{
  if(teleporting)
  {
    // Do stuff
  }
  teleporting = false;
}

I don't remember if the debug window lets you cancel the room change. In that case, this will have a side-effect that the next time you change the room, it will think you used the teleport. But since it's a debug feature, that doesn't seem like a big problem.