Messages

Setting the question of what is fair and what is not aside, I think the biggest practical issue is that while trying to distinguish between "commercially competitive" and "hobbyist" games may be easy in some cases, it will become highly arbitrary in others.

If we want to try streamlining the process to make the client quicker to produce for the Awards team and the nominations easier to digest for the community, we probably want to steer clear of anything that requires heavy moderating or in-depth research, and is very prone to be disputed.

40 minutes is hell of a lot of gameplay for a MAGS game, and interactive movies are fun. Don't give up!

For me, announcing the theme earlier would help. I only get so much free time a month (not unlike nearly everyone else here, I bet) and there's a constant battle of priorities, in between work, parenting and other random (but important) stuff. I may get 15 hours to work on a game a month, or I may get zero. Having some extra days would increase the chance I squeeze out those several hours I need to finish a small game.

The themes are good and I almost always remember to check them on day 1. More often than not, they spark an idea that I like and I feel I could use a distraction from the long term projects (not just games... I have an unhealthy amount of hobbies and the shiny bauble syndrome). So in my view at least, there is nothing wrong with the competition itself. It's just me and my lack of time. And sometimes focus.

We have a vast selection of trophies to reuse, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Category intros are a separate issue though, because they feature the name of the award, and are animated. They were made by selmiak so if he's up for updating them, great. If not, we can perhaps substitute them with idle graphics.

As for keeping and ditching specific awards, if we feel that there are things the opinions are heavily split on, we can do a poll afterwards to decide on these few specific items. The good news is that we have a consensus about the awards that create the biggest bottlenecks during the prep stage (animation, character art, voice work) being simplified into more generic categories.

cat, yes, I believe you have captured the key points perfectly.

To provide an alternate opinion, "programming" is often quite visible in AGS games, because of how engine is focused on particular gameplay and offers little to no foundation for another. Hence it's quite easy to notice something that was programmed from ground up as opposed to games using built-in behavior.

Definitely, but only if you are very familiar with the built-in behavior, and possibly also with modules and plugins made by other authors. Best Programming would be an outstanding category if we had a judge panel system and could pick our experts. It is a lot easier to make an honest judgement on visuals or storyline, because all of it is on the surface, made for the player to enjoy. There's no misjudging (or refraining from vote) due to lack of programming knowledge or familiarity with AGS.

While I do see the logic in putting programming in with game design for streamlining purposes, it does seem a shame not to shine a spotlight on those games which do incredible things under the hood, especially if a game has a dedicated coder who isn't the lead designer.

I get that and I agree, but streamlining isn't the only reason. Best Programming is one of the awards that seem difficult to judge for the general audience, and while real programming gems do often get nominated, they rarely if ever win this award.

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?

Remakes, demakes, fan games. But it wasn't my intention to suggest any changes to this part of the rules, it's just how I happened to word it. What I intended to suggest was a set of compact, more generic awards.

I don't like the "Best Game Design" category. This is too similar to "Best game" and I think both awards would go to the same game. Instead, I would keep "Best puzzles". It's about adventure games after all.

That's a sensible and viable approach, too. I personally like the more generic category better (maybe "Best Gameplay" if "Best Game Design" sounds too much like a Best Game duplicate), but that's just me.

Not sure about "Best short game" (my favourite). While I think this is a very important category for game makers, the lack of votes in recent years shows, that it is maybe not important to players. If everyone is strongly in favor of Best Puzzles - sure, why not.

I do love both Best Short Game and Best Character, yet I think they don't (or no longer, perhaps) work well enough. As you noted, Short Game is getting very little interest during the nomination stage and Best Character is kind of like Best Programming - categories that (in my perception, perhaps I'm wrong) get more default voting that others. Maybe it's time to kill some of our darlings for a healthier voting and ceremony prep process..

[Best Game Design]

Having a selected panel of judges to nominate or reveal winners is an appealing idea in many aspects, but it probably wouldn't work in our small, semi-active community. Like cat said, it's enough of a challenge to find 5 community members willing to discuss the committee awards for the given year, where the only requirement is basically "be a fairly active community regular, capable of civil communication"

I would definitely like to try making the nomination and voting process somewhat easier to digest. Scaling down the amount of awards is one way to do it. It would also yield an extra benefit of having the ceremony time, the amount of presenters required, and the number of resources to be collected and prepared significantly reduced.
There are some problems tied to it, e.g. less awards means less games get the spotlight, and an even higher chance the awards would be dominated by a single game. But maybe we could think of a way to address these specific potential issues.

So here's a very minimalist version, built upon LimpingFish's suggestions:
Best Game Design: Puzzles, game mechanics, GUI design, game flow, overall enjoyment.
Best Visual Design: Backgrounds, GUI graphics, animations, sprites.
Best Sound Design: Music, sound effects, voice acting, how it all plays together overall.
Best Original Story and Writing: Story building, world design, character design, dialogues, writing quality.
Best Non-Adventure Game: (unchanged - it still feels distinctive enough to keep).
Best AGS Game of the Year: (unchanged - the alternative might be splitting into Freeware and Commercial like LF did).

Thoughts? I do realize this looks like a rather radical change, but more generic categories are also easier to interpret and understand (Best Gameplay and Best Puzzles, I'm looking at you two!).

Is there any way to get statistics of games made in AGS per year, at least ones registered in database?
It may be curious to see the graph and compare how this number changed over the decade(s).

Actually, you made me curious... Here it is.

Good to have you here, Vitaliy! Best of luck with your pet project. 15 minutes per day may not seem like much, but slow paced progress is still progress.

Actually, GIMP's default setting is Background Color for the fill Or at least that's what the version I installed came with.

You can either change the default in the settings (Preferences > Default Image > Fill with) or just add transparency by right clicking your layer and choosing Add Alpha Channel from the menu.

We all wish he could
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/general-discussion/rip-slasher/

I second that. It's a lovely theme and I've been eyeing this thread since early September, but I couldn't squeeze out enough free time.

Anywhere I can lobby for bi-MAGS? 

I've noticed that Slasher's birthday is coming up (Sunday 20th, if I'm not mistaken). I feel like we should do something but it's a bit late to organize much

What if we were to just open the AGS Awards client for the day so anyone who wants to can just drop in and have a virtual beer in his honour?

That's a nice thought, I'm checking what we can do.

Les

That's a sweet piece of art.

1. I also thought of distant fields and animals on them. Maybe a farmhouse, some haystacks. Very tiny in the distance, so that it doesn't clutter up your composition but enough to break the monotonous greenery.
2. The shrubbery is fine, I think. I'd focus on the water surface, it looks very stirred and contributes to the impressionistic-ish feeling the most. This said, it didn't occur to me before I read your question, so that's probably one of the things you start noticing when you stare at your own piece a little bit too long. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Media as in digital files of whatever type (music, graphics, etc.) that may be used as part of a larger project.

It would require all participants to have an itch.io account and submit their entries to itch instead of here, I guess? Or is there an option to advertise only, without using the platform for entry submission and/or voting?

Other than that, it's an interesting suggestion. People tend to prefer aggregated community hubs for finding stuff like competitions, and itch looks like a decent host with their user friendly reasonable rules, voting and promotion systems.

Dunno if it's unethical to enter a contest you chose the theme for, but here's something I have so far:

You're good. It's been done many times in the past Good luck with your entry!

 

And then, came along mine... and YOU MOTHERFUCKERS had me crying my ass off at the stuff that was being said onstage and off about me...

Serves you well! 

Seriously though, like I said onstage, it was long overdue. Never change, Mandle!