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My game was released a week ago, but I figured that since the soundtrack is technically Midi, why not render it out using a high quality soundfont and upload it for others to listen to.

The game's out, and now you can listen to the music for free on both GameJolt and Itchio. 

The game is finished, and I've made a completed game thread which can be found here.

This thread can now be locked. 

Click here to buy.

The sequel to my point and click adventure game, Black Friday.

It's been twenty years since the incident, but the killer scarecrow has finally come back. Will this brand new group of five teenagers be able to accomplish what their predecessors failed to do, and rid the world of this pumpkin-headed scarecrow once and for all, or will they end up barely surviving a traumatizing event that will haunt them for the rest of their lives?

A homage to the slasher movies of the 80s in the form of a point and click adventure game, with some gameplay elements reminiscent of the Clock Tower series. With multiple endings, longer puzzles, and a deeper story, this is sure to please any fan of adventure games, horror, or slasher movies in general.

• Two-click interface: left-click to interact, right-click to examine.
• Spacebar to pause.
• F5 to open save menu, F7 to open load menu.
• Contains strong themes and gore.
• Multiple playable characters.
• Multiple endings.
• Game length 1 to 3 hours, depending on player skill.

OS: Windows XP or above

Processor: Intel or AMD CPU

Memory: 512 MB RAM

Graphics: DirectDraw or DirectX compatible card

DirectX: Version 9.0c or above

Monitor: 800x600 or above

Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card

Additional Notes: Mouse, keyboard

If you like the game, why not
play this game's prequel here for free.

Hey everyone i just joined AGS!

Welcome to the forums Kamilla. 

Have you got any plans to make a game or are you just here to join the conversation?
Either way, it's nice to meet you. 

I've updated the game pages and uploaded a trailer announcing my game's release date.

My brother put the trailer together, and I think he did a brilliant job at it.

The release date by the way is the 28th of November.

What business decisions, Danvzare?

_

Well to name a few, changing the logo to one that wouldn't be out of place for a railway company, changing the UI to one that was broken and unfinished (it's a lot better now at least), removing the category system, removing the search functionality for the favourites folder, and most recently the whole AI generated art debacle that's recently erupted.

With each controversial thing they do, the whole site seems to suddenly become less active, and it now feels like a ghost of its former self. At least in the circles I move.

EDIT:
To add to this, the search function is now almost completely useless. You can no longer search for more than one tag unless you're logged in. And even when you do, it shows you completely unrelated results. Look up "Emoticon+Baseball", and enjoy the 8000 results that are neither emoticons nor include baseball. There used to be a time when every result was an Emoticon doing some sort of sport. 

And to further add to this, they've recently added a feature where your pictures will without informing you, be rated mature, and only be visible to those who are logged in. Except, it isn't affected by your setting to not show mature pictures.
8 of my comics have been affected by this (down from 19, which I managed to fix by butchering the tags). 

So basically no one can search for my comics anymore, and even if they could, it's starting to look like they won't be able to read them either, since my latest two have been rated mature for no apparent reason. 

What grinds my gears is deviantArt.

I've been using the site almost exclusively to put my comics onto for the past decade, but boy do they make some infuriating business decisions. 

As far as I can tell, his intention was to never buy Twitter, but to instead stir up trouble. Which in turn landed him into trouble, and forced him to buy Twitter. Now he's trying to make lemonade out of lemons and seems to be failing.

Does this spell the end of Twitter? Possibly.
But if it does, I can only see that as both inevitable and good.

I mean, didn't Instagram pretty much already replace Twitter in the same way Twitter replaced Facebook and Facebook replaced MySpace? It's an never-ending cycle, of which Instagram itself isn't even the latest in the chain. I think that might be WhatsApp or Discord or something.
It's all the same thing either way. And it's a thing I never understood. 

This week I finished fixing up the problems encountered during alpha testing, and have sent the beta off to two different people to play through in their spare time.

Now it's just a matter of waiting until I hear back from them. So if I don't make an update next week, just assume that it's because no progress has been made as I'm still awaiting feedback.

Once I hear back though, it should only take a week or two to sort it all out and release it.
Unfortunately there's no screenshots to show this week, but rest assured that the game is basically in the last stage of development.

The description of what you had to do to get that AI generated image is absolutely brilliant, and showcases just how much of you own effort you have to put in to get something worthwhile.

It's a very useful tool for amateurs like me. But it's not quite there for being wholly independent. 

That being said, I don't think anyone should use it as a tool to help them make a contest entry.
Maybe to help come up with ideas, but that's about it.
Like tracing, it'll be rightfully frowned upon.

This week I finished the boring and laborious job of spellchecking the entire script, and then entered the alpha testing phase, which is where I have other people play through the game while I watch and make notes.


Here's a screenshot of what one of the bedrooms now looks like. It's changed a bit since it was last shown.

During the alpha testing, I've fixed a few minor problems, a missing hint here, a bigger clickable area there.
The only real major change was one of the puzzles, where I realized that there essentially wasn't a puzzle where there should've been one.

Next week I plan to enter the beta testing phase, where I give the game to other people and wait for feedback.
I'm also hoping to get a short trailer made for the game. I'm not too good with cinematography, so I'm planning on conscripting my little brother for the job, since he's got quite the knack for it.

Youtube has been making subtle changes to its UI since forever but the latest one is just jaw-dropping.
The info box below the uploader's name will say "3 years ago" for a video that came out 3 years and 364 days ago. This is truly some next-level math. I get what they're trying to do there but that's a pretty spectacular fail.

To add to this, it grinds my gears how Youtube has gradually been making their entire website worse over a very long period of time.

I still miss when nested replies could have their own nested replies. 

[Jazz Jackrabbit 2]

At the time of writing, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is currently free on GOG for the next 60 hours or so.

It's an absolutely awesome platformer, that I'd personally highly recommend to anyone. If you've never played it, then trust me, you won't be disappointed. 
Especially if you get a friend or three and play through all of the levels together. 

The polishing phase continues apace. It's taking a lot longer than I expected, but I should "hopefully" be out of the pre-alpha stage sometime next week and into the alpha stage.

I've fixed a lot of problems with the game, but it's all been either coding bugs, or additional dialog. So there's not really anything new to show art-wise. So why not another background from the flashback portion at the start of the game.



The next item on the agenda is to spellcheck the entire script. After which I plan to give the game a quick test to make sure the bugs I fixed are actually ironed out. Then finally, I'll be getting someone else to play the game while I watch! 

An example of game based on an AI-generated story:

https://meiri.itch.io/bohemian-symphony

_

Do they ever say what they used to generate the AI-generated story?

After all, saying something is made by AI is one thing, proving it is another. And a lot of people seem to be using it as a way to jump onto the hype-train and grab some attention.

I'm sure it is indeed based on an AI-generated story, but considering I've seen people repost pictures from a decade ago, stating that it was made by AI, when in fact I know that it wasn't, has made me skeptical with these things.
(Even more so when they say they used a certain tool, and whenever you use that same tool your results are barely decipherable messes, while there's somehow looks perfect.)

The polishing phase continues. I've tested the game, made a list, fixed everything on it, tested it again, made another list, fixed everything on it, and now I'm in the process of testing it again. And to top it all off, I've still got to go through the entire script, spellchecking it all! 

The things I've been fixing are more than just simple bugs though. I've also been putting hints into places where someone might try a sensible (but incorrect) solution, correcting artwork or adding something to it, and just generally polishing everything up.



As an example, the inside of the barn now has flickering shadows, and the sprites of the guys who I took from the previous game, now have ears. I've also improved the setup icon a bit more.
It's taking longer than I anticipated, but I'm getting there.

Congratulations on getting the funding so quickly. 

Also, I wish you good luck on hitting all of those stretch goals. 

I've finally entered the polishing phase of the game development process. What this entails is testing, making notes, fixing, then rinsing and repeating. I ended up with nearly 40 items to fix or change from just playing through the introduction of the game, and it's taken me all day just to mark most of them off (I've still got nearly ten items left). I can't imagine how many problems I'll spot after actually managing to play the game all the way through.

But that's just today, for the rest of the week, I've been prepping myself for entering this polishing phase by doing up the GUI elements and making an icon for the game.



I'm very proud of how the icon came out. It took me an entire day to make it though. It resizes nicely as well.

The polishing phase is all about prepping the game for Alpha testing, where I have someone else play through the game while I watch and make notes. So I need to get it to as good of a standard as possible, since the person I'll have do the Alpha testing, can only play through the game for the first time, once. (And he probably wouldn't want to play through it a second time anyway.)

After fixing the problems identified during the Alpha testing, it'll be onto Beta testing, where I send the game to someone I know for them to play it and report back any problems they encountered.
Then after fixing those problems, it'll be onto the release.
The biggest uncertainty is the Beta testing phase, since people are busy doing other things, and will get around to it when they get around to it. But I'm hoping to enter the Beta testing phase by the end of this month.

I feel like I've gotten nothing done this week, but that's only because I've been working on a bunch of the smaller stuff. For example, last week I showed an animated screenshot of some burning hay in a barn, but this week I fixed a bug where it stopped animating whenever someone talked. I also added a pool of blood for someone who dies, because I finally realized it looked odd without it. So it's basically been a whole lot of that.

Oh, and I also finished adding in that easter egg. That took up a lot of time.

Next week I plan on brushing up the menus and GUI elements, and finally make some icons for the game. And after that's all done, I need to play through the entire game from beginning to end, fix any bugs I encounter, then rinse and repeat.
In other words, I'm onto the final leg of the race. The end is in sight, although it's still too early to give any release dates, because who knows what could happen. And I do intend to give the game to some people I know, in order to find and squash any remaining bugs, and who knows how long they'll take to get around to playing my game for me.

Still, I need to show something, so why not show off how the living room looks now, in all it's glory.

This week I fixed a few minor problems which I encountered during some of my testing, such as a missing sound effect here, or no grab animation there. I also improved a bit of the artwork I originally grabbed from the previous game, to try and make the artstyle more consistent, while not drastically changing anything (after all, I want that flashback sequence to still be a clear flashback sequence).

Here's a quick example of that:


Lastly, I added an extra step to one of the puzzles near the end of the game, and I've also been hard at work on a hidden easter egg that I doubt anyone will find.
Why am I putting in so much effort for a very well hidden easter egg? Well, because I dread bug-testing that much.