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I annoyed that my body will only allow me to have one cup of coffee per day. Any more than that and I'm an anxious wreck. Decaf just doesn't have the same edge, so that's not an option, and I've never been a tea person.

Have you tried cocoa instead? 

Ooh, this looks interesting.
Then again, I'm a sucker for fluid mechanics. 

Gloom?
Ion fury?
Prodeus?
One of the countless Doom mods that exists?

We need more hints!

[games]

The end of Dragon Quest Builders 1.
I have never played a game that made me want to defeat the final boss and save the world, while giving it my all, quite like that game did.

I've put it in spoilers, because I don't want to spoil it. If you think you'd like a JRPG with some Minecraft-like gameplay thrown in, I'd highly recommend it.

Spoiler

Throughout the game you're told that you're not a hero, and you take it with a pinch of salt. You know, maybe you did something bad before or maybe you'll become a hero. You get it. Except no. Right at the end after you've made all of the equipment to be used to defeat the final boss. The goddess who brought you back to life at the start of the game tells you to get lost. Because you're not destined to be the hero that defeats the final boss. You're told you can't defeat it because it's not your destiny, and you should just leave it for someone who is worthy.

So what you inevitably end up doing is saying "FUCK YOU AND YOUR DESTINY!"
The twist inspires you to do your absolute best and to not get hit, because as you're told. You won't be resurrected this time, especially since you're going against the wishes of the goddess. But you just want to give her the middle finger.

It's framed way better than how I'm portraying it as well. It's definitely the kind of twist that you could only really do in a video game. It's brilliant and will probably stay with me for the rest of my life.

[close]

Dragon Quest Builders 2 is the better game by far. But the first game has the better story. 

EDIT: And I know you wanted books, films, and TV shows. But video games have writing in them, heck two genres are practically called books because they essentially are for the most part (Interactive Fiction and Visual Novels). Also this is a forum about Adventure games, so... I hope you don't mind that I chose to talk about a game.
I did make sure to pick something I thought was especially noteworthy though, and not just the latest thing that's been on my mind. 

But this is a case were I can see AI being actually useful, healthcare usually being a woefully understaffed field. But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.

AI replacing human (creative) jobs is inevitable, though humanity will be the poorer for it. AI can't create. It can't critique. It can generate ersatz "new" media based on learning models and algorithms, but, despite what tech-bros would have us believe, this is not "just like" how a human creates, and the more they pedal that lie, the more I despise them for it.

I just want to start by saying, I completely agree.

But I also want to say that... well. Have you seen what most so-called "writers" are writing nowadays?
It's usually nothing but drivel made to appease an unseen algorithm. All of the good stuff is buried, because the good writers refuse to appeal to the algorithm (I should know, because all of the good stuff I ever find is incredibly unpopular). And I'm not just talking about Youtube videos and News articles. I'm including games, TV shows, movies, comics, all media.

What I'm trying to say is, the people that look like they're about to be replaced by AI, kind of brought it on themselves. They lived by the algorithm and now they'll die by the algorithm. It's hard to feel empathy for sellouts being sold out. 

But that's just one tiny part of a much MUCH larger picture. Which is why at the start I said I completely agree with you. Overall, it does seem as though as you said "humanity will be the poorer for it". I just wanted to point out how I felt about that one small part.

You know, all of this talk about having AI doing vocals for songs has made me think about something...

What about Hatsune Miku? 
Or do people only care about this lazily trained (dump in a bunch of data and let the program figure it out) AI generation nowadays? Because if so, that would be a shame. 

Giving attribution might be difficult, though. It will be hard to find out the author of a certain sprite. Maybe attribution should be made solely to "AGS Demo Game Contributor" and not each individual person. I hope artist are okay with that.
Of course, the game itself should contain an elaborate credits section that lists all contributors.

Sounds good to me. 

Right now the only inventory item I am aware of would be a key for the first room.

Would something like this be ok:

I made it with the Apollo palette, and I tried to give it a fantasy style. Although being a key, there's not really much you can do in that regard. 

There is legal precedent in the US for the protection of someone's voice going as far back as 1988. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.)

Oh wow! I did not know that! 
Thanks for sharing.

I love hearing about things like that. 

Ski Free: Garfield Edition? 

I don't know if we're assigning roles or accepting volunteers yet. But I just want to say that I would gladly make all of the inventory items if you want them in a consistent style. 

I rather enjoy drawing inventory items, even when there's a lot of them. And if you've seen any of my games, you probably have an idea as to how I draw them. Just tell me what to draw, the size limitations, and palette limitations if any, and I'll make them. 

Then again, someone else might want to do it (or might be better suited for it). I just thought I'd throw my hat in the ring just in case. 

This is becoming a bit worrisome.

Agreed. 

Hello this is Gulshan Negi
Well, according to me, AI art creation is an evolving field that both excites and challenges the art community.  It creates debates and discussions about the nature of art and the relationship between human and machine creativity, in addition to opening up new creative opportunities. We can say AI is at peak and there is still a lot of research going on in this field. 
Thanks

No offense, but that is the most nothing statement I've ever heard about AI, and could be used to describe almost any field in technology (seriously, you can replace "AI" in what you said with something like "Video Games" or "The Internet" and it still makes sense).

This is what I'd expect to hear in a company's press release, not a forum full of personal opinions and thoughts.

So is there anyway you could elaborate in detail and actually share your personal thoughts on the matter? I'd love to hear them.

[each room is self-sufficient]

The real question is: how much adventure game is needed for a demo game? If you want to get a game with good story and great world building, there are tons of them in the database. The demo game should IMHO showcase the most common use cases and how to implement them.

Yes, I guess you're right.

So, the rule should then be that each room is self-sufficient, not requiring visiting other rooms for completing.

Like Gobliiins. 

I think that would be a very good rule of thumb to follow for a demo game. 
Unless we need to showcase how something can happen in one room and affect another. But that's the only exception I can think of.

I agree that we should decide resolution before setting up the project and doing any artwork. I also agree with your concerns. 640x400 is still rather lo-res, but it might be a good middle ground between 320x200 and anything considered high-res. This gives the creator of each individual room background some freedom in chosen style - you could still do fake super lo-res by drawing the background in 320x200 and scaling it up before import.

Considering this is probably going to be quite text heavy and include descriptions for how to implement certain features. I think going for 640x400 or a resolution along those lines, would definitely be preferable to 320x200, at least for readability sake. 
(Not that there's anything wrong with pixelated fonts, it's just hard to get a lot of text on screen at once in a low-res game, without it looking overwhelming.)

What do we think? One-click or a default like BASS? Pros? Cons?

Lurkers, chime in!

I highly doubt this demo game will be played on a mobile, and I also think it would be beneficial if there was some sort of implementation of the mouse wheel as a code example. So I don't think there's a reason to go for the one-click interface. Although I do think a one-click interface template should be included with AGS one day. But I digress.

As for the interface we should use for this, well personally I think a custom interface which can change between rooms would be preferable. So you can showcase each of the interfaces that come with AGS by default, you know 9-verb, BASS, ect. But considering that might be difficult to implement, the next thing I'd suggest is to just choose the one which seems the most popular to newbies. Which interface do most people gravitate towards when they first start using AGS?

For the record, the first interface I tried to use was a 9-verb template I found. But that was many years ago, and I'm usually in the minority with preferences like that. Besides I haven't tried to use a 9-verb interface in a long time.

While I may have never actually spoke to him in any form (it seems as though his last active date was before I even joined), I did know him thanks to his lasting impact on AGS. So this is quite sad news.

Rest in peace Phil. 

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees. And an extra special congratulations to Mandle.    (Speaking of which, has he heard the news yet?)

I also learned a large number of new ancient Chinese proverbs at the awards, which is something I'll always treasure.

Same here. It was a surprisingly educational ceremony. 

On the one hand it's a shame that development on this game will have to slow down.
On the other hand, congratulations on securing that funding for that Unity game. I hope it does well. 

Is it possible that Windows itself is preventing the EXE from being built because of file location permissions? It is after all the main reason why the config file for games compiled with AGS, is now no longer saved in the game's main folder.

The ceremony will happen tomorrow! I hope everyone will be there. 

I'll try my best to be there, but I may be a little late. 

I'm personally of the opinion of having a tutorial game. One where you can look at the code for each individual room and get a good idea of how they were coded.

I remember when I first started with AGS, I liked to look at the example rooms that came with templates, to see how to do basic things (I even ended up making one myself as a personal notepad of snippets of code).

Something like that can also be its own little (albeit simple) game. After all, to demonstrate picking up a key and using it on a door, it's best to actually have a room where there's a key on the floor which you can pick up and use on a door.

But that's just my two cents on the matter. There are definitely good reasons to have a demo game that's meant to be a showcase of what you can do with the engine, rather than a tutorial game which tells you how you can do things with the engine. It all depends on whether we want to inspire newcomers or help them get acquainted.