More works in progress

After getting fed up with trawling the Games in Production forums in my last post on these things, I thought I'd cover just a few more games that are on their way:

The Dwarven Dagger of Blitz

Join Trevor Lostpick in miguel's medieval spoof. Latest on this one is that it is nearly finished, so lets hope we see it soon.

Dragonfall : Alucard's Quest

Nightfable is developing this alongside her Robots of Dawn game, which is great if both come out, but too many people try to do too much at once. Let's hope she doesn't overstretch herself and one or other (or both) of these gorgeous looking games makes the light of day.

Doctor Who Episode 1: The Soup of Doom

This GIP thread contains Episode 0: Tardis Trouble already to download, and both episodes feature the Paul McGann TV-movie doctor.

Conscript: The Apollyon Incident

"Space freighter captain, Jack Ferrell and his crew of nine stumble upon a derelict spacecraft from the distant past. Hoping to claim the salvage rights, they enter the ship, only to discover that they are not alone on the ship." So basically Alien meets 7 Days a Skeptic. Aiming for a summer '08 release.

STAR WARS: Knights of the Old Jedi Order

kanagon's adventure game looks to be well into development, based on the screenshots posted, but it also looks quite large. Let's hope George Lucas doesn't shut him down before the game is released!

Hot live nerd cams!

Just follow this link to get hot geek action. Yes, AGS has its own webcam chat room on Stickam where you can go and see up to 12 AGSers staring at their computers watching each other. What excitement! Sometimes we even talk about stuff. The other day there was a theological discussion!

If you prefer not to see the nerd you are conversing with, try instead AGS's IRC server and channel. Not only can you talk to real people here, but there's also Roger, our chatbot who can play thrilling word games like acro!

Two RC for his own good

CJ has churned out a second Release Candidate already, with new features despite him saying that he wouldn't add any! You just can't get the staff, you know!

GIPsy Kings

Here's another bunch of interesting looking stuff floating around the Games In Production (GIP) forum:

Craft of Evil

If a game is made by a guy with a bucket on his head, does that mean the graphics will be bad? Well, not according to the screenshots published for this first-person haunted house game which were put together with the Unreal game engine then imported into AGS as backgrounds.

ColourWise

bicilotti is making a colourful non-adventure puzzle game with Once Upon a Time's Ghost and some other AGSers. Looks like it could be a cracking bit of fun: Q-bert meets Marble Madness!

Jack Hurt and the Living Dead

Yay, Zombies! Forumite thesuitor is putting together a game where you can see if you are Legend!

NES Quest

Yolt and MrT (the real one?) have reached the beta-testing stage of their DOTT-esque game where you try and get your Nintendo fixed. Reports from beta tester TwinMoon have been good, so this is worthj keeping an eye out for its release.

Near Somewhere

Wacky French surrealist naamlock is following up his recent release Far Nowhere with this nearly-monochrome cat-murdering game.

Infection 1

After a long hiatus, a new demo is out for this Alien-esque Sci-Fi game that takes place on a spaceship with a mysterious cargo where the crew are woken early from cryo-stasis.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Using pre-rendered 3D to recreate Baum's yellow-brick vision, this ambitious project has a nice looking trailer but no doubt will take some time to be completed.

Quest to End All Quests!

Looking somewhat like Terry Pratchett's Cohen the Barbarian, wrinkled veteran hero Balder embarks on one last mission. Strange Visitor and Pijin (Dr Lutz and Robotragedy) are working together on this wonderfully hand-drawn game.

Project Hecka: Faith

Faith is trapped in her boarding school with a serial killer and the police seem to be getting nowhere. New kid on the block vertigoaddict and lo_res_man are working on this project that has a nice Yahtzee-ish style to the graphics.



Well, I'm all blogged out for now. Perhaps I'll cover some more GIPs shortly. Or not!

Adventure Con

AdventureCon is an anagram of "Adventure Con". Took me ages to work out that one. Anyway, last year it fell through. This year, Howard Sherman is trying again to make it work. By "make it work" I mean refusing to talk to any adventure game companies unless they pay him $1000 first. By "make it work" I mean booking in to a hotel that isn't even finished being built yet. By "make it work" I mean not offering any guarantees to people who book in advance that the event will even take place. But hey, look at the website and judge for yourself.

I would actually be quite pleased if the thing did work despite the whole dodginess of the set up: it would be a great thing for it to run year after year, but until they've got a couple of years of success under their belts, I doubt that most companies or people will want to shell out in advance. If I were to go, I'd want Telltale, Autumn Moon, Hothead, Wadjet Eye, Benoit Sokal, The Adventure Company and some European companies there.

Estudio de juegos de aventuras

Mis hijas y esposa (la famosa Princesa Marian!) son españolas así que pensé que debo presentar una descripciónito de qué materia de AGS está disponible en la idioma española. Ciro Duran ha hecho algunos juegos y una gran clase particular de AGS. Hay una cierta cobertura en el sitio general Aventuras y Cía de la aventuras, el Google Grupo Comunidad AGS Español y el sitio de la serie del espía del James Peris. Y hay algunos miembros españoles del foro de AGS como el maravilloso artista Nacho. Y los juegos de Princess Marian tiene un pocito de español. Y aqui esta un listo de los mejores juegos gratis de aventura ¡Déjeme por favor saber si hay la otra materia hacia fuera allí! ¡O que mi español es terrible!

Wiki worky

Looks like the AGS Wiki is back online after the server downtime.

More game releases

Enough time has passed since my first summary of games that a whole new pile has come out, so here's a quick review of what has popped up since:

Which Witch

This is apparently an old game, retrieved from the attic in Flog It style. It has Anime style graphics and presents a simple get-past-the-bad-guy puzzle quite nicely.

Lazytown: The New Kid

First Bjork, then Lazytown, have promoted Iceland as being a place from whence slightly odd things emanate. If you (or your kids) are a fan of Sportacus, Stephanie, Stingy and Ziggy and so on, then try out this first effort from "Ultra Magnus" (with a name like that, perhaps its Magnús Scheving himself?). It all proves that it's a piece of cake to make an AGS game.

Lone Case 3: Showdown

Now, the observant may notice that LC3 is out after LC4. Perhaps Dualnames has followed the Yahtzee school of releasing games in a nearly entirely random order as to their place in a series? We join our returning hero Dave Dell as he is unfrozen from his cryogenic state (a la Demolition Man) and he tackles the challenges and secrets of the futuristic society in which he awakes. And how DO you use the three shells anyway?

Far Nowhere

This game looks like it plays like French art house cinema: that could be good or bad depending on your taste. Make sure you download the English translation for the full subtitular art house experience in this baguettey western. (Geddit - like spaghetti western, but French, see.. oh, never mind)

Diamonds in the Rough

Atropos Studios produce their first commercial game. You have to order the CDs on their website, or you can download a demo. There's a certain Heroes/Jumper vibe to the plot by the look of things, so fans of those may want to take a look. I have a credit, which I think is for my Save/Load GUI module used in the game, which was also used in Prodigal and Stargate Adventure.

Unintelligent Design

This March 2008 MAGS entry might offend some Creationists (perhaps it is meant to!) and seems to be the only MAGS entry this month entered into the games DB so far. The results aren't out yet, so we'll see what people think of it. Creator twin-moon also entered February's MAGS, so its good to see such a high work rate!

Jimson and the Jazz Crabs

Not yet in the games DB, this mildy surreal adventure through a world of cookie monsters, saxophonist crustaceans and trumpet-devouring whales is an intriguing first effort from sigbuserror.

RON: Rock - A True Story

Reality on the Norm gains another game about Rock music, pirates and bad jokes. So it should fit right in with the series...

CJ gets all RC

Over in the Technical Forum, CJ has just put up AGS 3.01's first Release Candidate. A Release Candidate means that CJ is only going to do bug fixes rather than add features as happens with Betas. Normally we go through 2 or 3 of these before the final version, so we can maybe expect v3.01 to be released in May, perhaps? v3.01 fixes a few niggles with v3.0 and adds a few handy things so should be well worth using when it comes out: there's no major changes compared to v3.00 so if you're already using it, watch out for the new version and upgrade when it hits the streets.

Full list of updates in the forum thread.

Pretty Module Updates

If you fiddled with the compile options in AGS 3.0 (and 3.01) then my Hypertext and SpriteFonts modules did still work. However, now I've updated them and they work natively AND still work in AGS 2.72. How cool is that? As I mentioned before, these should work more efficiently in AGS 3.0 because they now use the DrawingSurface functions and don't have to keep saving off the whole screen to use it as a scratchpad as they used to.

Blog blag brag

Not only has CJ cast his peepers over these very pages (I'll never wash them again!), but over on his Les Miserables Game blog, Chris Tolworthy sings the praise of some module or other. What a clever chap.

In other exciting blog news, Jozef Purdes who used to review every AGS release ever on his blog has returned after a prolonged hiatus, and this time he says he's going to stick to more detailed reviews of the better games rather than single sentences about every piece of... work... that pops up in the AGS Games database! Thanks to Vince Twelve for pointing that one out on the AGS Forums. Jozef has already reviewed Ben Jordan 6, Linus Bruckmann and Deirdra's Wintermute-made games Chivalry is Not Dead and Pigeons in the Park.

A sign to view

Well, the great one has spoken. The very founder of the religion known as "AGS" His Most Circumalliumness Christopher Quentin Jones has deigned to read my humble blog. And in doing so, he commanded me to write about the AGS "Assign to View" feature. How can I but obey?

The "Assign to View" feature is a handy way to "push" sprites into views from the sprite manager, rather than "pulling" them into a view one at a time from the View manager. You'll find it in AGS 2.72 as well as the most recent 3.0, but I'll describe the new one here. They're both pretty intuitive once you know they're there, anyway.

So, first click or drag or shift-click or control-click to select the sprites you want to add to a view. This might be part of your walk cycle or another animation that you've imported. Then, right-click on one of your selected sprites and a huge menu pops up with more options than you can shake a stick at.

Choose the "Assign to view" option and a dialog box pops up in the Editor. Here you can select how to add these sprites to a view and clicking on the button beside the view number give you another dialog box that lets you choose which view, along with a handy preview of existing loops in the view.

If you choose all the options you require, you can then head over to the View editor tab and check out your lovely new frames, loops and views. Easy as pie.

The fickle public

It's amazing what is popular in this blog. My most visited post seems to be the one reviewing the games so far in 2008. That's understandable. However, second comes my post on how I have more Americans reading this blog than any other nationality. Why do people want to read that tiny little post? Why has it got 3 comments, when far more informative ones have none? Not to mention the ones where I actually ask people to comment. Ah, the fickle public.

I mentioned this to the illustrious behemoth of AGS game design, Dave Gilbert, and he said that the most visited stuff in his blogs are the entries related to poop in some way. That is worrying on many levels. Perhaps he got linked to on a bunch of popular (poopular?) poop blogs? Anyway, let's make his problem worse with this link...

ChangeRoom bug!

AGS 3.0 is wonderful and all, but if you use the player.ChangeRoom function with the optional co-ordinates, the player moves to the new x and y co-ordinates then the room fades out and the new one fades in. Obviously, the player should change position after the fade out and before the fade in of the new room. So, Super Scottish Hero to the rescue! Here's a module that will fix the problem: all you need to do is replace all your ChangeRoom calls with ChangeRoomFixed and hey presto! It's especially easy now that AGS has a find/replace in the editor now.

Probably CJ will fix this for the next 3.01 beta, but meantime you can use this module in 3.01 and 3.0. Full documentation is on my site.

By the way, this module uses the extender function ability of AGS 3.0 to make the new function look as close to the built-in ChangeRoom as possible.

Mortality

Well, its been a sad week. Arthur C Clarke, Captain Birdseye and Ivan Dixon all died. Now, I was particularly shocked when I saw the news about Ivan Dixon, as I thought "He only released Sydney Treads the Catwalk in a wee while ago, surely he's not going to be another gonetoosoon?" But, as it turns out, it was the actor from Hogan's Heroes, not the aussie AGS game creator. Still sad, of course, but a few degrees of separation further away and at a ripe old age.

Arthur C Clarke, of course, was an inspiration for many Sci-Fi fans and there's at least one game in the Games in Production forum based on his works. He was tainted in later years by unpleasant allegations and he looked like a bit of an old colonial, but there's no disputing that he had a huge influence upon modern Science Fiction.

Princess Marian

It's about time I covered what is possibly the greatest series of games ever to have emerged from the bowels of the AGS Editor: Princess Marian I, Princess Marian II, Princess Marian III, Princess Marian IV, Princess Marian V, Princess Marian VI, Princess Marian VII, Princess Marian VIII, Princess Marian IX, Princess Marian X and the surprisingly titled Princess Marian XI. The graphics of this excellent series started with a high standard and has never deviated from its quality level. The whole gamut of occasions has been covered: anniversaries, birthdays, mother's day, Christmas. Some episodes go as far as having animation, or voice acting, or a plot. So, don't miss out: go and try a Princess Marian game today!


Oh, and if you really want to actually have a proper gaming experience, go for PMX.

God Bless America

Some people say that Americans are parochial, whining, bullying, irony-deficient fools, but I say nay! In my experience, they have great taste in blogs. If only their taste in presidents and foreign policy was better...

ssh.me.uk problems

So, part of the server downtime that hit the AGS forums and my site ssh.me.uk was a change of web server from Apache to lighttpd. This has some advantages, but disadvantages are that all my dynamic pages that used PHP are broken, as are the nice URLs to access module documentation, etc. Hopefully normal service should resume soon, but in the meantime, you can access the documentation by using URLs like: http://ssh.me.uk/parsemodzip.php?modfile=Hypertext.zip where the last bit can be replaced for any module zip file.

UPDATE: Some things still not quite as pretty on my site as they should be, but the module stuff seems to be working again fine, thankfully.

Back to life

The forums are back online, although not all of the server's sites are restored yet (like mine, boo hoo).

Dave Gilbert interview

Just a heads up about the Dave Gilbert interview over on GameZebo. That's it!

Games pages

While googling to try and find non-AGS release to blog about, I realise that its quite hard. Perhaps one of the unsung advantages of AGS is that it has a proper games database that by-and-large reflects finished games that one can download and play with direct links (mostly) and you can list chronologically, to see what's new.

Wintermute's site has a list of games that are not in chronological order, may or may not be finished (how up to date is it? hard to tell) and you have to trawl through a site first to actually get to the download. Lassie has some direct links, but is also cluttered with unfinished projects and is not available in chronological order. SLUDGE and all other engines don't seem to have games released at all in 2007, let alone 2008... so its very hard to tell what cool stuff has come out from other engines recently. Devotees of other engines, please put me right if I've missed such a resource somewhere: I'd love to have access to it.

However, if you can call "escape the room" adventures adventures, then the lists at Shut In and Escape Games 24 are pretty good.

AGS 3.0: The Editor

One of the biggest AGS events recently was the release of version 3.0. This is the biggest change in the editor since it moved from DOS to Windows! The actual script language has changed very little in this new version (see previous blog posts for those wee changes), and so that part is reasonably painless in upgrading, but the editor is waaay different.

First, you need to download the .NET framework, which gives the new editor its standard look-and-feel, and saves CJ re-inventing the wheel. You can then run the AGS 3.0 installer (yes, it now has an installer!) or there is a zipped version if you prefer DIY installation.

So now you can have multiple scripts open at once (via tabs at the top of the page), you ran set breakpoints in the code, and single-step through them with the editor and game side-by-side, you can import editor plug ins like the great Media manager and the whole thing has a much more modern look to it. I'd really recommend going in and having a play, and CJ is particularly open to fixing minor usability issues as new people come to use AGS 3.0, so the 3.01 beta already has a lot of things fixed in it.

Another major point is the support for version control systems, like Perforce and Subversion, so large projects with lots of people working can all gel together better, and you can keep track of all changes to your game so when you say, "Oh flippety-flop, I didn't mean to delete that" you can cancel your checkout or go back to an old version of your code.

Anagram again

"Adventure Gamers" is an anagram of "Um, a starved genre"!

Upgrading Modules to AGS 3.0

I've been going through the Hypertext, Credits and SpriteFont modules checking if they need to be changed to work better under AGS 3.0. Forrtunately, Credits didn't need anythign doing at all. If you turn off "Enforce object-based scripting" in AGS 3.0, they all should still work, but they would be, still, using the Room background as a temporary draw space, then restoring it, which less efficient.

So, it turned out to be relatively painless to move to the DrawingSurface commands I mentioned before, but I have yet to fully test the upgraded modules at all game resolutions, which can often be the tricky bit to get working. Also, since my own site is on the same server as the AGS forums, I can't upload it right now anyway!

But to make sure the modules still work under 2.72 (and 2.71 and 2.70, where possible) I have to stick lots of #ifver 3.0 and #ifnver 3.0 in all over the place, to wrap up the version-specific code. And then, if you have to support versions before 2.72, then you need to wrap those up in #ifdef AGS_SUPPORTS_IFVER as 2.71 and earlier didn't have the #ifver commands! So it can get quite convoluted. Then, I need to load up all the different versions and check they still work... Maintenance can be pretty non-trivial, sometimes.

Adventurematography

One thing missing from most AGS games is a good bit of Cinematography. We see tracking shots when there's a scrolling screen, perhaps some parallax scrolling, maybe the odd zoom or unusual camera angle, but where are all those cool camera techniques we see in the movies? Here are some things it might be cool to see:

• SnorriCam
• Trunk Shot
• Dolly Zoom
• Follow shot
• A bit more camera movement in general

Now, its easy to say these things, but of course in 2D animation they are hard to do, much easier in 3D, but I'm sure some of these things would look absolutely fabulous in an AGS game if someone has the animating ability and time to do them.

Hi ho Silver Lining

OK, its not made with AGS, but with Torque, but I know you'll be interested that the game formerly known as Kings Quest IX, The Silver Lining has gone into beta testing, and you can enter their beta testing contest over on their site.

Good names for modules?

Today I updated my DeNGVaT module for the first time in ages, as someone found a bug in it (D'oh!). This also probably indicates that they are also probably the first person to use it. I have to admit, the name is pretty cryptic (it stands for Debug, Named Global Variables and Timers) and I sometimes feel that it would be better calling it "Named Global" module or something that at least covered one aspect of it. The trouble is it does too much!

Another module that is similarly burdened is the Hypertext module. This allows you to use mark-up in your text, and it displays it properly, allowing you to change fonts, colours, underlines, etc. in mid-text. Most normally, one might use a bold version of a font in mid-sentence to emphasise a word. This can be marked up as "Yes, he *really* did do it!" for example, and the word "really" is displayed in bold when the module is used. It also does hyperlinks, so one can simulate a simple "intranet" browser within an AGS game. Since the text rendering is already there, I also extended it to do speech bubbles for characters. So perhaps the module should be called "Text markup rendering, hypertext and speech bubbles module". But that makes for a mighty long file name and a poor acronym.

So, I open the floor to suggestions for better names for any of my modules. Answers in the comments section below, please, and the best one wins a free mention in the newly named module and this blog. What more could you want, eh?

Forum downtime

The AGS forums will be down later this week for a while (Wed 12th March to Sun 16th March). As will other important sites like the AGS Wiki, my homepage, Grundislav Games, etc. all of which share the same server. I think the main AGS stuff is hosted elsewhere, so that should still be alive, but if your life is the AGS forums, you will have to go into hibernation until the server stuff is done with.

More anagrams

To tide you over the weekend, here are two more:

Droll Berating (Ronald Gilbert)
Toke ends motley franchise (Secret of Monkey Island)

Download or Disc?

A raging debate has ensued in the Completed Games forum within the Diamonds in the Rough thread. When Alkis (of Other Worlds fame) announced that he would only be making his game available as a boxed CD purchase and not as a download of any kind, a lot of people started complaining.

It's an unusual move, but of course, setting up one's own download site is not trivial either. For both type of sale you have the overhead of an online store, but on top of that you need to provide a way for people to download their purchase that is easy for them, but also means that others cannot hack in easily. And although the copy protection on a CD is unlikely to be harder to circumvent than a download, at least there is a psychological difference between illegally copying a CD and copying something you just downloaded. However, if you use a popular webstore software on your site, like osCommerce, you may well find that download controlling is included, or a free add-on.

There are a number of things that one can do to prevent copying of AGS games. Phoning home is not really possible, as AGS doesn't really support net connections. When Dave Gilbert's games are sold through Playfirst or Big Fish, I believe they use the Software Passport suite to allow timed demos and then code activation. However that software, although free to try, is very expensive for one small commercial project. I think the best way for authors to protect AGS games is to put a unique identifier in each copy of the game they sell, at least that way when a pirated copy becomes extant they can name and shame (and sue!) the guilty party. Possibly one could also use some kind of encrypted activation key that combined with the unique ID.

No software protection scheme is foolproof, but one needs to have enough there to stop the indignant ignoramus who thinks "Hey, why should I have to pay for this, all other AGS games are free!" but is unable to hack at all.

Forthcoming AGS Meets

I could waffle on about how Mittens started (and already did slightly in my last post) but more exciting is the upcoming AGS meets this year. If you want to know the history, read it on the AGS Wiki.

This year's Mittens is in France and all the places have been booked, I think, so you can't go if you're not booked up already.

Brittens had been planned to be in Ireland this year, but unfortunately not enough people could commit and so its all up in the air at the moment. If you live in the UK, offer free accommodation and you could have the chance to have loads of internet wierdos descend on you!

Lapaset (Finnish for Mittens!) is presumably in Finland, presumably in Summer but has only been mentioned in passing this year, so we'll have to wait and see!

If you're interested in where all these AGSers are, check out the AGS world map!

I met CJ once!

Many moons ago, there was an AGS meet-up called Bonfirittens. Most AGS meets have their names derived from the original Mittens which was a random name conjured up by the surreal Captain Mostly, I believe. Anyway, a bunch of AGSers headed to exotic Sunderland for the annual celebration of politicians not being exploded known as Bonfire night. It was there I had what some might term a religious experience: I met Christopher Jones, esteemed author of Adventure Game Studio himself.

Some people may doubt this experience I had, as I don't actually have any photos of us in the same picture. Perhaps it was all in my imagination! I do have this of CJ and spleen chatting in Creed_malay's living room, but does it really prove that I met him?

Oh, I also have Ron Gilbert living in my garage and Jane Jensen stashed in my attic, but no-one is likely to doubt those.

Extender functions

One of the coolest new features of AGS 3.0 is the extender function. Previously, if you wanted to use a function to, say, make your character look at someone before saying their line (e.g. in a 3-way conversation) you could script it manually each time:

cFred.FaceCharacter(cWilma);
cFred.Say("Hello Wilma");
cFred.FaceCharacter(cBarney);
cFred.Say("Hello Barney");
cFred.FaceCharacter(cWilma);
cFred.Say("How are you, dear");

Which gets tedious after a while, so you make up a function:

function FaceAndSay(Character *speaker, Character *facing, String what) {
speaker.FaceCharacter(facing);
speaker.Say(what);
}
...
// in script header
import function FaceAndSay(Character *speaker, Character *facing, String what);
...
FaceAndSay(cFred, cWilma, "Hello Wilma");
FaceAndSay(cFred, cBarney, "Hello Barney");
FaceAndSay(cFred, cWilma, "How are you, dear");

But what looks even better is:

function FaceAndSay(this Character *, Character *facing, String what) {
this.FaceCharacter(facing);
this.Say(what);
}
...
// in script header
import function FaceAndSay(this Character *, Character *facing, String what);
...
cFred.FaceAndSay(cWilma, "Hello Wilma");
cFred.FaceAndSay(cBarney, "Hello Barney");
cFred.FaceAndSay(cWilma, "How are you, dear");

So, you are, in effect, adding a new method to the Character class. This is a noddy example, but it can really lead to much nicer code.

Drawing Surfaces

AGS 3.0 introduces a new type to the game author called the DrawingSurface which allows you to do the equivalent of RawDraw commands on an object other than the current Background. You can also use it for the background, too.

Previously, if you wanted to modify a sprite on the fly or do any complex drawing you had to save the background, clear it to the "magic pink" colour that turns transparent when grabbed, do your drawing, grab a dynamic sprite and then redraw the background how it was. This wasted time and could make things slower than they needed to be. The Drawing Surface concept lets you draw onto a Dynamic Sprite directly. Not only that, but it adds the ability to use hi-res co-ordinates within that sprite instead of the standardized 320x240 co-ordinates, if you wish. Further capabilities are added in the 3.01 beta where you can also grab the colour of a pixel within the drawing surface, just like the eyedropper tool in a paint program.

Modules like my Hypertext module, which allowed fonts to change in the middle of a piece of text (amongst other things) used the drawing-on-the-background extensively in version 2.72 but now they can be much more efficient and organised, and draw on dynamic sprites, which is great. If only I could get around to updating the module... and all the others that are affected by this: like SimpleSnow, SimpleRain, SpriteFont and Shadow...

Bless You

Its not often that a game featuring a phlegmatic porker fails to attract attention, but Gesundheit! seems to have largely passed by the AGS scene, despite it being made with AGS. However, it attracted enough outside attention to become a finalist at the Independent games Festival at the 2008 Game Developers Conference despite still only being a demo! Author Matt Hammill (no relation to Mark, I assume) doesn't hang around the AGS forums much, so that's probably why it hasn't had a lot of attention, but it still managed to get a Best Non-Adventure nomination in the recent AGS Awards.

Farcesmith

One of my other hobbies outside of adventure games is anagrams. Way back in 2000, I won a category in the monthly anagrammys with my epic George "Dubya" Bush = Boy, he'd bugger USA.

So, the heading of this post is "Farcesmith" and see if you can work out which famous adventure author it is an anagram of?

The AGS Wiki

I described earlier the sorry state of some of the "real" Wiki pages related to AGS, but after a flurry of activity at its inception, the AGS Wiki regrettably doesn't have a great deal going on these days. Gilbert does a great job keeping the Competitions and Activities Hall of Fame up to date. And monkey_05_06 keeps manual pages and tutorials up to date and I've recently updated the AGS Awards pages myself. However, there's not usually anyone else updating and its a great shame. There are plenty of handy nuggets of wisdom residing amongst our eclectic forum membership and it would be great if there were more art or scripting or story writing tutorials, game reviews and other pages in the Wiki. The AGS's wiki rules are much less strict than Wikipedia, so you can put in any old rubbish, although blatantly off-topic Spam will obviously be frowned on and deleted and may gain you a ban.