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The author of Chmelnica and Bill DeBill also made another game called Dinky Island, but it doesn't look like it has anything to do with the Monkey Island series. I am not even sure this one is an AGS game, though it seems probable. Does anyone have this? (Or know if it is an AGS game at all?)

And does anyone have The Fan Game: The Goonies by Daniele Spadoni?

[Dragonscale]

The September Mags 2003 featured a game called Dragonscale, which is on the archive, but not in the database. This is a short game set in a future which looks pretty much like our times, and perhaps involving a dragon. The theme was "Mythological Beast".

It looks like one of Daniele Spadoni's Back to the Future fangames is not in the database, but it is on the archive. This is the one similar to the movie.

And with Adultsqualman returning, why not post the link to his production from his younger days. It's on the archive again: A Cup of Coffee is worth 1000 Bathroom Trips This may require an older pc or some tinkering before it will run. And it's made by a kid, so be warned. 

From ITCH comes
cosmo's trinket hunt
that could be categorized as joke since it lasts one click only

Joke indeed. Looks nice, but a bit disappointing.

From the author of The Beekeper comes 2 little game about Holmes' brother Mycroft
MYCROFT HOLMES SIMULATOR 1895
MYCROFT HOLMES SIMULATOR 1895 ExEd

This is the same game, but with a bit more features in the expanded edition. Absolutely delightful and funny, albeit a sort of celebration of pointlessness at the same time. I was having a good time, achieving very little. 

Purpose : Retired
stating from the itch page, it's a short P&C adv, to be finished in few minutes

This is a really nice, "slow" game about a retired cop. Good-looking pixel art, too.

Zombie Train Beyond Earth: Episode 2
(the episode 1 is done with another engine)

I checked out episode 1 (made with GameMaker Studio), and it was really cool. Making a flipped animation? Nope, just let the guy moonwalk (Space, you know).   Episode 2 is well made, but I didn't like the idea that much. And I can't reveal it without spoiling it.

Well, welcome back! Time machines really do exist, they just work differently than in the movies.  And while I have you here - I guess you don't have your old games anymore? Warrior of Might is on the list of "lost games" that our archivists are looking for, and possibly others, too.

Thank you, Gabriel! As always, much appreciated. 

Does anyone have Bill DeBill? It was in the database years ago, but have been removed.

I'm primarily noting this because you seemed to want to upscale the GUI graphics automatically. There's no good reason I can think of to ever want to do this.

I think the point may be that the option seems to indicate that the GUIs will just work if you upscale.   As a new user, you want the inventory window, options menu etc. to just be there and work properly without having to make them from scratch. (Frankly, I wish the option would work that way, too. But you have explained adequately why it doesn't.)

Jimm's Quest III: Lesko's Revenge Demo does not have a scripted ending. To be fair, this is more or less stated on the db page, but there is nothing in-game.

deep lake mall

This was a fun short investigation game.

Senpai Getaway

Short Slovak game that I needed Google Translate to finish. Made for a small anime-inspired jam, this is a mix of graphic assets that doesn't fit together. I found it kind of charming, anyway.

drawn to the flame

This one is a brilliant short horror piece featuring a scary elevator ride. No real puzzles, but I thought it was genuinely unsettling. Good stuff.

The same author also has a game in the database (Where No Fear Was), but on his itch page, there are also two other small games:
Grace Russell: Episode 1 tech demo, which is a taste of an investigation game. Just a demo, like the title says.
A Fool for Love (or: Finding the Right Words Beta Version), which is an unfinished game where the player control a cupid who is guiding a hopeless guy in his quest for love. Quite funny, and a great idea for a game.

TijdTripper
This is a 2010 AGS prototype of a later flash game

It's a shame the flash game doesn't exist anymore. Very cool concept where the player has to time travel to preserve the history of Utrecht. Learning history this way is very appealing.

Or you could send the player to a room with an all-black background and display the speech on that. (Then send them back when you end the dialogue.) Could be useful if you need to do this at several places in your game and are not sure about how to turn Matti's solution into a function.

So sorry to hear about that. All the best wishes! I hope game making can be a welcome distraction in a difficult time.

Do you think a link to the current month's MAGS contest on the front page would help?

Or posting next month's rules early, giving a bit more time?

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.

EDIT: but of course such category will be prone to not having enough competitors each year. So maybe consider the some kind of "special award" as with "Good character".

To be fair, one of the comittee awards already in place can also be used for this, although the tech award has been given mostly to work on the engine, modules and plugins the latest years. But maybe the committee could choose to award "Spectacular programming" a given year if there is a game that deserves it? If there are few coders in the anonymous committee, they would probably be dependent on tips from our experts in the field.

*) Reduced categories
"Best Demo" and "Best Character" are dropped.

Possibly combine Best Demo and Best Short game?

Best Character, if we should want to keep it, could be awarded by a separate committee consisting of a few of our members who play most of the games, but are not necessarily devs themselves. I think this is a different consideration from Lifetime Achievment or Technological advancement, and calls for a different approach. Not possible now, but ideally, these members would be appointed before a year starts and keep each other updated on good characters in a separate thread. (My thoughts here are that there probably will be a "best character" every year, put maybe not "Outstanding programming". Also, I think our programmers are too busy programming to have time for being hard core gamers. Could be wrong.)

Hmmm...I actually like the best character award, but I think it's rather difficult to do by popular vote as we do now. But I do think it could be done by a small committee. Suggestions could be posted in the FYI thread, like others, in case there's a great character in an overlooked game.

I guess when it comes down to it, the people who organize this will have to draw the lines and determine how much work they want to do and how they are going to do it. The rest of us will have to accept that and rather try to support where we can.

Actually, I don't think 50 people deciding the awards is all that bad, if it's compared to other websites giving out awards where it's done by a small committee. I wish more people would participate, of course.

My gut feeling is that the AGS crowd are pretty fair in their ratings, even though some of us are friends or "fans" of each other's work. This could be due to us being mostly adults by now. I see a tendency on other sites that (younger?) people will vote either 1 star or max amount, and they may also feel an obligation to rate another product with five stars if the author of that game gave their game the same. At least to an extent, I see this in some game jams and on google play. (My own theory is that this is due to these people using game rating the same way they use social media.) But I digress.

In theory, artists should be more interested in nominating games in the art categories, not to mention more capable of recognizing good art than those of us don't know what's the front end of a pencil. Same would go for programming, writing, music and most of those categories. I wouldn't mind if someone with a talent in one of these fields were given a big blue nominate button, to be able to give the nominations out where they are deserved. Thus if a game doesn't get the five nominations necessary, it could be nominated as a "Expert's pick" (I'm sure someone could make up a better name for it) instead.

Again, I'm working out of an assumption that may be wrong, namely that we choose which games to play out of our field of special interest. For example, if eri0o makes a game with some programming magic, that other expert coders are likely to check it out to see what he did and how he managed to accomplish it. But I fear many of us don't really play many games at all.

I played Shrouded Space. This was the overall winner of the game jam, and it's a very good game. First and foremost, it's humourous and very fun to play, as the protagonist more or less by accident makes his moves from prisoner and against an evil intergalactic empire. Graphics and sound are also impeccable, so the one gripe one could make, is that the puzzles are a bit on the easy side. This is a unity game.

Hmm... I tried this one but it wouldn't launch. Did you play it from the Itch App or just download it independently?

Downloaded. I used Windows 10, 2.40 GHz, 8 Gb RAM.

I played Shrouded Space. This was the overall winner of the game jam, and it's a very good game. First and foremost, it's humourous and very fun to play, as the protagonist more or less by accident makes his moves from prisoner and against an evil intergalactic empire. Graphics and sound are also impeccable, so the one gripe one could make, is that the puzzles are a bit on the easy side. This is a unity game.

If the goal is to get more nominations, one solution would be to grant some people the power to nominate a game on their own, without getting the 5 (?) votes necessary behind it. This could be the moderators, the organizers, some anonymous committee appointed by the organizers, or a combination.

I'm not sure if it's a good solution, though, and I would vastly prefer if our members do the nominating of their own accord. It's not strictly democratic, and we already have committees deciding certain awards.

This suggestion is made out of the assumption that the nominations is the bottleneck, but if votes are as low in numbers as the nominations, then that may be based on a false premise.

[More forgiveness]

I enjoy the ceremonies, but I realize they take a lot of work for the organizers. However, going back from that ceremony with all its bells and whistles to irc or discord only is bound to be a major downer. Probably not very twitch-worthy either.

I'm not sure I want the awards to be that much later in the year. Every year see a lot of games coming out near the end of the year, if I'm not mistaken. There's got to be enough time to actually play the games before nominating and voting. I always end up with some full length commercial game or other that I never found the time for.

More forgiveness
I think there is sometimes a pressure to have played every game in a category before voting in it. I can't be the only one who has decided against voting in a category because I wasn't able to play all the games in it. While this should definitely be encouraged, I think we should be more forgiving in this regard.

I think this especially applies to nominations. Some people don't nominate because they have only played few games, but nomination isn't a "this is better than the others" thing. It's more like "this game has great graphics!", and it doesn't matter if others, that I haven't played might have great graphics as well.

For MAGGIES in the last couple of years I have tried to include links to video play through for anyone too busy to download and play all the games. I'm trying to get this sorted even earlier for next year, so that every entry will have a video to watch. Maybe something similar could be done with all the AGS Award nominees.

Another great idea!

These are very good points. I think especially for graphics, animation and sound, one could easily nominate games after just watching videos. There's been some oversights over the years, unfortunately. I think also that for categories with only a handful of games, like non-adventure games or voice work, we shouldn't be afraid to nominate those few games that fit in the category.

It's very hard to get people to vote/rate and leave comments on the ordinary database pages, and unfortunately, I think the nominations and award votes have the same pattern.

[Super Author Simulator 2023]

Here are my thoughts:

Super Author Simulator 2023 by Rootbound

Spoiler

I like the idea a lot, and I find the implementation is very well done. However, the gameplay features a lot of keyboard bashing, which I'm not particularly fond of. The chapter openings and the agent's feedback are funny and well-written, but I have to say that the Powerups were the most of fun here, and probably what I'll remember abour the game. Longer feedback in the game's release thread.

[close]

The Weird Thing Under The Bed by Mandle

Spoiler

I spent some time chasing dust bunnies under the bed, believing that was what I was supposed to do. (Yes, I found the place for starting the game immediately.) I liked the choose-your-own-path gameplay afterwards, even though all possible endings were somewhat bleak (but fit the tune playing 100%). Indeed, I think the best ending is to choose "Sleep and exit". 

[close]

Conclusion and who I voted for:

Spoiler

It dawned on me that both the games this month have had me reach ultimately bad endings. The CYOP parts of Mandle's game was easily my favourite game mechanic, but there was more gameplay and polish in Rootbound's entry. I gave my vote for Super Author Simulator 2023

[close]

At first I thought "Is it Frank and Joe?" but then I went "No, could it be...?"

It was.