Wednesday 30 September 2009

Three Games

Ben Chandler's new short AGS game has been released: Awakener. As expected, it's a highly polished affair, with a pleasingly unusual ending. Well worth a look. I may have something XAGE-related to post on this in the near-future, so watch this space.

Another AGS game I (and a lot of other people) have been keeping an eye on is VinceTwelve's Resonance. Interestingly, he's used KickStarter in order to fund its entry to the IGF competition. So positive has been the response that he's actually been pledged over ten times the required amount.

As Resonance is being keenly followed by a lot of adventure game adificionados, this is entirely understandable. The XAGE project is still rather low-key, and will remain so until v1.0 and T4W hopefully begin to raise its profile. Seeing that people have pledged both $250 and $500 in order to be included as a character in Resonance only confirms that not only are people very excited about this game but they are also willing to part with large sums of money in order to feel involved in its construction.

My idea: A KickStarter project to allow a single individual to pay a reasonable sum (say, $500 to $1000) to have a short XAGE game created for or about them. Just as some people are crazy for adventure games, a whole lot more are crazy for their Xbox, investing a huge amount of time and money in their hobby. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that someone would be interested in funding some such ego project in order to see their idea or character come to life on their console of choice. It would also tie in nicely with an idea I have for an episodic adventure game on XBLIG, where with each release the episode's financial backer stars as the antagonist.

Finally, Pixel Man was released to XBLIG recently - something about it appeals to me on a very basic level. The tiny graphics, 8bit sounds, rainbow menus and absolutely minimalist gameplay stir some childhood yearning for the Sinclair Spectrum. I'd love to have a crack at making something similar. Maybe when things aren't so busy.

2 comments:

Keith Weatherby II said...

No thanks to you I spent a good several hours on kickstarter ;-)

I don't remember your email so I decided to post a comment here. I'm wondering if you could possibly make it so that if I made an ags game, converted it to xage, that I could substitute higher res graphics in the xage version. IIRC ags games can only go of a max about 800x600 (or are they up to 1024x768 yet)... when the xbox 360 is of course 1280x720p. Is that at al possible?

Keith aka Uhfgood

Clarvalon said...

Not easily. The problem would be that AGS game data and scripts are rely on co-ordinates. These are not scaled as there would be all sorts of problems with this, such as going from a 4:3 ratio to 16:9.

It is trivial, however, to apply visual scaling in order to make the game better fit the xbox's 1280x720 resolution.