Quoting: EikeI loved Infocom's work once upon a time and played around with Inform a bit. I'd be happy to learn when (if) these games are out.

There's a playable build of Code 7's "Episode 0" up itch.io [External Link]. It works as a standalone short story IMO and is worth checking out to get a feel for what they've got in mind.

Quoting: Mountain ManSo what I'm seeing is that these aren't text adventures as much as they're fairly standard video games with an unconventional interface (at least by today's standards). The beauty of text adventures like the Infocom classics is that everything took place in the player's imagination, which is what made the experience so magical. These games seem to miss that aspect of it, but I suppose they don't have a choice in today's market. Trying to mass-market a pure text adventure today is, I think, a fool's errand.

While I agree that by having visual elements and voice work, these two games leave less to the imagination than traditional text adventures (this is one reason why I'm resistant to suggestions that I should put voiced narration in Winter's Wake [External Link], their different minimalist approaches do more to push the experience into players' imaginations than most games today.

FWIW, I don't think either of these games are trying to be "mass-market".

Quoting: tuubiAnyway, both games seem interesting and I'll most definitely be keeping my eye on them. Thanks for the heads up, Cheeseness.

No probs!

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Quoting: Farmboy0Does this use tank controls or even this hideous control scheme that tales of monkey island used?

Nope, it uses traditional point and click controls (I'm not even sure if it has gamepad support, but who needs that when you have a mouse \o/).

I also backed this one on Kickstarter. I was hoping for a little more, but given their budget totally understand why the game has the scope it has. It's rough around the edges in some places, but could be a start to a great series. I enjoyed the first installment and am looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

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This sort of thing is always nice to hear and echoes my own experiences. The more platforms/compilers/contexts you can build/run your game on or in, the more chances you have to find new perspectives on things you may not have previously identified as problematic - even when you're using a closed source third party engine like Unity.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: NelOh please stop this bullshit, this has been explained til death...

Are you trying to sell me that porters do not know how much RAM or how recent GPU their port will need?
Sorry, but I do not buy this piece of... smooth talking.

I ported Day of the Tentacle Remastered to Linux [External Link] and I couldn't tell you what graphics cards it does and doesn't run on or even what the theoretical minimum for RAM usage might be.

I removed the hard coded minimum GL check to allow people on way old hardware to at least try if they want, but like Nel says, the published system requirements we ended up going with more comes down to what we're willing to support (this is also true for the Windows system requirements - they're just what matches the lowest spec machines that happened to be laying around). If somebody has problems and it turns out that those are caused by obscure hardware that I can't get ahold of, then my options for reproducing, diagnosing and fixing those problems are significantly reduced.

That's not smooth talking. That's me being realistic about how I want to spend my own time and how much of other people's time I'm willing to waste.

Quoting: GuestI meant 'don't buy it' in response to the idea that stuff like this shouldn't be on steam. I think their user-curated Greenlight system is a good idea. Clearly some people want to pay money for this shit - let them have it I say!

This is how I feel about it. Plus, those that are pushing their way through Greenlight by means other than demonstrating an enthusiastic userbase are only making surviving on Steam harder for themselves and will wallow in obscurity, so it's not like they're getting free success.

There was an interview from a while back where Gabe had talked about his vision for Steam as an open platform where he wanted to give people the ability to create their own Steam "storefronts" (I feel like the Steam curator stuff is the first step along this path). Steam as a single monolithic storefront is becoming less and less relevant, and that's the only context where the signal to noise ratio of the quality of games really matters.

I'd much rather see individual communities highlight games that they find interesting (whether that be assessed through quality, production values, or more valuable subjective means) than have storefronts cull out ones that they think aren't.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: bubexelwell, almost 60% games that appear on steam are windows exclusive

That's not up to Valve.

As far as I know, they require all games to have a Windows version. They could require all games to have a Linux version. Or at least drop the Windows requirement.

If it's a requirement, it's not very well enforced.

There was at least one game (Don't Be Patchman) that for the first few months of its existence only had Linux builds, and there have been several Mac versions of games that were separate on the Steam store (most of those got consolidated down into one app when Valve added the option of paying platform specific publishers like Feral and Aspyr automatically based on playtime).

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Quoting: aLSo does any game work right now?

Official support hasn't landed yet. Since the word previously had been that they were waiting on upstream features from Kronos partners, it's possible that Valve may hold off until VR/Vulkan support is stable on all drivers (including this.

The OpenVR/SteamVR libraries were updated two days ago. I haven't checked to see if previously broken stuff has been brought back online for Linux, but judging by the update announcements, I'm guessing not.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Cheeseness

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: bubexelwell, almost 60% games that appear on steam are windows exclusive

That's not up to Valve. They've said they'd prefer all of them to be cross-platform. I don't think any of Valve's own games are exclusive to a single platform.

AFIK, Alien Swarm isn't available on anything but Windows (of course, it has the source files for it available which somebody with more time than me could look at porting to a Linux compatible version of the Source engine).

Oh, that's the free thingy valve paid some modders to make? I think my point still stands, if a bit uncomfortably. :) The point being Valve doesn't like exclusives.

It's a Valve published game made by Valve employees (although as I understand it, it was partially a "learn to Source engine" for some new hires who previously worked on the UT Alien Swarm mod). I think it also served as a test bed for improving some of the Source content editing tools and the Source SDK.

Valve have been explicit about wanting to avoid exclusivity though, for sure.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: bubexelwell, almost 60% games that appear on steam are windows exclusive

That's not up to Valve. They've said they'd prefer all of them to be cross-platform. I don't think any of Valve's own games are exclusive to a single platform.

AFIK, Alien Swarm isn't available on anything but Windows (of course, it has the source files for it available which somebody with more time than me could look at porting to a Linux compatible version of the Source engine).

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When this stuff lands, I'll be doing an unboxing video and talking about my experiences with it. For anybody who's interested, keep an eye out!

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For anybody still subscribed here, the graphical glitch on skin textures was a shader issue which was resolved in a patch that came out last night.

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