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Adventure Game Scene of the Day - Monday 18 July

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Bestowers of Eternity

Even if you’re not a serious Wadjet Eye fanboy as I am, I’m sure there will be something a bit familiar looking about the above screenshot!

Bestowers of Eternity is sort of a precursor to the commercially available Blackwell series. NOT a prequel or prelude or anything like that, it is the freeware game, made by Dave Gilbert, that the Blackwell series arose from. The first Blackwell game is based – sort of – on this game. It isn’t anywhere near the standard you have come to expect and enjoy from Wadjet Eye but is nevertheless a piece of adventure gaming history!

Having heard Dave discuss it in a couple of talks at AdventureX and so on it is interesting not just because of the link to Blackwell, but also on the question of whether freeware and commercial games can be properly equated.

To give an example, pretty much every year over on the AGS forums recently when the annual awards are in prospect someone asks ”is it fair that freeware and commercial games are judged together, shouldn’t there be separate awards?”

Similarly, I’ve heard people on this forum (usually in connection with Kickstarter projects) saying that commercial funding should make no difference to the quality of a game. If someone believes in it enough and works really hard there is no reason that their non-funded game shouldn’t be just as good.

Bestowers is a case in point that a game made on a budget of 0 and in spare time rather than by people working professionally (i.e. being paid) to do the job will not yield the same results and definitely not in the same timescale. Bestowers was made by a few guys in their spare time working for nothing. The Blackwell series was made by people being paid. All games were written/produced by the same guy.

Anyway, enough waffle from me, hope you find this interesting and that Dave doesn’t get too annoyed about Bestowers being dragged up to haunt him yet again! Wink

It is after all part of adventure gaming history!

     

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I wonder how many other games there are like this. I.e., games that didn’t have a lot of polish, but showed sufficient “spark” to get the designer hired to a “real” job.

     

For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.

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Intense Degree - 19 July 2016 08:33 AM

To give an example, pretty much every year over on the AGS forums recently when the annual awards are in prospect someone asks ”is it fair that freeware and commercial games are judged together, shouldn’t there be separate awards?”

 

I think for awards games have to be judged together. Even commercial adventure are made in spare time sometimes and budget for games are wildly different between them.
But I can see that a specific category for Best Freeware should also exist to reward the effort (maybe it already exists…)

     
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wilco - 19 July 2016 04:12 PM

I think for awards games have to be judged together. Even commercial adventure are made in spare time sometimes and budget for games are wildly different between them.
But I can see that a specific category for Best Freeware should also exist to reward the effort (maybe it already exists…)

That’s exactly the difficulty with it I think. There are Commercial games made on a tiny budget and Freeware games which have had money spent on them, or are done by professionals (i.e. those paid to develop games for their job) in their spare time. I can understand why the spare time bedroom developer sees their game up against Wadjet Eye’s latest and may think it’s an uneven playing field, but (as you say) the dividing line between commercial and freeware is too blurry. Ideally there might be a different class system but it’s too difficult to define.

The “Best Freeware” option is probably the best fit and is exactly what the AGS community have done in recent years. Great minds Wilco…! Laughing

     

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rtrooney - 19 July 2016 02:57 PM

I wonder how many other games there are like this. I.e., games that didn’t have a lot of polish, but showed sufficient “spark” to get the designer hired to a “real” job.

Look at the Wadjet Eye catalogue for answers to that one!

Technobabylon, Primordia and Gemini Rue (the commercial versions) came out of freeware games or works in progress in the AGS community.

     

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Intense Degree - 20 July 2016 05:02 AM
rtrooney - 19 July 2016 02:57 PM

I wonder how many other games there are like this. I.e., games that didn’t have a lot of polish, but showed sufficient “spark” to get the designer hired to a “real” job.

Look at the Wadjet Eye catalogue for answers to that one!

Technobabylon, Primordia and Gemini Rue (the commercial versions) came out of freeware games or works in progress in the AGS community.

And on the ‘getting hired’ side, Portal is a pretty famous case - Narbacular Drop was made as a student project and Valve basically hired the whole team to make a more polished version. They repeated the trick for Portal 2 - the gels in that came from another student project, Tag: The Power of Paint, whose team they hired.

The Silver Lining got Phoenix Online noticed, too.

     

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