AdventureX 2015 - London December 12-13th

I wanted to set something like MAGS up for VS but I don't really think we have enough members to keep it rolling each month or quarterly. Also I wouldn't be able to provide any actual prizes unless we could find some third party support.

I know MAGS prize isn't really a prize. The winner gets to pick the theme & set the conditions for the next competition. It would be interesting to see what people could come up with in 48 hours or over a 5 day working period.

Yeah i think so too. To be honest and i don't want to bash anyone or anything i think you guys are doing a great job but i really think the Forum could benefit from a different layout or system than the current one. It's pretty convoluted and the search function only searches in the thread titles than the whole threads itself which makes it difficult for newbs like me to find some answers to questions which have DEFINITELY been asked before so as a result you get the same questions asked over and over probably and people like you have to spend all the more time giving answers. Even a Beginners Questions Section or something like that would be great already. The AGS forum might be nothing fancy but they have some pretty good sub-forums.

I'm never really sure why Visionaire isn't more popular. I mean when you google Adventure Game Engines surely you'll find it in no time right up there with AGS. But i think their Community, Documentation and Catalogue of Tutorials might just speak more to the beginner audience... but that's just my personal opinion

I think Visionaire is less popular because it has this commercial appeal, since we sell our licenses. AGS has this free open-source appeal, that many people in this genre seem to value most.

That certainly plays into it as well but on the other hand GameMaker is not for free either and there's a huge Community there too. Of course it's a General Purpose engine so it automatically attracts more Users but yeah.

Having said all that: VS has a great track record of commercially published Games and the development of AGS is kinda stalling so people are looking for alternatives and there really is only one other big player in the Adventure Engine field which iiiiiis... you guessed it

So i think there might come a new influx of Users from AGS and hopefully this Community will grow with it I'm certainly one who advertises VS whenever i can and the price is very reasonable for what it offers.

Its a bit offtopic right now but i also think that visionaire and especially the website would benefit from a better user experience like better forum functions and a more "everything belongs together" feeling. Right now the site has a lot of little bugs (especially for mobile users) , lack of features and several sites for news, articles, 2wikis (where one is abadoned and only half accessable) and lot more stuff where new users could be scared of or cant find places where to start or find the tutorials they need. Dont get me wrong,. Visionaire is a great tool, but the presentation and the access to several places on the website could be more easy and more organized so that more people who visit it will say: "i need this" ...

I think documentation and training is key to any Software so it would definitely benefit from more Tutorials and a more complete Documentation. But of course, easier said than done. Mark my words though, if i get any kind of proficiency in the tool i will do some Tuts I think for creators it's also great marketing to do training.

The AGS presence at AdventureX is probably because we ( the organisers) met on the AGS forum, the guy who started it is a long time Mod on the forum. I'd love for there to be a bigger Visionaire presence there which is why I posted here As Joel says AGS has it's problems and people are looking for a long term solution so now is probably your best chance.

& VS will get better. As for the forum CMS. It's a custom one that Thomas & Calli & the rest of their web dev team are constantly working on. Thomas is unwilling to switch to an existing tried & tested CMS like SMF or phpBB so all in all there's not much point in talking about it.

The documentation is really hard to keep up with. I'm often busy & the 3 current devs of VS are usually busy debugging, improving or adding new features to the engine when they aren't busy with non-VS related things. On top of this I don't get paid (don't know if the devs do either) & I can't just drop everything to spend hours each day on typing up documentation, providing templates, text or video based tutorials.

As for Game Maker Studio... you need look no further than Shaun Spalding's website or youtube channel. He covers just about everything from the basics to programming in GML & he explains why he used said code. Actually GM hired him the other month officially or something, so now I guess he gets paid to create tutorials & other things.

In regards to AGS: I've never actually used it. I looked over it, but didn't bother. I knew I wanted something capable of HD resolutions & something that allowed extensibility, which I get via Lua script & the VISObject Data Structure tables & fields. However I am also learning GML as I think it's a nice little engine for creating non adventure related 2D based games with. Although I've seen that people have created p+c games with them, I doubt they were so easy to create seeing as they have no way system like thing for easily creating borders, specifying walk paths or controlling the scale of characters / objects.

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The AGS presence at AdventureX is probably because we ( the organisers) met on the AGS forum, the guy who started it is a long time Mod on the forum. I'd love for there to be a bigger Visionaire presence there which is why I posted here As Joel says AGS has it's problems and people are looking for a long term solution so now is probably your best chance.

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I'm not sure about the rest of the VS team, but I live in Spain (currently) & lack the funds required to travel to London, let alone afford to pay for an hotel for the night or whatever. I am originally from the UK though. From Wakefield nr. Leeds.

I've been to Leeds a few months ago

I know of Shaun Spalding, watched some of his stuff too. I only did a few small Games in Construct 2 which i like very much but for Adventure Games Visionaire seems to be the best choice and i'm not even doing a Hi-Res Game

Anyway about Adventure-X: i'm going to be there and if anyone who's working with AGS would like to know more i'll be happy to answer the best i can...

@ARFLme totally understand was extending that to anyone making a game and who is on the fence.

@Joel cool see you there!