AGS Awards 2025

Better late than never, I thought I should do a write-up of the AGS Awards 2025. There was one very clear winner from the awards overall - Grundislav Games, with 4 wins including the coveted Best Game. Francisco has certainly come a long way since making the first Ben Jordan game! (Which was way back in 2004! Yes of course I just went and checked, my memory's not that good...) I also had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at Adventure-X 2014... okay, now I'm feeling old.

Another big winner is Knoodn, with 2 wins for the very retro BARBARIAN vs ROBOT. I helped a little with testing and voice acting for this game, and Timo is also someone I have actually met in real life, so this was another win that I was very happy to see. Since my first real experience of helping create an adventure game - which led to my further adventures with designing and creating games, along with voice acting - were in his game UNGA needs MUMBA - I'll always owe a lot to this guy. 😃 It was great fun voicing one of the characters for B vs R, and the retro look couldn't really get more retro. Well, unless, just perhaps, it was the next game I'm going to mention...

My favourite win was, however, that of Anomaly Resolution by Let'sGetCooking. Is it weird that I desperately wanted this game to win the Best Non-Adventure Game category, even though the only other game nominated for that category was my own game (AGSnake: The Last Bite)? Well, even if it was weird, it was definitely the case - Anomaly Resolution is a great mash-up of retro gameplay styles presented in glorious CGA (just look at those colours - all 4 of them!!). I had a blast playing it, and was very pleased that it won - thoroughly deserved.

The other winners were Beyond Booleans, Postmodern Adventures, Jabbage, Dave Gilbert, WHAM, tampie85 and AGA. Very hearty congratulations to all!!

The full list of winning games is below:

Best Game of the Year

Rosewater

Best Freeware Game

BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT

Best Short Game

Snarl

Best Non-Adventure Game

Anomaly Resolution

Best Demo

The Dark Rites of Arkham - DEMO

Best Audio

Rosewater

Best Visuals

Rosewater

Best Writing

The Beekeeper's Picnic

Best Programming

Rosewater

Best Character

Old Skies (Fia Quinn)

Best Gameplay

BARBARIAN vs. ROBOT

Lifetime Achievement

WHAM - for his many years of let's play videos, his hilarious and engaging forum games, and always being willing to play devil's advocate on nearly any topic. After nearly 20 years here, he continues to be one of the more unique voices in the AGS community.

(Edit - can't believe I forgot to mention this - Tomi is the very first member of the AGS community that I ever met in real life, way back at Adventure-X 2012)

Best Innovation

tampie85 and AGA - for their tireless efforts designing, creating, launching, and maintaining the new AGS website and database

Now, just to get myself into the mode of finishing Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara so that hopefully, it may win something in next year's edition of the AGS Awards...

New release! At odds of 3,720:1...

I've just released a new game - still Captain Disaster-themed (albeit the most tenuous of connections!) - a short-session, browser-based game (still made with AGS, obviously) where you have to blast your way through an on-rushing asteroid field.

Check it out on Itch. Since I actually designed it from the ground up to be played in a browser, I'm not planning on releasing a downloadable version.

Yes, yes, I should probably see if I can work out how to have it available to play directly on this site... but in the meantime...

Update on Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara

This is a bit hard to write but I guess most people will have thought it's probable by now - I won't be shipping the game in 2025. It's so close to completion in a lot of ways but I've had difficulty getting the last few things done ready for a final test phase. There are numerous reasons behind this but suffice to say that creating a game of this scale in your spare time is a difficult proposition at the best of times - and certain circumstances over the past year meant I didn't have the best circumstances to be able to work on the game in the way I needed to. (Not looking for sympathy or about to go into details - it's just life, and like sentient pizzas wearing nose-glasses, it happens.)

Part of the problem has been struggling for motivation, which is again down to a few different factors - my recent small project (AGSnake: The Last Bite) was an attempt to get myself back into it. To some extent it's worked (and it was a project that had been in the back of my mind for some time - I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out)... I just need to find that extra 10% to push myself back into the zone. Well, maybe more like 20%. At most, 30%... but I digress...

On more positive news, I've had some great voicing completed in recent months to really bring the characters to life. The voice cast now includes Sally Beaumont, Katie Aitken, and AGS Forum alumni Durinde, SinSin, Cat, Mandle, Viking, TheBitPriest, ManicMatt - the biggest problem I have with the voicing now is that I often don't like my own voicing in the game! I may need to redo a lot of my own lines, but it will be worth it to improve the overall quality.

Anyway, my currently plan is to release the game early in 2026, but I'm not setting a definite release date yet (although I do have a particular date in mind) - I only want to release the game when I'm really satisifed that it's finished and as good as I'm going to be able to make it. In all likelihood, sales are going to be nothing life-changing, so from that point of view I don't have sales pressure to release it - on the other hand, I don't like feeling that I've let people down because I led people to believe the game would be released this year. But again, life happens - I'm not the first, nor will I be the last, indie dev who has to push back release - in fact two games I've backed on Kickstarter have announced that their games will now be out in 2026 (yes, that did give me a little push to make this announcement publicly).

Speaking of other games that are coming out in 2026, check out Confidential Killings by Brane - with graphics by Lorenzo, the artist for Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara. It's an atmospheric murder-mystery - the demo will give you a really good idea of the flavour of the game.

Well that's it from me, for now. If you're looking forward to the game, maybe drop me a comment here letting me know - that could go a long way to helping me focus on the final development stretch!!

New game released! - AGSnake: The Last Bite

For reasons beyond my understanding, I've wanted to make a Snake game in AGS for years. Needing a small side-project to help me focus my brain for the last development stint of Captain Disaster 3, I decided now was the time to make it. I had fun working out the game mechanics, how to track snake music and direction, collisions etc - yes you heard me, I found it FUN! - anyway, I added a few features to hopefully make it more fun, like power ups / downs and 2-player cooperative mode. 

 

Hope you enjoy it!

Incidentally, I subtitled it "The Last Bite" because it turns out that another AGS user had the idea of developing a Snake game with the name AGSnake - albeit, 14 years later, that hasn't been released (but don't give up hope, you never know!).