I was wondering if someone could help me with this. I bought the game, but everytime I launch it it says unable to access guidedog please make sure that it is running running the installed shortcut should fix this problem. I want to register my game but like I said it won't let me do it either. Thanks in advance for your help.

Ok thanks, I have tried it and it just freezes my computer so I have to always restart the crazy thing. Hopefully it gets resolved soon, noworries.

No mac/iOS version, no money. That goes for all games. Yeah its hard to make cross platform games, yeah I can play in vm-ware, but playing for a while and spending quality time on a cool game are two different things to me.

Devon,

I appreciate your input and opinion on this.  Unfortunately, we're a small company.  In fact, we're basically two guys that met on Alter Aeon and tried to put together a BGT version of a game from an extremely old version of the same game that I developed in Basic in high school in the 80s.  Aaron doesn't use IOS products except in the past phones, and other than my phone, I don't either.  Neither of us can afford the extra equipment or time.  I think the best solution for the Mac and audio games problem that I hear about more and more from friends online and from people like you who are upset on forums that there are no games for your platform, or not the games that are coming out and being discussed, is for either a group of Mac users to get together and find programmers willing to take on the project, form a kickstarter, give that programmer an incentive, and see what comes of it.  The other option would be to get a few enterprising Audio gamers/programmers who use Mac to develop new games.  In a perfect world, there'd be cross platform support for all programs, but currently, this is a far from perfect world.  Now, that said, if anyone on forum wants to give me say 10,000 dollars so I can buy a Mac, take some courses, and learn what I need, I would strongly consider converting our games into IOS.  No guarantees though, I need groceries first:(. 

Take care,

Jeremy

Valiant Galaxy Associates is proud to announce the release of version 9 of Yellowbonnet.  After receiving some feedback from purchasers, beta testers, and people who tried the demo version of the game, we have made some extensive changes:

1.  Added a lot of sound material both as ambience and for specific characters. 
2. Added introductory and closing text to the game.
3. Added new hot keys J to check number of jobs left, s to search, and o to open look menu.
4. Added an inventory menu with a brief description of weapons in statistical form and a note that other items are of no practical use implying they are best sold.
5. Cash spent no longer penalizes score.  However, found items do add to the score.
6. All characters fought, and all hazards encountered, are now tracked.
7. The copy to clipboard text is radically changed.
8. Attempted to eliminate odd strings in combat where snakes were blocking blows with arms.
9. Changed encounter text on mobile hazards to make it clearer what happened.
10. The burglar no longer appears if the deputy does not have a job for the player.
11. A number of other minor bug and string cleanup changes were made.  For full information see the change log.

     Current customers do not need to do anything.  Once you start Yellowbonnet again, the game will automatically download new files and update itself.  This update is completely free.  As usual our beta test team were amazing, and we believe we’ve squashed all known bugs.  If you find any, please notify us.  We hope you enjoy the game even more now.  Thank you for the feedback and support.

To read the documentation go to http://www.valiantgalaxy.com/yellowbonn … ation.html
To download the game go to http://www.valiantgalaxy.com/yellowbonn … taller.exe
To purchase the game go to https://guidedoggames.com:7081/games/4

that's your choice. When people buy a Mac, they know that there aren't audiogames made for the system. So that's just your choice of not wanting to play audiogames. I play a lot of games in Fusion on my Mac, and it just works fine. If you can't deal with the small lag you might get, then Bootcamp is the option for you. So again, that's your choice, and don't blame the developers that much when you at leased have a choice to play most of the games you want.

Well first off I confess I had a few shenanigans with the update.
I ran yellow bonnet to have windows open for both the "guide dog client launcher" and the client itself. I sat around and waited for the game to start or update, but nothing happened, then it occurred to me to run yellow bonnet again so I did that however a yellow bonnet launcher window came up and again I sat around for a minute or two waiting feeling a trifle confused.
I closed all the windows and was just about to come and report an error, but decided to try on the basis of "third time lucky" only for everything to launch fine and for yellow bonnet to tell me the update was successful.

Of course, I confess myself I was a bit of a chump for not activating the dolphin curser and checking those launcher windows, however perhaps for future reference a sound file or two could be added to the guide dog client to let you know when programs need updating, particularly sinse I suspect as now you can login to the client and leave it running and then turn your screen reader off for games, some people will likely do as I did and not read the launcher windows.

Either way it all worked out and I'm loving the new updates, the ambience, the sounds, the extra descriptions, very good stuff indeed! I particularly like the descriptive text. where in that game I decided to do a bit of good olrough housin' I will actually try to complete the jobs next time and see what I get.

My only miner comment is that you could consider adding a few more shortcut keys, eg, t for talk, I for inventory and f for fight, though look and search are the major things and having keys for them really speeds up the game, and while I definitely approve of a menu for options,fluid gameplay is good, still this is just a miner deal and I liked a lot of this.
I actually agree with Sean, this is a nice formula for game creation and you could definitely do more with it, indeed you've got the basic mechanics down for an rpg or a stratogy game here, as is already proved by traders of known space so I'll be interested to see what comes next.

Statistics for Playthrough of the Yellowbonnet Game, on Version 9
The game lasted 17 minutes and 33 seconds and ended on Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 9:0 AM - The player lost!

A man going by the handle of Bruce Mcgrusome came in off the dusty trails into Yellowbonnet a new hand.

Bruce Mcgrusome got himself killed fighting A burglar! Bruce Mcgrusome was laid to rest in our cemetery right and proper at this here town’s expense. He might for sure have been a tolerable good addition to our fine town, but we’ll never know now. Yet another soul is sacrificed in the taming of the good ol' grand frontier, folks.

Bruce Mcgrusome moved 26 times to finish 1 out of 6 jobs, defeated 1 hazards, found 9 items worth 220 points, spent 17 cash, and wound up with 15 cash.

Bruce Mcgrusome  dealt with happenings like, fighting a drunk cowboy and fighting A burglar.

Final score: 5735. Bruce Mcgrusome is, or that is, was, sure a dude!

This is Jeremy:

I'll make two posts, a general response, and then one addressing specific issues raised by Dark.

Thank you for trying out the update.  I'm glad it is an improvement:)  We may very well release other updates later.  For instance, with TKS last year we released a similar update after the game was released, and we're planning another this year to bring in some things we liked from Yellowbonnet.

It is possible there are some bugs with updated material.  We tried to test as extensively as we could, but we were trying to work quickly (Aaron had farm-related things going on during the first part of July) and it's possible some things slipped past us.

In answer to Crashmaster's request for more material, there are plans afoot to return to Yellowbonnet and environs for future releases in this mini-game series.  At this point, some of these plans are nebulous, but our hope would be eventually to release a small series and be able to sell them separately or bundle them together. 

In response to the comments about expanding the game, making it larger, having something more detailed:  Aaron put a lot of work into making the game do just this.  A lot of the code is very portable, and we're discussing taking time out to create a generic game creation engine that I could use to create more titles that use similar mechanics and ideas to create other games that might use this format.  This is still very tentative: a lot depends on time, what we have going, and need.  Further, I like to expand on what I do design wise when I do something new, and this sounds like a good idea in principle, but could lead to YB in just different time periods.  That's not a bad thing necessarily, but it strikes me as stale after a while.

Again, we appreciate the feedback and support.  We're hoping to have Interceptor out before the end of July.  With three games under our belt, we're starting to feel like real game designers and stuff:) 

Also, again as a teaser, if you tried TKS last year, our next project is going to be a greatly revised and expanded version of that concept.  Using a lot of ideas suggested on the TKS forum last year, as well as several suggestions we've received from players since then, we're going to rip the game apart and start from the ground up to redo not only the size of the map, but rework the way the economy works, the opportunities for avoiding/lessening hazards, creating business opportunities outside just standard trading, engaging in criminal trading, and other things.  Word of caution: this is likely to be a long running project.  I suspect it won't have the kind of 3 year cycle Interceptor had, but it's likely to take us a lot longer than the original TKS or YB.  We will probably be establishing a mailing list in the coming months to give fans of the games more info. 

Take care,

Jeremy

Hi fellas.

On expantion and changes, the advanced tks sounds like a good thing, as do more games set in and around Yellow bonnet, however gameplay wise while I do really like the map and talk to formula and the stat tracking, I'd personally be more in favour of games that each had something distinct.

I'm guessing it would be fairly easy to create essentially a modded version of Yellow Bonnet. For example, have a number of survivers of a zombocalypse each in their different house giving the player jobs and replace the runaway horses and cowboys with zombies, or have a sea side Jamaican pirate town with various seedy taverns, naval officers and drunken pirates. However, II'm not sure of that idea myself sinse esentially you'd be playing the same game and doing the same thing with similar mechanics, just a slightly different setting and map.
If a similar formula was used in the future, I'd prefer to wait and see it get a little tweaking gameplay wise to alter things. For example, imagine a more adventure style game similar to "a dark room" where you needed to make it from Yellow Bonnet to the gold mine crossing the desert, where moving each square took water, where you had to mine gold but had a limited carrying capacity and also had to juggle what weapons you took with you.

Or maybe another game set around the town, but one based on finding a number of hidden outlaws  by  piecing together clues from the town's people, eg, "I thought they were hiding somewhere south of the church", with the goal to have a limited number of moves to deduce the outlaw's location and catch them before they rob the bank. Or maybe a game which expanded the combat idea, with some more tactical fight options, like perhaps the ability to use the revolver on people in the surrounding squares, or have different weapons had different properties and different qualities against various targets.

There are certainly possibilities, but I'd I think be more in favour of something which  tweaked the board and movement gameplay in various ways rather than just repeating the same mechanics again.

for example, one game I've always! wanted to see is a single player space colony management game, where you get to gather resources from a map, guide your colonists through various hazards from disease, to accidents, to alien beasts and mechanical failures, build buildings and machines and eventually fly off your initial planet and colonize other worlds, either as resource bases for your original colony or as actual new colonies.

As to Yellow bonnet itself, the revolver thing was rather weerd and I really can't explain it, it might have been a miner glitch.
With the inventory I didn't know tab showed it. I actually don't think hotkeys are a bad thing provided that there are always menu commands instead because that gives people the choice, people can choose either the menu or the hotkeys, but as I said the two main hotkeys I wanted were look around and search.

With the ending clipboard text, one suggestion  I do have might be instead of just putting the modifyer "man" or "woman" to use something a bit more colourful and wild westy, just for purposes of flavour if nothing else..

For example "A roustabout going by the handle of insert player name"

I've actually always been a fan of the term "roustabout" it's got a nice ring to it. I first came across it in the novelization of the film Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster (one of the few westerns, possibly even the only western I've ever read). Amusingly enough, because I read the book in grade two braille, and because whoever had translated it into braille had thought it was a good idea to use the "A b"  sign for about in roustabout, I thought for quite some time the term was actually "roustab" which sounds sort of Klingon .

Perhaps a new race for the Tks universe? the gun toating no good roustabs! .

Jeremy here:

Oops, forgot to address one point I missed.

Your suggestion of a space colonization game is actually one I have notes for in my VG main line notes folder.  We have outlines for about 15 or 16 games in that folder exploring different aspects of science fiction and space opera conventions.  The colony game is one I want to pursue, but it needed to wait until we had a way of doing what I wanted with the map situation.  If this TKS expansion does use the map conventions I want to use, then that will become a lot closer to reality.  Now, given Aaron and my's glacial development pace in some cases, it might not see the light of day for many years, but it is thought of and lovingly fiddled with. 

Take care,

Jeremy

Jeremy here:

Dark,

I detest this kind of space colonization game as well.  It's one of the things that has bugged me with Sound RTS. 

If we do a space colonization game expect that to be different, perhaps not as detailed as either of us would like, but different:)

As to YB's random map generation.  Agreed, that could have been more random, how ever, with a modern town, the business district will always be in the same place.  We talked about several plans to randomize the map, and we didn't like our alternatives.  So we went with a simplified map.

As to the nested maps, that's precisely what I'm wanting to do with TKS's expansion.  I.e. a galactic map with star systems marked, once you click the star system a solar system map.  In TKS that's as far as it's likely to go, though there's a couple of intriguing possibilities with places to go further from that.  With a pirate game, I could see maps for overall area around the ship, islands, towns, individual ships and houses.  A lot of it depends on our ability to fool with randomizing maps within certain parameters and letting the game juggle multiple map settings.  That's something we have an idea for, and we have a couple of games that might utilize it.  IF the TKS expansion works out well in that regard, we might try another minigame that uses a different map strategy and then move on to pirates.  All of this is very nebulous.  Aaron and I have not plotted our future beyond the winter.  Take care,

Jeremy