Hallooooooooo
A bunch of you lovely peeps saw us talking about our *takes a breath* sci-fi noir point-and-click adventure presented in a motion-comic style *phew!*, and figured it's high time I made a post about it here.
I'm the writer and assist a little with the design, Jaco (@RustyBroomhandle 'round these here parts) is the codemonkey and main project manager and developer; we're both in Gordon's Bay. Our artist, Joshua, is in George and our musician, Ben, is in the States (linked his twitter - he frequently posts snippets of the lovely soundtrack he's making for us :) ).
You can play the demo here - Linux and Windows and Mac, Oh my! (More of a prototype than a demo, Jaco was afraid to call it a demo ;p It's the first few scenes of the Act 1, about 15 - 30 minutes of gameplay.)
We keep a sporadic dev blog on the site, have an IndieDB page and are on Steam Greenlight (about 48% to the top).
We'll be showing at UCON Cape Town on the 14th & 15th of September and would looooooove to meet some fellow MakeGames-ers. Alas we won't have any ph4t l00t to give out because we're on a non-existent budget, but you WILL get to play the demo AS WELL AS the next ~20 minutes of gameplay from where the demo left off, which we're quite excited about in a terrified kinda way. ;)
Anyway, enough writing. PRETTY PICTURES GO!
Most recent concept art (as of tonight), showing one newly revealed main-ish character and hinting at her personality;
In-game screenies:
Some more concept art:
I'll keep this post updated when there's new stuff to share. Thanks for reading!
A bunch of you lovely peeps saw us talking about our *takes a breath* sci-fi noir point-and-click adventure presented in a motion-comic style *phew!*, and figured it's high time I made a post about it here.
I'm the writer and assist a little with the design, Jaco (@RustyBroomhandle 'round these here parts) is the codemonkey and main project manager and developer; we're both in Gordon's Bay. Our artist, Joshua, is in George and our musician, Ben, is in the States (linked his twitter - he frequently posts snippets of the lovely soundtrack he's making for us :) ).
You can play the demo here - Linux and Windows and Mac, Oh my! (More of a prototype than a demo, Jaco was afraid to call it a demo ;p It's the first few scenes of the Act 1, about 15 - 30 minutes of gameplay.)
We keep a sporadic dev blog on the site, have an IndieDB page and are on Steam Greenlight (about 48% to the top).
We'll be showing at UCON Cape Town on the 14th & 15th of September and would looooooove to meet some fellow MakeGames-ers. Alas we won't have any ph4t l00t to give out because we're on a non-existent budget, but you WILL get to play the demo AS WELL AS the next ~20 minutes of gameplay from where the demo left off, which we're quite excited about in a terrified kinda way. ;)
Anyway, enough writing. PRETTY PICTURES GO!
Most recent concept art (as of tonight), showing one newly revealed main-ish character and hinting at her personality;
In-game screenies:
Some more concept art:
I'll keep this post updated when there's new stuff to share. Thanks for reading!
Comments
I'm not sure that the storyline is my type, but this looks like an impressive and interesting project -- very good luck with it! ^_^
(That said, I do intend to at the least try the demo!)
First, once again, I really like the art style: it's cold, and futuristic, without being so unfriendly that I don't want to play. I also really like the first-person view. The game itself was enjoyable and interesting. ^_^
Two minor issues:
* The interface seemed a little inconsistent at times: most frames and text-boxes seemed to be advanced by clicking on a text prompt, while the drone scene advanced on any click, as I recall.
* I'm inclined to suggest allowing the player to dismiss the text-boxes that pop up to describe objects; I had a few occasions on which I ended up clicking on something else just to get rid of a text-box that was covering something that I wanted to click on.
Regarding the "radio" puzzle, I'll admit that I was stuck there for a while, until I gave up and looked at the forum thread. It might be that I'm by far in the minority in having trouble with it, but for what it's worth I think that I had two problems:
* First and less important to my mind, that I don't think that I registered the relevant number as being one that should be paid attention to. This could be fixed either by -- as I think a poster in your other forum thread suggested -- a "cutscene review" option or (by far my preference) an automatic "notebook", keeping track of important data (perhaps salted with a few red herrings?).
* Second and, to me at least, the more important, I didn't realise that the radio was at all related to my character. I presumed that it was simply left there by previous tenants, and so never thought to try anything relevant to my character: I just kept sweeping the room, looking for some clue related to its previous inhabitants. To some degree, at least, this could be fixed in fixing the first point above: given the option to go back over information previously given, I might have arbitrarily tried the only number on hand. Nevertheless, it might have been worth providing some (slight) connection to the main character -- perhaps just in making the radio look very new, standing out in the messy room. Of course, it's quite possible that the clue was there, and that I simply missed it -- if so, then please do ignore this point!
Regarding the view, while I do like it I also have two critiques of it: first, that the range of rotation is somewhat limited, leaving it feeling a little superfluous, and second that in rotating it seems to reveal the two-dimensional nature of the scene by angling the various objects, which I think dented my immersion a little. I think that changing either would improve it to my eye; for one, increasing the range of rotation and placing things outside of the initial view might give a broader sense of space and place, as well as making the effect more relevant, and either might counterbalance the challenge to immersion that the angling of the various objects produces.
I'll admit that increasing the range of rotation might incur some development time, since it may involve changing how you represent and interact with your scene. As previously, I may well be very much in the minority in my feelings on the effect, so take my thoughts with a pinch of salt.
And thanks everyone else for the kind words! <3
@Thaumaturge Thanks! I'll go through your points; Both of these were fed back on on the forums, and definitely things we're fine-tuning. I think he (Jaco/RustyBroomhandle) is going to allow the boxes to be dismissed on off-click, if he hasn't already. Absolutely our fault. As you now know, the bit you need to solve it leaves the screen as soon as the first conversation ends - we'll be putting an extra object in the first room to let you always see what you need. Also, probably some kind of 'mental notes' system that logs interesting/important information that you can always pull up. Well, it'll probably involve our artist re-drawing the whole game :D That design decision was made by Jaco though, so I'll let him feed back on that.
Thanks for your input though - very much appreciated! ^.^
http://makerseden.screwylightbulb.com/?action=view&url=here-have-a-wet-towel-or-two
Jaco discovered Unity cloth simulation on the weekend and development on everything else promptly ceased until he'd animated the two cloths hanging from the clothes line. We do plan on having little animated touches in all the scenes to liven things up but it's more of a 'polish' thing to do when the rest of the scenes are all finished and hooked up, towards the end of development. Still, it looks nice ^.^
He 'simulated' wind by having mini solar systems set up behind each towel with a rotating sphere 'nudging' the cloth. He tried the horizontal velocity thingy but didn't like it. "I prefer the balls". :D
One of our new scenes, brand new and hot off the Joshua-press this morning. Nicely re-usable, you'll be in the taxi back and forth a bit, talking to the taxi driver and developing a rapport with her as she carts you about.
The same scene while it was still in-progress from Josh:
Another work-in-progress of one of the new scenes:
And a 'pose-selection' for one of our characters, Gartley, that people who've played our game at UCON or last nights' CPT meet might have seen briefly.
Our musician tells me the soundtrack will be released tomorrow. SO EXCITED. I shall of course pimp it here accordingly when it's done!
You can grab it here: http://abstractionmusic.bandcamp.com/
$5 for a ~45 minute album. You can follow Ben on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bFusion - I'm sure he'd love feedback on the music.
^.^
http://kotaku.com/ten-indie-games-you-must-keep-an-eye-on-1424118671
International press also print retractions and corrections if they get their facts wrong. In fact, I would only go so far as to call a few local games writers "press", the rest are fanpeople.
Stasis too, indirectly in the comments: "more on stasis soon, actually....stay tuned..." - Luke Plunkett
http://makerseden.screwylightbulb.com/
*runs around in circles, crashes into wall*
*holds thumbs* *makes noise*
Super 'grats, guys! Performing all manner of good luck rituals on your behalf here.
I think that emoticon says it all.
Pff, wallpillows are for wimps, I play in hardcore mode ;p
Tried to positively mention and particularly highlight the international success of some local games in it to offset the LazyGamer nasties, but my 'ohshitpixelboy!' post-interview sudden remembering didn't make the cut - sorry Pixel Boy >.<
Two 'rooms' from the game;
And a bit of uh, 'promotional material' that will appear in the game at some point...
I like the way that you did the dialogue with the changing pictures, it makes it much more exciting to read (something that can sometimes be a bit boring in adventure games). In the game, the music and art really works well and adds great atmosphere. The atmosphere reminds me of blade runner.
Looks like you are getting the praise that you deserve. Well done! Hahaha, love it!
@rigormortis You're a natural...sexycircuitry.com is available! Register it now dude. Really. :) I thought it was a great name for a domain so I checked its availability... I'm funny (weird, not haha) like that.
I feel terrible though I saw the game mentioned on Kotaku, and didn't know it was South African, until now :O
but, mind you I believe that is a good thing, as the game is standing on it's own feet being recognised for what it is! It's an awesome game, and it is looking really better and better as the development is going on! :D
This has been a failing of local press for quite a while now. The number of people that don't know Viscera Cleanup Detail or Desktop Dungeons are South African games is astounding. I'm going to try my best to change that (I've only begun writing for NAG Online recently. Luckily some at Lazygamer.net are also getting on board with this :).
On top of that, our game is quite niche. Not quite a traditional point & click, not quite a visual novel - but bits of both. It already has a small audience, and only a tiny subset of that audience are likely to be in SA. ( guessing wildly here )