This City at Night - RELEASED

Started by paolo, Fri 27/03/2009 10:37:23

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paolo

RELEASED December 2018.

Game announcement thread: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=56750.msg636599275
Game page: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2313/

===============

Tracey hates her humdrum job at Insurance International, but it turns out there is more going on there than meets the eye. An unknown organisation is plotting a coup that will have catastrophic global consequences, and unless it can be stopped in time, the world will be brought to its knees...

Some screenshots for you (these will look different in the finished game):







Ben304 and I started work on this game not long after completing Trance-Pacific, so as you can see, it's been in production for a while. Ben was producing the graphics but unfortunately had to bow out, so the project stalled for a while. James DiGrizz has produced some great backgrounds for me, three of which are shown above.

Latest update (11 April 2016): Demo version released. Play the first few scenes of the game! Some features are not available in the demo and the artwork will be updated in the full version.

Game page: here
Download link: here

ThreeOhFour

Those backgrounds look great!

Good luck with getting this finished, Paul :D

Spike4072

Looks great. Good luck on this can't wait to play it. :)

Sorry can't help you I stink at making characters or I would all ready have my own game out :P

Alarconte

I love it! Luck with the game!

But maybe characters and bgs need more cohesion, not?
"Tiny pixelated boobies are the heart and soul of Castlevania"

Galactic Battlefare Capital Choice Part 1 , finished, releasing soon
GBF CC Part 2, WIP

paolo

Thanks, everyone, for your encouraging words. Progress is slow but sure.

Alarconte: The characters are temporary (they were drawn by Ben and the backgrounds were drawn by James DiGrizz). I am looking for someone to redraw them in the style that fits more closely with the backgrounds.

Dualnames

Great to see you guys are back on track, I'm still confused on who's doing what, but I guess the credits will settle it. ;)
Worked on Strangeland, Primordia, Hob's Barrow, The Cat Lady, Mage's Initiation, Until I Have You, Downfall, Hunie Pop, and every game in the Wadjet Eye Games catalogue (porting)

paolo

Quote from: Dualnames on Mon 30/03/2009 09:45:04
Great to see you guys are back on track, I'm still confused on who's doing what, but I guess the credits will settle it. ;)

Thanks. Yep, it'll all be sorted out by then :) I say that the game is by Ben and me because he came up with the idea and we developed the story together. He also did the artwork for the inventory items and the cursors, and some of the backgrounds that he drew have been reworked by James.

arrr

As it seems, I think I should post something here too.

Well people, I'll let you all in a little secret Paul is keeping from you all. TCAN will have theese features also:

-98057 different rooms, all hand-drawn
-47 different endings
-38 playable characters
-a 3d, online, multiplayer, doom-style, mini-game featuring advanced shading via directX 16 with shaders and realistic looking water.
-a grid based inventory with magic weapons and potions like Diablo
-a random level generator
-physics engine with ragg-doll effects on every hotspot and inventory item
-random taxmen appearing out of thin air
-adventure related permanent death, so when you do something wrong and die, the game will erase your saves, the game itself, windows, and overclock your CPU untill it explodes
-a palette of 143 gazillion colours
-and we are also thinking of porting it to J2me platform so we can play it on your tiny mobile screen

Minimum system requirements are just:
  -34.5 octo-core processor
  -4 TB ram
  -six fingers on each hand as the game is playable wit two mouses/mices? in each hand simultaniuosly
  -580X speed Blu-ray drive
  -new nVidia GeForce 300098 ST turbo-diesel mega power unreal graphic card
  -a new title: Angel Sword of Mysterious Cavern Mega-robot X devotion and apathy

All this will be implemented until tomorrow morning and we will still have enough time left to make ourselves a warm cup of tea.

Beat that other AGS game developers!

And yes, I'm not kidding =D, Honestly! Cross my french potatoes and hope to fry.

paolo

Quote from: James DiGrizz on Tue 31/03/2009 14:05:56
As it seems, I think I should post something here too.

Well people, I'll let you all in a little secret Paul is keeping from you all. TCAN will have theese features also:

98057 different rooms, all hand-drawn
[etc]

You'd better a get a move on then... I haven't even had the first 1000 rooms from you yet. (Maybe you should have waited until this morning before posting! :P)

dirk delshire

I love the style of this game right down to the text everything has a unique feel about it.
I always love hand drawn sprites too, they remind me of Ben Jordan.
OMEGA Works Lead Director
Sometimes the art defines the artist but I believe artist defines himself...

paolo

Quote from: dirk delshire on Mon 06/04/2009 22:20:22
I love the style of this game right down to the text everything has a unique feel about it.
I always love hand drawn sprites too, they remind me of Ben Jordan.

Thank you, it's nice to hear that. Wow, a comparison to Ben Jordan... I don't know if I can live up to that!

The game is coming along slowly. Half of the music has now been done and nearly two-thirds of the backgrounds. There is still loads of scripting to do (even though I say 91% is done, each 1% involves a lot of work...) but it's all coming together.

UPDATE: The backgrounds and music are coming along very well, but I am still looking for someone to do the character art if anyone is interested.

paolo

Forgive the double post and the bump, but I thought I'd tease you all with another screenshot :)



By the way, I'm still looking for someone to draw the characters in a style that fits well with the backgrounds (the characters you see in these screenshots are temporary), so if anyone wants to take it on, please PM me.

paolo

Update... the music is now all finished and it is awesome (thanks, Jordi)!

The backgrounds are coming along very nicely (thanks, James), and I'm gradually getting through the huge pile of scripting and testing there is to be done.

paolo

Update...

I've decided to do the character art myself. It's not that difficult, just laborious and slow-going, but it's coming along slowly.

The game uses portraits for speech and these are now complete for a few of the characters. Here's a sneak peek of Tracey's main portrait...



The portraits for each of the main characters will have various expressions.

sthomannch

Superb graphics! I'm looking forward to this one

paolo

Quote from: sthomannch on Fri 14/08/2009 19:58:28
Superb graphics! I'm looking forward to this one

Thank you!

It will be quite a while yet, I'm afraid. So far I have done the portraits for about a third of the characters... the one you see above is one of the most expressive with six different facial expressions. I have two-thirds of the walkcycle done for this character too. Lots more to do, but it is coming along, little by little.

J_Aguila

I really like the sample portrait, good work Paul. Can't wait to see the game finished :)
You can check my music by following this link:
www.myspace.com/oniricajordi

EdLoen

Everything looks to be awesome.... but those Neon eyes are freaking me out....

paolo

Thanks for the comments.

The portraits are about half done now. I hope to get more done over the weekend.

Atelier

I never knew that Yoshi was the interior designer for Insurance International... :)

That brief description has me hooked!

CosmoQueen

Wow these graphics are excellent! I can't wait to see the finished product!
KPop and AGS....................that is my life.

paolo

A further update... progress is slow because I can only work on the game from time to time, but a fair number of the animations have now been done.

PuNKKoMmANDO77

good job Paolo and Ben
you two make only fantastic game !! ;D


paolo

@PuNKKoMmANDO77: Thank you for the nice comment!

I got a good chunk of work done over the weekend but there's still a lot to do. Realistically, I don't this game will be seeing the light of day until 2010.

paolo

Quote from: paolo on Thu 22/10/2009 12:53:50
Realistically, I don't this game will be seeing the light of day until 2010.

And indeed that has been the case. As things go, I think a more realistic release date is going to be something like summer 2010, but please don't hold me to that :)

I am still slowly working through what needs to be done on this game. The bottleneck is the drawing, but I downloaded Sketchup just before Christmas and this is great for drawing rooms and objects (not so great for drawing walk cycles, though, but I have other sources of help for these).

I'm going to update the progress in the original posting now.

Timo.

Excellent graphics and the gameplay, storyline and character development sounds good.

Looking forward to the game.
Smile :]

Peter Bear

Not much time for gaming neither creating, but keeping an eye on everything :)

paolo

#27
Quote from: Pierceval on Sat 20/03/2010 08:23:36
WOOOOOOOOOO !

Courage my friend !

Thank you :)

I got a big chunk of work done last week:

* Another character's walk cycle done
* Two rooms drawn and added
* Added a new batch of sound effects
* Scripted most of the boss battle!

There's still tons to do (mainly those pesky laborious walk cycles [sigh]), but there are only two more rooms to draw now. Watch out for further updates!

paolo

Although I haven't updated this thread for some time, I'm still making good progress on this game.

Here are the latest versions of the screenshots from the original posting.





This is very probably how they will appear in the game. I've upped the resolution of the player character (Tracey) to match the background resolution, and as you can see from the first pic, the other characters in the game are now fully-fledged. (The other two characters no longer in the image are in the back office having a conference.)

There's lots more still to do, so I hereby cautiously announce the game's release in autumn/winter 2011.

theo

Looks great! I realize this is no the critics lounge but I find it hard to keep my mouth shut. The 1 px black edges you have around/inside all your objects in the backdrop are not helping you. Why not do the same with them as the outlines on your character? Simply have a darker tone of the current color, that is. It works magic on her and I can see no reason not to do the same on the backdrops.

It will look less "habbo", I promise.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to this!

Peter Bear

this is so good to hear news from your game project !

Indeed, what lays forever is not dead :p

How long do you think it will take to be released ? I am desperate about releasing mine one day :'(

Nice graphics, I like the outilined objets myself, more contrast ... but this is just my sole opinion.
Not much time for gaming neither creating, but keeping an eye on everything :)

paolo

Quote from: theo on Fri 19/11/2010 08:24:27
Looks great! I realize this is no the critics lounge but I find it hard to keep my mouth shut. The 1 px black edges you have around/inside all your objects in the backdrop are not helping you. Why not do the same with them as the outlines on your character? Simply have a darker tone of the current color, that is. It works magic on her and I can see no reason not to do the same on the backdrops.

It will look less "habbo", I promise.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to this!

Thanks. Interesting suggestion. The backgrounds are for the most part the work of someone else and they are all done except one. Changing them now would be a lot of extra work for me (foreground objects would need to be changed too) at this stage. If that weren't the case then I might have tried that out.

@Piotr - at my current rate of progress, I think there is about another year's work to go, so look out for this in autumn or winter next year.

Thanks guys for your feedback and the encouragement!

markbilly

Black out lines being almost impossible to go back and change was one of the reasons for the big Longevity Gene re-start.

I think it can work for you, though. Especially if the backgrounds are nearly all done. I started again because it was taking ages to draw anything and I stopped liking ho it all looked.

You should add an outline to the main character, though, so it all looks consistent.
 

paolo

A further update for those following this thread...

I've nearly finished one of the most involved scenes in the game. The next thing will be to add another character's walk cycle so I can develop a couple more scenes. There's still a lot to do though.

paolo

#34
Here it is... the teaser demo for This City at Night!

Play the first few scenes pretty much as they'll be in the final game, apart from some updates to the backgrounds and few other tweaks and extra features.

THIS CITY AT NIGHT - TEASER DEMO by paolo, ThreeOhFour and others. (Follow the link and click on the "Download This File" button.)

Game page

Peter Bear

Not much time for gaming neither creating, but keeping an eye on everything :)

paolo

Quote from: Piotr OBKINSKI on Mon 11/04/2016 21:12:20
Whooooo ! Hey Paul ;)

Yay, Piotr! I'm excited too! Hope you enjoy the demo.

paolo

A quick update: at the moment I'm "dehabboing" the backgrounds as per Theo's suggestion. They are looking much cleaner and fit in better with the characters.

paolo

#38
And here we are:

Before:


After:


Before: 


After: 


Before: 


After: 


The link to the demo has been fixed.

NickyNyce

Looks fun paolo. I like the changes.

Gurok

Wow, Paolo, it's looking great! I'm getting a great vibe from these pics.
[img]http://7d4iqnx.gif;rWRLUuw.gi

Mandle

The old pics look nice in a charming amateur kinda way.

The new pics look slick and professional.

Huge change for the better!

paolo

Thank you for the kind comments, everyone. The updated graphics will appear in the completed game and aren't the in the demo.

Danvzare

Ah, changing the outlines from a hard black, to much softer colours. Great idea, and it improved all of the backgrounds tremendously. (nod)

sawyer


Darth Mandarb

Sawyer, please read the forum rules before further posting.

Paolo, let me know (via PM) if/when you want to post an update and I'll unlock this!

paolo

#46
A long-overdue update...

Not too long to go now. I still have several animations to do (which are what takes me longest), some bugs to fix and a few other bits and pieces. Soon I will be recruiting a proofreader and in a few months, I hope, some play-testers. Watch this space!

paolo

The Italian translation is complete, and I'm advertising in Recruitment for volunteers to proof-read the English text and the translation.

Here's a sneak peek of another scene:

Outside house

Still a few more animations to do, bugs to fix and things to clean up. Getting there!

paolo

The game is now being beta-tested. I anticipate it will be released in November.

ManicMatt

Crikey, it's been nearly ten years in the making! That must feel like a huge weight off your shoulders!

paolo

Quote from: ManicMatt on Sat 17/11/2018 09:00:22
Crikey, it's been nearly ten years in the making! That must feel like a huge weight off your shoulders!

I think it's already over 11. It will be, believe me. I've almost forgotten what the outside world looks like :)

paolo

Final touches are now being made - the last step is the editing of the Italian translation, and that is almost complete.

I'm aiming now to get this into the games database before the end of the year!

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