Death Wore Endless Feathers (Disk 1) - RELEASED! (Bugfix: v1.1.0)

Started by Scavenger, Sat 18/07/2009 05:11:03

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Scavenger




The year is 2053. A world, stagnant and full of money-grubbing, heartless corporations gripping onto their intellectual property with iron fists. Nothing can grow, nothing can progress while they squeeze every last penny from their stale ideas. Black Sun, the crypto-anarchist hacker organisation, is the one thing that stands between them and utter oblivion. By stealing back their creations and giving them away for free, Black Sun ensures that ideas can once again circulate in a world where everything comes at a price.

Hackers in the Black Sun movement are the Robin Hoods of the digital age, stealing from the rich, bloated corporations and letting even the smallest user experience the best in ractive entertainment.

Ideas Must Be Free.
The Sun Will Set On Big Business.
A New Dawn Will Rise.
- Black Sun Newsletter #20, "On Ideology"


Jakob is a hacker for Sector H, a new branch of Black Sun, a crypto-anarchistic organisation that looks after its own. Funded by mysterious benefactors, Jakob and the rest of Sector H break open ractives to ensure that everyone can play them. It's a dog-eat-dog political minefield that Jakob wants no part of.

All Jakob wants to do is play ractives, watch the new Ripsaw Bloodgore concert, and have fun. He has no place in this war - but fate conspires against him, dragging him into the very core of this matter. He will never forget the day...


Death Wore Endless Feathers.

Disk 1 of this four Disk tale establishes the setting, as Jakob, taken from his usual routine of grinding for Silver Bracelets and Gemstudded Hides, is forced to get food for Sector H. With no money, and none of his comrades willing to help him, what will he do?

Oh, the humanity!


This Exciting Ractive Features:
- Fully Animated, 256 Colour Graphics!
- A full soundtrack by Sebastian Pfaller!
- Real Time Translucency (Courtesy of Nickspoon)
- Characters You Won't Forget! (most of the time)
- Passable Humor!

Author's Note: This is my absolute first game that I have finished, ever. This took me 6 months of almost solid work, and I really do hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it. Or more, in fact! It was a real rollercoaster ride. If people like it enough, I will definitely get to work on the rest of the series!

MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE .NET to 3.5 and run this game on DirectDraw mode. The plugin will not work otherwise! Updating is a good idea :)


UPDATE: There were a couple of cosmetic bugs in certain parts. Nothing game breaking, to say the least, but they were pretty jarring. v1.0.1 has been put up.

Download Link:
DOWNLOAD

Mirror: (Just in case my bandwidth runs out)
MIRROR (Courtesy of Peder Johnsen!)


Captain Lexington

Looks awesome. Great concept.

Downloading now.

Leon

Wow! Looking very promising. Trying now, telling later.

[Update]

Found a little glitch?

Spoiler
When inside the ractive and talking to the receptionist, you can change your ranking to #1. You'll then see a cutscene with Ollie and you should return to the subway.  When further in the game you change the ranking again to the same position, you're going to the subway straight away, not being able to move but able to interact with things. Eventually you'll be able to move and continue in the subway...
[close]

and in the taxi with the eye-patched lady, as soon as Jacob starts talking, you see a little image of the lady again....


Great game overall. Very well done for the first. Very solid. Please finish the other three! Graphics reminded me of Limey Lizard.  Compliments to Sebastian as well... will the soundtrack become available as well?

Another thingie (very minor): During the credit roll at the beginning, the title of the game is half off-screen. You can only read "Death Wore Endless".....
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Cyrus

Awesome! Just finished it. If you have any questions on the walkthrough, I'll answer in the "Hints" thread.

Eggie

Looked great, really fun to play. Fantastic work!
Can't wait for the next part.

Takyon

Great game. I was really hoping it would have full voice acting though :(. Really like the GUI though, pleasant change to MI1 type.
ghost.

Scavenger

Thanks everyone who played the game! :3

Leon: The Eyepatch lady and receptionist bugs have been finished in v1.0.1, though if any more bugs appear I'll fix them in another release. As for the soundtrack, it might be available depending on Sebastian's choice. After all, it's his music, not mine. I'd wait until all parts are available, though.

JJ: I did plan to have voice acting at some point, but it seems prudent to wait until I've made all the parts before getting VAs to do their stuff. I don't actually have any VAs to hand apart from myself, and I'm not versatile. :P.

But if the game is well-liked enough, voice acting is a certainty - though it has to be good voice acting. I'm not subjecting everyone to bad VA. x3

Leon

Ok, I switched to 1.0.1 and found a small thingie (nothing to worry about but still... )

Spoiler
After giving the can of spraypaint to Buster, the dialogs are reset. I'd expect to be able to continue with the cola trick but instead he starts telling again what he's able to do with it...
[close]

Eeehhh.. oops. Found a crash..

Spoiler
I saved the game in the Khato's room, just before giving him the shaken cola. When you load the game, the start-sequence starts again, this time without Buster which results in a crash because of the FaceCharacter statement: characters are in different rooms.
[close]

Another issue that might become (very) annoying: when you press F7 or restore from the menu, without having a saved game, you see a green transparent window. That won't close or disappear. You can continue the game but it will be much harder.
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Scavenger

Okay, those bugs have been fixed, and I also tied up some loose ends in the parser. v1.1.0 has been uploaded.

Leon

In version 1.1.0 I found some typos.. (the text is quite fast... maybe you can add a slider to the control panel so you can choose the speed?)

Talking to Ollie outside the Slice&Byte: Slice snd Byte --> and
Talking to Serv9000: Manfunction --> Malfunction
Talking to Desiree in the car: I forget --> I forgot

Two more things (sorry   :-\ ):

Spoiler

1: When you nail the mousehole shut before even talking to the serve9000, it's still repaired the first time
2: When replacing the chip on the chef, the chip isn't removed from your inventory.
[close]
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kaputtnik

Hey! Good to see this is finished, I enjoyed playing it very much; I also enjoyed fiddling with a tracker for the first time ever very much - and for all the people who can't get enough of cheap Roland MT32 samples arranged in a quite dubious way, I'll upload the soundtrack soon.

Now on to disk 2-5!
I, object.

Nlogax

Really enjoyed the look and the atmosphere of the game and the writing is excellent.

However:

Spoiler
the puzzle with the robot chef and getting the chip out of his mouth is infuriating and in the end I gave up. It's probably just me, but I couldn't get it out and in the end I gave up so i never saw the end of the game. Ho hum!
[close]

Look forward to the other instalments tho.

robvalue

Really enjoyed this game, thanks! Great work. I hope the series will continue. Loved the

Spoiler
virtual world affecting the real one
[close]
hope to see more of that!

Found a couple of small corrections:

Spoiler
When you examine Ollie after you've stopped her playing the ractive, it still tells you she is playing the ractive, both at the subway and outside the pizza shop.

If you put the board over the mousehole and then do the birthday thing, the bot gets repaired, but then with the board lying on the floor, if you do the birthday thing again, he doesn't get repaired until you try and grab the green chip. I assume the repair bot should be able to come out still and repair him right away?
[close]

Just small things, it's an excellent game with great characters and ideas.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

Congratulations on finishing the game!  It's nice to see how your art has evolved since you first posted the main character's sprite in the Critic's Lounge :).

Ryan Timothy B

It was an interesting game.

The virtual world was a little annoying.  I would have preferred using the mouse over the text parser (only because you had VERY limited inputs for the parser).  But even then, the mouse would still be better.

Loved your character and background art.  Music was nice too.

I found exiting the rooftop to be a little difficult, the cursor didn't change unless on a small small area of the bottom of the screen.  Took me like half a minute to find the exit cause I didn't remember where the EGO had walked in; due to the background directional change.

And the girl in the taxi seems to talk through the whole thing.  Which was very confusing at first.

Some text, like the gamer dude playing in the virtual world (If I remember correctly) were hard to read due to it matching the background color of the wood.

Text speed was a little fast.  Didn't look for a menu GUI so I don't know if there was the ability to change it or not.  It was fast mostly just for the graffiti painter since he talked in a weird manner (which I liked, just had a hard time keeping up to the text speed).  But some other areas of text were hard too.

Anyway, I only criticize because the game was very promising and I did enjoy it!  It just had some features that need improvement.

Looking forward to the next game!

Jared

So... nobody else has got an error where the opening credits just loop endlessly?

(Downloaded the mirror, btw)

Leon

Aren't they supposed to loop until you click or press a key?
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Jared

Yeah, but I clicked roughly 300 times whilst pressing every button on the keyboard. The game's working now, but I've no idea how. I'll post some actual feedback when I've played it a little longer...


EDIT: On that earlier note, I did actually get the same error again. Seems to happen one-in-two or so times I start it up.

Anyway .. I walked away really liking the game and the idea. I'm surprised that I haven't come across any similarly postmodern cyberpunks before, but I suppose it's a fairly new genre so a big congrats in beating them to the punch. The loveable ragtag band of slackers in the dark, gritty megacorp-ruled mega-city really struck a chord with me, and the fact that they're life-and-limb struggles were purely over arcade games just added to the quirky appeal. I admit the plot was thin in the ground in this first part, but what there was was definitely an intriguing start.

Music and art were great, by my personal standards anyhow, and the puzzles all made sense. My main qualms are reasonably petty design things, as they usually seem to be with games on here: I didn't quite 'get' the variable music volumes from location to location and found it a bit irritating, I thought we could have used a double-click instant-exit function given Jakob's slow walk speed and the large rooms, the personality-chip-snatching puzzle seemed unnecessarily fiddly and pixel-hunty (though my biggest laugh came in the dialogue right afterwards) and... well, that's probably it... oh, a couple more verbs in the text parser section would have been nice.

Probably not too fussed about it, but one of the first times the pizza shop is mentioned in dialogue (I've forgotten the name now...) they say "Slice snd" instead of "Slice and". Thought I'd better mention it because I know a lot of people get anal about typos.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

Played through it, wanted to say I found it quite enjoyable.  I especially enjoyed the close-up sequences.  Very nice work!

ThreeOhFour

Really cool!

I loved the way the graphics, writing and audio all come together to form a solid and atmospheric world. The graphics took me a little while to get used to, but I soon fell in love with them, and the puzzles made perfect sense to me without being too easy - although

Spoiler
I agree that the robo-chip puzzle - specifically getting the green on - was a little confusing at times (mainly because I didn't have the multitool when I first tried it)
[close]

I really like some of your colour and perspective choices on the backgrounds, and I really got sucked into your world and story. Fantastic work, especially since it is your first! After I played the game I looked at all the little extra things bundled up with the game and thought they were a very cool touch  :D

Nice work on the music, Sebastian  :=

All in all I have to say I absolutely loved the game, and I really hope you make more in the series!

Thanks, Scavenger :).

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