The almost-finished Beta of part 1 came out yesterday. I came here fully expecting ten pages of discourse and it turns out no-one even made a thread.
Putting it side by side with it's spiritual contemporaries I am liking it better than Lilly Looking Through and worse than Primordia and where exactly it fits on that scale I guess I'll figure out in the next few hours.
Here is something! Was not expecting Vella to be mean! Was kind of a shock, not sure how I feel. She looks all wide-eyed and innocent but she's Simon the Sorcerer in a cute dress! Don't be fooled! Watch out for her! Man!!!!
Edit: Oh okay, not hours. I'm done. I liked it! Mostly...
I've played through a couple hours as Shay, absolutely love the art direction, the tweened animations and high res traditional looking assets are a big plus for me, and the characters are suitably cute!
It's annoying that Shay doesn't have a talking animation for when he's moving, he can be running off lines of dialogue whilst you're walking about and his lips will stay sealed. Surely this is something easier to do with the style they've gone for (i presume the head, arms, torso etc are all separate elements). Oh and it got stuck on a blank screen with GUI elements about 1 hour in, so i had to reload.
Otherwise lovely so far, not very challenging yet...
It was fairly easy , but the art and writing were lovely. Looks amazing on mt big widescreen monitor.
I'm waiting for the complete game. I hate this episodic bullshit... But having said that- pretty excited about it. I've always been a LucasArts, not Sierra, fan!;)
The art reminds me of PBS Kids shows my son watches, what with the textured puppetry. I think it's lovely so far, though I've only played for 10 minutes, and especially like the work in moving the camera in natural ways, close-ups of characters talking, zooms to corners of rooms, etc.
It's fine, I suppose, but I wish it would stump me on a puzzle eventually. My guess is they've got harder puzzles in the full game. My HOPE is that they have harder puzzles in the full game.
I haven't received it yet :(
Judging by the DF forums and KS comments, I'm not the only one... oh dear :/
I never got it either, Stu, but there's a link from another backer in the comments to request a new link from Humble Bundle. That worked for me. You have to have Steam to install.
But yeah, it's a disappointment to have to do that. Not sure if the fault lies with KS or with them, though.
@Eric, is the link you're refering to the 'resend keys' link? because I tried that and just got an email with my three previous Humble Bundle keys but still no Broken Age. I have steam already, though :)
But not to derail the thread, I do think this game looks great. Glad it's finally released. It was a long and bumpy ride for everyone involved, not least the backers, but it has been fun and now I can't wait to play it. Though I am almost tempted to wait for the full version.
Yeah, that looks like the link. It's being tossed around a lot more today than yesterday, which means a lot of people are in the same boat. Is your HB account the same as your KS email?
Yep, both the same, but I checked all my other email accounts anyways and no sign of it. But I've email humble about it so I'll just wait and see what they say.
I've been playing it at night with my kids. They love it. It's definitely too easy for me, but not for them. It's been a blast so far. We only play a half hour or so each night, so it should last us a few days.
Art & animation are gorgeous and the writing is charming as hell and very funny. I've had a couple visual bugs here and there, but nothing too jarring.
It's a bit shorter and easier than I'd like, but I'm definitely looking forward to Act II. Very charming, and absolutely gorgeous - I hope anyone who asked "how can an adventure game cost so much?" sees the difference between this and a one man indie P&C made in a weekend.
I doubt this will keep a place in my heart the way things like Grim Fandango or Monkey Island do, but I'm also not the age I was when I first discovered those games.
Good work, Doublefine! A-!
Spoiler
The twist at the end really took me by surprise!
Quote from: Grim on Wed 15/01/2014 21:14:07
I'm waiting for the complete game. I hate this episodic bullshit... But having said that- pretty excited about it. I've always been a LucasArts, not Sierra, fan!;)
+1
Quote from: Anian on Thu 16/01/2014 18:30:11
Quote from: Grim on Wed 15/01/2014 21:14:07
I'm waiting for the complete game. I hate this episodic bullshit... But having said that- pretty excited about it. I've always been a LucasArts, not Sierra, fan!;)
+1
It's not episodic per-say, though, is it? The second part will just be the full game, right?
Anyway, the game oozes personality and looks pretty great. It's a bit 'click this one thing and then this thing happens' atm, but it'll get better and more challenging. Hopefully. They were always gonna have a lot to prove with this game and it's a given that not everyone will be satisfied. But on a whole I think they done a pretty good job. The cast won't have been cheap either...
Quote from: Sunny Penguin on Fri 17/01/2014 07:10:58
The cast won't have been cheap either...
I believe I read that the cast (at least, some of them, presumably the bigger names,) worked for the bare minimum, the legally required amount, as a favour. Given their small parts, I doubt they would have had to sacrifice much time for it (especially Wil Wheaton, Pendleton Ward and Jack Black.)
(Don't ask me to source that as I have noooooo idea where I read it.)
Aside from a few bugs, I really enjoyed playing this. We played over dinner while my son sat and watched, enthralled. As I said above, the animation style is similar to some shows he watches -- stuff like Daniel Tiger -- so he loved it.
The puzzles were a bit on the easy side, but the story was enjoyable. Some elements, both puzzle solutions, and parts of the narrative, are telegraphed a little too far in advance. But, for the most part, I'm invested in the tale, the world, and the characters. I want to know more, and am already counting down the days until the next release. The voice work is amazing, as has been noted.
However, I will say that this didn't really have the feel of a class point-and-click, which is what I think many backers were hoping for. In addition to the graphics being modern, the story and the arrangement of the world also seemed different. Not as much was explorable / not as many objects were clickable. It felt in places like an adventure game being optimized for a future tablet computing / iPad experience. Vela's world especially suffered a little from my feeling as though I'd crossed vast amounts of space with little effort. I know some material was cut out that would have mitigated this.
As I said, though, the characters, the story, and the world are all rich and promising. I look forward to the next part and don't at all regret backing. For the documentary alone, I think my money has been well spent.
Yeah on the cast the director mentioned the budget being much smaller than other games, which indicates the bigger actors prob took a pay cut. Jack Black has obviously worked with Schafer before, and Elijah Wood was a backer :grin:
I'm really missing a way to look at things. This game made me realize the way I play all adventure games is I enter a room then look at every single interactive object before doing anything there. There's not even a hover text to tell me what anything is.
I guess losing that ability is the tablet market's fault.
Other than that, I'm really liking this so far. And the occasional graphical glitches in this beta are charmingly AGS like. The main character passing straight through some objects when moving in the z direction for instance.
I don't use a tablet, but on my Mac trackpad I can easily "right click" by using two fingers. Works like a charm. Do tablets not have similar tech?
That's up to the game or app, but practically none do. They could do in Broken Age, but then they'd have to educate the players about the ability to do so.
The simplest solution seemed to be to ditch using right clicking for anything useful in the PC version also. Currently it opens the inventory menu, which can be opened by moving the mouse to the bottom left of the screen anyway.
I'm not saying they should've added a right click for look, it does makes sense to target the tablet market, but it leads to me opening the inventory whenever I want to hear the main character describe what a door is.
Quote from: Snarky on Sun 26/01/2014 21:29:01
I don't use a tablet, but on my Mac trackpad I can easily "right click" by using two fingers. Works like a charm. Do tablets not have similar tech?
Its a different mindset. On a track pad you're controlling a mouse pointer and instructing that to interact with things, and people understand that mice have a right button. On a tablet it's more direct - you're tapping on an object and there's nothing in the middle. Plus if you're tapping on something with two fingers, how does the tablet know which finger is on the object? Now if tablets could recognise different fingers...
On topic: The game was fun but a bit too easy - it often felt like they were telegraphing answers before I'd even begun to think about the puzzles. The art's great and the locations and characters are interesting. In fact I was disappointed when I ran out of dialog choices for most characters because I wanted to spend more time with them. Overall I preferred Vella's part, I was getting a Studio Ghibli vibe from parts of it.
So yeah, good game so far and I'm glad they made it. Though even if the game had been terrible the documentary is more than value for money.
So part 2 has just been released and finally the age is Un-Broken! I thought Act 2 was a lot more challenging and a lot funnier. There was some pretty great stuff in there and the artwork is beautiful with some really clever, vibrant animation considering the 'cut out puppet' nature of the graphics. What does everybody think of it?
I wasn't in love with it after Act 1 but now I am! Now I aaaaaaam!!
Looking foreword to playing it when I finally get home! I've really enjoyed all the 2pp episodes, I think AGS'ers should watch these, just hope the game has the same entertainment value. Sounds like you folks are satisfied, right??
Oh yeah, the documentary's fantastic! You feel the passion! I need to catch up on a bunch of those...
Playing through over the past few days. Act II has the first poorly designed / unfair puzzle. The first time I've resorted to a hint system.
I played it for the first time cause I waited for the whole game. To be honest I did not like the game, I even gave up at the very end and I do not intend to get back to it. I found
Spoiler
hexipals wiring puzzles
so frustrating I stopped playing. I liked the artstyle and I absolutely loved English dubbing but the humour was not really up my alley.
Gribbler's spoiler is where I am too. Glad to know I'm not alone.
I've been going through it until I got to a point where I was stuck. Got me a bit annoyed, and I've not got that much patience, so eventually I looked up the solution online, and it turns out that to solve it, you have to use information that one character would find out and not have any logical way of relaying to the other. That's kind of...bad, and I quit in frustration, since I'd been focusing on one character, mostly.
I'll probably get back to it soon.
Again, it looks like most of us are having the same problem with the same puzzle. Interesting! I wonder how this passed through playtesting?
Reading Twitter and various comments, it seems that particular puzzle is gaining some notoriety. I guess every good game has one. I still haven't even played Act 1 as I can't get it to run on my computer. I'll probably now just watch a let's play of the whole thing and judge it on that.
I love the art style, and the stories of the 2 characters, and most of the puzzles. :smiley:
Part 2 is a lot harder than Part 1 though. Don't like the randomness of some of the puzzles. I'm completely stuck at:
Spoiler
How to get F'ther to untie the knot to free H'rmony. I can't figure out what to tell Carol it looks like. And then the instriction lines don't seem to match the pictures in instruction sheet. :undecided:
What does everyone else think of that puzzle? :confused:
good:
- its relatively unique for many reasons.
- voice acting could hardly be better.
bad:
- its too simple in style and game play.
- it is too much like any of the dumb "escape the room" flash games.
- it would have been an incredible games 10 years earlier, but now it just looks like a flash game with over-average-polishing. the problem with that is that almost all flash games are free, financed with advertisement. not too long into the future anyone could easily make such a game, minus the voice cast.
- its artstyle sucks. you could argue that 2d painted vector graphics look cute, and that htis looks original, except it does not its poorly drawn and not too well animated. and its not unique, since the monkey island 2 remake does the VERY same 2d-painted vector graphics for characters, except they look good.
The last episode of the documentary just came out, looks like they might break even :)
Its a great watch, the whole series. Still haven't finished the game, despite being completely engrossed in the characters we've met in Double Fine, I suck at adventure games I am thinking... but I love them :~(