The Story
A mysterious stranger, an unmarked package, a terrible explosion â€" that's all you remember. But who wanted you dead? And what about the beautiful woman that lingers at the edge of your memories? Uncover your identity, but watch your step… at every corner you can anticipate murder.
Screenshots:
(http://static.filefront.com/images/personal/p/plasticostrich/49689/jxssprfujh.jpg)
(http://static.filefront.com/images/personal/p/plasticostrich/49689/zwscmzyyjz.jpg)
Game Features:
All 3D graphics, 15 rooms, over 50 inventory items, 8 animated NPCs, and three big explosions.
About the Creators: We're a husband-wife team of classic adventure game fans. This is our first full-length game, and we're psyched to release it here.
Anticipated Release Date: August 2006
Development Diary:
May 19th
All 8 NPCs are now dressed, skinned, and fully prepped for animating. Looking pretty good! They just need polygon hair… We'll post a preview as soon as that's sorted.
June 3rd
Had a slight hard drive scare this week, but all systems are back up. Must keep up-to-date back-ups! We've figured out how to make decent hair, and are in the process of designing everybody's hairstyle, finally. You can see one of the NPCs, almost ready and with hair, above. The player character is designed, skinned, and ready to go. On the same note, we've started with the character animations, and have a basic walk sequence. All of the rooms got spiffed up, the map has been created and intergrated, and scripting is well underway. We should be able to make the July deadline, barring any surprises.
June 15th
The scripting is just about finished! The character animations (particularly the player character) are taking longer than expected, so our beta testers will be receiving the game a bit later. Regretfully, this may delay the release until August, but we're working full speed to get it up and running.
July 2nd
The special effects, sounds, and music have all been taken care of, and we've completed our informal testing. We've only got the characters to sort, and then it's out for beta testing! We're learning how to use an alternate animation program, which may speed things up...
July 16th
The character animations have been completed, and just need to be uploaded into the game. We want to fix up the sound effects. It should be out for testing by next week!
July 28th
It's finished, phew. We're sending it to the beta testers. It will be released as soon as they give the ok. ;D
Aug 10th
Our first beta tester has given it the green light -- no bugs. We're still waiting for the other two to complete testing.
Aug 17
The game has been released! You can find it in the completed games section, and in the AGS database under "Medium Length Games."
Looks and sounds very good and interesting.
The gui looks very nice in my opinion.
Keep up the good work!
a really interesting game, it seems. Plus it is made by a couple! Yeah! I hope my wife will see this and give in to my pressure of writting a gane together...
As for the screenshots, I'm not sure but I detect a deliberate tendency to avoid including details (the car is rather empty) and I actually like it so. I think it adds to the tention and mystery and murder case... :)
Awaiting and looking forward...
This reminds me of those CSI games in a way.
Looks very classy, if a bit too shiny in some places. (Like the car's dashboard)
Look foward to seeing some characters!
hows the progress, this one has tight graphics !
Thanks for all of your comments -- very encouraging!
Looks like this will be an interesting game to check out.
Will it be 1st (ala "Myst" style) or 3rd person perspective?
Did you do all the graphics yourself? If so, quite professional looking.
Following comment is not meant as a critique, but more as an observation that looks a little "odd" to me: In the bathroom screenshot, the "Handle" (I think that's what it is) that on the glass-shower door, it seems oddly placed, at least in the following way: Using my imagination thinking about how the door would open, I'm assuming the door would pull-out to open. In that case, looking at the position of the "handle", and thinking in what position and how the door would open, and looking at where the sink is located, this seems like an awfully tight "squeeze" to get in around the sink by the wall in that case.Ã, Or if the sink didn't look so close to the shower, then it probably wouldn't look as if one would need to "squeeze" in past in order to get in. I know it's just a minor thing, but it's the only thing that struck me a bit "odd" about the picture.Ã,Â
Good luck with your project. I look forwards to seeing it in action.
The player is the lead character, but there will be an animated character representing him.
All our backgrounds and objects are original creations, made by us using freeware 3D modeling tools. It's been a huge learning curve, which is partially why its taken us so long to get things done, but we're picking up speed rapidly. Our characters are a combination of original design and mesh creation programs under general public license (so they are free to use, alter, and distribute). If anyone wants the names of these great programs, feel free to pm us.
Barbarian, we see your point about the shower door. We'll revisit that area. We've decided to go back and polish up our rooms some more, now that we've learned a bit more about using the creation programs and have more control over the design.
mind if i pm you with some gui questions ?
Feel free to PM us with any questions you have. We'll be happy to answer if we can.
See the top for a preliminary NPC preview.
Bumped. See the top post for new info on the game's progress.
Bumped? Drat. I was looking forward to this coming out soon. Well, whatever it takes to get it done right must be done.
Almost ready :)
See the top post for an NPC walk sequence preview.
Glad to see it's so close to being finished. It seems so promising I really want to try it out. :)
Just out of curiosity, what program have you been using for making the 3d graphics?
We've been using Anim8or, mostly. Blender too, but to a much lesser extent.
Next time around, we want to try Endorphin Natural Motion for characters, which has a physics calculator.
Anim8or?, thought so, make the lights cast shadows and have objects cast shadows.
1 main light with soft shadows one dark grey difuse to light darker areas with No shadows and other smalled darked lights for say a bright red object making the whitewallpaper mildly red.
Have a look here:
http://www.anim8ormaterials.cjb.net/
That should help, just use it as a guide for values. (Second time I posted that on teh web todayÃ, ;))
Look into specularity maps and bumpmaps(same map usually)
P.S: What tool did you use to make the people?
EDIT: Also you need to change the skin tone on the woman she looks like a corpse and look into some hip movements (Women walk with there hips and men with there chests apparently)
Thanks, Crazy. We will definitely go for lights and shadows if we do other games. We have a lot of learning to do! I've seen in professional games, those details do make the difference.
To make the people, we used Blender's MakeHuman, exported as 3DS, and imported into Animator. Then, we added hair (after much experimenting) and clothes (our technique still needs some work there).
My husband is the real character animator. I'll get him to check out this thread.
Don't want to give away much of the plot, but there's a reason she doesn't look her best... :-X
It's out for beta testing, and will be released as soon as we have the ok. ;D
[quote author=Crazy link=topic=26566.msg349939#msg349939
EDIT: Also you need to change the skin tone on the woman she looks like a corpse and look into some hip movements (Women walk with there hips and men with there chests apparently)
Quote
That's funny, I'm a woman and walk with my legs. :P
Game's looking great though, I'm definitely eager to get my paws on it.
Our first beta tester has given it the green light -- no bugs. We're still waiting for the other two to complete testing, but its looking good. We really hope to have it out by next week.
Congratulations on finishing this really awesome looking game. I really like the backgrounds. So just waiting on two beta-testers, huh? Tell them to get a move on it, where all waiting!!!! LOL!!!! I've been waiting for a lot of the new games to come out and this one was on my list of "can't wait to play"! Sooo, hope they finish there testing soon.
Thewalrus
Goo, goo, ga, joob!!!!
One of our beta testers is busy with some personal work, but we've decided to do a preliminary release while we're waiting for his response, since we've done a bit of beta testing already. ;D