Berlin 80 - Short demo available.

[Cagliostro]

BERLIN80 - demo at the bottom of the post.

Overview

BERLIN80 is my first experience with Adventure Game Studio. I am trying to rescue the visual and playing atmosphere of the old Lucas-Arts games, when limited tools were capable to make artistic and somewhat cinematographical scenes. 

Although i am rather satisfied with the current graphical results, i have poor scripting abilities and the demo still lacks the polished and creative playability i desire.

What i have done so far

The development is at a very early stage. There are no puzzles, character interactions or GUIs. Also things are passive to heavy changes. I have no previsions of a concrete release date because every time i find myself improving this little beginning i've made in place of developing new scenes. I want to be really satisfied with it before i go on.  You can witness what i have done so far downloading the demo.

Story

The game is set in divided Berlin during the year of 1980, the peak of the cold war. Malcolm Baskin is an american journalist working for a musical magazine, who is forced by his boss  to cover the emerging New Wave scene of the german capital. Highly pissed with the travel, he begins to witness mysterious happenings, all leading to a bizarre conspiration.

Graphics

As i wanted to recreate the old adventure games, i tried to limitate myself to using microsoft paint as graphical tool (of course i wasn't able to use ONLY this software to accomplish the desired results). Also, i am not a good walkcycle animator, so i used walkcycles templates made by Eric, from Kafka's Koffee (http://kafkaskoffee.com/).

Screenshots

The original, 320x200 background size





A scaled up to 640x400 screenshot.




Music

I will use mp3 music in my game. I intend to use the Brian Eno and David Byrne album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts 25th anniversary re-release", with 18 tracks , as the entire source of music for the game, although i know it may lead to boredom. Depending on this, on file size and on legality (I don't know if it's okay to use that kind of copyrighted music on a free game) i may use other music.

Demo Download

I feel that this file should be smaller... should it?

Rar File - 14MB

[JimmyShelter]

Your screenshot tags got mixed up.

Great looking screenshots. Impressive if you only used paint. I couldn't live without Photoshop anymore. I love me some layers.


Story sounds original too.  Good luck on your game!

[ambientcoffeecup]

Wow, This looks exactly like my kind of thing. I have to sleep right now but I'll be sure to check out the demo and comment tomorrow. But for looks alone, top notch.

[Firestorm1]

 :o did you say that this is your first experience with AGS?  :o
is this your first game?  i totally doubt that it is coz these screenshots... :o and in ms paint?  :o :o

i like the sound of the story... was it at all inspired by Tintin?  the journalist who goes on an adventure and finds some sort of crime?  i'd would love to play this game in it's finished form.

good luck with this mate!

[Dualnames]

I've always told MSpaint can do miracles.. It's not the program that draws it's that hand..Anyway this game looks cool..

[Buckethead]

Nice looking stuff. Good luck with this  and he didn't do it all in MS paint. That was his first intention but he says he didn't acomplish this with only using paint.

[ambientcoffeecup]

This game has pretty nice playability so far. I assume I got as far as I could go inside Hotel Vogel. I couldn't find any way to go further than that. I did notice a few spelling mistakes/grammatical errors along the way but I didn't write them down since I was just playing through. Visually, really enjoyable and I look forward to the finished version.

Also I didn't really feel that the music fit the locations but that's a matter of taste and preference I guess.

[hedgefield]

It's been a while since an AGS game in production made me go "wow!". I love the graphics, they look very much like a classic adventure game. The vibe is certainly there. Can't wait to see the final product.

[Cagliostro]

Thanks for all the good comments 

ambientcoffeecup, indeed the inside hotel vogel scene was the last room i've made, so you have played it all 

Firestorm1, this is really my first game on AGS 
before this, all my game-making experience was ZZT, Megazeux, RPGmaker and (unsucefully) Game Maker 6.

Also, i'm sorry for the grammatical incorrections, that happens because i am brazilian and english is not my native language (and i still haven't mastered it). I guess i'll need to ask for help on language issues in the right forum.

The majority of the art was made in Paint, most of scenes inspired by photographs of real places. aside from this, i used a poor but handy tool called PhotoFiltre basically to correct color and reshape things.