Thanatus - Death from the Stars :: DEMO available!

[Ishmael]

I hope you can keep this quality level up through the whole production, since the demo's looking awesome.

[robvalue]

I really like it! Nice one, I wish you well with completing the project.

[MadReizka]

Ishmael: God, me too

robvalue: Thanks, that is needed.

[Rd27]

I liked the demo! If you can keep the same quality level in the future, this could be a fantastic game!

Good luck!

[AJA]

Oh, it'll get better. At least there'll be lots of interesting (or at least semi-funny) characters and situations and stuff... Well, it should get better unless we mess it up. But what are the chances of that happening?

[MadReizka]

BTW we might need some help from the community at some point. We need some material for a scene where the should be a lot of people in one room, and if guys from the forums are interested in participating by taking photos/video footage against green screen or other chroma screens we would love to have you in the game!
If you happen to be female, we'd be even more happy to have you appear in the game, since at the moment it's just guys.

More info coming when we are at the point when we need you!

[Jared]

Love the demo. Nice, irreverent, harmless fun. The sheer silliness of the 'diversion' moment won me over. My only hope is that future puzzles are a bit more nuanced, but I'm sure that will be the case.

Would be happy to cameo in the game, too, when the time comes.

[Kweepa]

Fantastic quality demo.
Great graphics and humour!

The video capture is so good that it highlights the cheap costumes, beards etc, which is either a shame or pretty funny - I can't decide.

[DazJ]

The horrendous fake beard just made me laugh WITH it, not AT it. EXCELLENT demo! I can't wait to see more of this!

[AJA]

Heh, thanks! Yeah, the costumes are a bit cheap at times (most of the time), but it all sort of fits with the style of the story and the world. There are some characters (not in the demo) we're going to reshoot because the constumes are just very very very crappy.

Btw, as a fun fact, all of the animations that are currently in the game (except for the king and the glider vendor) were shot in one day over a year ago. We have approximately 70 minutes of usable footage (multiple takes) for the characters, so there's going to be a lot of stuff going on with them. Thankfully, turning the footage into sprites is a relatively fast process.

[Jeffers]

Out of all the games in production right now, this is easily the one I am most hopeful for and excited to see released.
Good luck, guys!

[AJA]

Out of all the games in production right now, this is easily the one I am most hopeful for and excited to see released.
Good luck, guys!

Wow, thanks!

Since I haven't posted for a while, I decided to tell you that we've been on a break since the demo was released (working on other projects, being lazy, etc.) but now that we've shot two new characters for the game (okay, one of them was a reshoot), we're back in business. Most of the puzzles we're scripted probably more than a year ago so we've started adding animations and other tweaks. Also, we've talked about some major changes to the second half of the storyline, which should elevate things into new and thrilling places. Or plummet into a certain death at the bottom of a dark pit full of sticky goo. We haven't decided yet.

If things go slower than planned, we'll hopefully have the first half pretty much finished by November. The exact year is still a mystery to us.

[AJA]

Time to resurrect this thread!

If things go slower than planned, we'll hopefully have the first half pretty much finished by November. The exact year is still a mystery to us.

I'm slowly beginning to believe that the year might be this one. Now that it's summer again, I've had much more time and energy to get this project going again. Last month I and MadReizka revised our plans for the story and extended it a bit so it would feel more complete and interesting. For the last couple of days I've been making new animations and I've completed scripting on some of our older puzzles.

So, what exactly has happened during the year? Not much except for the story revision. We've added five new puzzle sets (not sure if we're going to keep all of them in the game), plus we've extended the ending to such suspenseful heights that you'll probably need to change your pants twice while playing! That might be an overstatement but we'll see. There will be a certain amount of excitement in any case.

Why should you care, then? We've done nothing for a year, why should you get your hopes up now? Because this time there's a schedule! One that I'm going to try to follow, at least until school starts. The schedule states that by the end of august more than half of the game will be playable. Also, any missing or new character footage plus cutscene material will have to be filmed during the summer. Here's where the schedule gets a bit iffy, if things go according to plan (which they won't, thanks to school) the game should be released by the end of the year. So I'm going to guess that the game will be released next summer.

So much text and not much real content or even a single smiley. Well, here's a screencap of a mini game I just finished to help make this post more interesting:


Yay! Darts! The slider on the left is obviously a placeholder.

What the heck, let's throw in a funny animation too!



Hopefully there'll be more updates soon. Meanwhile, you can play the DEMO.

[miguel]

Pretty cool Demo guys, keep it up!

[Swordofkings128]

woah! That was a snazzy demo dudes, I just wish there was more...

I liked the opening movie, and the backgrounds are nice too. At first when I saw the screens I didn't like the real people mixed with 3d backgrounds, but actually it's quite nicely done so good job there.

hope you guys finish this, it's a very promising game!

[AJA]

Thanks!

Our first deadline is on Sunday and we're already behind schedule, yay! That's mostly because for the past three days I've been making a dialog designer program to help write the game's dialogs and organize the dialog options more efficiently. After all these years, I tried the "original" Dialog Editor 3.1e and it didn't really meet my needs so I decided to make my own.

The basics are already working: dialog options displayed in a tree view, syntax highlighted option script editor, dialog preview, saving and loading the dialog (XML file) and also, it manages references to other dialog options in case you change their order. There's still a couple of more advanced features I'm planning on implementing. Also, one important feature that's still missing: exporting a script that can be copied back to AGS, since the dialog scripts aren't 100% AGS compatible. Once it's finished, I'll probably release it here in case somebody finds it useful.

Here's a preview screenshot:

(syntax highlighting is temporarily off because it needs a bit of enhancing)

[AJA]

After pushing back the deadlines a bit, things are looking great. I still think we can finish the first half of the game by the end of this month, more or less. Intro videos/cutscenes will be missing but the core gameplay should be working nicely and we can begin playtesting, yay!

We had one day of shooting in the beginning of this month but we didn't manage to get half the things we needed. Also, the lighting sucked! I'm going to have to go look for a greener green screen for the next try when we'll be shooting character animations for the grand finale and all our video cutscenes.

Here's a bunch of weirdos from this month's attempt:



Dialog Designer is also ready for release unless I find any more bugs during the next couple of days (or weeks).

[Lucid]

Hey, are you guys from Finland?

Anyway your game looks sweet. Very interesting project.

[AJA]

Thanks! And yes, we're from Finland.

[Swordofkings128]

Yaay! It's not dead! This will be great, can't wait to play the finished version.