Adventure Game Studio

From the guys who brought you the OROW winners The Heist (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=728), How many... (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1045) and Alone in the Night (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=595), comes a new and exciting adventure game filled with humor. (Just like the title suggests.) A game that's been in development for almost two years (and it's still nowhere near finished). Evolum Games proudly presents...





Story

Vincent wakes up from a terrible nightmare: a huge rock from outer space was headed towards the Kingdom of Colvennen. The dream felt so real it must've been a vision of the future. If the asteroid hits the planet, the consequences will be disastrous. Vincent decides to consult the vast knowlegde and wisdom of the mages without delay.


Screenshots

(http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo1.png) (http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo1.png)
Visit the International House of Mages.

(http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo2.png) (http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo2.png)
Try your luck with hang-gliding.

(http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo3.png) (http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo3.png)
Blow dust off of very very old books.


Team

Ari Huuskonen (MadReizka)
Design, writing, background art, music

Aki Ahonen (AJA)
Design, writing, scripting

Sam Dobbs
Writing, proofreading


Actors

Aki Ahonen
Ari Huuskonen
Tommi Kivistö (Ishmael)
Joni Ahonen


Features

- Resolution: 320x200
- Gorgeous 3D background art
- Live actors with tons of animations (check "Alone in the Night" for a preview)
- Wacky characters
- Video cutscenes
- Original soundtrack
- Voice acting, hopefully
- And probably more!


Progress

- Graphics   50%
- Puzzles   95%
- Scripting   50%
- Music/sound   5%
- Cutscenes   0%

Man, I just cant get enough of that dancing dude.

Thanatus= the correct word for death in greek is Thanatos. Just mentioning.

We decided to use the Latin version of the word because it sounds nicer. :)

Though Thanatus has not been recorded in any Latin text ^^ But hell, who cares? The game looks nice and the style is magnificent.

Sweet ;D.

Now this makes me think how do you manage to do such animation? (dancing man)
I mean, as it clearly looks like its done in real life :-\.

Very good! In our original plot for our game, we set it in Greece on an island called Thanatos, weird coincidence! :)

Thanks very much for your comments!

Quote from: Peder Johnsen on Sun 06/07/2008 11:48:29
Now this makes me think how do you manage to do such animation? (dancing man)
I mean, as it clearly looks like its done in real life :-\.

The actors are shot against a green screen with a camcorder. Then we just remove the green parts, drop the frame rate, do some color correction, and we have a nice "realistic" animation.

Quote from: nihilyst on Sun 06/07/2008 00:32:32
Though Thanatus has not been recorded in any Latin text ^^ But hell, who cares?

Yes, well... This game really has nothing to do with our real world, so in the game it might mean something totally different. You'll see. :P

Quote from: DazJ on Sun 06/07/2008 11:51:06
Very good! In our original plot for our game, we set it in Greece on an island called Thanatos, weird coincidence! :)

Heh, one of the other reasons we chose "Thanatus" is that it doesn't get as many hits in google as "Thanatos" does.

This is looking promising. And yet another addition to my acting portfolio I'm too ashamed to show anyone :=

Quote from: AJA on Sat 05/07/2008 22:38:15

(http://serpentpictures.net/randomia/wtfdans2.gif)
(blooper footage)

This should be the "wait" cursor

This looks pretty awesome, actually! I'm looking forward to that demo.

Serpent Pictures is taking over the game industry...

Great looking game guys!

Heh, looking good.

I wish you guys luck to finish this project :).

This looks great!! I can't wait :)

By the way, I haven't played your previous games so I'll be sure to go and check them out.

Great news guys! The project has been canceled!

No, not really. The news are that the demo will be out this weekend! We are almost done with it, and AJA has been hard working to sort out the bugs and gettin everything in order. We are stoked to give you guys some preview on whats to come when the game is finished (hopefully it will, because there is ALOT of work to be done). And, ofcourse we want to hear what you think of it. So stay tuned, few more days and you will be playin the demo of Thanatus - Death from the Stars!

Cya.

The real life green screen style reminds me of another adventure game I loved as a kid.
Ripley's believe it or not: The Riddle of Master Lu
Thats was an awesome game and you got to play as Ripley himself.
I hope your game comes out as well as it did.  ;D

You're right. I needed to google that to find some screenshots, and indeed, there are some similarities. Our game looks 200 times more better though ;)

Hm, I actually have that game somewhere so if I can get it to work I can do a side by side comparison...

This is looking really good! I look forward to playing it :)

Today is the day. Next update will be made by AJA and will contain the link to the demo! Stay tuned!

The demo you've all been waiting for... at least one or two of you... is finally released!

Download (http://www.serpentpictures.net/games/wip/thanatus_demo.rar)

Go and play it right now!

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

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

Ishmael: God, me too :)

robvalue: Thanks, that is needed.

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

Good luck!

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? :P

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Quote from: Jeffers on Wed 13/08/2008 01:51:37
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! :D

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.

Time to resurrect this thread!

Quote from: AJA on Sun 24/08/2008 19:22:30
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:

(http://www.serpentpictures.net/games/wip/promo4.png)
Yay! Darts! The slider on the left is obviously a placeholder.

What the heck, let's throw in a funny animation too!
(http://www.serpentpictures.net/games/wip/weird_guy.gif)


Hopefully there'll be more updates soon. Meanwhile, you can play the DEMO (http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/thanatus_demo.rar).

Pretty cool Demo guys, keep it up! :)

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!

Thanks! :D

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 (http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agsresources/AGS%20resources/Programs/editor3.zip) 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:
(http://serpentpictures.net/games/wip/dialogdesigner_screen.png)
(syntax highlighting is temporarily off because it needs a bit of enhancing)

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:
(http://www.serpentpictures.net/games/wip/weirdos.jpg)


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

Hey, are you guys from Finland?

Anyway your game looks sweet. Very interesting project.

Thanks! And yes, we're from Finland.

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

I just beated the demo and I loved all those video cutscenes.
Juu ja kiva, että täälläkin on lajitovereita.  ;)

Yes, there are quite a few Finns here. I'm glad you liked the demo. :)

Well, it's the end of August and the game is, to my astonishment, playable to the end of part two (out of four). However, there's still quite a bit missing from the first half of the game: lots of dialog, some special animations and graphics, small scripting tweaks and the entire intro sequence which we decided to add to the very beginning of the game to make the main character feel a bit more interesting. Well, I'm not sure if 'interesting' is the right word but anyway. Also, the first half of the game is probably the easy part. As were getting closer to the AWESOMELY DISAPPOINTING climax of the story, there'll be much more to do, especially on the graphics front. But it'll be worth it. ;)

Nothing new to show you guys, I'm afraid. Wouldn't want to spoil too much. Hopefully, you'll see more when we've managed to shoot the cutscenes. Which might be a while since school's starting again. But I'll try my best to keep this show going forward at least a little bit every week.

Thanks to everybody for their support! I'll post again when there's something even remotely interesting to tell. :)

As I have absolutely nothing to do otherwise I want to get filming more stuff for this :P

Hey AJA, have you thought of increasing the frame rate of your animations a bit.  Technically your game is amazing and you've inspired me to do something similar.

Wow, great to hear this little thing has inspired you!

We chose the current frame rate (actually it changes a bit depending on the animation) because of two reasons: less frames equals smaller file size, and more importantly, it feels more classic adventure gamey. If the animation was smoother, it'd feel too much like the characters are actually filmed and not hand animated. That's also the reason why the game is low res. We want the characters to feel like they fit in that world as much as possible, and I think smoother animations (or a higher resolution) would make them seem too realistic.

Well, I might as well let you guys know where the project is heading today: nowhere. As expected, studying (actually mostly not studying) destroyed our nice little fantasy world where the production would never have stopped before the thing was finished. Hopefully, we might be able to kick ourselves back to work soon. No promises though. What I can promise, however, is that there's a 99% chance the game won't be released this year.  :-\ (This is my attempt to yet again make myself a liar by actually finishing the game before next year.)

Xenogia - please do not dig up threads that haven't been posted in over 90 days.

AJA - thanks for the update.

Quote from: AJA on Thu 21/01/2010 00:38:07

Well, I might as well let you guys know where the project is heading today: nowhere. As expected, studying (actually mostly not studying) destroyed our nice little fantasy world where the production would never have stopped before the thing was finished. Hopefully, we might be able to kick ourselves back to work soon. No promises though. What I can promise, however, is that there's a 99% chance the game won't be released this year.  :-\ (This is my attempt to yet again make myself a liar by actually finishing the game before next year.)

Good thing we decided to extend the storyline so much! ;)

So it IS still in production? Is anyone working on it?

Well, we haven't given up on it but right now we're too distracted by other shiny things. I've been trying to start working on it again for a couple of weeks now, and luckily this discussion has given me some more inspiration. It's becoming quite clear that what killed the production last autumn is the same thing that's preventing me from starting it up again: dialog. Also, every time I mention writing dialog to MadReizka, he goes silent. :P So, I guess I'm just going to have to start with the first puzzles in the second half of the game. Ideally, we would be able to finish scripting the puzzles etc. for the first three parts (out of four) of the game before summer, and then we could really start to think how we're going to pull off these damn video cutscenes.

well if you need any help just say amigo. :)

Thanks for the offer, we'll keep it in mind! :)

Quote from: AJA on Fri 22/01/2010 07:14:47
It's becoming quite clear that what killed the production last autumn is the same thing that's preventing me from starting it up again: dialog. Also, every time I mention writing dialog to MadReizka, he goes silent. :P

Well I always thought that since you are the mastermind behind the second half you could do it :D
That's so true, we need to schedule this project again and start working!

CUT TO: ½ year later:

No progress...