Unknown Lands

[qptain Nemo]

Unknown Lands

Dear AGSers, I'd like to present you a short experimental game I made this spring. It's called Unknown Lands and it tells about the adventures of captain Cassandra Sway who's lost everything in a blink of an eye and found herself alone on a piece of land completely strange and unfamiliar to her.

What happened to her next and in what order is very much up to chance and your choices.

Unknown Lands has a deliberately misleading structure for a short narrative-focused game, it's not linear and it doesn't have an overarching goal, and the main storyline isn't prominent or important at all. The game leaves you to explore the island/continent Cassandra is on and deal with the encounters she experiences by making choices. It's all about having your own adventure in a strange land.

The game has an end and can be finished though. The whole territory is divided in 4 types: water, forest, towns and hills&fields. Once you exhaust all encounters in each area, the game is finished.

The game is controlled with WASD for movement and menu selection and space for confirming choices.

You can download the game on the website of my indie game development team, Lazy & Sleepy:

download Unknown Lands v. 1.01

Some extra notes

I must say, I'm somewhat disappointed with the way it turned out. It doesn't quite have the effect I had in mind. And I ran out of energy before I could add certain features I planned. But as with any interesting experiment I certainly don't regret making it. Furthemore, the friends and pals I've shown the game to have been pretty much universally positive about it and said they have enjoyed the game. Funnily enough, many of the suggestions I've heard from them were amongst the features I originally envisioned but didn't have the juice to add in the end. And I think at this point I know how I would 'fix' this game to get closer to the feel I wanted it to have, but right now I'm simply too busy with much more exciting projects, so this game will have to stay this way for a while. Maybe later when I'm really in the mood for it, I'll return once more and enhance this little thing. But for now, I need to focus on more important games. I do hope you enjoy it for what it is and I anticipate hearing what you guys think.

Known issues:
· both fullscreen and windowed display resolution is limited to 800x600; I'm definitely gonna offer more options at some later point
· no saving / loading; probably not a huge deal for that game, since you can beat it in half an hour but still, I believe it must be a common courtesy
· the fonts could be more smooth
· the graphics are hardly perfect; I'm very much content with that it's a graphical map of the world rather than an isometric picture of it and I even like the current tiles, but if anyone feels like making an alternative tileset, just let me know
· there are typos, grammatical errors and other unnatural transgressions wreaked upon the English language. You bet there are! don't just giggle at them alone, report them so we can all giggle together and fix them.

Last, but no least, I'd like to thank Pablo for playtesting and clever suggestions, as well as everyone who originally took their time to check out the version 1.00.

[abstauber]

Oh, what's this mysterious QSM game engine about?
Anyway, playing this feels a bit like a pen&pen RPG. No matter what I choose, something totally unexpected happens

* abstauber looks at the Gooseking

[qptain Nemo]

Oh, what's this mysterious QSM game engine about?

Mostly flexibility, optimization for speed and I'm currently writing an experimental 3D renderer for it, so hopefully that also means teh cool graphix in the near future.

Anyway, playing this feels a bit like a pen&pen RPG. No matter what I choose, something totally unexpected happens

* abstauber looks at the Gooseking

I think I'll take that as a huge compliment.
Thanks for playing!

[kaput]

Gave it a try - pretty cool idea. Nice one cappy'.