Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure

Started by Mr Underhill, Wed 17/12/2014 10:39:56

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Blondbraid

Wow, that really looks impressive!


Two Tales

How the hell have I missed this thread up until now?! This looks really exciting. I'll be following your progress from now on.

Mr Underhill

Thank you so much, everybody!

In tangentially-related news, I decided to finally sit down and write a post mortem / guide to Kickstarting, building on our great crowd-funding experience of last year.

The idea behind this is to gather all the information I've had to hunt down in several places during 2015-2016 and write it down into one cohesive thing. Well, three of them actually - I had to break it into chapters because of sheer length.

Part I, which deals with the pre-campaign period, is now published and a featured post on Gamasutra.

I really hope this helps you out if you are thinking of crowd-funding. I keep seeing great games that would deserve to get funded and don't because their campaigns don't match their games' awesomess, so here's to my article hopefully being of some use.

Mr Underhill

Kitteh demonstrating adventure game players' approach to solving puzzles:


Frodo


Cassiebsg

I'll bang that trapdoor open with my head! (laugh)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

Mr Underhill

Hey! It's screenshot saturday! :)


Gurok

Those are some nice, smooth animations, Mr Underhill.
[img]http://7d4iqnx.gif;rWRLUuw.gi

CaptainD

That guy's eyebrows are freaking me out a bit though! :-D

Looking awesome.
 

Blondbraid

It's fantastic to see how well the animation and dialogue flow together, it looks awesome!
Also, is the couple an American Gothic reference? ;-D


Mr Underhill

Thanks, guys. @Blondbraid: yes, very much so :-D

Here's a link to our latest update, rife with tons of gifs and other cool stuff!

Just a taste:



...and a work-in-progress of part of our intro cinematic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHv_ry1edu0


Andail

Looking very professional, Mr Underhill... all those animations must take forever to make!

selmiak

wow, very interesting the best past of the intro is how he appears from out of the dark @ 1:12.

the light from the side changes from redy orange (best color imho) to bright green to bright yellow orange (and the phone disappears on that, probably behind the paperwork). Some of them seem like neon sign outside of the office, but then, why would the neonsigns outside your office change so much, so this indicates a change of location to me. if there wasn't the green light it could be different heights of the sun outside the office, but the green gave me that neonsign vibe. just saying.

Mr Underhill

@Andail: Yeah, they do take a lot. Luckily we're pretty experienced, and client work has taught us to be fast and furious ;-D

@selmiak: The color change in the office reflects different moments of the day - we see Don poring over occult stuff at night first, illuminated by different lights from outside as you correctly noticed, and then when he's checking his wallet it's already morning light. Details in the backgrounds are all temporary - to be honest, they're not really actual backgrounds. We wanted to show what we have so far in the update, so we (shamefully!) used slightly touched-up color script panels as background art. Never do that in a final product :D

There are plenty of other small goof-ups but we'll iron those out before launch proper, right now this is probably what's going in the backer beta build as an intro cutscene.

Thanks for the interest, guys! It's our first game, and it's always good to have feedback from people more experienced with adventure game makin'.

Stupot

This is coming along grandly.
Keep it up :-)

Mandle

#155
WOW! I just watched the trailer for the detective intro and it is AWESOME!!!

I hope you have ditched the Argyle-cover-on-the-Necronomicon joke... That's still way too cheap a shot to take at the mythos for the quality of the game you are producing...

Lovecraft fans can forgive humour at the expense of the characters, but they will not forgive any cheap-shots at the mythos itself...

If the game includes humour then my advice would be to emphasize it early on in the game and then slowly phase it out bit by bit as the horror factor ramps up...

This gives the player their comfort zone early on while the character they are playing is still in a good mood, and then slowly takes it away as the character and the situation slowly descends into madness...

The player will feel the rug taken out from under their feet and feel uncomfortable as the game changes tone from comedy to horror...

Then you could have a unique and substantial take on Lovecraft gaming... A path that few games have walked...

But if you continue with the comedy throughout the game you will keep the player in their comfort zone and provide a merely entertaining game for them...

Sorry to be that guy, but I feel you could do something really special with this game if it was handled with the care that the mythos deserves.

Blondbraid

Very slick intro cinematic, it felt like watching an animated movie! ;-D


Mr Underhill

Thanks Blondbraid! We will hopefully have a few of these punctuating important plot points.


Quote from: Mandle on Tue 26/09/2017 18:22:36
WOW! I just watched the trailer for the detective intro and it is AWESOME!!!

I hope you have ditched the Argyle-cover-on-the-Necronomicon joke... That's still way too cheap a shot to take at the mythos for the quality of the game you are producing...

Lovecraft fans can forgive humour at the expense of the characters, but they will not forgive any cheap-shots at the mythos itself...

If the game includes humour then my advice would be to emphasize it early on in the game and then slowly phase it out bit by bit as the horror factor ramps up...

This gives the player their comfort zone early on while the character they are playing is still in a good mood, and then slowly takes it away as the character and the situation slowly descends into madness...

The player will feel the rug taken out from under their feet and feel uncomfortable as the game changes tone from comedy to horror...

Then you could have a unique and substantial take on Lovecraft gaming... A path that few games have walked...

But if you continue with the comedy throughout the game you will keep the player in their comfort zone and provide a merely entertaining game for them...

Sorry to be that guy, but I feel you could do something really special with this game if it was handled with the care that the mythos deserves.

No need to apologize, I completely understand where you're coming from with this, and it's an interesting discussion to have, for sure. I'm a huge fan of Lovecraft's, and I'm not at all into cheapening and disrespecting the very thing that inspired us by taking cheap shots.

However, it's also a matter of perspective and interpretation. The Necronomicon example is incidentally a very good one: comedy is primarily relegated to humans. They might make fun of the triangle-based design of the Necronomicon, sure... That doesn't make them right, or make the Necronomicon itself less scary ;) Lovecraftian media that tries to achieve a comedic effect by belittling or cute-ifying the Old Ones, while it doesn't offend or bother me, just isn't my thing.

But heck, I made a whole animated video about this, check it out :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiK7dpJMNWI


Mr Underhill

Heyo! So, we got Gibbous running on Apple TV, how crazy is that?

Show starts at about the 2 minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9eigNI1DxM

If you're interested, we do dev streams every Monday to Tuesday, this including art, development, music, animation... pretty much everything on our Twitch channel.

Blondbraid

Quote from: Mandle on Tue 26/09/2017 18:22:36
Lovecraft fans can forgive humour at the expense of the characters, but they will not forgive any cheap-shots at the mythos itself...
Weird, since Lovecraft himself made fun of his usual tropes with indescribable horrors in this short story.
I'm of the opinion that things can be funny while also being scary, it's just hard to pull off right.

It will be very interesting to see how this game turns out!


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