Project Japan (BETADEMO!!!, read first post!)

[waffer]

Project Japan by Digital Pollutions.

First I want to introduce the team that is working on this game. We are four guys from Sweden and we are all 18 years old. In our school we have something called Projektarbete (roughly interpreted = Project work). The goal here is to work together with others and work like you do in real life. You're able to choose your own project and we chose to make an adventure game. So now we have a whole school year too make a game and scheduled time to do it on!
We have assigned different tasks for everyone in the group, we have one Lead Storywriter who writes story, dialog and stuff like that (known on the forum as WeHoo). We have one Lead Programmer (known on the forum as Purra_H), one Lead Designer (that's me) and one Lead Director (Jo.Walter)
Ok that's enough about us, now on to the game!

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The year is 1274. The powerful Mongols invaded China in 1259 and they are a growing threat against Japan. Threats have been sent to the Japanese government in Kamakura and they now fear a invasion. The odds to fight back an attack from the Mongols aren't good.

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The main character (temporary name: Ego) lives on the country with his parents. His relatives have lived on farming as long as they can remember and are happily unaware of what's going on in the rest of the country. One day when he is out he meets a samurai who says something about Mongols and that it's over for Japan. The samurai also mentions that Japan now need all the men they can get and that he should go to the nearest village to help. Ego, who's not so interested in working on the family's farm, immediately decides to do as the samurai says.

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News
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13 october
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Added a new character and updated the first background.

14 october -> 6 may
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What happend between those two dates?
I may write a report on how the project went.

7 may
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The first screenshots are uploaded doh!

20 may
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The Betademo-version is released


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EDIT: Set to be released when its done.

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Images (None of the images are complete and may be changed in the future)

Screenshots







If the pics are too big, just tell me and I'll just link to them.

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Project Japan Betademo -  Download 7.33mb (Right-Click)

[remixor]

That's a really cool assignment.  I wish my school had something like that.  It should be good motivation to finish your game

I like the concept.  Historical plots are always interesting.  Your character somehow reminds me of an Asian CMI-style-Guybrush  My only comment is that his eyebrows make it look like he has four eyes, other than that your character and background look pretty clean.

Good luck!

[WeHoo]

Well, my first, and probably not last, post on the board. As Waffer already mentioned I'm the storywriter on Project Japan.

[Ginny]

Welcome WeHoo! Souns like a great story you got there! I sure wish we had something like this in our school, all we'll have in computers this year (next semester only) is HTML, which I studied by myself long ago. Oh well, I'll use the time for game making then
What subject was the project given in? or is it a general thing? Hmm, I wonder if I'll have anything like that in computers when I'm 18 (4 years until then ). I presume you're in your 12th grade, right?

Anyway, this looks promising, the graphivs are smooth and the whole design method sounds very proffessional

I was wondering, when you say Lead Designer, are you reffering to art? And what does the Lead Director do?

[waffer]

Welcome WeHoo! Souns like a great story you got there! I sure wish we had something like this in our school, all we'll have in computers this year (next semester only) is HTML, which I studied by myself long ago. Oh well, I'll use the time for game making then
What subject was the project given in? or is it a general thing? Hmm, I wonder if I'll have anything like that in computers when I'm 18 (4 years until then ). I presume you're in your 12th grade, right?

Anyway, this looks promising, the graphivs are smooth and the whole design method sounds very proffessional

I was wondering, when you say Lead Designer, are you reffering to art? And what does the Lead Director do?

Hi GinnyW!!
The project is a subject. We have about 2,5 hour a week scheduled time to work with it. But at the moment we can't work with it at school so all the work is done at home. But we use the scheduled time to have meetings on were we talk about what have been done and what has to be done and stuff like that.
Yes we are in our 12th grade.
And yes, Lead Designer is reffering to art.
So on to your last question about the Lead Director. Well after the three other titles were given we had nothing more that someone had to be responsible for. So we gave him the title Lead Director wich means that he will be the one responsible for putting it all together.
But we are not locked to our titles. We help eachother with all the things.

[Evil]

Wow, a whole year... I wish I could have a year to make a team project. We have blocked classes so I would only be able to have 1/2 a year at max... Sounds really cool, cant wait to see more art.

[Purra_H]

Like wehoo said my first and probably not last reply ont ths forum.

PS.
I am the Lead Programmer if you haven't already read it.

[waffer]

Evil, as you wanted, more art!!!!!!
This is ONE of the samurais that you will meet in the game. I also updated the house background.

[jason]

Oh wow, that samurai is sweet! I can't wait for this game, especially with the comfort of knowing that it will be completed otherwise you guys will fail.. muhahah!

[sergiocornaga]

Sweet.

Really creative and authentic drawing style, can't wait to see the finished version.

[Jo.Walter]

Wow im in! I have had some problems with my internet, modem, OS, ehm...evrything... anyway Im in and I am the so called "Lead Director" of this projekt as Waffer hopefully (for his own sake) has mentioned...

[sergiocornaga]

What is the game's resoloution?  

[remixor]

The house background is 320x240, so that would be my first guess.  On the other hand, the characters look more like they'd go in a 640x480 game, though they could just be concept art.

[oscar]

nice cartoony looks and fresh, clean graphics....I'm looking forward to the game!


var i Sverige kommer ni ifrån?

[Jo.Walter]

nice cartoony looks and fresh, clean graphics....I'm looking forward to the game!


var i Sverige kommer ni ifrån?

Eksjö Gymnasium typ

[oscar]

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[Purra_H]

JO. is the lead Director (strange title) in our projekt....



så han gissar inte

[Inkoddi]

Jag ska också göra ett spel som projektarbete

[oscar]

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[waffer]

The game resolution will be 640*480.

[dunder_dacke]

När jag blir stor vill jag ocksÃ¥ göra adventuregames pÃ¥ skoltid..  
haha, hoppas det går vägen.

Eksjö som i Huskvarna eller Eksjö som i Hultsfred eller annat Eksjö?

[oscar]

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[Ciro Durán]

No entiendo nada de lo que dicen  

[Inkoddi]

Ni kommer säkert att få MVG på erat projektarbete och jag tänkte också skriva lite på svenska

[waffer]

Please visit our forum at
http://www32.brinkster.com/oaklake/forum/toast.asp

Update:
We are currently not taking any new registrations because we use some parts of the forum for our project. But please visit the forum as a guest!

(Sorry Inkoddi )

[Purra_H]

Ok... Here is a new modified version of our new Logo.
I added some effects and i also added an S so the name
is changed to Digital Pollutions.
http://www32.brinkster.com/oaklake/logos/newlogo1%20copy.jpg

stay tuned for more updates..

over and out.

[Jo.Walter]

Ni kommer säkert att få MVG på erat projektarbete och jag tänkte också skriva lite på svenska

'

Ja det är ju kul att skriva på svenska but try to write in enlish so much you can (even if you spell wrong).

Anyway the game is in progress so dont worry!

[oscar]

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[waffer]

Hi again! Just wanted to reply to the post and tell you that we are not dead and the game is still under development. Due to different circumstances there havent been much progress in the gamedevelopment, mostly becuase we lacked knowlegde about the ags-engine. But now things are looking better and we hope to release a demo/beta in the end of this month as scheduled. I'll try to return here with updates on the developmentprogress more frequent and I hope that you still have some interest in the game

[IntentInsane]

The game looks great so far, (I love the group logo BTW)it's definetly gonna look better than my game, I only have two team members, Clueless3 and myself. He's doing chars and I'm doing everything else. Hope to play the demo/beta copy soon!

[CoffeeBob]

herregud vad många svenskar det finns här :o.....

Det menar du inte?

[waffer]

The plans of releasing a demo has been put on ice. The final decision will be taken after this weekend. During the weekend we will get togheter and work with the game. We hope that we can make  a lot of progress during these days. I will keep you updated.

[waffer]

The plans of releasing a demo is still on ice, but we will upload some screenshots and art next week.

[waffer]

Ok, I'm back again, this time with some screenshots.

The time for our project is over and we are now just waiting for our grades 

I will write you a report on how our project went later.

We didnt manage to finish the game but we will continue to work on it until its done.

[waffer]

We have released a betademo. You can find the link in the first post. Please tell us what you think

[oscar]

it was very fun to play, but I really think you should make the sprites look smoother in the game by resizing them in photoshop or something...or add the details after resizing them.

[waffer]

it was very fun to play, but I really think you should make the sprites look smoother in the game by resizing them in photoshop or something...or add the details after resizing them.

Yes, you're right. I'm just too lazy But it will be fixed until the final version

EDIT: Does anyone know a good place to host the file because my current host aint to happy that I use their space to host it?

[Hollister Man]

How large is it?  I could host it on the demo quest site, if it is a reasonable sized file.  PM me.

[waffer]

Well, just to bump this thread, I can tell tell you what grade we got...
We got an "MVG", wich is the highest grade. ^^

[Barbarian]

Can't down-load the file, I get a "File does not exist" error.

[viktor]

Can't down-load the file, I get a "File does not exist" error.

me to.

[waffer]

Can't down-load the file, I get a "File does not exist" error.

me to.

Well, sorry about that, but my webhost (yes its a free webhost, so I shouldnt excpect anything more, i know) has decided to shut my account down for 24h because of to much traffic (FYI, they are going to shut down my account for good in some weeks because of to little traffic ^^) but it would be up for download again later today or tomorrow

[Barbarian]

Okay. I managed to get a download of it this time.

First impressions: I don't like that you have it bundled in a forced installer program. Kind of made me nervous. Also, doing it that way doesn't allow me to access the Windows Setup program if I wanted to change any settings for the game. Really, I think AGSers would appreciate more if your games files was Zipped and wasn't bundled with a forced installer.

Okay, so I find the game directory then run the program. It starts of a with a couple minutes of text with the opening story? There's no appearant way to skip this, so, each time the game is started, I need to wait for a couple of minutes before I can access anything.

Some other comments I'll put in hidden text:

Spoiler

I tried talking to the bird. So, the bird has a big conversation with me, calls me something like a smart-ass, then turns into a giant? I don't really understand what the heck all that was about, especially if this game is supposed to be a History-based type game? I guess you guys were trying to throw that strange bit in for some kind of wierd humor effect?

So, going to pick some berries, I meet the Samurai? by his horse. I find out the Samurai is hungry and wants some food before he'll talk to me more. Anyways, when I tried to look at the Samurai, I get a game crash, something about "Invalid Message number 79" or somesuch.

The walking speed of the character is painfully slow. There's no kind of indication of things that I'm able to actually able to have any kind of interactions with, it's more like a guessing game I what I can actually do anything with. As far as I can tell, there's only 2 rooms/areas that I'm able to explore. Of course, after a few failed attempts of sitting through the un-skipable starting text, and the game repeatedly crashing on me when trying any interactions with the Samurai and his Horse, for the moment this adds to the frustration level of the game. From what I can tell, the game demo takes up about 16MB of disk space, and as it stands right now with all of the problems I mentioned, it hardly seems to justify that.

[close]

I'm sorry if I seemed harsh in my critisism. You guys looked like you did try and put some good effort into it, and it may prove to be in interesting story/game with some more work. I love Asian History and culture, and from what you described about your game before I was looking forwards to see it in action, but, I guess the demo you've released thus so far was a bit of a dissapointment in a few ways for me.

Please don't think I'm attacking your hard work or ideas. I'd really like to see you guys do wonderful with your project. Take or throw away any of my comments as you wish. Ultimately, the project is yours and should take shape of the vision of what you guys intended it to be. I wish you all the best, and if/when you do have a completed game version, I might like to see it then.Ã,  *Salutes*

[waffer]

Hi Barbarian, no offense taken

I understand that a install program make you nervous, could have installed anything, but I promise I didnt put anything bad in there The problem with the winsetup is that I just renamed the demo executable to Project Japan.exe. Just rename it to Demo.exe and it would work (play the game in 640*480). And of course, you should be able to skip the intro.

Lets get on to that bird then, this was, as you said, just a crazy idé. Did you manage to read everything that the bird said? if you did, then maybe we should have tried to make a completly serious game, and if you didnt then maybe the "fun" part wont be so fun anyway

I got the same error as you with the samurai so theres a bug.

The demo was very buggy and we knew that (thats why its called a beta-demo ^^) we released it because we knew there was a chance that we would never work on it again and we just wanted some comments on it.

But as I said, no offense taken, I just think its cool to have some comments on the game.  The game will probably never be released as the the others are doing there military service and I dont really have any inspiration to continue on my own.

But it was fun working with the game, as I wrote in the first post it was a school project. Of course the goal wasnt to make a game but to learn how to work as a group and how to work with projects. I think I have learned some things that can be usefull in the future. You might wonder why there wasnt more than 2 scenes in the demo (actually we had more, but not that playable ) when we had 1 whole year to work on it. Well, what can I say? One reason why, was that we couldnt work with it at school. This was due to lack of time and computer problems, as restrictions of for example wich files we could download. So all the work on the game had to be done at home. So what happens then, when 4 young men gets to work with something at home in front of the computer, well you have probably guessed right, nothing We didnt make much progress until after christmas when we got together and worked over a weekend. During this time we got a lot of work done, but after that we had a hard time to find another date when we all could come together again.

nah, now I'm too tired to write more, maybe another day.

[Borish da second]

Tjena, behöver ni hjälp me nåt? Ja kan alltid beta testa eller göra hemsidan...

For those who didnt understand me:

Hi, do you need help with anything? I can always beta test or do the site...

[waffer]

Tjena, behöver ni hjälp me nåt? Ja kan alltid beta testa eller göra hemsidan...

For those who didnt understand me:

Hi, do you need help with anything? I can always beta test or do the site...

Tjena Borish, tack föare erbjudandet men som jag skrivit tidigare så äare det ingen som jobbar med spelet längre pga att 3/4 av gruppen äare i lumpen och själv har jag ingen inspiration att jobba med det själv. Men tack ändå.

Hi Borish, thanks for the offer but as I wrote earlier there is no one working on the game because 3/4 of the team is doing their military service and I dont have any inspiration to work on it by myself. But thanks anyway.

[Borish da second]

Förlåt, såg inte de, läste typ inte hela tråden

Sorry, didn't see that, didn't really read the whole thread