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While the rest of the team is busy putting the final touches on our beta build, I've been writing so many additional hotspot descriptions that taking a break and making a quick custom pick-up animation felt like a real fun distraction

Thanks, guys! Now back to my 102-point revisions list for the beta build...

Yeah, adding some real lighting is in the plan, plus some extra layers, but  we're focused on pushing out the beta build asap, so those nice to haves will probably have to wait til release proper

We weren't exactly happy with our previous main menu screen, so I've overhauled all the graphics and now they parallax-scroll in what I dare say is a pretty sexy way.



Yay!

I just came in to say that I love the nickname BunnyShoggoth.

One day I'll get my hands on that Ben Chandler and yank out of him the arcane knowledge of both outputting a ton of good art AND playing tons of games. Oneee daaaay...

No. Sadly my game playing has been reduced by a whopping 80-90% (yes, really!) just by working on Gibbous. Gonna have a lot of catching up to do once we're done with this thing!

Hey, it's not a problem, really. I'm all for talking adventure games and Lovecraft in general in this space (I don't think there's enough interest to warrant a separate thread... OR IS THERE? )
Personally I'm still salty Agustin Cordes' The Case of Charles Dexter Ward didn't make int on Kickstarter back in 2014. I understand people felt it was wrong to double dip before delivering on Asylum, but it's still a shame.

With the official Call of Cthulhu video game delayed until next year, what I'm really, really, REALLY looking forward to and buying day one is The Sinking City. Granted, not really an adventure game, but we can't really be that picky

Yes! Bought it right when it came out, only got to play about an hour and haven't really had time to touch it since, but looking forward to it!

Mandle, you'll have to forgive me, I am old and my memory is feeble and I'm the kind of guy who tells the same joke to the same people until someone stops him

Blondbraid, true! Was just listening to this beautiful thing:



...and there's a part where the actors reading it discuss exactly that, how even in his 20s the man knew himself and his style so well that he would self-parody himself in writing. Granted, that doesn't mean that it's an easy task for a rube like me to successfuly mix comedy and cosmic horror together... But I am encouraged by the fact that I feel I've found my voice with it and writing comes naturally. This does not make it necessarily good, it merely makes it not disjointed, but that's an important step to feel you have conquered when you mix such radically different alchemical elements together. Really curious how the beta will be received from a writing standpoint

[Twitch channel]

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.

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

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

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

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

@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

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'.

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

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

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

Hey! It's screenshot saturday!

Sooo pumped for this! Woot woot!

Aaah, I thought there was a new one already. Waitiiiing

Kitteh demonstrating adventure game players' approach to solving puzzles:

[is now published and a featured post on Gamasutra]

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.

The link on the picture is not working.

But that looks great.

Whoops, PHPBB kicking my butt I put the link above the gif now.