Messages

Hrgrfrmmmble... I used the name "Dawning Brilliance Productions" because I made ESPER under the auspices of a group called the Dawning Brilliance society, which in turn is the "master group" for the real ESPER the game is based on... So I'm safe!!!

But I must agree. I would like to know why Grundislav had Ben Jordan change companies in the fourth game... Is it because the game had a new look and was a little more mature, and thus he wanted to promote it with a less IMmature name than "Monkey... whateveritwas?"

The old big version has been replaced by the bugfixed one... Go to the games page (click my name and then click the name of the game in my profile for a shortcut) and then download the mirror instead of the first download option.

EDIT: Although, I'm noticing, the file server is down for the moment. GRRAAWLLRGG! I can't remember ever GROWLING so many times in forum posts. This has been a most aggravating venture. Can anyone suggest GOOD, SOLID hosting that wont be crappy every eight and a half seconds?

Hey, looking for character animators for the ESPER series. Check my first game (and notice how crappy all the character animations were in it!!!) There are going to be quite a few games in the series I hope, but you don't have to be in it for the long run. I want to keep doing the backgrounds, so check those out and see if you can come up with characters that will work with the backgrounds ("atmospheric," the characters should look lke they belong in a horror movie... desaturization, pale skin, black clothes, lots of shading... the works...). Any interested party either play the first ESPER game or look at the screenshots and try to redo the main character, host it on ImageShack or something and PM me the link. It might be a good thing to have more than one person working on it, since there might be quite a few characters.

I just got a brand new graphics tablet! I hated having to draw using just a mouse, and the graphics in my first game suffered tremendously beause of it. Here is the complete works of my first 24 hours with my new delicious wonderbaby...


A guy. You know, I hate it when some kid likes anime too much and always tries to copy it, and sucks...Ã,  Unfortunately, I used to be that kid, and now that I'm older I CANNOT draw right anymore... Just goes to show you: kids, don't get too wrapped up in anime... It can control your life... right down to your ability to decently draw people...


A beautiful maiden loking off into the sea, done in (fake) charcoals. I hate drawing with real charcoals, so ths is just the thing I need to get started in some artsiness...


And now, to offset the beautiful maiden, the horribly waterlogged and badly decomposed Queen of Hate, Samara (Sadako) herself! TV effects made using Project Dogwaffle...


I don't know what this is, but you can see my predilection of using anime where it is not needed....


Yet ANOTHER overly anime'd guy. Do you notice how all my guys are looking off into the sky? Why is that? Does it mean anything? Is there a psychologist in the house?


My old pal, Cthulhu. Did you know tht Cthulhu really IS a real thing? Lovecraft didn't make him up. Ktulu was a god worshipped both by the ancient Sumerians and was known to the greeks as the Kraken. He even appears in the Bible, where he is mistranslated from the aramaic as "virgin..."
EDIT: What the hell? I misquoted the couplet! Dammit!!!

And finally...


...Don't ask. and yes, I even felt the need to tell you in what medium I drew this down at the bottom right...

These were going to be the backgrounds for ESPER: The Town on the Edge of Darkess, but I determined that since I couldn't makea decent 3d character that using the 3D backgrounds with a 2D character would look kinda crappy. Made them with the free version of Caligari Truespace:


The cabin of the boat. Note the strange portholes. Originally I had made them with a square brush, but they didn't seem to show up, so I used a round one and they did. Unfortunately, in the final render they showed up... Better late than never...


The church, from the door looking in. I was originally going to make this a first person game, so I started you off far away and then you walked to...


here. I LOVE this one in comparison to the one I actually used in the game, save for that door, which looks totally out of place.


Then you turn around and face the door, which AGAIN for some reason shows that doors don't like being rendered in 3D scenes.


Right up on the door now, going back outside.

And finally, what was going to be the title screen. Notice the church on the desk.. That is the model I made to use as the outside of the church, but I never rendered it as such.

NOTE: On the books are the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a picture of the All-Seeing eye astride the unfinished temple made by my pal Ravean, and the book that is standing up behind the others has YHWH written in Hebrew letters... supposedly, this is the most holy name of God, and I thought it would be in place in a game about an anti-occult team of investigators.

I just heard about that in the ESPER thread under completed game announcements. I was not able to playtest all eight endings. There might be a bug that I don't know about, but one of the endings does involve you dying in the ship even if you have "iced" Lucy. You may have forgotten to do something in a hidden area of the game...  However, if it is the exact same ending you get as if you say yes, then it is a bug.

Jane: you can use the GUI from the main screen to access save/load

About leaving and coming back... sorry, I didn't plan for that one... But there are eight different endings you can get.  Are you getting the EXACT same thing happening? If so, that is a bug. However, there is only ONE very good ending, and you might have missed it.

Thx, Brisby! The big and non-buggy is up, it's just on a really slow server. The little one has the additional fix now of the cursors in the inventory screen fixed (how come no one noticed that?). You might not be able to get it... It took me three hours to upload it on highspeed! Grrr again...

Sorry 'bout that, jane... You must have the old version. the newer one has alot of bugfixes, and that's one. I only uploaded it about two hours ago. Like I just said in my last post, it's a REALLY slow server, and I'm working on ways around that. If you have the smaller version, I'm going to try to upload it onto the AGS upload server (@SSH: I'm doing it and it says it's done, but it isn't giving me a link to it... I left it on for three hours and nothing ever happened ), but the bigger version is staying where it is. Unfortunately, the webmaster at www.theespers.org says to put it on the server (and I own the damn website!!!) would take up too much of our "bandwich," as he calls it... Grrr... But I hope you can get the newest, bugfixed version and enjoy it!!!

Fixed! Here's the smaller file, and I'll be working on getting the bigger one online later tonight...

http://www.savefile.com/files/3263173

EDIT: The bigger file actually got the smallest as an ACE (I tried ZIP and RAR), so I hope everyone has an unzip frogram that will do ACE's. The smaller one is a ZIP: I saw no need to save 1MB or so of space using a non-standard file type that not everyone might have access to. On the bigger file, however, I saved about 8 MB, which is the entire size of the smaller game!

So, alas, it shall be available for download later tonight, and as soon as I get both finished uploading I will put the link in here and add both links to the AGS games archive.Ã,  Thanks everyone for motivating me to make this project good and to set a deadline for myself. If you guys didn't show the response you did, I probably would have just posted the unfixed original and let it be!

And here's the big file! And that's that!!!
http://www.savefile.com/files/4718255

Graargh... It is a VERY slow connection. Took 3 hours to upload the bigger file with high speed, takes about 30 minutes to download the smaller file with high speed. I'm going to try to put the smaller one on the AGS uploader site again (if it works), and if so, I'll post the link here.

Hey... Is there a place where all the RoN games are archived, so I don't have to go mucking about in the games section loking for them?

Graargh! Sorry, folks, but ESPER is offline. For some reason, out of the three uploaders I used (including the AGS upload site) all of them had problems, and fileFront deleted the old ones instead of replacing them, so now I can't get them uploaded anywhere. The one that was already on the AGS site still exists (the link is somewhere in this thread) but other than that, the final version of both the deluxe and compact versions of ESPER: The Town on the Edge of Darkness, will be offline until I can get one of these bloody sites to work!
   In the Meantime, here's what you're NOT getting:

   ---A full version, with animations, that is fully bugfixed
   ---The smaller version, which was bugfixed and had its own cursors, had a problem I'm surprised no one mentioned: the look and use icons in the inventory screen were all whacked out.... I fixed those
   ---Both versions now have a nice, rewritten PDF manual
   ---Both versions now come with The Town on the Edge of Darkness original short story.

   Sorry guys. I'm working on it...

I tried DivX (whatever the simpler one is... for some reason the more advanced DivX codec doesn't want to work) and Indeo 5.1... Can you suggest any others, or 3rd party video compression software that might be better? It's too bad ZIP is the standard file compression format, too, because I got it to 40-some MB archiving it as an ACE...

---And thanks for the complements...

Thanks a bundle guys. You sure know how to treat a newbie well! I'm glad to see my game has had such a good response in the first day of it being available... I know it's not the best, but I worked on it seriously (maybe not quite so seriously with some of the animations) and tried to make a game that would be fun, enjoyable, not too hard to beat and maybe a little creepy! I hope my next ESPER game, and my MAGS entry for this month, will be just as well received, if not better...

And if anyone liked ESPER enough to work with me, especially in the graphics department, I would appreciate it!

You're right, Yvonne. I sure hope it was worth the time you spent. It isn't the greatest game in the world, and I wonder exactly what it was that caught your attention so much that you decided to brave Hell and high water to get at it!

Gijs: I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the recommendation. It will stay in the short games section. I worked for a long time trying to make it take a while, but what takes so long to put together doesn't take very long to beat

I'm not sure what the problem is! 40-something people from AGS have downloaded it already! Here's how fileFront works (BTW: I highly recommend FileFront! Free hosting on siles up to a gig with as many files as you care to add!) It's a long process, but I can store many large files on fileFront, so it's kinda worth it for everybody... Click on the link (http://files.filefront.com/ESPER1zip/;4085708;;/fileinfo.html) and then click the large DOWNLOAD NOW icon. The next screen gives you a list of mirrors. Try one, and if it doesn't work, try another... the game is hosted on all of them... by clicking the DOWNLOAD link on the far right of the listing. It will contact the server and prepare the file for you, and when it is ready it will tell you to "Please click this link to download...." Do so, and it will come up with the standard dialogs asking where you want to save it. I'm not sure why you can't do it, unless you have a REALLY good firewall turned on...

I had a problem in my last game that made it so I had to make an entire room dedicated specifically to text during fadeouts... I wanted to try to make a fadeout, show text, and then fade back in, but as soon as the text was displayed, the background instantly came back up! What is the reason for that?

**sighs in exasperation** Sure. For you, and because you asked so nice, I'll do it. It shouldn't be too hard, since all I really need to do is delete the new cutscenes and put the PlayVideo script back in their place. Tomorrow night, same bat time, same bat channel. (I'm still only going to post the newest version of the game in the AGS games list, but the fixed game with animations should be available at the same link here in the forums. Oh, and BTW, I just got my graphics tablet in the mail today, so the next game should have MUCH improved graphics!!!

I really like it! Except the tree thing (the cliff would totally not support that!), and the moon refelection, and all those other things that were already mentioned. Although I have to say, I kind of LIKE the black outlines... If you had a 3D rendered object in the middle of the scene it wouldn't fit. In my last game, I went with my crappy 2d art for backgrounds rather than some really nice 3D backgrounds I made with TrueSpace for the sole reason that a 2D character in a 3D world would look horrible. I really think the outlines on the wagon make it loo "part" of the scene. VERY nice. I just wish the free version of TrueSpace had toon shaders.
   Photoshop CS, huh? so you used a tablet? I just got mine in the mail yesterday, and I've never been happier!

Rui: The original large file with the animations is staying just like it was. I have heard a bunch of people say they like the game, but no one has said anything about the animations and everyone wants a smaller file size. Thus, unless I get people saying they want otherwise, the animated version is on permanent hiatus. As a matter of fact, although it is still hosted and can be downloaded at the link given earlier, I will be REPLACING the one in the AGS games directory. This present version fixes all bugs spoken of earlier EXCEPT the antialiasing, which like I said wasn't working. I took advantage of it for the cursors though, because without the antialiasing the cursors would not have been very visible since it is a dark game and they are, likewise, dark cursors. The new download link is HERE: http://files.filefront.com/ESPER1zip/;4085708;;/fileinfo.html