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Hey guys!



I bet at least some o y'all have been around long enough to remember "The Journey Down", no?

Well, long story short, I built a little AGS game by that name a long long time ago and then a couple years later, I managed to convince my buddies at SkyGoblin that we'd remake the game at higher resolution and with new tech, as a commercial project. So we did. We launched the first chapter about five years ago, the second three years ago, and now finally we're about to launch the third and final chapter of the trilogy this coming Thursday (September 21)! It has been an incredibly bumpy ride, but finally reaching goal is an amazing feeling! And without AGS, the TJD series (something my life has revolved around for over 10 years) would never have existed - imagine that!

Some of you I've had the pleasure of hanging out with at previous AdventureX's, I certainly hope to go this year as well but I honestly don't have a clue what lies ahead of me beyond the JD3 release. If you're curious about the TJD3 launch or have any questions about the business of adventure games (I never considered myself a business man, but after building and pushing these games all these years, I've worked up quite a lot of experience) please don't hesitate to ask!

The AGS community has always been supportive, and I'd love, if possible, to give something back. Thanks for being awesome, guys!

Oh and here's a youtube preview of the TJD3 soundtrack. My favorite song from the game.

[There will always be saxophone in TJD!]

Breaking news! The kickstarter has launched!





We announced our first stretch goal today in a fancy video update. Please check it out!

At 80%, the kickstarter for TJD has scored some pretty awesome coverage so far, with the most recent ones being:

Kotaku - Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Eurogamer

Hey guys! Long time no see.

Remember The Journey Down?

Once upon a time I made an AGS game called "The Journey Down: Over the edge". It won some awards and I got carried away and decided to turn it into a bigger, fancier commercial product. (Albeit no longer in AGS) Years later we've launched the first two chapters (And got some pretty darn good reviews!!!) and are now working on the third and final part of the series. I'm proud to announce that it's coming along beautifully! We'll be launching a kickstarter in october to help wrap up funding for the last leg of development and I figured I'd be a complete dolt if I didn't make a thread about that here. So, from now on, expect project updates right here!

As you can probably tell, the setting has shifted somewhat. It's no longer film noir, but rather an eighties/nineties action move type mood. And we're LOVING working with it.

If anyone's curious, here's a new interview I did at gamescom about our current state: Video interview with Adventure Corner (youtube)

The TJD3 soundtrack is being produced by Jamie Salisburry, the insanely talented guy who took over after my good friend Simon passed. The soundtrack too, features a substantially different mood than the previous games, but don't worry, there will be saxophone. There will always be saxophone in TJD!

And here's a sneak peek at some of the new and old characters featured in TJD3:

 

Expect more shiny pics as we progress in working with our kickstarter campaign materal! And please don't be shy with your feedback.

Thanks again for taking your time and also thanks for being awesome. Without AGS and the awesome community surrounding it, there would be no TJD.

[About time I do the official "OMG we have left AGS" post, I guess.]

About time I do the official "OMG we have left AGS" post, I guess.

Yeah it's true. We've decided to build our own home-grown tech for the HD release of The Journey Down. Why? Because building the engine from scratch turns out to be more fun, put simply. Also, if we build it from scratch we'll be the masters of our limitations, something we much prefer compared to being at the mercy of someone else's. Our current goal is to release chapter one HD in Q1 2012 on Pc, Mac, iOS and android - Something that would have been pretty much impossible if we were to cling to our old AGS ways, for very many different reasons.

For those not familiar with TJD, chapter one was released last year as a free AGS game and can be found here. Since then, me and my buddies at SkyGoblin have decided to re-release chapter one in HD with speech and added story and puzzles, but this time as a commercial project, not built in AGS.

Our hope in releasing a HD version of chapter one is to set the bar at a level awesome enough to ensure the commercial viability of keeping up the work on the coming chapters. If that works or not though, remains to be seen!

The sales pitch:

The Journey Down is a classic point 'n click saga with a black African twist, owing much of its character and pattern design to traditional central African arts such as carvings and masks from the Makonde and Chokwe tribes. Mixed with an all original jazzy reggae soundtrack, feedback-oriented puzzles and tons of hand painted environments, the unique cultural fusion of The Journey Down is bound to draw you in.

In the first part of four, Over the Edge, our hero Bwana and his trusted sidekick Kito struggle to make ends meet at their run-down gas station. One day their lives turn upside down as they're thrown into a twisting plot of corruption, laughs and brainteasing adventure.

Follow the development of The Journey Down on skygoblin.com, and check out more screenshots over at the official webpage.





PS. Do you guys mind if I use this thread to spam updates about the game's progress? I realise the information is not as relevant now that it is no longer an AGS project, but the more channels we can spam, the bigger the odds we'll actually be able to reach out with this huge pile o pixels.

Peace. 

[SkyGoblin]

I am proud and happy to announce that SLX Games (The Gothenburg, Sweden based company where I work for a living) has now merged with SkyGoblin (the pseudo-fake company I started for the Journey Down development group) and now form one single entity: SkyGoblin. "What does this change?" I hear you ask. Nothing, really. It just makes life for everyone involved in the development of "The Journey Down" a lot less confusing, since it's now developed under one flag, instead of two.

The core team behind the game is still exactly the same. Namely me, the two programmers Mathias and Markus, as well as our animator Henrik and our musician Simon. The only real difference is that SLX Games (now SkyGoblin) as a corporate entity makes a large official focus shift toward working on the commercial release of "The Journey Down", rather than spending all its time working on our other title, the social mmo "Nord".

A look at the charter interior in the high-res commercial release of TJD.



The cockpit of Kaonandodo's ol' airplane, now a cacti farm!

So why am I posting this? Mostly because I wanted to share the good news of us now focusing a lot more on TJD development and because I wanted to share my relief of now having made my life a tiny bit less schizophrenic on the "where I work" front. Also, hopefully giving our development group one title instead of two will reduce the risk of confusion a bit.

Since the initial AGS engine source code release (and since we now finally finished our silly facebook-credits implementation into Nord) our two programmers have finally been able to start poking around in AGS to make it 720p friendly, which is the resolution we intend to release TJD in. I would like to take this chance to thank CJ for the bold move of releasing his precious source. A highly commendable and ballsy move to say the least. I am confident projects such as TJD and other similar commercial game efforts will benefit from it greatly.

Chapter one of the fully voiced, puzzle extended, high-res version of TJD is scheduled for a 2011 Q4 release and its development can be followed over at www.skygoblin.com

So, after lugging my five huge bags of (mostly) scifi books to the used book store, I got a 500 Kr bill and the question "If you wan't a couple of new books, just grab something from the shelf". Now, I'm about to move to another home, so the whole point of getting rid of these books was to not have so much lose junk to lug around. I was about to decline and walk out the door, when the familiar DIG logo caught my eye from one of the bookshelves.



I figured, heck, how much can it suck? I'll give it a chance.

Now, I'm no huge DIG fanatic, I like the game like any other average point n clicker obviously would, I am however specifically in love with the games' backdrop art, music and overall ambiance. The actual story never really stuck out to me as something worth getting all literate about. However, I decided to revisit the world of Cocytus a quickie by reading the book, and I'm very glad I did.

It brought me back to the beautiful purple/orange world and had me bathing in it's visual wonders once again. I liked being back. The story however was no doubts lacking, as everything that really mattered sort of suddenly got insta-solved on the last two pages of the book. I must admit though that I remember having the same feeling when beating the game. All pieces of the puzzle sort of dropped in place in a period of five minutes at the end, leaving the player/reader nothing but dazzled by all the cheap auto-happy-solutions. I personally, would not have minded if Foster took some liberties with the original story and tried to avoid the big deus-ex-machina type solution, or at least tried to embed it a bit better into the overall story arc.

As a stand-alone novel I think I would have dissed this book quite badly if it weren't for the fact that I have played the game and loved it's ambiance and art direction. As it is now, I found it a pleasant way to pass the time when sitting on the tram zooming about in Gothenburg.

Now, I'm curious to hear if anyone else here has read the book, and if so, what where your feelings about it? Also, are there any die-hard DIG fans out there who read the book? Did it strengthen the story or break it?

(Note: I posted this on mixnmojo a week or so ago but got no interesting replies whatsoever, thus I'm re-posting it here, hoping to find some firey soul who wants to discuss this with me.)

edit: PS. If anyone here is in Gothenburg, and would like to get their hands on this book, drop me a line and I'll gladly give it to you.

[Hey all!]

Hey all!

Just droppin' a line to say me and Henrik (the animator on the commercial release of the Journey Down) have just started some form of development blog over at www.slxgames.com. For you who are curious about our JD progress and/or our general bantering regarding our other projects/tomfoolery, please, drop by! If people visit the damn thing we might actually bother keeping it updated too!  

[DOWNLOAD HERE]

DOWNLOAD HERE

Me and my colleague Henrik have just begun preliminary work on the JDHD project and are currently experimenting with codecs etc to see what works technically, and what doesn't. We've quickly thrown this slightly moronic "tech demo" together, to try out running Scotch's theora plugin together with some high res character stuff, on top of each other.

So why am I posting this here?

In short, I'd be very thankful if anyone out there would like to download the "game" and see that it runs properly on their computer. We are afraid we are about to spend a couple months working on something that later will turn out not to run properly on the average home computer.

* Is the ogg movie showing and looping in the backdrop? (it's short and isn't supposed to loop seamlessly.)
* Are you getting a decent framerate?
* Does it initialize in fullscreen? (does it crop oddly?)
* Is the character scaling smooth or are you experiencing any nasty tearing/artefacts?

Walk to the bottom right corner to hear my own brilliant voice acting!
Quit the game with good ol' CTRL+Q

THANK YOU!

[What is JDHD?]

A month or so ago I realized I'm an idiot for not so much as attempting to monetize on The journey Down. Thus I made up my mind: For better or for worse, chapter two was going to be a commercial release. After having done loads of painting and some early prototyping I realized I needed a better testing platform for the new framework than a brand new chapter.... So, the idea of JDHD was born.

What is JDHD?

In short, JDHD is (hopefully) going to be the polished up commercial release of chapter one of the Journey Down. A rather odd and economically suicidal venture, I must admit, but a fun one to build nonetheless!

So what makes JDHD more awesome than the original you might wonder?

Well, let me sum up some of the features I hope to implement:

* I hope to have a 1280 x 800 px canvas (depends on AGS development)
* pre-rendered 3d characters for smoother (and additional) animations
* a full voice cast
* more sound effects and feedback in general
* built in hint system for n00bs.
* additional puzzles and backstory.

So what is the purpose of this thread?

Well, at first I was going to create a "games in production" thread, but seeing how strictly those rules are being followed, I figured I'd stay clear of it until I have any real screenshots to show off. So the point of this thread really is primarily for me to vent some of my thoughts on this project, but also, hopefully a good place for discussions regarding the improvement from the original game.

Did you play it? Did some specific puzzle bother you? Did you encounter anything that felt broken or out ouf place? Was it too easy? Too short? Please, take this chance to make yourself heard! I am interested in improving as many aspects of the experience as possible.

Thirdly (is that a word?) I intend to post updates here with new assets as they drop in, to have a nice quick place to receive feedback in.

Kaonandodo's loft in the HD version of chapter one (downsampled). Note the fancy floating GUI!

[This however poses a problem.]

Due to a huge bunch of silly and fun things coinciding at once in my life I am now considering releasing a special edition of chapter one of the Journey Down - as a cheap/humble commercial title. Apart from trying to fix voice acting, remaking the animations and adding a couple of puzzles + back story, I am for obvious reasons planning on releasing the game at a higher resolution than the original version. This however poses a problem.

In my experience, most players run my game on 16:10 wide screen monitors (not to mention the fact that I'm producing it on one). The only alternatives available in AGS as of now are 320x200 and 640x400 - both far too low if I want the game to have a nice, modern, polished feel. (Which is why I'm considering remaking it in the very first place.)

Adding 1280x800 support would be a nice step in shaking off some of AGS's image in the public eye as being a "retro game maker" and would allow future AGS titles to reach out to a larger audience than just us old "golden days of adventure gaming" nerds who love big pixels, thus opening up a bigger market for games created in AGS.

Is this a realistic request? Is it even feasible?

I realize I may be celebrating things a day early, but heck, I'll hopefully be rascally drunk far from any computer tomorrow by this time, so won't have the chance to do my greetings then.

With Christmas and all I hope y'all are getting some time off from work and whatnot so you can spend some quality time with  your beloved family and friends AGS projects! I sure have! Mostly been doing lame pr work though, but still, good to get it done.

Thanks AGS'ers for enriching my life in the odd way that you do! May 2011 see the release of many new juicy adventures!

Yo all!

To celebrate the fact that I finally got my Journey Down site updated, I have decided to release my original cinematic storyboards for public viewing pleasures!

If you're into making cutscenes yourself this may be in interesting read, specifically if you through some mad feat of memory mastery actually remember what the cinematics are like in the finished game. Comparing my storyboards and the actual result is a good way of getting a feeling for what things were better left alone than actually implemented. I had many great ideas, and many utterly lousy ones. Many of them were cut out because I felt they only confused the player, other things were removed since I felt they weren't really worth the effort it would take to make them.

In retrospect I am very happy with the final cut that the game ended up with. Some few things from this original storyboard that are missing would have been fun to implement but all in all I'm very happy that I managed to trim it down so well. (Trimming it down was not only dramaturgically important, but also critical to me actually being able to finish it off.)

Hopefully someone out there finds this an interesting read. If you've got similar documents don't be shy to show them! I'd love to have a peek. 

Hey y'all!

An artist friend of mine who also lives here in Gothenburg, named Erik Zaring has been working with another dude named Anders Gustafsson in making an absolutely balls to the walls gorgeous point n click named THE DREAM MACHINE.

This game has now reached the sweet time in its life where it's finally  available for purchase!

If you're a cheapskate and/or don't take my word for granted regarding getting your moneys worth, I recommend downloading the first chapter, it's free!













Do the indie adventure game crowd a favor and give these guys some love for their incredibly hard work. You can buy all five chapters in a bundle now for the unbelievably low price of 11 â,¬! (Chapters 1 and 2 are ready, the rest of them are under way and will be released as they complete them.)

The art is more or less all made out of clay and cardboard. (How cool is that?!) And it's browser based (flash) and stores your progress online as you go.

A perfect Christmas gift to yourself perhaps?  

Hey all!

I recently finished a new backdrop art tutorial. This one is specifically tailored toward the indie adventure game crowd and has been written in a way that it directly targets the main issues I see with most backdrops in independent adventure games.

The article points out a couple of core problems, and by addressing these we travel between these two pictures in just a matter of minutes:



Please head an over to HardyDev to read the full article.

If you've got any questions or thoughts please keep them public so other readers can see them as well.

Thanks Hardydev for hosting my article:)

I am aiming this question toward anyone who has a playstation console.
Are there any classic adventure game point n clicks available on PSN?
If so, do you have any clue as to their success and sales?

Do such games have a chance to sell? on PSN Is there a market?

Also, what do they charge for such games on PSN in general, and how many hours gameplay do people get/expect?

Hey all!

Just wanted to mention that Simon D'souza, the musician who did all the sweet jazzy reggae music on chapter one of The Journey Down, has just released the entire soundtrack on his website! Also make sure to check out his other freaky musical creations while you are at it, it's balls to the walls whacked out awesome!

Also, here's a neat little mashup video he did with some comments about the music.

Enjoy the music! 

Hey all!

I just pseudo-finished a new section of my website and I figured it would be fun to get some response on the stuff, hence I'm making a bit of a mirror here of my "sketches and thoughts" page. Also as a bonus goodie I'll throw in some deleted scenes here for you to mock and laugh at. Primarily I removed them from the game since I didn't need them. But had they looked better I might have tried harder at keeping them in the game I guess. I think it's probably good for people to see that behind every good looking backdrop there's a million ones that didn't turn out as nice. Brute force does the trick!

I hope someone enjoyed this, I sure had a good time going through my sketches and reflecting about them for a while!

Hey guys!

I've encountered a strange problem in my game. When loading a saved game that was saved in certain specific rooms, it crashes.
Most rooms I save in don't do this, but some certain rooms do it every single time without fail (upon loading them again).

I'm using a simple SaveGameSlot(30, "save game"); and RestoreGameSlot(30); so there's nothing fancy involved whatsoever.
I use the exact same slot every time i save and load.

The game shuts down and throws this:
An exception 0xC0000094 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00483D9D ; program pointer is +220, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (1,0)

Does anyone have a clue as to why it does this?

thanks!

That's right! Chapter 1 is finished! I have been working on and off on this game (and its following chapters) for over 5 years. Man does it feel strange to post this or what?!.... I didn't realize I'd one day actually have to release this and stop picking at it. Wow. What an odd feeling. My brain is tingling. I was hoping to feel a great calm and sort of bathe in an all round sense of closure upon release... instead I get this foreboding feeling that this project has barely started. What a wonderful thought!

A big thanks goes out to all you testers out there. You have done an amazing job hunting down issues!

Here are some screens for those of you who missed the production thread:

The Journey Down is a classical point and click adventure game, full to the brim with puzzles, conspiracies, mystery and adventure!

In chapter 1 "Over the Edge" we follow Bwana and his trusted sidekick Kito, as they struggle to make ends meet at their waterfront gas station in an off-beat place called Kingsport bay. When all hope seems lost and the power company is on their case with a mean threat, something promising appears. A woman. A woman with cash. What strings does she come attached with? What secrets are hiding underneath her fair surface? Find out, in chapter one of The Journey Down!

-

Please drop me a line if you do play through the game and tell me what you liked and what you didn't like. Honesty sucks, but I need it. I'm about to get my hands dirty with chapter two and the more feedback I get this time around, the better chapter two will be.

Also obviously if you find any bugs or odd flaws in chapter 1, please don't hesitate to send 'em my way. I will most likely be updating the exe some time soon with fixes to the issues that arise now that more people start playing the game.

Thanks for playing! I've had a great time making it, I hope you will enjoy it as well.

Here follows a collection of links related to the game:
Jayisgames feature.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun feature.
Game, set watch feature.
Interview on Zombie Apocalypse
INDIE GAMES Freeware Game Pick
PC GAMER Feature
IGC Feature
GAMASUTRA Best of indie games
Review on HardyDev
Review on the Slow down
Interview on the Slow down
Review on CaptainD's PC Gaming Blog
Official GAME JOLT profile

My own article on HardyDev
Sketches and Deleted scenes

[Over the Edge]

Chapter one
Over the Edge

The Journey Down is a classical point and click adventure game, full to the brim with puzzles, conspiracies, mystery and adventure!

In chapter 1 "Over the Edge" we follow Bwana and his trusted sidekick Kito, as they struggle to make ends meet at their waterfront gas station in an off-beat place called Kingsport bay. When all hope seems lost and the power company is on their case with a mean threat, something promising appears. A woman. A woman with cash. What strings does she come attached with? What secrets are hiding underneath her fair surface? Find out, in chapter one of The Journey Down!

The game as a whole (4 chapters) has been a project of mine for over 4 years. Most of this time has been spent writing and sketching the whole plot out, but another large part has been scripting, animating and pasting together that wich is about to be released as chapter 1: Over the Edge. To say that I underestimated the size of this project when I started it would be a tremendous understatement. However, I now finally have enough of chapter 1 finished to feel comfortable with making this post. More or less everything is finished. Some music and sound still needs to be lodged in place, and some final rounds of testing need to be done, but apart from that, we are ready for launch.

Room art (won't appear this hi-res in the game)

I am aiming for a release of "Over the Edge" some time late August. As we all know though, such dates are bound to change.


Key features:

* Dazzling full motion cinematics!
* More than 20 Locations!
* Over 15 bizzare characters!
* An all original jazzy reggae soundtrack!

Keep your eyes on this thread for updates. And, err.. sorry for lurking for five years.  :