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Here's a fresh look at what Kito, our chunky sidekick looks like in 3D!



Hope you like how he came out. Also, check out the devblog to read up on some of the roots of the artwork in TJD!
I'm hoping to make a little series of posts about the artistic origins, and the one I posted yesterday, is the first of what will hopefully be a collection of such posts.

Note to moderators: I realize I should create a GIP thread for this instead. Will do so as soon as we have a couple of solid screens to decorate it with.

[Ascovel:]

Ascovel: Yes, that will no doubts be a challenge! Thanks for cheering us on

zyndikate and Darkdan: Thank you! I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking that we are keeping this in style!

Btw, the custom resolution tech we've integrated in AGS can now be poked at by anyone who's interested, read more about that here.

Cool news, man! Lookin' forward to seeing more pics!

Well, technically, we SkyGoblins just released something.

Please head on over to this thread where Markus just opened up the first shaky version of our custom resolution AGS branch, for everyones unstable enjoyment!

[Armageddon:]

Armageddon: Hey thanks for the detailed feedback, it's appreciated! The model however is basically set in stone by now though. But we have done some hair-tweaks and worked on his pose to make it more curved etc. Don't worry about the jaggedness of his hair now, it's smoother once we do the real render. Also the lighting is still kind of lame.



mode7 and Dualnames: Thank you! We're very glad to have landed in a style so close to that which we had on the 2d characters. It's basically the same look, but with higher res and wayyyyyyyyyyyyy better animation

Calin: We certainly intend to release any line of code that may be of interest to other AGS developers. I need to warn you though, we are building everything very JDHD specific. As I hinted about earlier - we are not interested in any form of backward compatibility whatsoever. The only thing our new version of the AGS editor is built for, is loading and running JDHD, and the only purpose of our acwin.exe is to run JDHD at our desired resolution, with our desired settings.

Also, when I say 720p compatible, all I mean so far is that the editor works with a 720p game canvas and that we can initialize the game in 720p. This looks gorgeous on a widescreen monitor and works great, but since we still haven't had the time to implement any form of letterboxing, it's still all bonkers stretched on a 4:3 screen. But this will come in due time

So again, we will share all "tech" we develop for JDHD but I need to stress that it may be tricky for other developers to simply "one click" apply it to their own projects.



A peek into our awesome version of the AGS editor.

how ear-shatteringly horrible would the main character have sounded if it was an actual norwegian person speaking english instead of vice-versa? Since most of  his lines are in english, I think this is a pretty good solution. =)

Now that is a VERY good point. 

As for portraits, yes, I can see why they did what they did seeing 3d facial expression is such a difficult thing to pull off, but that doesn't mean I think their solution works. Having 2d closeups could perhaps have made some sense if they actually used them for animation or whatever. But now all we get is two different static representations of the character you're listening to at the same time. One in in 3d and one in 2d. It's just weird. (Though admittedly the 2d characters look real good!)

Then again, I never liked character portraits in adventure games. The closest that has ever come to work according to me is the in-dialog portraits in GK1, and even those, I have my doubts about.

Sounds great! a kickass lead cast to say the least.

I played the demo. Very impressive for such a small team.

Not a big fan of the odd cartoon overlay vs 3d character thing though. Strange design choice. They're gorgeous illustrations though I also found the fake Norwegian highly disruptive to immersion, but being Scandinavian I'm clearly biased. Will consider purchasing the game once the price tag has relaxed a bit.

I'm eagerly awaiting a "Journey of Iesir" demo of some sort. 

I would say cleanup/refactoring the code is much more important as keeping FULL BC...

I couldn't agree more. The gigantic patchwork that is AGS could do with a nice enema - flushing out old obsolete thinking with a new, modern framework, built for what AGS (and the market) is now and not what it was ten years ago. Contrary to your opinion though, I think Backwards compatibility can go screw itself. I (having worked on the same AGS project for over 5 years now) certainly appreciate the backwards compatibility of all new versions of AGS that I have updated to during its production.  But from a broader perspective, is it worth the bogging down that the code as a whole suffers from now? I sincerely doubt ut.

That said, I have full understanding for why the AGS code base is what it is at this stage, and I fully respect the choices CJ has done during the project as a whole. That it now is a huge patchwork, was inevitable. I'm merely pushing for a flush now, rather than keeping on patching stuff simply in order to open up ancient AGS projects. Look forward, friends!

I'm just droppin' a line to say I'm using the new poster as a desktop wallpaper - it's absolutely gorgeous.

Keep up the great work, guys!

This looks really cool, nice spooky mood in the scenes, but the GUI looks like it doesn't fit.

I agree. This looks great and moody, but the GUI is hogging ALL the attention. Be warned!
Will keep an eye on this.

Seconded. That walk animation is gorgeous. If you somehow manage to keep the overall animation quality that high, you'll blow me away!

Thanks Markbilly! Glad you find the blog interesting, we're doing our best at keeping it updated and at least pseudo relevant   

We've updated the blog today actually with a sneak peek of the voice of Lina. Check it out and tell us what you think!

Me wants MOAR!

Seconded, it pissed me off when it ended.

But maybe you're right and I think I will redo this background with proper perspective and then decide on how to proceed. I'll post it here when I'm done.

I suggest at least redoing it with proper perspective for the sake of practice. If you don't like the way it turned out, throw it out the window! At least you will have done some good old perspective drawing and will likely have learned a little from it:) The more perspective drawing one does with the help of perspective lines, the easier you will find it is to approximate perspective on the fly, and the more natural everything will look in the long run. Also, breaking the rules is OK in my book, as long as you have a good reason for doing so. Unintentionally doing so always shows.

There's no doubt about it though, the more "correct" your perspective is, the more awkward it will look if you don't scale your characters as they move around in your scene. Personally though I see no reason why you shouldn't scale them. Your characters look like they'd work beautifully with "real" alpha transparency and thus would scale gracefully as they move up and down on your screen. With a more pixly style, I can certainly see why people don't want to scale their characters. But with this high-res sharp look, you've got nothing to loose in doing so.

Good job on handling my criticism with grace, this shows a will to improve, which something I respect a lot.

Stupot: I couldn't agree more. We never liked "SLX Games" as a name. It was born out of a cesspool of acute inspiration-failure-disease.

Ben304: Your support is highly valued and appreciated. Thanks!

Arj0n: Whatever we chose, it will have to be digital distribution. Thanks for the ideas anyhow! (that means no stickers ben:P)

This will likely be a 100% digitally distributed game. I wonder how that will affect sales by the way? Do people still largely buy games to get a physical "trophy" box? Would it for some people in fact be a dealbreaker? Thanks everyone for your thoughts and input. I appreciate it a lot.

Arj0n: Not sure. If enough people seem to want to be able to pre-order it, I'm sure we'll make sure that option exists! I have no idea what goodies to bundle it with though, but I'm sure we can come up with something. Bundling a preorder with goodies feels mandatory if you ask me

Snarky: Thanks, man! As for risking ruining the company, heh, we've always been a small, independent, high risk "will-we-get-paid-or-sacked-next-month?" kind of company so I don't think that will be a bigger problem now than before. I do however sincerely share your concern regarding how difficult it seems to be to make real money off of point-and-click adventure games. Especially when you're self publishing it and have zero funds to put into marketing it. That's the core issue really, I think.

Ascovel: I hope we will be able to build higher-res support in a way so that we can share our new features with the rest of the AGS community and that it won't just dwindle away into a TJD specific branch, but who knows what will happen... Building things game specific will surely be very tempting for our programmers as it usually allows one to cut one heck of a lot of corners. As a team however, we certainly feel that we owe it to the community to share as much tech as possible, so we'll definitely be pushing to keep things as open as we can.

This was hilarious. I laughed all the way trough it. Blowey and Lauren Crackwell make a perfect duo.

I loved the map.

[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