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Again, brilliant. Keep up the great work.

Most of all I found the GF document an incredibly inspiring read, that really gave me that nice warm "I love developing games" feeling. It also does offer a good example as to how one can boil down the essentials in an easily overview-able document, as I must agree the Torin's passage document completely failed to do. It mostly made me dizzy. But as a holy bible for a development team to follow, I'm sure the TP document did a good job. It seemed to cover pretty much EVERYTHING.

On a side note, it is interesting how Mr. Lowe , in the TP design doc, actually discusses the fact that the in-game hint system will lead to less hint-book sales than usual.  I wonder how much of Sierra's total revenue back then came from selling hint-books for their some times ridiculously difficult games...

I personally feel that from a sheer dramaturgic perspective, having the lead character die every twenty minutes, doesn't really give the story a coherent feeling. I'm not saying I don't enjoy watching Roger die in all sorts of humiliating ways, all I'm saying is that it does leave the player with a rather disjointed narrative. (Which I think perhaps is one of the reasons why I never really managed to bond with any story or character for that matter in a common fps or arcade game.)

That being said, I can totally understand the love for the Sierra classics. They had a lot of good things going for them. I personally think GK1 is just about one of the best games ever made, and I loved the space quest parser games though frankly I can't remember if I beat a single one of them.

Oh and another thing that has been mentioned but might need to be reiterated: People like different games. That's cool and should be respected. Different things are important for different people. No point convincing people to change their minds. 

It'd make a great opportunity for a great Leisure Suit Larry reference.  Maybe not a cameo, but a reference.

Or maybe a tie-in with crackwell? I loved unhinged. I'm not really a "profanity is funny" kind of guy but that shiet was hilarious.

Good luck with this commercial endeavor of yours, technocrat. I love your stuff. The rail rocked!

Hey, just droppin' a line to say I think this is looking absolutely radical. Really looking forward to its release.

Fight the good fight!

Thanks Armageddon! I had seen the pic before but didn't know who made it until now. 

I take it you projected your 2D drawing onto a 3D model, and then filled in the blank faces? Are you using actual lighting or just the shading from the drawing?

It's almost all shading from the drawing. Only thing lit with "real" 3d lights is the airplane. And that was lit with 3d lights in the original as well. Glad you enjoyed the boomshot, it's actually a lot longer than that, the camera pans down from far, far above the city.

Strangely, the characters still look a bit blurry in some of the closeup shots. Are they not rendered at the full game resolution?

They had to be downsampled for performance reasons actually. They're pretty close to 1:1 though. I'm guessing we'll get away with it with some sharpening in post.

My face just melted off my face! I hope the volume of music and voice are controlled separately, those voices were WAY too loud for my eyes.

heh yes don't worry, there are separate controls for music and speech volume.

[Grim:]

Grim: Sorry the character design is not your cup of tea. I guess either you think the whole mask thing works, or you don't. Most masks in TJD are pretty much faithful to the original carvings, if african masks freak you out, I'm totally cool with that. I personally, am afraid of cats. 

In other news, we finally released our teaser trailer. Please check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_czCnC1zJI&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

oh and please spam absolutely everyone you know with this trailer.  8) Reaching out and getting seen is ridiculously difficult. Thank you, internet!

I'm updating to say that we've now started chronicling our development on twitter, so if you're curious about more behind the scene type info such as how we develop stuff, be sure to follow me, @theowaern on twitter.

It's good to see so many of you AGS'ers there. I expect getting tons of nice AGS game-building-spam in the coming future!



Above is a pic from a short video Henrik made while working on a short little cinematic for the Journey Down, watch the whole video on his twitter at @Henrik_Englund

If you're more interested in the techy, real nerdy stuff, @skygoblinmarkus is the one you should follow.

Hope to see you on twitter!

Just updating to say we pretty much wrapped up voice work on our last major character, Matoke, and that this means we're practically finished with ALL voice work for chapter one of The Journey Down. It has been one heck of a project to get all these actors and lines to do what we want them to, but finally this gigantic project is starting to wrap up.

If you're interested in hearing some voice samples from Matoke or any of our other characters for that matter, be sure to have a peek at our dev blog, where every major character in the cast have their own spotlight.

Hey I just wanted to drop a line and say good job with the bake sale!

I've only finished the rail so far but am in the middle of falling skywards and I'm enjoying it a lot. Kudos to however started the whole bake sale thing. An honorable cause and an asswhoppin' bunch of games - can't ask for much more than that. Looking forward to more bake sales!

Yay for progress! Looking forward to this. Keep it up.

THanks for the kinds words guys! I'm glad the stuff we push out there is getting your approval! 

We recently wrapped up implementation of all the core puzzles and key interactions of chapter one of The Journey Down and have now moved over to the actual polishing of it all. This phase should by no means be underestimated though, just the sheer size of the task of making bwana move to the correct location, turn to the correct angle, and play the correct animation on every single interaction we've got - is a gigantic one.

In short, we seem to somehow magically still be on schedule and are still geared for a PC and Mac release some time by the end of March.



Here's a pic from inside Bwana's dented old airplane. I've spent the last week working on implementing Lina's different animations into the scripts, and this is one of the scenes I wrapped up yesterday. The actual animation work is done by my colleague Henrik though, I'm just standing in as script-monkey.

I also did some ranting on the dev-blog today about implementing emotion in characters, if you're curious, please check it out here.

Now you've got me wanting to read the book!

The book was a fun read for me, as a fan of the DIG, but I'd recommend reading RAMA or 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke instead. They do the same thing but way better. The book left very many interesting stones unturned, and never really fleshed out the characters in a satisfying manner. Also it wrapped up equally abruptly as the game. I was definitely hoping for more there.

I would agree that the strong points of THE DIG (Game) were by far it's ambiance, the music, design and voice, they we're all spot on. I agree that some of the puzzles felt pretty forced though. I remember having to resort to a walkthrough too, which is never a good memory to have of an adventure game.

good thing I've gotten back to work on planning out the rest of the series!

Good news! I'm strongly looking forward to the next installment. 

Hey congrats on releasing this! I wish I somehow could find the time to actually play games. 

Don't worry anian, there will be shadow.   

Here's a new screenshot featuring the full main cast if anyone is interested.



In other news we just wrapped up voice work on Bwana. Feels good as bananas having that wrapped up. 1350 lines in the bag. 8)

Absolutely ballbustingly gorgeous as usual. Good job, man!

Did that bouncerguy on the ship always look like he could easily change his red jacket with a brown one

ehrm. That USED to be up to the imagination. 

He's got a french accent though so don't get any ideas.