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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsRe: The Little Acre - OUT NOW ON PC AND CONSOLES
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ChaosResolution
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« on: July 01, 2014, 02:43:14 AM »

Edit - 2016 Box Art:


Hello everyone! We're a four-member team called Pewter Games Studios based in Dublin, Ireland. We're developing an adventure game with a bit of a twist, and we wanted to show it to you guys! So without further ado, this is The Little Acre:






The Little Acre is a unique point-and-click adventure game which follows the story of Lily and her father, Aidan, who find themselves transported to a strange world filled with adventure, humour and fantasy.

Both Aidan and Lily are playable characters - the player takes control of each at points. Gameplay features two play styles combined. Firstly, the traditional side view for point-and-click adventures. Like this:


Then, at a certain point in the game the player will travel to another world. When this happens we switch it up and make it isometric:


Throughout the game the player will travel back and forth a couple of times. In the isometric world, it's still a point-and-click. The main difference is that both characters have a main 'mechanic' that they can use to help navigate their way past obstacles, as well as some more creative uses. In the case of Aidan, he finds a glove with a strange stone embedded in the palm. Wearing it, he has the ability to take life from living things and transfer it elsewhere. In the screenshot above, he'll take life from one giant plant and shoot it across the canyon, growing a plant horizontally to create a bridge.

We're still working on Lily, but her mechanic revolves around the idea of how she interacts with other plants and creatures she encounters in the world, armed with just her wooden sword. It's not straight-up combat, but we'll update you guys when we have something to show. For now, here she is running and attacking in isometric glory:

 

We recently made a trailer, which you can check out



We'll do our best to keep you all updated on our progress. Feel free to ask anything at all about the game, us, or both. You can also keep an eye on us at various other places linked below!





Facebook

IndieDB

Twitter

YouTube
« Last Edit: December 13, 2016, 04:17:06 AM by ChaosResolution » Logged
afilionComposer
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« Reply #1 on: July 01, 2014, 07:04:01 AM »

Wow! Love the art! Smiley
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« Reply #2 on: July 01, 2014, 08:25:15 AM »

Quality art, very ambitious, and unique mechanics--I want to keep my eyes on this. Gifs would be nice to clarify how it plays, not sure why they wouldn't load, maybe try a different host?
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« Reply #3 on: July 01, 2014, 03:38:29 PM »

I'm having a very hard time seeing that as a canyon: for some reason my mind really thinks it is a cliff that he's walking up to...had the same problem with it when I watched the trailer which shows that scene.

Like the concept and the art otherwise.
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« Reply #4 on: July 02, 2014, 01:35:18 AM »

Thanks guys!

And yes, you're not the first to express confusion about the canyon/cliff issue. Since that screenshot was taken, we've darkened the lower half of the opposite face a bit more, and made actual particle effects of the spores tumbling off the sides (previously they were only drawn in). If I can figure out why gifs aren't working, I'll upload an updated version later!
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« Reply #5 on: July 14, 2014, 05:47:42 AM »

I'd like to preface this update with some news: The Little Acre has been Greenlit!  Beer!



Now for the hard part - finishing the game!

Most recently, we've been working on implementing some of the new mechanics for Lily. The main idea is that she uses her sword (as seen in the gifs in my first post) to bash things. When she bashes a specific type of plant, such as the one below, it bursts into a cloud of colour.


This coloured cloud of dust attracts a small swarm of butterflies of that same colour to surround her for a short period. Cloaked in a swarm, she can pass certain hostile creatures undetected, such as these:


I'll record some gameplay soon to show it in action. Aside from that, we've been working on a redesign for Aidan since we felt that he was lacking detail. There were also some issues with how well he blended with the background, so he's being lined in a slightly different style:


We're pretty happy with his new look, but unfortunately it means re-doing all of the animations that have already been completed Concerned Anyway, onwards and upwards!
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« Reply #6 on: July 15, 2014, 12:23:09 PM »

Ooow awesome, any 2d adventure game is always welcome here... and especially when it looks fantastic!
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« Reply #7 on: July 17, 2015, 05:06:31 AM »

HELLO? Hello hello hello...

ECHO! Echo echo echo...

It's been a long time since our last post here - almost exactly a year in fact! I've been wanting to return for a while now, and was considering making a new topic because things have changed/progressed so much, but no, this is a development log and I guess that's what it's all about. Showing the ups and downs, the ins and outs. So here we are. Let's call this a bumper edition (heh, forum puns).


First of all, let me bring you up to speed on our studio. My last post was about us getting Greenlit. Immediately after that, we applied for a government funding scheme here in Ireland called the Competitive Start Fund. It was an unpleasant couple of months where we had to take a significant amount of attention away from development, to focus on application forms, presentations, and other nasty business-related stuff. It all worked out in the end though - after a few tries we were awarded the grant, which meant that we got to continue development while also expanding the team a little bit.

Around the time of my last post, we had also just joined the ID@Xbox program (the first Irish company to do so!), but because it was early days and we didn't really know where that was going to go, we didn't say anything. Since then, Xbox have become a much bigger topic of discussion where The Little Acre is concerned. In December we signed the Title License Agreement, and during GDC we announced that The Little Acre would be coming to Xbox One, in addition to Steam. Xbox even uploaded our trailer from their own YouTube Channel:





Since then, they've been a great help where promo is concerned. They often retweet our stuff, make little blog posts which reference our weekly live-streams, and then at E3 they passed around a bunch of double-sided cards which had Little Acre artwork on one side, and the logo with a QR code linking to our website on the other.


They also posted our second trailer on their YouTube channel!





So, onto the game. It has changed, a LOT. The story, characters, and animation style remain the same, but the first thing we did after getting funded was review everything we had so far. We figured we could do better, so basically all the artwork that I've showed you guys in the previous posts is scrapped. You can probably see that from the trailers, but the blue-grass-purple-cliffs type of aesthetic for the alternate universe is gone, and now looks like this:


The real world is also a lot more detailed, and the characters are a bit more substantial:


We've also been working on making the animations smoother than they were previously.


In terms of gameplay, we've also pivoted slightly. I spoke before about how it's an adventure game supplemented with more action-oriented bits where the player might have needed to fight various creatures in between finding their way around Clonfira (which is the name of our fantasy universe). We decided to drop this feature for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's hard to get a combat mechanic to feel good. Unless it's the core mechanic for your game, it might not be worth spending so much time on, as was the case with us.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it affected how we would have had to market the game, and who we would market it to. We'd be showing the game to old-school point-and-click adventure fans, and hoping they wouldn't be put off by the combat elements. And conversely, hoping that people who were looking for something like Bastion wouldn't be put off by the adventure game side of things. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the adventure. In my opinion, the game is still pretty unique among adventure games - we still transition from the traditional perspective to isometric when the player travels to a different universe, and once they've done so, we do make the game-play and puzzles a bit more exploratory than straight up adventure games usually would. We demoed the game at a convention here in Ireland called ArcadeCon, and I streamed this play-through of a section of the game which should show you what I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsKW6Vp4Syo

So, as with most studios, a difficult start involving a LOT of hard work and four people sort of working part-time. Now, a team of nine, STILL a lot of hard work, but things are looking pretty good!  Beer!



I'm all info'd out for the minute, but I'm sure there may be questions. I'm aiming to update this more regularly from now on, but if anyone has questions about anything at all, ask away!
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Jasmine
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« Reply #8 on: July 17, 2015, 05:40:25 PM »

Wow! SO glad that this beaut is still being worked on! Just watched the playthrough video and, yes, those animations are SUBLIME. I just recently fell into the point/click genre (realizing that I like it, a lot), so I am excited about this little gem!

Color me interested!

Keep up the good work, guys!
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ChaosResolution
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« Reply #9 on: July 18, 2015, 10:10:57 AM »

Thanks so much, M4uesviecr!

At the moment we're also putting a lot of focus on the audio side of things. We'll be getting live-instrument recordings soon, so I'm hoping to give everyone here a listen to show the direction we'll be taking it.
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Impmaster
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« Reply #10 on: July 18, 2015, 10:53:57 AM »

This looks cool! I esp. like the backgrounds.
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ChaosResolution
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« Reply #11 on: July 20, 2015, 02:43:02 AM »

Cheers Impmaster!

All done by the talented Edward Duff.
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« Reply #12 on: July 20, 2015, 03:00:45 AM »

They are certainly some smooth animations!
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« Reply #13 on: July 20, 2015, 03:07:21 AM »

Another adventure game with a girl named Lily? Wink

Seriously though, it looks adorable. Looking forward to playing this!
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ChaosResolution
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« Reply #14 on: July 20, 2015, 03:24:19 AM »

They are certainly some smooth animations!

Yep, and thus time-consuming  Droop . Some of the animations at the start of the game are a bit choppier though, because they were done at a time before we had funding and were able to expand the team. You can see what I mean in the first trailer, around the 0:55 second mark. We plan to go back over those once we're content-complete and add extra in-betweens.

Another adventure game with a girl named Lily? Wink

Seriously though, it looks adorable. Looking forward to playing this!

Haha, yes! But we spell it with one 'L', so that's ok right?
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« Reply #15 on: July 20, 2015, 07:15:05 AM »

This looks delightful! Looking forward to the release. Great job, guys!
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« Reply #16 on: July 20, 2015, 11:14:21 AM »

Hmmmm I missed this one somehow. Looks stunning! The scene with the dog and little girl made me smile Smiley
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« Reply #17 on: July 20, 2015, 01:33:17 PM »

Looks great, keep up the good work!

And wow fast progress too. Smiley
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ChaosResolution
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« Reply #18 on: July 21, 2015, 01:08:58 AM »

Thanks, guys!

Hmmmm I missed this one somehow. Looks stunning! The scene with the dog and little girl made me smile Smiley

We can always count on that bit getting some laughs! Though it's always tough to watch people getting stuck. Danny O'Dwyer played it during a live-stream for St Patrick's day earlier this year (here), and at one point they got stuck. It was nerve-racking! Worked out well in the end at least!
« Last Edit: August 24, 2015, 12:26:21 AM by ChaosResolution » Logged
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« Reply #19 on: July 23, 2015, 03:55:06 AM »

Wow, this looks amazing. The animations look fantastic. I'm normally not really into point-and-clicks, but I could see myself playing this.
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