Hey guys,
My name's theo, I'm one of the three swedes that make up the SkyGoblin team, makers of the point n click adventure series "
The Journey Down" on
Steam (Pc, Mac, Linux) as well as
iOS. We recently launched the second game in the series and are currently working on the third and final part, which I hope to be writing about here in this thread.
About The Journey DownI don't see a lot of point 'n' clicks around these parts, so I realize this may not be everyone's cup of tea, but here's to hoping that someone here is curious at least.
If you're a fan of the point 'n' click genre, you'll probably feel quite at home with TJD. It has often been described as a mix of monkey island and grim fandango, which in my ears is praise that I take very dearly.
Following are a couple of sketches for some of the environments of the game. The entire thing will not be taking place in this city environment, but it'll be a fairly large part of the experience. While the previous game was set in more of a 40's film-noirish setting, the third game has more of a retrofuturistic 80's action movie feel to it.
techAs with the two previous games in the series, the game runs on our own home grown engine Gobby, and is put together in our own editor GobEd. For anyone curious, you can read up on our tech
over here.
The game's backdrop art is generally hand painted in photoshop, with a couple pre-rendered 3d bits thrown in, such as animated water, cars, smoke, etc. The characters are modeled, animated and rendered in maya.
scheduleWith a little bit of luck, sales from TJD1 and TJD2 will keep on trickling in at a good enough pace to allow us focus entirely on TJD3 development. If this is the case however, remains to be seen. If we are able to put pretty much all of our time into it, I'm hoping for a TJD3 launch early 2016, but again, at this point it's too early to tell. Though we have come quite far with the game's story plot and design, actual production of the game has barely begun, not to mention the fact that the characters still need to be designed, written, cast etc. etc. We have a lot of fun work ahead of us.
musicAs with the previous two games, the music in TJD3 will be a very big part of the experience. For TJD1 and most of TJD2 we we're lucky enough to work together with
Simon D'souza, an incredibly talented jazz musician, who sadly passed away this year. Fortunately however, he helped us find
Jamie Salisbury who he recommended to wrap up the TJD2 soundtrack. Jamie will definitely be the musician we will be going for in TJD3.
Lemme know your thoughts on what we've got so far, and if you've played the previous games in the series, please make some noise, I love player feedback and I love ranting about the game and its development.
Thanks for checking this out. I'll be back with more pics and info as we progress in development!