Alright, the not so good news:

Our engine seller is almost bankrupt...

The good news: they made the engine open source with MIT license.

Right now (as in, the relevant stuff is running in the background) I am trying to compile and run it myself, if I succeed I intend to edit it to improve the performance of our game, and maybe I will release my changes...

Hello,

I am the co-owner of a company that ran out of money just a tad before we finish our flagship game... I am looking for some contract work that I can do to pay my bills while I finish my company game.

This is my company site, all games there were 100% coded by me (and many were also designed by me): http://www.kidoteca.com/

And this is my half-neglected portfolio: http://coderofworlds.com/ it has one source code available (C, Allegro 5)

Please contact me, I really need the work Or I will get evicted...

You can PM me or use the contact info on my portfolio site.

I can't tell if you're relating with me or disagreeing. When you start and get to the first city there are at least 4 ways you can go.  Only one of these ways is sensible as the others have enemies so powerful you'd have little chance defeating them.

I do agree that the "necessary" path in the first map is very linear.  I have no problem with linear.  But giving you 1 right direction and 3 wrong directions is not, IMHO, good level design.  I don't enjoy "bumper car"ing my way to the right path.  I like an indication that I'm headed in the right direction.

Current situation without spoilers: I've found this cave with enemies in it that are literally invincible.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to find some magic item in another quest that makes them vulnerable.  I'm not sure if that quest is outside or inside this cave.  I'm not even sure if this quest actually exists!  Maybe I'm supposed to use sneak to avoid these characters all together. 

I tried the last option and got very far avoiding them.  But along the way for 20 minutes (!) I never felt like I was doing the right thing.  This feeling got so uncomfortable I eventually returned to a save before I sneaked passed them. 

BTW, I'm not saying they should hold my hand.  I'm saying they should provide in-game ways to find the next path *if* you're going to make a linear game.  If I were to have a take away from this, it would be, "be wary of creating a linear game with a non-linear map AND a sub-par journal system."

This game reminds me of some of the worst qualities of point and click adventure games I've played.  You get stuck and you start trying every combination of options to proceed.

There are two sneaking levels on the game, this cave, and another area in the same "overworld map" where the cave happens.

Disappointingly, at the end of that cave you start a quest to kill those enemies... But you cannot go back to the cave. To me this was very disappointing, since I really wanted to fight them, they behaved like it would be a fun fight after they are mortal, but I ended finishing the game without fighting any enemy that require the spell (I wonder why the spell is in the game in first place, it is almost completely useless, and the plot-line on this quest feels rather confusing and useless too in the overall plot).

Also another implication of not being able to go back to the cave, is that you should loot everything and do all side quests BEFORE you sneak to the other side of it.

I'm starting to get sick of this game's shit.  Originally I didn't mind that it plopped you in the middle of the world with no idea where to go next.  But lately I feel like the levels are intentionally laid out to make you feel lost.  I feel like I have to google for faqs or waste 1-2 hours wandering hoping I stumble upon the next thing I'm supposed to do.

As an abstract example, you'll discover a new map by entering at the lower left.  You'll travel your way to the upper right and explore along the way.  In the middle of the map you'll enter this place that NPCs are *saying* you should visit because that's your overarching main quest goal.  You get there, and get stuck with no clue as to what to do next.  Turns out the next thing you're supposed to do is really at the upper right part of the map but all signs point to the middle. 

What really, really exacerbates this problem is that you clear the fog of war further than you've actually traveled.  This can reveal large parts of the map that you've never even visited before.  As a result, when you feel like you should explore to progress it's very difficult to discover the places you haven't visited yet.  It often looks like you've traveled a path until it hits a dead end when the reality is you haven't even traveled that path yet. 

I don't think it is intentional... On the first map it took me a while to understand where I need to go, but after I understood it was easy, it has some logic, in fact the first map after you understand it is actually very linear, probably most players finished it in the very same way as I did with minor variations.

I think they just ran out of time and started to smash stuff where they should be in the way that they could, the second map has a very distinct feel regarding that (for example that random area in the northwest that has nothing to do with the rest of the map, also it is a buggy area, the trigger related to it might trigger in other places, but the characters speak the same dialogue, even if it results in utter non-sense)

Excepting the sound (still need a guy by the way) and bug squashing the game is almost done, we have 7 scenes of 7 completed, and 5 minigames of 7 completed.

I will later try to remember to actually update here with all the tasty screenshots and info

homestead upgrades

What are these and how do you get them?

They are necessary to complete the main quest, so explaining is not necessary (ie: you WILL come across them, and you have to, otherwise you cannot fight against the final boss, also the backstory is explained as you get the upgrades, either in cut-scenes or new characters that talk to you about it) and also a spoiler (ie: it will spoil the main quest storyline).

I wonder how much time it will take to From Software get bored from doing the same style of games over and over again...

Granted Koei managed to make Romance of Three Kingdoms and its action spinoff reach number 20 or something... So...

(also there are freaking 20 harvest moon games, without counting the spinoffs, most of them by the same devs...)

Finished the game...

I feel disappointed.

First, the maps after the first are kinda... incomplete, not really half-assed, but they have a strong feeling that the devs ran out of time, the farther you go, the worse it is, the balance then is even worse (with fights get lots of spikes of being too easy or too hard, mostly for the too easy side, specially if you manage to over-level), also lots of areas have just non-sensical stuff, clearly result of being unfinished (Example: there is a place that devs seemly slapped a minefield just to make your progress harder, the thing is that 2 different peaceful NPC groups also cross that same field, and promptly explode, and clear the field for you, and you get free loot, and there is no comment about it, it is like if it never happened, noone is bothered with people getting blown up... also there is a group of evil NPCs that decrease you reputation if they die fighting when you are nearby, no matter who started it first or even who actually killed them, and clearly this was not intentional by the devs, it is just the NPC type that trigger the reputation loss, the devs forgot to make a exception for those particular NPCs)

Also crafting suck, there is ONE recipe that is overpowered (putting rubies into armour, at level 20 you can get immortal by doing that, with resists nearing 200%, meaning enemy attacks can heal you absurds amounts), and all others are underpowered or utterly useless (for example crafted level-20 weapons have less base damage and effects than any found weapon AND you cannot improve them with anvil or other boost items).

Also the near-ending homestead upgrades just suck (some don't even have a NPC, and one of them is buggy), and homesteaded characters don't react to your homestead (there is one character you can optionally send to the homestead that complains that your homestead don't have stuff that it DOES have, it is very silly at least).

And finally, consumables on this game are terrible, they are almost always useless, healing too little (in case of stuff that heals) or having too short duration (specially bad because you cannot use them outside combat to solve puzzles or use to pre-buff yourself), it is easier to just figure how to out-damage the enemy (ie: kill it before it kills you).

also talents are very broken, or they are absolutely overpowered, or useless, sometimes both (ie: leech... if someone is bleeding near you, or yourself is bleeding, it means full-heal, but if you see that HUUUUUUGE multi-screen pool of blood and touch it, it is entirely gone and you get some few amount of HP...).

Still, it is a better game than many I have seen recently, hats off to the devs... but they now need to use the money they are earning in boatloads on steam to actually finish the game properly.

Whoa, hammeron edit look so much better

And yes, that is more or less what I was talking about (note the bricks are now obviously blue, and the torches obviously yellow, before everything was just a green-ish shade of grey).

I guess it depends on what you started with first, most of the complaints about Blender I see have to do with the interface not being like 3DS Max, rather than about actual functionality. Not like I can complain, I started with AutoCAD R14, adding each quad manually specifying the position of each vertex in the input line... (try to beat that)

Heh, I did that took (started with Acad R14), the best part was when after 4 hours of work without saving, I pressed the power button (I had a stupid keyboard where the special keys were below the delete/end/page down keys), I got so mad I hit the CPU on the side, and a memory clip detached and flew out on the other side (it was open because of cooling issues).


As for blender, it DID had a terrible interface until recently... Blender before 2.5 was just bad, and the blender community extremely defensive, they got outright agressive when you commented on their issues (I once made the mistake of commenting about the interface in a blender conference I was attending in person... baaaad idea...)

But I think all open source communities are like that, even when the devs know that something is broken (blender for example had a official document describing the interface issues, it was a PDF explaining the changes planned to 2.5 and why... if you gave that link to some fans they would swear it was fake and that the current version was perfect and that you was some noob asshole for wanting it to be different... I saw this behaviour also with GIMP, Inkscape, Linux, emacs, and so on...)

I am on a soft daylight (no lamps on, just daylight, but my windows are facing the shadow side, and the day has some clouds).

My monitor sucks (it is those cheap LCDs that has some extreme colour deviations as you move your head below or above it...)

Your art well... It looks too hard to see the actual art, it feels like some generic dark art, because it is too dark to show details.

I don't think just increasing the radius of the torches will help, I think instead you should use colour mapping (ie: use colours with more light, but with hues that mean "dark", a example is games where night is shown by having deep blue colours, or daylight by using lots of yellow).

Also the bricks flatness don't help.

An example of night scene (Prince of Persia 1 for TurboGrafx)
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MHZkY5-ktrU/hqdefault.jpg

Hello!

We hit a snag that prevented us from releasing the beta...

We are still moving forward in general (developing parts of the game we never intended to finish by the beta time).

But we need a new sound designer... the snag is that the current sound designer disappeared (he is just... gone... he don't reply any messages or contact attempts, we are not sure what happened to him... also his last batch of files had a terrible quality compared to his past quality...)

So we need a new  freelancer sound designer... So if a sound designer (NOT musician! although if you are both at the same time it is awesome) wants to get a contract... Send me your portfolio.

Please, relevant stuff, I've been getting some portfolios that are 100% 8-bit/retro stuff... I don't need that, I can use SFXR too, I need someone that can make audio appropriate to the game shown here, specially the animal sounds (the previous sound designer sometimes used foley art and even his own voice to pull some sounds...)

I bought the game and I am really liking it so far...

But it has some issues...

First, the inventory management is terrible, to the point that I only bothered with crafting so far once (I made a sword, out of curiosity if I could, it was better than my own, so I am used the new sword), and the only shopping I made so far was buying the crafting tools...

That said, I am now finding the game stupidly hard... maybe because of the previously mentioned issues, I am level 4, and stuck trying to advance west of the main city, I killed a couple enemies already, but I stumble in some areas where I get my ass handed to me really fast, even against level 3 enemies, mostly because their amout (I am with 3 characters, there are some areas that trigger about 10 skeletons coming from the ground around you... then the archers pound me with explosive arrows and kill me in 3 turns).


Also the controls are annoying... I dunno if maybe is because their "indecision 3D", that makes it feel like a half-assed Baldur's Gate, entering buildings is hard (frequently I close the door instead, or click on areas that pathfinding cannot go), the zoom level is too close (yes, you can scroll around, but it is MUCH easier to control holding the left mouse button, that forces the camera to center), and sometimes you have to interact with stuff that no matter how much you zoom and rotate you still cannot put them inside the camera field.

Also the combat controls have problems... Frequently I end walking when I intended to  attack (move obvious with archer, since archer don't need to walk to melee range of a enemy...), and there are difficulties aiming some stuff, it feels like pixel hunting of those old adventure games, but instead you are hunting what pixel don't have a stupid prop blocking your line of sight to a enemy that you intend to cast teleport on.


But I still think the game is one of the most interesting ones I ever played... The environmental effects are particularly fun, specially in more puzzley areas and combats (and sometimes teleporting a barrel of oil in front of a enemy you want to see burn is just fun...), they are also easy to forget (I once stunned my whole party after using electricity in a area where I hacked lots of people, and once I blew up my entire party in a mishap involving bleeding zombies and fire arrows... the explosion was quite violent, killed all enemies, and killed my entire party too... although I was upset I needed to reload I had a laugh )

dota has many interesting combos...

one of the most sheannigans one I pulled was having all damage aura heroes on the same team, it was a long time ago, I don't remember anymore all of them, but it was Drow, Luna, Venge and two others...

I remember that drow and luna were dealing about 350 damage each per hit without using divine rapiers endgame.

The opponent was absolutely despairing, they were behaving like it was a 100% hopeless situation, because every time they came near my team they all died, and very quickly.

I think it never ocurred to them that my team needed to walk as a ball all the time and that splitting the team or attacking our towers with help of the creeps in several places at once would work as a counter.

They're going to put up the videos and say something in the description similar to "Thanks to <game company> for making this video possible!" Which I guess you could interpret as an acknowledgement that the video is an ad, but not everyone will see it that way.

which apart from being immoral is also illegal, gg

Yep.

I'm wondering if this also applies to the press as well. According to the FCC, one is required to disclose even when one gets a free copy of the game, something which is pretty much a requirement for a preview (and also the way reviews are usually done). I have yet to see any game journalist making a proper formal disclaimer about having obtained the game for free.

I make mobile games for kids... And when kids are involved, regulators are known to fall down with the force of 10.000 banhammers.

So, I ALWAYS see reviewers of our games to write that they got the game for free and that they are not affiliated with us, yadda yadda.

I'm definitely following, sorry for not saying anything! 

Yay thanks!

Hello!

Well, I stopped updating the devlog because people here never reply, and I got sick (not of TigSource, I mean I got literally physically sick and needed some rest).

Still, the beta is almost really done, we are only doing some finishing touches.

Thus I ask, anyone here will want a testflight copy on iOS? (for Android we plan in releasing the Beta on google play, so anyone can play anyway).

I have a little problem...

When my artist hand me the PNG files, I resize them with ImageMagick and then I recompress them (in a process that among other things remove most of PNG meta-data, including gamma and colour profile).

My artist recently started complaining that the in-game version do not look like his Photoshop version (the in-game look less saturated).

So I wonder, anyone know what settings I tell him to use on photoshop, so that the PNG files stay the same saturation after I strip gamma and colour profile from them?

Experimenting with some tree bondage ...

(with hopes to make the difficulty curve more gentle: By binding the tree to 'closed branch' mode for a level or two, I'm giving the players a simpler control space to navigate, and hoping that helps them find useful strategies more easily.)

This is so exciting to the wood

It is sexy!



Alright, sorry for the bad pun and joke, but I still think it is amusing (the tree bondage, not my jokes)

It is a mobile game, if it was a desktop game I would put the string editor in the in-game engine...

Currently the only things you can edit while dev-mode is on is object positions and collision boxes (that you can modify using fingers on a screen...), typing lots of text on a mobile phone is not much... practical (neither is figuring how to code a cross-platform text entry)