next »

[Oddball]

That last one immediately made me think of Tyrell's office in Bladerunner, which is by no means a bad thing.

[Skygoblin]

Definitely a good thing, I'd say 

I was actually close to add window blends just like the ones in tyrell's office, so, there's no doubt that I had that scene brewing at the back of my head. 

[Loren Schmidt]

The backdrops are well done, good job. I particularly like the city backdrop with the green to orange color shift.

I'm leery of the rendered sprites. It's nothing against you, I've just seen this approach done badly so many times... but I've also seen it decently, so I haven't lost all faith in the idea. The thing that bothers me the most is that in almost every case I've seen there is a jarring style mismatch between the characters and the backdrops. The lighting doesn't match, the rendering is different, or the motion is too fluid.

I think it would help if you use the rendered image as a base, and then use some combination of image processing and manual touch-up to get the style to better match that of the hand drawn backgrounds. Make sure the values match, if not the actual lighting in each scene. I think breaking up the gradients a bit, killing the too-clean outlines and adding in a few hand done touches will help tons.

Another thought is that even with good touch-up you'll have trouble selling anything that high frame rate as part of the background. It will just move too differently. You might want to consider lowering the frame rate of the animation. Another thing that would help a lot is adding some simple animation to the backgrounds- for instance flickering candlelight. Make it so the backgrounds and the characters match in as many ways as possible.

Anyway good luck- I hope this works out for you. It seems like a fun challenge.

[Skygoblin]

Hey Sparky, thanks for your intricate thoughts on how to solve the ever nagging issue of pre-rendered stuff looking out of place! I couldn't agree more, it's a big challenge. I'd say our current model, which combines rendering and post rendering techniques, comes a long way, though I'm not confident that we are all the way there yet.

We are making sure to take ample time at this stage to experiment with different workflows to work something out that is both smooth to use, and looks good. A challenge to say the least.

I too believe animating the backdrops can make a world of difference when making the two elements blend. The prototype version of the game had some rich backdrop animations, and I hope that the new high-res version will feature the same thing, only sharper. A lot of work, but it makes a difference.

Thanks again for your thoughts on this, it was an interesting read

In other news, I just revamped the interior of Kaonandodo's Gas 'n charter:



I finally got the chance to add some nice African carvings to the backdrop, it's nice with the new high resolution to actually be able to see 'em in their full glory!

All feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

[Skygoblin]

Hey, just bumping this to say we just released a preview of the voice of Kito, the mechanic sidekick, over on the dev-blog!

A couple days ago we also released a sneak peek of what Bwana, the main character sounds like. Please head on over to the dev-blog and check 'em out! We'd love to hear your comments.

[Skygoblin]

We've just updated the blog today with a sneak peek of the voice of Lina. Thus finishing our lead cast preview on the dev-blog. Check her voice out and tell us what you think!

[Skygoblin]

We've finally got Adventure Game Studio to do our bidding, and run the game in our own custom resolution (in our case 720p), and to celebrate this, we are releasing our modified version of the AGS engine to anyone's enjoyment. Check it out here:



Long gone are the days of AGS only building low-res retro games!

[Skygoblin]

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.

[Derek]

Long gone are the days of AGS only building low-res retro games!

Awesome!

Also, the 3d characters look nice and the voice-acting seems top-notch. So far, I'm quite impressed!

[Skygoblin]

Thanks Derek, appreciate it! Stay tuned

[Skygoblin]

Progress update ahoy!

We're slavin' away at a crazy high tempo now, churning out Bwana and Kito animations 20 a week, also we're hard at work finalizing and animating our backdrops. Click the one below to check out some behind the scenes stuff on our devblog!

[Skygoblin]

We finally got our new "The Journey Down" website up and running with a couple of brand new screenshots and other neat copy-paste-friendly junk on it! Here's a quick peek at a couple of the screenshots featured on the site:



As always comments are appreciated, we love to hear people's thoughts on the stuff we create! Either here or on the devblog over at www.skygoblin.com.

Don't forget to visit the website to see the rest of the screenies. Also, please give us some sweet internet-love by hitting the good ol' spammy like button. It makes a difference. Thanks:)

[Skygoblin]

Figured it was time for an update. We've been so busy churning out point-n-click sweetness, we forgot all about taking the time to get down and dirty with some good old spamming. We are slowly closing in on release after all, and with zero money for advertising, ranting on forums is just about our only option for being seen, pre release.

Progress is moving along beautifully. We recently changed game engine from AGS to our own home-grown Gobby engine, which at a start pretty much put production to a complete stand still, but now that we've settled into the new milleu, it really turned out to be a good idea. Not only does it allow for easier multi-platform porting, it also gives us artists a wider range of new neat tools to work with to make the environments blend together better, without bogging down the system.

Working with Adventure Game Studio has been great though and I'd still recommend it to anyone who wants to get into point-n-click game making. It's a brilliant tool with incredible possibilities and it's got a great game developing community attached to it to boot. Our main reason for changing was the single-platform issue. Our in-house programmers decided that understanding and reverse engineering the innards of AGS would be more work and less fun than simply building our own streamlined, TJD specific development environment, built from the start with the intention of porting the game to several different platforms.

We are currently aiming for a PC, Mac, Android and iOS release some time Q1 2012.

Work on in-game assets is slowly starting to get wrapped up. Most backdrops are ready and animated, almost all characters have been built and animated. Music and speech is all pretty much in place except for maybe a third of our main characters lines, (There are over 1300 of them, heh.) The only major parts missing are some scripting and working on the intro+outro cinematics. In short, we are slowly getting there!

Please drop by the dev-blog a little now and then to catch up on or progress.

[Skygoblin]

Hey, just thought I'd share a pic from our dev-blog. Sketches from The Journey Down. Thousands of sketches.

[Skygoblin]

Hey y'all!

Here are a couple of new screens to feast yer eyes on!











Keep your eyes peeled on the devblog, stuff is moving along nicely!