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[Mr Underhill]

Now moving to Unity 4.6.1, woohoo! Apparently the plugin we're using, Adventure Creator, has some 4.6.1 updated features too, so we're hoping for a smooth transition and improved efficiency.

[Mr Underhill]

Exciting times, we've started adding npcs, animations and placeholder dialogue   

[CasePortman]

This looks increddibbllee!!
I'm a sucker for a lovely Lucas-like adventure P&C game, and this is making me warm and fuzzy just by looking at the GIFs, yum!!

[Mr Underhill]

Thanks, Case! 

[Olsen]

This looks stunning and A LOT of work.  God speed to you.

[vladharsan]

pretty cool!!! I'm guessing you've invested a lot of time in it... Just can't wait to see some more...

[macepoodle]

The artwork and animation is looking  fantastic mate! How are you feeling about the adventure creator now that you have had some experience with it? I was thinking about going with it as well but ended up going with visionaire , but due to some mac export issue I'm thinking about possibly revisiting the unity / adventure creator route.

[Mr Underhill]

Hey macepoodle! Thanks, I really appreciate coming for you, since I love your game's art style (and have been advertising it on some forums, mind you  ).

As for Adventure Creator, we're very happy with it for now. Our programer recently ran into some trouble with it and the guy developing had that fixed in a couple of days with an update. The guy's very forthcoming and helpful, and that's great because we use Unity and it would've been a hell of a lot more work had we started building it from scratch. At that price, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Disclaimer - this is all concerning Unity, no idea how it works out for other engines. To sum up, we're very happy with our purchase.

And since I'm posting, here's a gif of Kitteh going into her idle animation!

[Mr Underhill]

Here's a rough animation of Piscilla, the first NPC you'll meet in the demo.
It isn't an animation per se, it's more like a collection of frames that we'll be shifting around and looping in order to construct different animations, mainly for her talking/reacting to stuff.

[vladharsan]

The animations, are they done in flash, or another software?

[Mr Underhill]

Toon Boom Harmony! In our opinion, the best 2d animation software out there.
Well, the best we've ever worked with, at least  

In Gibbous news, we're working on the inventory! Here's a sneak peek:



Yes, Kitteh is a usable "item", a'la Max in Sam & Max hit the road.

She might not want to do everything you ask her to, though... A little convincing goes a long way (a dialog puzzle or something cats can't resist, I dunno, Purina?).

[posxposy]

You doing so cool animations! Awesome! 

[Mr Underhill]

Thank you, fellow cat person!  

Today was the first day Gibbous was presented to a group of mostly programmers.

I asked the 60-odd crowd how many of them were familiar with point and click adventure games.

One guy raised his hand.

We're a lot more encouraged by the fact that, having shown a very bare-bones build with limited animations and no functionality and shown some making-of stuff, tens of hands were up in the air when we asked how many people WOULD play the game.

Goes to show adventure games grow on you, I guess  

Chop chop, back to work!

[TheChaoticGood]

So it's kind of like Monkey Island?

[Mr Underhill]

So it's kind of like Monkey Island?

Well, yeah.

Our main influences are, in no particular order: Day Of The Tentacle, the Monkey Island series (especially Curse!), Grim Fandango, Full Throttle... You get the picture

As the game's developing, it's probably end up closer to the Curse Of Monkey Island from a lot of standpoints. I myself am very much influenced by Bill Tiller's background art style, among other artists. So yeah, the game is pretty much a Lucas Love Letter  

[ephoete]

This is really looking more and more stunning. My only piece of advice would be perhaps to take more risks here and go out of the level design schemes that were ruling 10 years ago. I personally always found these multi-choice ribbons kinda ugly and quite protuberant on a screen for instance.

[Mr Underhill]

You mean the dialog options?
Seen that Gibbous is sort of an homage to the classics, we really want the player to feel like he's playing a 90s-style game, but with HD graphics and everything modern that makes sense (e.q. hotspot highlighter, etc). We don't want to be retro for retro's sake, we just want to preserve everything that made those games magic and weed out the few things that were a bit jarring (pixel hunting, dead ends, etc).

[Mr Underhill]

Writing Dialogue

One of the most essential parts of a point 'n click graphic adventure, dialogue creation isn't the most easiest, straightforward task for the game writer/designer - the interactive and interdependent nature of what characters are saying can look quite intimidating when seen in diagram form.


E.g. Here's dialogue between two characters, zoomed in...





...and here it is zoomed out (not to full extent!) - I rotated it 90 degrees so it wouldn't take too much vertical space.




Yup, it's a lot work, but it's fun and it forces a right-brained person like myself to not rely on creativity alone, and constantly be aware of the consequences of words coming out of the characters' mouths.

For this, we use this software called Chat Mapper, which I can't recommend enough. Is' great to use for all kinds of genres that imply dialogue with npcs, and has this great feature of actually simulating it within the software, so you don't have to imagine everything just by following the diagram. They have nice, comprehensive video tutorials on their channel, and are currently some of my favorite people in the world for developing this piece of software. Love you, Urbain Brain Studios!

In engine news, we've now upgraded to the latest version of Adventure Creator, and hopefully that means problems solved and smiles on our faces  

Kitteh is uncharacteristically excited!

[TheChaoticGood]

You got to tell me. Whats your secret to having such a popular indieDB page? You don't seem to have alot of updates, but it's ranked really high.

[Mr Underhill]

You got to tell me. Whats your secret to having such a popular indieDB page? You don't seem to have alot of updates, but it's ranked really high.

I was surprised by that too, we usually hover around 300-500, sometimes as low as the thousands. For one thing, we only made the page last week; just launched the twitter account today; got a little bit of press here and there... Also, the boss at the company we work at supports us using the hardware and company time to develop Gibbous, and there was an internal list e-mail where the page was linked, so that's a possible 200 views there.

Anyway, from I what I read popularity is a very up and down thing and can vary greatly from day to day. What seems to really be important are watchers. Then again, I've only known IndieDB for a few days now, so your guess is as good as mine.