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[MikeDee]

EDIT: The game is now available !

You may download the demo here and buy the full version here.

Official Site:
http://amanwithamonocle.neogen2.com/

In A Man With A Monocle you follow the story of Henry, a noble turned traveler in order to discover the secrets of his mysterious monocle and his new friend, a ghost trapped inside and his guide through this journey.

This game features, among other things, an interesting and unpredictable story backed with quality voice acting, a truly absorbing soundtrack written by Johan Hargne and many different and interesting locations full of secrets and shortcuts.

The game was written in C++ using SDL so that I can release the game for as many diferent platforms as possible. At the moment the game is planned for Windows, Linux and Mac but I might release ports for other platforms later.  


Trailer#1:




Some (outdated) screenies:

[MikeDee]

Been working on new backgrounds here's some shots:







Feedback greatly apreciated. 

[Montoli]

I say!  That man has quite a monocle!

I like your art styles.  Or at least one of them?  I feel like there might be several.  I really dig the cartoony mountains, at least.  The main character sprite looks a bit different in style though.  (And the sky seems totally off - it looks like the sun in the background has a higher pixel resolution than the mountains in front of it?  Kind of jarring.)


Still, I'm quite intrigued to see where this goes.  Any game that has a monocle in it can't go TOO far wrong.  (And I'm curious why the protagonist wanders around sinisterly collecting bones....)

[hyperduck]

Why the HELL have I not declared this awesome?



Because I'm Duck. That's why.


(this is awesome: Declared via HyperDuck)

[Aquin]

Wow.  I'm really impressed you could do all this in 2 weeks!!

I'm really curious to see how this turns out, as I use C++/SDL myself.

[deathtotheweird]

seriously great for 2 weeks.

there's more info at the daily click about the levels and a few other devlog like posts

http://www.create-games.com/project.asp?id=1676

[Alec S.]

This is looking pretty nice!  I really like how the backgrounds look.

[MikeDee]

Thanks everyone ! 
montoli: Thanks for the crits, I did some changes to the sky and the character sprite to make them blend better with the rest of the level, I'll post some screenshots soon. 

[skyy]

For some reason I get knytt wibes from the graphics, not a bad thing at all. I like it. 

[MikeDee]

Thanks ! 
Actually I was slightly inspired by Knytt for the whole ambiance of the game, but not really for the graphical style. Still getting compared with Knytt is a very nice compliment.   :handmetalR:

[ElijahKatz]

I like it all...
But the main character sprite just seems to big for the play space 
I feel like you could make him a little smaller and it would work better...

[MikeDee]

Mmmh well spotted, I don't know, I'll do some tests and see if it there's some improvment.

Thanks for the suggestion ! 

[ElijahKatz]

I've also noticed he sometimes has his monocle on and sometimes its off...
Out of curiosity...
Why would that be?

[Devlin]

I've also noticed he sometimes has his monocle on and sometimes its off...
Out of curiosity...
Why would that be?

Because the monocle is only on one side of his face?

[Jason Bakker]

Looks pretty cool! Does that springy spring in the last screenshot work already?

[MikeDee]

Jason: Thanks !  Yup it does, could use some tweaks though. 

ElijahKatz: yes, like Devlin said, it's because the monocle is only visible when he's facing right. 

Here's a new image for the game (the main menus will be based on it)

The drawing of the man was made for the game by jthongbai, a very talented dude I must say. 

And here's a new screenshot, showcasing some new stuff like ladders, underground passages and a new enemy type (there's other new ones too but they aren't in the screenshot)

[MikeDee]

I don't know how or why but Vista messed up pretty bad, and now I can't log on or even turn off the computer, and I don't have the Vista DVD because for some reason it didn't come with the laptop. So now instead of being a few days without working on the game while I find a copy, I decided to just install Ubuntu and continue working on the game there.

I had already used Linux before, but not as a development platform, but I have tot say I just love the whole environment, it's a lot more developer friendly, the simplicity, the good looks, the overall speed, everything just feels better than Vista.

Now on the latest updates:

-The menus are almost done, you can save and load your progress, start a new game and quit. You can also pause the game (while playing) and then resume the game again. The only thing left is the options menus.

-I finally finished writing the story of the game, and I'm really happy with it. It's about 15 pages long, and I believe it's pretty unpredictable with many twists and few but interesting characters. I also believe it will compel the player to play the game until the end.

-I finished the cavern tiles as well as the cavern background.

-I improved the morning and day time backgrounds, they now look a lot better and give the game a slightly different feel.

-Added new enemies, there are now 10 different enemies.

-Received another track from Johan, and once again I'm fairly impressed with his work. Like I said before, the music will play a very important part in the whole feeling of the game, and Johan is doing a truly wonderful job at that.

-Fixed and tweaked the game a bit in many aspects, too many to remember.

That's all for today, I'll post some screenshots later.

[MikeDee]

Ok just got back to windows. While it was great to be developing on Linux, I needed some tools like Paint.net, because the alternatives like Gimp were far too clumsy for me to use efficiently.

In these last 5 days or so I've been working on the game day and night, sleeping about 4 hours a day, but I have to say, the feeling you get when you put so much work and sacrifice into something is amazing.

Right now I'm tired and sleepy as hell, but for every new bit of the game, every fixed bug, every slight mirage of improvement, I get more and more proud about my work. I really can't wait to release the game and say "it's finished !" 

I finished the Level Editor and sent it to the level designers, and I must say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. All I wanted was to have a tool that would allow the designers to make the levels easily and quickly, and I believe I achieved that.

Talking about the levels, I decided to make them a lot larger, in width but specially in height. This decision has to be with some new elements I added to the gameplay such as ladders and blocked passages which can only be open with keys. This will make the levels a lot more open, and less straightforward, while at the same time will compel the player to find every secret passage in the game in order to get the game done at 100% (by getting all the golden bones).

One of the biggest news I have for today is that I'm planning to work on a free expansion for the game, to be release not long after the release of A Man With a Monocle.
More, I will release the level editor, and everybody will be able to create their own campaigns.
For that I will setup a special section in the official site of the game, where the creators will be able to upload and get their custom campaigns listed, so that anybody can download them.

[MikeDee]

Well it's been exactly 6 months since my last update here, so I thought I'd drop a few lines.

The game itself is close to completion, almost everything is finished except for the last quarter of the game, a few finishing touches and the game manual. Also I haven't recorded all the lines for the game, but I'll only be able to do so once I'm back to my hometown where I have my band's studio. Those will probably the last touches to the game because by then I'm confident I'll have everything else completed. Then only a extra week for the obligatory beta testing and then finally the game is ready for release.

In the meanwhile, I decided I'd make a small trailer with some gameplay footage of the first parts of the game.

I had a hard time trying to upload the damn thing because of my crappy mobile internet connection but I finally did it, even if I had to compress the video quite a bit (now that I look at it, perhaps too much  ).

Though what you see is, like I said, only a few parts of the beginning of the game, you can see the game in motion (well sort of, the compression almost ruined the video) and hear a small bit of Johan Hargne's work (for who doesn't know, the composer of the soundtrack of the game and if you want my opinion, one hell of an artist).  

Highly compressed trailer:





Moar updates soon  

[Zenorf]

Musics lovely in that video. Almost drifted off to sleep listening to it.
think you need a better compression video so you can make out the dudes titular monical.

perhaps you could also consider porting it across to XNA and XBLIG for a little bit extra money for your cause. It can be friends with Ishi's Johnny Platform games and Tobe's Vertical Adventure. It looks a lot better than most of the drivel on there anyway, and I'm not even a retro fan.