It`s out!

Yes, it`s done and I`m enjoying my well-earned small amount of alcohol. It`s been quite a trip I can tell you, and I`m willing to take it again as soon as I get everything fixed and wrapped up for this spring. You can find the games page at AGS at http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk under the medium-sized games category. By July, I should have the official web-site open, so next stop is there.

I will update the reception of the game here after a week so I can get some feedback and a rest :)

But until then, have fun with Keith!

Coming clean

Yup, the RC1 is now ready. Only things left to do are the main-menu -buttons and fix a couple of .avis that still won`t seem to work, dammit! I decided to put honing the action-animations under the axe, since I`m already running out of time with my other projects keeping me busy besides this. The compiled size of the RC seems to be 102mb, which is pretty much what I estimated it to be. Zipped the file is 52mb large so pretty big game nevertheless.

I`ve now set the official release date to 1.5.2007 which is exactly after a week. The next two days will be seeing the RC2 and the day after the release, the final version should be done. This gives me shivers as I only have three days left to edit the game and I`m not sure how I will manage.

More news tomorrow!

The end is nigh...

Hello again,

I`ve been tackling with the beta this week and thanks to the help from my fiance and Jon from adventuregamestudio-forums, the bugs are now pretty much squished. The major problem with the beta was the use of a global modifier which screwed up many things as I changed it. I replaced most of the modifiers with room-mods and particular global-mods and everything seems to be working alright for now.

The musics are now done and embedded to the game itself, making the full product 65mb large(that a little over 40 zipped). Tomorrow I`ll head straight to the studio and make all the cutscenes I have time for and the rest on next Monday. For now, it seems that we`ll see and RC on Tuesday. After that it`s time for the final testing and (drum-roll) Release! I think that I`ll make the non-game material, the DVD-covers and concept art for example, after the release. I think the first amount of prints I`ll get for the game is 10 pcs, with one going to myself, one going to Jon, few going to my relatives and one for the thesis. Perhaps I`ll even send a copy to the kind fellow aiding me with my thesis with sending me Dark Seed II as research-material.

All that and much more next week!

Beta!

Yes, you read right! The game has finally come to the desired beta-status. I decided to have a short beta, lasting only a week since I have only 2-3 weeks left since deadline. If the bugs are squished fast, meeting the deadline won`t become a problem. I edited the cut-scenes yesterday and today I will put them in-game. A few hotspots still needs to be fixed but I`ll have time for that kind of stuff next week.

Finally it`s getting ready.

Anima

A week since last update and since my last working day. I`ve been busy, trust me. Anyway, today I finished the walk-cycles for Keith and battled with few bugs I still need to fix before beta. I also made the idle-animations for the NPC:s so only character-animations still missing are the interaction-anims for Keith. They`re done fast so I think I`ll tackle them tomorrow.

It seems that some parts of the script just don`t want to work the way I want them to. I also need to the rid of Bulk in one scene and haven`t figured out how to do it. Next weekend I`ll get the chance to redo the piano-recordings so on monday I hopefully can finally get the cutscenes together.

Still on schedule, don`t worry :)

Walk-through

Yep, with one I managed to play through the game today and it took me about 20 minutes. With the cut-scenes intact, it`ll take probably half an hour with a wt and without one maybe 1-2 hours, assuming you don`t know what you are doing.

All the scenes for the cuts are done, all the graphics are intact and the scripting in nearly finished. My to-do -list is now ten phases long so everything seems to be in a good shape. I moved the studio-day for tomorrow however, since the easter-holidays are beginning on friday and I don`t have access to the studio and hardware that time. This moves the final scripting onward to next week. That kept in mind, the game should be ready for release in a little over two weeks. Hopefully, again.

Good news and bad news

The good ones first: today, I finally got the rain working the way I wanted it to. Also after working through the whole weekend, the skeleton is actually intact and the game is nearly completable. Just a few things to fix in the ending and we`re set. The cutscene-videos are also now nearly done, only two more cutscenes need their images. I`ve put a couple of screenshots of the slideshow-videos below, just so that you get the idea. Tomorrow, I will make the last two videos and start focusing on the character-animations.





























Then the bad news: I had a recording day on sunday and all the days recording are unusable.
For some reason the volume went so low that even after amplifying, the volume level is much too low. Also, the filesize of the game will be pretty huge. Right now, with just the scripted game and one song the complied size of the game is 12mb and if I`m correct, after putting in the .avis and rest of the music (6-7 songs) the filesize will be over 100mb.

Anyway, I will be having a studio-day on friday. That day I will be recording the guitars for the soundtrack for the 2nd time and also Keith`s voice in cutscenes. Voice will be provided by yours truly. The piano-parts of the music will have to wait two-three weeks, so I can forget the estimations of the game being out earlier than predicted. Instead, the end of April still seems pretty accurate. Hopefully so at least.