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KickStarter Mage's Initiation - A Classic Sierra-style Adventure/RPG

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
It's portable then. Zero coding effort involved (sorta).
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...e/posts/743266?cursor=5977767#comment-5977766
Chris Warren about 21 hours ago
Hey, thanks for being pro-active, you two! :D The conspiracy theorist in me almost believes that there's a segment of the gaming industry/fan-base who do NOT want to see our games published at any cost. While the realist says that it just comes down to clueless executives who don't know what the left/right hands are doing, and then end up making astoundingly arbitrary, inconsistent decisions -- or using our titles in some kind of guinea pig experiment. Either way, it's certainly not the quality of our games that's the issue.

I'd love to say that GOG gave us a concise, logical answer that we're not at liberty to talk about, but truth be told, we didn't even get that far into the discussions with them. Yes, they were that dismissive. This came as a pretty big surprise, as I was expecting them to be the most accepting portal, based on a combination of factors like AGDI/Himalaya's track record, our mutual goal of focusing on old games, and the amount of new customers we've drawn to their site. I've always loved GOG and what they do and it was immensely disappointing to have such inane decision-making sully the beginning of what would and should have been a very strong, long-term relationship.

I know I complain a lot about Greenlight -- they make it sheer hell to get a title through. But at the end of the day, at least they're eventually letting our games onto their system. GOG may well be the 2nd largest portal, and I suspect that shall remain so while they're so aggressively selective, that they end up rejecting games that are on Steam which would be even better-matched to GOG's audience. When all's said and done, it's more money in Valve's pocket and less in GOG's, which hardly seems sensible if your company mission is really to inspire a DRM-Free revolution. A developer really cares most about getting their games onto Steam and GOG is an afterthought, so with this in mind, why on earth would GOG be pushing strong candidates toward their largest competitor? Baffling! I just wish we weren't the ones caught in the crossfire.

:decline:

Vote for Mage's Initiation on GOG: http://af.gog.com/wishlist/games/mages_initiation?as=1649904300
 

Boleskine

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Ah, I just saw that comment as well and was about to post it. :)

It confirmed what I suspected - GOG just wasn't interested. That's a shame.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...e/posts/743266?cursor=5989861#comment-5989860

Chris Warren about 1 hour ago

[...]

Also, to be clear, GOG didn't outright reject the games. They gave us that dismissive line about "not accepting at this time", but that's meaningless. For Al Emmo, they did throw us a line about the cutscenes "needing some work". That was a true WTF?! moment, because we just spent thousands redoing them in 2D and the feedback has universally been that they're a huge improvement over the old 3D ones. We're not working with the budget of Deadalic here! When I pointed out that GOG have accepted other indie titles with "questionable graphics" - their logic, not mine (i.e. Richard and Alice), they just gave an evasive excuse that they don't discuss the acceptance of other games. I asked them if they also requested AAA game developers from the 90's to make fundamental and expensive changes to their now-dated graphics, or if they simply sold them as digital antiques, quirks and all - products of their time? This question was also duly evaded. I couldn't quite grasp the logic of expecting boot-strapped indies to spend thousands and thousands more dollars redoing work to be given a chance at a "maybe", when GOG routinely accepts titles from the 90's that are filled with flaws and graphical anomalies. Case in point, I'm betting they didn't ask Activision to fix the dated, clunky 3D models in Mask of Eternity before accepting it. Overall, the thing that worries me the most isn't that they didn't accept our games - it's the erratic and inconsistent decision-making behind the process and the fact that I know any games we submit won't be given a 'fair trial'. It's even worse if the people making the decisions aren't aware of how valuable a mutual relationship could be, and wish to tarnish that and all future prosperity by being obtuse about 1 or 2 titles in there here and now. GOG requested us to put those banner ads on our AGDI site, so you'd think they'd be able to put 2 and 2 together. It makes me just not want to deal with the headache of GOG's review process at all. Greenlight's taken enough of a toll, and there are more productive ways to invest our time (like developing Mages!)

At any rate, we'll be on Steam, and that's what truly matters. And of course, we'll be offering DRM-Free versions elsewhere for players who prefer it. We'll probably just offer the DRM-Free version from the main Himalaya site and remove the DRM version altogether. The Humble Bundle widget that we have on the Al Emmo page at the moment covers that pretty well.

Wow, I didn't know that GOG has been so arrogant.
 

suejak

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To be fair, the developer sounds like he needs to take a chill pill. "You accept 90s games with bad graphics, so how dare you deny our game with bad graphics?" What kinda bullshit argument is that?

Sounds like he's paranoid, burning bridges, and making a name for himself as a troublemaker. Bad move.
 

ghostdog

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Yeah, WTF GOG ? major :decline:

The only reason I use that site is for indies, and I can't even get that now.
 

JudasIscariot

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Serpent in the Staglands Codex USB, 2014

GOG always struck me as a relatively human company. What's the point in acting like a dumbfuck in this matter? No one likes this kind of primadonna "I don't have to explain myself because fuck you" bullshit.

Sorry, I could've used better words on this one. My apologies. It's just we really can't discuss certain things as was said in that post.

I just wanted to get you some sort of public response but I failed in the delivery thereof. Sorry :(
 

Blackthorne

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Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Oh yeah, I remember - we had the fully playable demo of QFI - I sent them that, they played that and said they liked it and signed us. I'm sure if they have a more complete demo to send them, it won't be an issue.
 

MRY

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I hope this is just the unfortunate misunderstanding that it seems to be. As a developer, I've been amazingly impressed with GOG's responsiveness and user-friendliness with respect to Primordia, especially given that it would be easy for them to just blow me off and refer me to WEG, with whom they have an existing relationship. Instead, they've fielded a whole range of annoying emails from me, cheerfully and promptly. While Steam is a much more lucrative sales portal, GOG acts more like a sales partner. For example, GOG crafted its own advertising copy for Primordia, and I think they did a better job of it than I did. I imagine that the attention paid to the games they sell -- and to the developers of those games -- is very time consuming, and probably puts more pressure on them to be selective. Also, the "Good" in GOG implies a degree of quality filtering that Steam doesn't have. By this I don't mean that Himalaya's games aren't good, simply that GOG probably feels obliged to carefully vet them.

With that said, it seems unfortunate that GOG declined Al Emmo, and that Himalaya and GOG aren't getting along better. I've never played AE, but Himayala (as AGDI) played a huge role in curating and carrying the flame of classic adventure games with their VGA remakes of Siera's titles. Like GOG, Himalaya/AGDI has a long history of excellent "fan service" and customer service. And AE has some glowing reviews on Metacritic (its average is higher than Resonance's, which is of course higher than Primordia's), and it received coverage by the New York Times of all things. Given its age -- almost a decade -- it strikes me as old enough to fall squarely in GOG's wheelhouse in a way that, for example, Primordia doesn't. As for Mage's Initiation, I'm sure it will be an excellent game.

It does seem like this is mostly Himalaya misunderstanding GOG's review process, though, and maybe feeling put out by GOG not taking Al Emmo. Hopefully they can patch it up and set off on a beautiful partnership. :)
 
Last edited:

GarfunkeL

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How can I change the resolution in the demo? It's not possible through the setup and fiddling with the config file didn't help either - unless I need to add lines somewhere. The default resolution won't work on my laptop.
 

ghostdog

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Is it using ags? If so it should have a seperate config executable
 

jfrisby

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Select "none" in the graphics filter dropdown in winsetup? May also want to run in a window, since it's a 4:3 demo.
 

Jaesun

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Update #36

Jun 19 2014

Summer of Sidequests
5 comments

Greetings patrons of the arcane,

We hope your summer has kickstarted nicely and that you’ve got enough Air and Water mages working overtime to keep your tower cool! (Or Fire Mages if you so happen to live in the colder climes).

Sidequests Ahoy
It’s certainly been a productive start to summer on our end, as we spent the past month working on, and implementing, the class-based side-quests into the game. This was a stretch goal that our glorious backers (that’s you!) helped us achieve during our Kickstarter campaign.

These 4-side quests have quite a checkered history, and they have gone through several inclusions, exclusions, re-inclusions, tweaks, changes, and complete rewrites to get them to the stage they’re at today! Originally written into an early draft of the design document, a decision had been made to axe them from the game in order to ease time and budget restrictions. However, when the possibility of using Kickstarter to fund the endeavour presented itself, we realized that we would be able to add them back in with the flair that they deserved.

Post-funding, it soon became apparent that significant adjustments would need to be made to these class-based quests to have them fit into the ever-changing game world, which, obviously, had since evolved. The side-quests would also be quite asset intensive - each being exclusive to one of the four playable character classes and centering around their element. For example, each of the side-quests introduces several new locales and NPC characters to interact with -- several of which cannot be encountered by the other classes. Each locale requires multiple game backgrounds which JP has been working diligently on, and custom character sprites, hand-crafted by Shane. Not to mention additional animations, NPC dialog portraits and so forth.

One unique little touch that Daniel has made to the side-quests, is that although they all tell different stories, tailored specifically to each class, these 4 tales all interweave in some subtle way. We thought it would be a neat method of encouraging replayability, so that curious players could see how this particular portion of the game looks from other Mage classes’ perspectives, who were at a different place during the same timeframe, yet still experience somewhat of a cross-over ripple effect.

We’re pleased to announce that most of the background art for all four side-quests has been completed. Earth and Fire quests are done, and Water and Air still have some colorizations remaining, but are otherwise finalized in sketch form. We don’t want to give too much away but in celebration of BBQ season, here’s an incendiary sneak peek!

0955cbbf18f2f3bdd68b83f52fb17d5c_large.jpg

Full update here: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...a-classic-sierra-style-adventure/posts/882911
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
New update: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...a-classic-sierra-style-adventure/posts/965244

August Antics

Salutations Seers, Sorcerers, and Shamans,

Thanks for tuning-in your crystal balls and Spheres of Observation into the very latest magical transmission that we’re sending out across this esoteric worldwide communication system.

We’ll keep this update rather short and on-point just to fill you in about what’s been happening on Mages. We’ve had a very busy and productive couple of months and have seen a sizeable dent made in the remaining workload. Many different aspects of the game have been worked on and some major milestones have even been completed. Below is a list of areas we’ve been tackling, some of them ongoing and others completed:

Combat System Programming
Morgan, our resident combat programming guru, has been busily tapping and typing away, refining the combat system scripts and performance. For a long time the RPG Stat elements in the game hadn’t been tied to the Combat/Spells system, because two different programmers were working on these systems independently. And while these still aren’t linked together completely, several big strides have been made to facilitating their unification. We’ve set an internal goal for getting it all implemented and are currently working towards that. We’re also preparing to program some of the trickier spells into the game, including some of the backer-sponsored ones!

Cutscene Movies Finished!
One of the bigger milestones we’ve hit in the last month is the completion of all the 2D cutscene movies in Mage’s Initiation. These cutscenes are 2D movie files that play at the end of each game act and assist in seguing the story together from one act to another. There remain some loose ends to tie up, of course, as certain areas cannot be completed at the present time. Character voices, for example. And there are a few visual effects and basic clean-up work that must still be added, but the huge bulk of the work is complete and out of the way, and we’re very happy to finally have this out of the way and checked off the to-do list.

6889e12a0794f981878d39f78881fe09_large.jpg

2D Intro Scenes
JP has produced a whole stack of great animations and general background artwork clean-up in recent months. Ever the perfectionist, JP felt that several early backgrounds that were created for the game didn’t match up to the aesthetic he’s set for the rest of the game and didn’t benefit from the additional skillsets he’s since acquired. So he’s been busy touching them up, giving them the old once-over, and creating all the necessary background animations that add life and movement to the valley of Iginor: Rivers, Smoke, Fires, Doors opening and closing, you name it! We’re pleased to say that we are now very, very close to tying up all of the main background work on Mage’s Initiation, with only a few close-ups and inset screens remaining. As we speak, JP is focusing on sketching and coloring all of the 2D stills for the Introduction Vignette that plays at the beginning of the game. After that, there will only really be a few GUIs and miscellaneous graphics needing to be finished. All in all, this portion of the game is now 95% complete, which is very exciting.

3e1384c3c9414f0930f24e99747bb628_large.png


Dialog Portraits

Another artistic element that’s fast hurtling down the track to fist-pumping completion is the character portraits. Karen has drawn, coloured, and animated an entire cast of wonderfully detailed characters, and they do so much to liven up the game world! With merely 5 or so portraits remaining, we’ll soon have an all-singing, all-dancing chorus line of NPCs to perform a great song and dance number, celebrating their very own completion.

Lipsyncing ALLLLLL the forthcoming voice audio for each and every one of these characters… now, that’s another matter *gulp*.

Character Sprites
Shane has boldly taken on the duty of animating the rest of the character sprites. A daunting list was presented to him, some months back, and the immediate decision was taken to cleft it in twain - just to give the illusion of making it look smaller. However, he soon reached the end of this list and now merely the second half remains to be finished up. 2D character animations have been a significant hurdle for this particular project, so it is with great anticipation that we’re holding out for the last of these to be finished.

Adventure Programming Near the End
Finally, the general programming/scripting is also flowing along quite nicely. Chris has been concentrating on programming only the adventure portions of the game, while Jason’s focus has been centered on the RPG system and fixing GUI bugs and issues. The adventure side of the programming has largely been completed, and Chris is now going back to filling in and fleshing out placeholder areas and puzzles that were not fully realized (or that were previously glossed over to make speedier progress). Programming and scripting always tends to be the one part of a game’s development that continues to drag on long after all the other areas have been completed, and since the RPG and combat still aren’t fully hooked into the adventure, it’s difficult to judge exactly how far along we are. We hope to have everything linked and playable, programming-wise, from beginning to end in basic playable form, by the end of the year. If things go according to plan, this would roughly mark the first alpha build of the game (without voices).

VGU Con
Rachel reports back that VGU Con in Washington DC was really awesome! Lots of cool stuff was showcased and Mage’s Initiation got a signal boost. Hopefully more of the team can get together for it next year and set up a booth. It’d be neat to put some faces to names at VGU Con 2015 and other upcoming conventions!

Shoutouts
Bill Tiller proves once again that you can take the man from the pirates, but you can never take the pirate out of the man. His latest Kickstarter endeavor is the luscious-looking, Monkey-Island inspired, point-and-click Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler. Do take a look!

That’s about it for now, we’re happy to have gotten so much more done on the game and things are looking good for a smooth release come Q1 2015. Thanks again for your support and have a happy and safe Labor Day weekend!

The Himalaya Studios Team
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
New update: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...-classic-sierra-style-adventure/posts/1115812

Greetings, mages, magesses, and familiars! We hope that the Fire Mages have been putting in overtime for you if you’re in the northern hemisphere. Between some major illnesses and housing troubles among team members that transpired over the last few months, this update has been incredibly delayed and we’re sorry about that. However, you’ll be pleased to find out we’re quite on track with the game! Behold:

General Progress Report
There's nothing scientific about these figures. They're our best estimates on where we currently stand in the grand game development scheme. Nevertheless, when one knows that the light at the end of a tunnel is rapidly approaching, one finds it far easier to gauge how close said light really is. So while these figures contain not a shred of scientific analysis (not even from a magical measurement spell) it's safe to say they are accurate guesstimates:

Writing & Design: 99%

Background Artwork & Animations: 95%

Character Animations: 93%

Music: 80%

Sound Effects: 15%

Voices: 0%

Adventure Game Programming: 90%

Combat System Programming: 95%

RPG/Stats/Equipment Programming: 85%

And for the RPG fans who are so hardcore, they need stats about stat-raising game, here are the latest AGS engine assets being used.

AGS Game Engine Assets & Stats

Total sprites: 17203 / 30000

Sprite folders: 789

Total views: 745

Total GUIs: 68

Inventory Items: 300 / 300 (our custom inventory system is dynamic, we have over 300 items)

Characters: 194

Dialog topics: 402 / 500

(Yes, some of these figures went backwards from our last update. This is due to us deleting unused assets and/or the streamlining process of refining certain scenes and removing any wordy or clunky sections that didn't work well to convey the story.)

At this rate, we will be aiming for a May or June beta sans voice acting!

January 2015 Summit Meeting in Oz
Early in January 2015, Daniel and Chris met up for the annual Himalaya Studios summer summit meeting (yes, it took place in Australia). We used this opportunity to carefully map out the remaining work to be done on Mage's Initiation, so that we can see it to a (hopefully relatively speedy) conclusion. As is usually the case, much was accomplished during this in-person developer meeting. It was really quite motivating to bounce ideas off each other, and quickly enhance segments of the design and puzzles in real-time. There's this peculiar phenomenon in game development where things tend to get taken care of faster and much more efficiently in real life. Or maybe it's just that sitting in cramped quarters for full 40c degree days, with just a small metal fan shared between two, swarms of flies to keep you company, and the prospect of a walk around the block the only reward for a hard day's work, were motivation enough to get our work done quickly.

The first order of business was to conduct a full playtest of the game from beginning to end. This was fairly entertaining to watch, because Daniel had not actually played any of our internal demos for some months and thus was able to approach this playthrough through the eyes of a "fresh" gamer. So, naturally, he was designated the test pilot for this play-test session. He started a new game as a Fire Mage (since that's our most solid class at the moment) and we were off to the races! This method worked out well, too, because through playing, we quickly located problem areas which needed extra attention and we were able address them as we played. For example, there were times when Daniel got stuck and didn't have any direction on what to do next. He would say "If I were an unaccustomed player and I were playing this part right now, I wouldn't know where to go." Such epiphanies where very, very handy in helping us to decide where we needed to insert new NPC barks, "hint" thought bubbles for D'arc, and sometimes subtle visual, graphical indicators to ensure that the sense of progression never completely faded out on the player experience. At the same time, we didn't want to make it to hand-holdy. So, while you may still need to pause for thought every so often, as you contemplate how to solve a head-scratching puzzle, you'll always have your next goal clearly defined, and won't be stuck wandering around for lack of something to do.

As Daniel discovered issues and areas to improve, Chris was busy addressing them in the AGS engine and cracking out bug-free code. Another painstaking task that Daniel commenced during the summit was going through every… single… line... of dialog in the game, and condensing the text where necessary. Rewriting lines if they no longer fit the context of the scene or the overall game narrative (some of this dialog was written years ago and the game's design has evolved significantly in that time!).

While the dialogue clunkiness was being... declunked, we brainstormed several ideas for spell-casting opportunities using the player's existing "adventure" spells. (Each Mage class gets 5 "adventure quest" spells and 6 "combat" spells, for a grand total of 11 spells per Mage class!) We wanted to put more of these "adventure" spells to use and thought of some alternate puzzle solutions for the varied Mage castes. A few sections of the game were trimmed down and fine-tuned. Some unnecessary art and animation assets (that were yet to be made) were scrapped in the interests of consolidating specific scenes and shortening the production time. We felt particularly good about getting rid of these assets from the pipeline, as they were weighing the project down and didn't really add anything to the story couldn't be told without. The benefit was that important scenes became faster-paced, snappier; like they should be, rather than getting weighed down by overbloated dialog and overreliance on animations. In some cases, clever wording of a character line could give the same impression without the need to visually show a character's action on-screen.

As the playthrough reached the final Act, we redesigned the slightly outdated ending scenes to make them fit into the events of the scene better, and reworked the final adventure puzzle there so that things feel more intuitive and the right emotions are being conveyed.

By the time Daniel departed into the sunset (actually, he left at 4am) and was on his merry way back home, we felt that (aside from creating a monstrous to-do list) we had succeeded in planning exactly what needs to be done in order to transition things smoothly towards alpha testing and eventual beta testing. Make no mistake, there's still PLENTY of work remaining, and our noses will be to the grindstone for the next several months while attempting to complete everything for a prospective mid-year beta launch. Fingers crossed, and we'll keep you posted!

Second Rule of Mage Club: Talk About Fightin'
Since the last update, the Mage's Initiation combat system has transformed from a rather simple affair, with just a handful of opponents and a majority of missing spells, into a spell-casting, battle-blasting, gem-crafting, spectacle. Morgan, our fantastic combat programmer has been devoting much time, of late, toward getting the entire system completed and his hard work is paying off in spades! The battle system is now almost feature complete. All of D'arc's stats are in the process of being hooked in, with the appropriate buffs and debuffs attributed to equipable gems being applied in real-time.

As mentioned above, each Mage class (of which there are four: Fire, Earth, Air, and Water) has 6 different combat spells - each one unique to that class. That equates to a grand total of 24 combat spells in the game! These have all been fully-programmed now, and we're almost ready to start bug-fixing all the known issues pertaining to them. Completing all of the combat spell programming, including the backer-created ones, was a huge milestone and we think you guys will have a lot of fun laying waste to the beasts of Iginor with this magical arsenal.

As of writing this, we have just 3 boss battles left to program. (All the regular enemies are already done) One of these 'bosses' is the backer battles, which we've just started working on, to be programmed in the coming weeks. For their generous pledge, these two lucky fellas not only get to be D'arc's spellcasting test-target during the tutorial, they'll also be endowed with magical gifts and get to duke it out with him mano e mano in real-time.

We're expecting the combat system to finish up soon. Very soon. This will go a long way in moving the project toward beta on schedule. The general RPG/Stats system is still lagging behind a bit, but because the combat system now necessitates its inclusion, it's likely to play catch-up very quickly!

Check Out Mage’s Initiation at These Upcoming Events!
If we have anyone reading in the New York area, please check out Playcrafting’s Winter Expo! Over 50 games will be on display including Mage’s Initiation. There’s free pizza and all kinds of games: what’s not to like?

If you’ll be in New York next week, Rachel will also be at Gamedev Hacker if you want to say hi.

She'll also be representing Himalaya for the first time at GDC 2015 in San Francisco, which we’re extremely psyched about! If you’re going to be there, feel free to stop by and give some feedback on what you’ve seen so far... and tell her where the adventure game party will be at!

RIP Astrid PolloDiablo
We received the sad news that one of our backers lost her battle with cancer recently. She was an integral part of the adventure game community and our hearts go out to her loved ones.

This concludes our broadcasting schedule. Please remember to wipe-off your combat Conductors, unequip your gems, and keep your tunics crinkle-free while you wait for our next action-packed update, which is sure to level-up on even this one!
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
97,107
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...-classic-sierra-style-adventure/posts/1140984

Mages: Almost Initiated

Welcome, once more, magical masters of the mystical multiverse,
As you'll no doubt be aware if you've been following along with our updates, development has been advancing rather well on Mages' Initiation and the game is fast heading down the track to completion! Sure, there's been the fair share of hiccups, hurdles, and illnesses to stumble over along the way, but the overall forward momentum is unstoppable and in this update, we'll document our progress thus far and cast our prognosis for when we expect to launch the beta.

So, come! Gaze into the Sphere of Knowledge. Let the clouds of prophecy roll in and we shall see what the fates have in store.

Name in Library Book - Please Read if You Backed at $20 or More
We wanted to get this out there first-- we ran into a little snafu. Kickstarter lets us survey a tier just once and the only tier we've surveyed to date is the $20 Apprentice tier since these backers were only receiving stickers and no other physical goods.

We've reached the point where we need to collect backers' names for inclusion in the "Book of Backers" in the Mage's Tower library. Please note the following:

  • There's a 30 character limit on names. (Due to the formatting of the book, each name can only occupy a single line. This character limit ensures the names will fit.)
  • Keep it clean, non-abusive, and avoid any mention of copyrighted terms or trademarks.
  • If you don't want your name or pseudonym included in the in-game "Book of Backers", please type OPTOUT in all-caps into the field.
Since we're not ready to receive the other data from the higher tiers (e.g. we don't need your mailing addresses just yet), for the time being we'll be sending a private message to each tier, linking to a Google Form asking for the name you'd like to have displayed in the library book.

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Progress Since January
We’re pleased to announce that we recently hit a glorious milestone! The art and animation assets for the project are now essentially finished. Every game background and associated animation (e.g. things like rivers, doors opening and closing, smoking fires etc.) has been completed. Our lead artist, JP Selwood, has worked endlessly, detailing over 80 game backgrounds. He has given each screen a consistent artistic style so that the landscapes appear seamless, without any clashes or variation in the style and quality (which is sometimes hard to avoid when multiple artists have worked on adjoining background pieces). We have truly strived to give the valley of Iginor the most verdant landscape we could imagine, remembering the way our imaginations ran wild playing all the classics on account of their brilliant art. We hope you'll enjoy getting lost in this lush, aesthetic world.

Karen also finished the last of the animated in-game character dialog portraits, which is another milestone worth celebrating. We're very pleased with the high quality of her work and it has been a blast seeing Iginor's diverse cast of characters come to life on-screen. Since none of the character voices have yet been recorded, their mouth frames currently just animate in a looping pattern. But we're really looking forward to getting the voices in place and the lip-syncing added, in order to witness the full effect of all those intricate mouth phoneme frames that Karen has painstakingly crafted.

Onto the final artistic front: the character animations. Shane and Jeremy have been knocking down the remaining entries on the animations list for both D'arc and NPC characters. Once a grand and intimidating sight to behold, the list is now dwindling and contains little more than a small handful of entries, which we expect will be finished in a matter of weeks. With 4 player classes and animations for nearly every player action, Mages is a very animation intensive title, and this, in large part is a major factor in what's contributed to the lengthy development time-frame. So to say that we're "elated" to finally see the animations list reach an end is the understatement of a quarter-decade… quite literally!

The music and sound effects are coming into the final stages. Brandon is currently working on polishing the remaining pieces for the game and we're getting them set up as they roll in. Adding sound effects, on the other hand, is a somewhat painstaking task which we usually leave until the very end.

In terms of programming, there are several outstanding areas that we still need to focus on before the game will be in a state fit for beta testing. Jason is getting close to wrapping up programming the Wastelands section of the game. This is a region which had to be put on the back-burner for a long time, for a couple of reasons The first being that the decision to re-include the wastelands as a fully-explorable area was decided upon later, as it was based on meeting our $80K Kickstarter Stretch Goal. And the second being that it's a complex area to script, with chasms, unique landmarks, and other obstacles - we wanted to get the combat system fully functional before implementing the wastelands as a secondary major combat zone (the forest being the first). That, and there were more important scripting priorities that took precedence, such as getting the RPG and Stats system working without flaws.

Simultaneously, Morgan is working through a very long list of combat-related bug-fixes. These tweaks are aimed at bringing stability to the battle system so that it can be fully-integrated into the RPG system. Hooking both of these together is something that still needs to be done, as if you were to test the game in its current state, it would simply play like a straight adventure game with optional combat tacked on that you could ignore. This means you could finish the game without raising any stats and the only mandatory combat encounters you'd face would be the bosses. Obviously, a lot of fine-tuning needs to be done once the combat and RPG systems are interlinked, and the timing of this long list of combat bugs is the largest variable affecting when the beta will be stable enough to release.

Those programming tasks aside, there's a trivial amount of work to be done on the class-based side-quests, one interface GUI still needs to be properly implemented, and a couple of mini-games are in need of fine tuning. That pretty much encompasses all of the remaining programming work.


A Word on Beta Testing

When all is said and done, we're realistically looking at a beta launch of around mid to late August 2015. Bear in mind, however, that this beta will likely be closer to an alpha, as the voices won't be present and there will be a fair few rough edges. Releasing a beta this way is a new process to us, as with all our previous games we've held off on releasing beta versions until the products were in a very polished state, complete with voices, and having been comprehensively alpha tested internally until we couldn't find any more bugs. At that point, we'd turn it over to a small, controlled group of beta testers to scrutinize and report their own findings.

To be honest, we do feel a little 'exposed' at the prospect of releasing such an early build as a beta version to a much larger test group, but we also feel that this will be the right time to let backers at the appropriate tier levels see the game they've backed after the long wait. This new approach also comes with some advantages, in that backers/testers can help us weed out any spelling or grammar anomalies before the time comes to record voice actors. (It's always a bit of a hassle having to get actors back for pick-up sessions if you've already recorded all their lines prior to the beta.)

We're aiming to have the game and all of its systems fully-functional and playable to the end by the end of June, so we can spend adequate time internally alpha testing it for a month or so. We'll keep you posted!
 

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