Aeon of Sands: The Trail - Dungeon Crawling RPG love letter to the 90s!

[naossano]

Movement better be keyboard based. And what's with the small window?

Even if i don't mind having keyboard buttons doing the same things for keyboard addict, i really welcome the comeback of mouse-based ingame movement buttons. It reminds Lands Of Lore and i really missed it. But i admit i am a mousefag, so i'll always welcome the games that allows mouse-only playing for those who want it.

Although, if i am not wrong, early 2015 is now. Is it released yet ?

 

[marcuz]

Both keyboard and mouse based movement are implemented, as, further down on the road we plan to port it to tablets too (much further down).

And no, it's not released: that was the goal we had a couple of years ago, and since we're only two people working on it, too optimistic. We did not make an announcement but we did publish the game site as a work in progress, and what we wrote there got reported too quickly.
We are set to complete the assets this year, or early 2016, though.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Having the option for mouse based movement isn't the same as being mouse only. The latter can make a game almost unplayable (or atleast very cumbersome) if you've conditionted yourself to WASD controls.

 

[naossano]

By allowing mouse-only gameplay, i don't mean that mouse should be the only way to play, but that it is possible for a player that wants it to play the full game by only using the mouse.
I am glad when i see some games allowing it. That doesn't all games should.

 

[mondblut]

EoB had 14 inventory slots, plus 12 slots of active equipment and one quiver per character; AoS has 25 inventory slots per character and 8 equipment slots per character, so I think we fare well enough for a game that's not limited to dungeon crawlling as EoB was

I was specifically implying equipment slots. The size of backpack is merely an issue of convenience.

 

[marcuz]

I was specifically implying equipment slots. The size of backpack is merely an issue of convenience.

We did go through a number of iterations of the inventory, following a number of principles regarding different aspects of it: design, functionality, technical limits, obsessions of the designer (I really wanted something that then I had to admit it was better to throw away).
Of the design part, the two most important to me were 1) that the items the player gets to use / wear in game are coherent with the narrative, and 2) that we wanted encourage the role playing vs the item dependence.

So, basically, yeah, we did move away a bit from the paper-doll of the colorful eighties, we have fewer slots and a large backpack: the party, being smaller than the ones of the games we took inspiration from, can use the added space of it, but it does not risk to collect everything in the world upon their shoulders.

The economy of AoS is based on making do with - and find best uses of - what little is found, stolen, bartered.

There were other considerations too, but those were the principal ones.

 

[Alchemist]

A new update went up yesterday: http://blog.aeonofsands.com/2016/03/monthly-update-march.html

This is looking pretty hot! (pun intended)

Glad to see the use of the old-school 1st-person tile technique. I look forward to seeing more developments on this.

 

[ghostdog]

If after 2 years all they have to show is this gif, I wouldn't hold my breath for this one.

 

[Alchemist]

If after 2 years all they have to show is this gif, I wouldn't hold my breath for this one.

Typical Codexian stock negativity... *yawn*

No shit, game dev does take a lot of time, especially since it's just 2 guys, and probably not their full-time job. The art and animation techniques they're using are entirely hand-drawn and extremely time-consuming.

Also they've shown a lot more than this over the past several months, if you look around a bit at their social media accounts.
For those too lazy to look, I gathered some more screenshots:

Here's one from their editor:

I gather that besides the art, a lot of work has gone into working on the technical side of the engine functionality - which isn't as visible unless you play the game or see it in action.

 

[Jaesun]

Pretty, shame it is more RT garbage...

 

[vonAchdorf]

The gif and the Aeons of Sand picture look pretty good.

 

[V_K]

I dig the setting, it seems delightfully weird. Hopefully the puzzles will be good.

 

[majestik12]

The art style reminds of Perihelion, and this is a good thing.

 

[Excidium II]

Aeon of Sands : The Trail - Dungeon Crawling RPG love letter to the worst times of the 90s!

 

[Hobo Elf]

Art reminds me of the good ol' weird Psygnosis circa Amiga era. Too bad this is A) not coming out and B) RT even if it does

 

[janior]

 

[Aothan]

Art reminds me of the good ol' weird Psygnosis circa Amiga era

I was trying to place some vague memory of what these pictures reminded of, and yea, it is the Psygnosis style art from times before. I know there is an Amiga art screenshot thread and probably a classic games screenshot thread somewhere, which I would like to go look for in coming days. For the record I had an Amstrad

 

[Nyast]

Stream in progress:

 

[Bubbles]

So far the stream has already served as a marvellous indictment of the German school system. Game itself looks nicely old-school, despite the real-time combat.

Greenlight campaign has been announced to start 2-4 weeks from now.

 

[LESS T_T]

Sooon?: http://blog.aeonofsands.com/2016/12/autumn-update.html

And that seemed like a quiet spot! Damn birds!


As you can see, we're not very active on socials in this leg of the year: between working on the dungeon crawler's parts of the game and creating a 2.0 site and forum from scratch (more about it soon-ish), we do what we can.

One could argue that, marketing being most important, you're never too late to do it properly.
Personally, I embrace our anti-hero philosophy of non-achieving, and made peace with things I cannot handle at the moment.

So, THANK YOU for keep checking this page and our other online caves and huts, with a frankly encouraging patience, to see if we are getting somewhere

One thing we do handle on the development front, though, is bringing Aeon of Sands to the finish line with each day' work!

We aim to have the whole game playable, from start to finish, between the holiday season and early 2017, and after that, polish it and test it extensively!

And maybe, just maybe, learn how to market it in the meantime, so that we don't end like the guy in the animation here, devoured by large crows, while trying to sustain himself with not-edible mushrooms in the wilderness...

 

[Sacred82]

Well that one certainly looks pretty.

character portraits by Prosper

 

[Grauken]

reminds me of french games, nice visuals, shit gameplay

 

[CryptRat]

According to the last update this may come out soon.

The Aeon of Sands team is on vacation until end of august, to regenerate for the final crunch to game completion.

The game is basically done: everything structural has been integrated, 90% of the mazes are in alpha state with all dialogues and graphics.


Combat finetuning against some Rogues

We want to use the next couple of months, starting from mid august, to do additional cleaning, and most of all, to add all sorts of stuff that is not core game or story, and work on mechanics we did not anticipate. But that's the fun part, right?

Starting from September / October, we’ll then handle the external proofreading of the story as well as marketing matters, but we will keep polishing the game until the last minute before the release.


Playtesting, Debugging of the final Dungeons

So, enjoy your summer (or winter, if you are on the other side of the planet)! If everything goes as it should, this is the last “have a good summer(/winter)” post before the game goes gold!

 

[Jimmious]

I'm a complete noob with crawlers/blobbers but at first glimpse there seems to be a LOT of wasted space in the right side of the UI

 

[luj1]

Interesting how just a distinct color palette plus some style make up a good atmosphere. Perihelion anyone?