Wadjet Eye Primordia - A Point and Click Adventure - Now Available

[MRY]

GOG.com is now open for pre-orders. Still clawing our way up the Greenlight cliff. Support on that would be much appreciated. (We hit code freeze today. Now it's just stability testing.)

I hope we live up to your expectations. Or, alternatively, that we have a Daikatana-like crashing-and-burning that will bring sadistic pleasure for years to come.

 

[Kosmonaut]

GOG.com is now open for pre-orders. Still clawing our way up the Greenlight cliff. Support on that would be much appreciated. (We hit code freeze today. Now it's just stability testing.)

I hope we live up to your expectations. Or, alternatively, that we have a Daikatana-like crashing-and-burning that will bring sadistic pleasure for years to come.

Voted for Primordia on Greenlight. Good luck! I'll preorder next week.

 

[JudasIscariot]

GOG.com is now open for pre-orders. Still clawing our way up the Greenlight cliff. Support on that would be much appreciated. (We hit code freeze today. Now it's just stability testing.)

I hope we live up to your expectations. Or, alternatively, that we have a Daikatana-like crashing-and-burning that will bring sadistic pleasure for years to come.

As long as there's no Daikatana-style ad campaign to go along with all that :D

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Pre-ordered on GOG.com for a price of a single movie ticket.

 

[kaizoku]

Pre-ordered this one and just finished downloading the demo!

how was it?

 

[LizardKing]

how was it?

It was pretty much what I expected; nice atmosphere and setting, great art direction, good writing and decent voice acting. Puzzles are logical, no head-scratchers so far. I found the demo enjoyable and it left me wanting more. Definitely looking forward to the full version.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Just finished the demo.

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick those visuals are delicious. The atmosphere is also really, REALLY good...


... except for one thing. The floating little comic relief robot sidekick almost kills said atmosphere. It would feel a LOT (and I really mean LOT LOT LOT) better, desolate and depressing if I didn't have to listen to a snarky remark each time I'm doing just about ANYTHING. It's like a post-apo Jar Jar, wtf.

Still, apart from that one, it looks p. cool.

Looks like there might be a new LP appearing around the 5th of December in the playground

 

[MRY]

The floating little comic relief robot sidekick almost kills said atmosphere. It would feel a LOT (and I really mean LOT LOT LOT) better, desolate and depressing if I didn't have to listen to a snarky remark each time I'm doing just about ANYTHING. It's like a post-apo Jar Jar, wtf.

Well, there's no arguing about taste -- what people dislike, they dislike. I don't really think the Jar-Jar comparison is apt, though, since the criticisms of Jar-Jar (as I understood it) wasn't just that he was inappropriate to the mood (was he, really? the whole movie was ridiculous) so much as (1) his Steppin Fetchit brand of humor was offensive and targeted at a totally different age group as the rest of the movie and (2) the entire Gungan concept didn't fit at all with the setting they were building, not from a mood standpoint, but from an internal coherence standpoint. If the movies had had Chris Rock doing his thing as Lando Calrissian's dad, there still would've been inappropriate humor, but I'm not sure people would've had the same viscerally negative reaction.

That said, I'm not trying to say you're wrong. Everyone is right when they are talking about their own reaction to something, positive or negative. I just don't want people to get the wrong idea of what kind of comic relief Crispin is providing.

In any event, while I agree the game's mood would've been a lot more desolate and depressing without Crispin, his inclusion was deliberate to make the game less desolate and depressing. Gloominess is not the be-all and end-all. Morte obviously makes the mortuary sequence much more ridiculous and much less macabre, but I don't think PS:T would've been better if it had started with two hours of TNO growling at things.

Still, again, defensiveness aside, I'm not trying to quarrel with your criticism!

--EDIT--

I should add, obviously if you don't find Crispin funny, then he's not providing comic relief, he's just being annoying. If he's not funny, that's just an outright failure on my part, as opposed to a philosophical decision not to go full grimdark.

 

[kaizoku]

If he's anything like the robot side-kick in BASS (Joey?), I will love Crispin as well

 

[Darth Roxor]

I don't really think the Jar-Jar comparison is apt

Perhaps I got carried away a bit

In any event, while I agree the game's mood would've been a lot more desolate and depressing without Crispin, his inclusion was deliberate to make the game less desolate and depressing. Gloominess is not the be-all and end-all. Morte obviously makes the mortuary sequence much more ridiculous and much less macabre, but I don't think PS:T would've been better if it had started with two hours of TNO growling at things.

When I played through the demo, I thought Morte was the most obvious influence So we might as well stick to this comparison.

I should add, obviously if you don't find Crispin funny, then he's not providing comic relief, he's just being annoying. If he's not funny, that's just an outright failure on my part, as opposed to a philosophical decision not to go full grimdark.

I fully understand the decision of inserting Crispin, it makes all the sense for Horatio to build himself an assistant/companion so he doesn't simply grow mad from the bleakness and solitude. So in that sense he works.

But my problem with him is that there's simply too much of him. Morte in PS:T would chime in only from time to time with something goofy, while Crispin seems to comment on about 75% of the stuff I'm doing - I found myself clicking through his dialogue in some places where I felt it was simply misplaced, like at the bunker, thinking 'oh shut the hell up about your arms and treads already'. That's perhaps another thing, so far I think he's a bit repetitive - the arms and legs shtick pops up too often, at the giant robot wreckage he keeps saying the 'blablabla GONNA EAT ME' a good few times in a row, etc. When it comes to 'small sidekick bros', I really like the way Goblins 3 handled it - you had the smugparrot, the snake, they never said a word, but they had distinct personalities nevertheless.

Still, don't get me wrong, I really dig Primordia so far. The setting and visuals are top notch, the atmosphere is great despite Crispin, and I loved the dialogues with Alpha/Beta and the faithful robot at the bomb.

And while on the subject of the bomb - did you also take a bunch of influences from Warhammer40k? Barring the techpriest-like main character, the conversation with the robot at the bomb gave me a truckload of 40K vibes, especially the 'Creed of Man' thing.

 

[MRY]

I can see where you're coming from in terms of him talking too much. My goal was to make him a strong presence -- to develop the bond between him and Horatio and make it seem like the two are talking about things, rather than that Horatio is narrating for an invisible player. But I get what you're saying.

I don't think there was a strong WH40k influence. I have played the first of the WH40k RTS games and I liked it, so I'm sure it had some subconscious influence. But EFL is really more inspired by A Canticle for Liebowitz.

 

[Darth Roxor]

But EFL is really more inspired by A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Yeah, that was also the first thing that sprang into my mind when I got the Gospel

 

[MRY]

I assume you also caught the reference in the shopping list in the UNNIIC?

To return briefly to the Crispin point -- what you're complaining about never goes away (when you examine an item, it also always goes -- Horatio: "Something straight." Crispin: "Something sarcastic!") but I think part of it is that in the Dunes, there aren't many forms of interaction other than with items. Crispin falls more into the background during conversations with other robots, and in the later part of the game, the density of robots skyrockets. So Crispin becomes "diluted." Maybe that will help you enjoy it more, although obviously a higher density of other robots means you're not going to have the desolate feel you're talking about.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I assume you also caught the reference in the shopping list in the UNNIIC?

I'm afraid I didn't. But if it comes from the Canticle, well, I haven't read it I just know general stuff about it, it's been on my 'to read list' for a longer while now, but I can't find it anywhere.

Maybe that will help you enjoy it more, although obviously a higher density of other robots means you're not going to have the desolate feel you're talking about.

Shrug. Gonna have to get used to a new one, then. I assumed things might change a lot after the duo arrives in Metropol. After all, it does advertise 'free energy for everyone!' etc, which already hints at a deal different to the wasteland. I also thought Crispin might work better in a situation like that. We'll see... soon @_@

 

[Joff1981]

The demo is now available from the Wadget Eye Games site if you haven't pre-ordered through GOG and already played it.

 

[MRY]

The latest demo is actually a bit better than the GOG one. It reflects like a month's additional polish. The GOG one had to get in the pipe very early, whereas this one was built using the gold candidate version of the game. Not sure it makes a huge difference, but I do think it's noticeably better.

 

[1451]

So I played the demo yesterday, kept me awake until 3 am. I really liked the random dialogues between the main character and his servant-friend. Puzzles and riddles have medium difficulty in my opinion, the only point of the game that got me stuck was

Spoiler

the big robot's nose. I just couldn't find the rag to put in his nostril. I didn't know that the screen scrolls if you go towards the right side.

I'm not sure if I liked the religious theme of the game. Robots worshipping humanity? Don't know about that. I liked however the fact that you can fail a riddle, but your game progression does not stop. Instead the game(in the form of npcs) gives you new objectives. For example

Spoiler

I failed to answer correctly the religious robot's questions and it sent me to find my real name.
Later, when I entered inside the big robot, I messed up while trying to capture Gamma(I destroyed the screens) but he told me my real name. So I returned to the shrine and by telling my real name was given the opportunity to pick a new power core for the ship. Really fun stuff.

Can't comment on the story that much, I'm just hoping at the moment it takes a more atheistic approach without however losing it's humourus touch.

 

[MRY]

Interesting. I don't think the game takes a pro-religion position, but I'd rather let the game speak for itself!

 

[wormix]

I just finished the demo, was very impressed with the game and will definitely pick it up. Although I don't like my chances of finishing the game without help as I got stuck for a bit

Spoiler

Finding the glass, it seems you have to click on a specific junk hotspot when you're in the junk area. And the reason I had to find the glass was because I didn't realise you could right click to read the gospel

My only complaint is that the mouse movement has forced mouse acceleration and feels sluggish.

As for Crispin, I only found him annoying when he chimed in randomly which I'm guessing was to do with the auto hint system being on by default? Even if a lot of the humour between the two was predictable I still found it mostly entertaining.

If anything I'd say the robot religion stuff highlights some of the ridiculousness of religion without being offensive.

 

[MRY]

Turning off autohints stops him from autohinting, but he still chimes in with observations about the area and your situation with it off. Maybe the whole thing shoudl be disable-able, but alas, it's not. Perhaps with our first post-release patch we can put such a feature in.

 

[Pyke]

Hey MRY,

I just wanted to say congrats on getting a game this far. As a developer myself, I know how nerve wracking it can be when people actually start to 'play' your game. Hell, Im only in a closed BETA, and I hit refresh every 30 seconds on the BETA forum board!
Ill be picking up the demo this evening, and playing it this weekend.

Again, congratulations!

-Chris Bischoff

 

[Flacracker]

The mouse in this game sucks. If I move my mouse slow it doesn't move in the game at all. Fix it.

 

[MRY]

I can't fix it. But it sounds like it can be fixed on your end by turning off precision clicking in your Mouse Control Panel settings.

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/forum/index.php?topic=1079.0

 

[wormix]

I can't fix it. But it sounds like it can be fixed on your end by turning off precision clicking in your Mouse Control Panel settings.

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/forum/index.php?topic=1079.0

From that link it seems like a conflict with Logitech SetPoint and AGS. (I have a logitech mouse)

Seems like some problem with AGS. I removed mouse acceleration in Windows with a registry settings so checking the 'enhance pointer precision' checkbox does nothing in Windows. If I do it anyway and go into Primordia it makes the mouse movement even slower (and acceleration is still on).

Just giving you some feedback, I doubt you can do anything about it.

 

[MRY]

I have a Logitech mouse and no problems.

There's really nothing I can do to help since: (1) I'm just a writer, not a coder; (2) even if it could be addressed through coding in Primordia (as opposed to rewriting the AGS engine), we're in code freeze; and (3) I think it sounds like an AGS issue, and we can't change the AGS codebase without running the risk of the whole temple falling down on our heads. Barring a fix along the lines that thread sets forth, I really don't know what to do.

Did you try uninstalling SetPoint? I'm pretty sure I don't use it, which might be the difference in our setups?

Sorry I can't be more helpful. :/