The Ages of Ilathid

ALPHA TESTERS WANTED!

 

 

We're looking for people to do an alpha test of part of an Age (specifically, a puzzle and a bit of music).  If you'd like to sign up, just send an e-mail to ilathid at gmail dot com with the subject header "sign me up for alpha testing" and we'll get things started.  :)

Great News: for a limited (but unknown) Time, DAZ offers it's Graphix Suite for free : http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/free-3d-software?cat=1486

For the Atronomical Price of $ 0.00, you'll get Daz Studio 4 Pro, Bryce 7 Pro, Hexagon 2.5 and lotsa other goodies (DAZ Bridge, DAZ Goz, Bryce additionnal content, an so on...). Run and get your copy right now !

Ok, I'm aware (and me guess you too are...) that I pop here only for various greetings... Although, I wish you the very best for these Winter Holidays for ya, your family and friends. So, merry Christmas and happy New Year !

Happy to announce that we've finished the demo for part of an Age.  :)  Still got a lot of work left to do on it, but it's pretty darned thrilling to walk around in.

We'll start setting things in motion to release it for testing once we've gotten our project management system straightened back out.  Redmine?  It finally bit the big one.  Too many errors, too hard to fix when it breaks.  Also, some of the official "upgrades" were actually Vista-style upgrades, if you get the drift.  So right now we're looking at OpenAtrium, which seems like it will be an improvement in any case.  

"Then the game designers grew proud of Redmine, and forgot their humble origins in the darkness of the ancient Ilathid forum.  And so a great catastrophe struck their project management system.  The survivors fled to a new home, OpenAtrium, where they could begin anew."  Story of our project!

We're currently in the final stage of assembly for the new area--the slides are done, the animations are done, and the programming is estimated at 25% complete.  :)  

Plans for the future are to focus on smaller bites at a time.  

Hello, it's Paulo again!

 

 

Now to talk about general design principles.

One thing every aspiring game designer should have in mind is that everything MUST BE DONE ON PURPOSE. You just do not throw game elements around because they're cool. Dissonant elements do the charming trick of not only taking the player out of the game, but of making them stop playing the game, and, in some extreme cases, making them return the game to the shop claiming a defect and making them trade your game for the first thing they see on the shelf.

In short, not good.

 

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Back in April I mentioned we were trying to finish a new demo in a scorching 30 day blitz. The operational part of the post was the following:

Not that we finished it all on schedule (let's just throw back 

our heads and laugh at that silly idea)

At any rate, it's time for a progress update. We're done with the modeling, sounds, voice recordings, landscaping and a bit of the rendering. Which leaves the animations, the rest of the renderings, the coding for the navigation, some voice alteration, and the puzzle logic.

But--due to some problems one of our team members is having, we'll have to put this on hold for awhile (a month or so, I guess).

I thought I'd share some of the work done for the demo here. This animal is called the stinger snail. (Due to the import process from Blender to Bryce, the snail won't look this good in the demo, but in the final version it should look right.)

Stinger Snail

And now, a post about our game.

First, we must talk about our background. I'll try not to be too spoilerific here, but be warned.

To start, as I believe you know if you're reading this. The Ages of Ilathid (TAOI, to its friends), is set on the D'ni universe. If you do not know about the D'ni universe, I'll recommend you to get the original Myst games and the Myst books. The books are important too. But you may also read reference sites, like this one:

http://dnidesk.rivenwolf.net/refindex.html

Now that you know a little or a lot about the D'niverse, read on...

 

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Sorry for the long hiatus,

I've been unable to post due to series of unfortunate coincidences and accidents that simply left me too drained to do much of anything.

Now, however, I want to talk about something I wanted to talk about for a while: good adventure games.

You see, the whole Ilathid idea is to homage Cyan Worlds' Myst series, by providing a good adventure game with good graphics, good music, exotic places, but, most importantly, a good storyline and good world design, where all the pieces fit in as a whole. The adventure genre these days has mostly degenerated to "escape" games which sort of demean the purpose...

But there still some bastions of good adventure left.

First, let's talk about The Infinite Ocean, a game by Jonas Kyratzes. If follows all the precepts of Myst: you don't know why you're in the place you're in, or even what exactly it is. As you follow the puzzles (very simple ones, mostly, so as not to get in the way), you begin to piece it together - and it is, frankly, quite amazing. I believe it might have been simply one of the top three best game I've played.

Check it out here, and tell us what you think:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/JonasKyratzes/the-infinite-ocean

 

-Paulo