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Doomsday Lost Echoes - Released and now with Physical Edition

Started by ||C|-|E||, 00:18, 31 July 15

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Javy Fernandez


||C|-|E||

Sadly, there won' t be a Spanish version  :( It is not possible to make it without sacrificing things because to fit the game into the RAM all the texts are compressed and they decompress in real time. This compression worked wonders for English language, saving us around 25KB (otherwise the game would require around 85-90KB of free RAM) but it would not be the same in Spanish, with longer sentences and different words. HOWEVER, I am really confident that anyone able to follow this forum will be more than able to go through the game. We have used quite a plain language during all the adventure to make it easy to understand, and the parser accepts lots of verbs and the wildcard "use" in case you do not know the proper word. The verb "use" can be employed every time you know that this thing needs to be used in combination with this other but you ignore the specific verb, and it allowed all the testers whose knowledge of english is not great to go through the adventure  :)

robcfg

Are you using a dictionary for text compression?


If you feel like it, we can talk via pm on the subject.

||C|-|E||

I am, but PAWS is much less flexible than the DAAD in this regard :) It has an embedded dictionary that cannot be changed and that is actually the problem. On one side, it really works great with English, on the other, it works pretty badly for any other language. However, even if we could sort out the compression issue, we would still need to create new databases of verbs, adjectives and nouns. This would be very difficult because I have already exhausted them: we are using 255 nouns, 255 adjectives, and 512 messages. There is no room for almost anything besides bug correction  :picard2:

MiguelSky

A shame! The compression dictionay in DAAD can be created in each adventure you make.

||C|-|E||

Yup! Maese Samudio told Tim Gilberts to implement it this way and it was a neat move  :D

||C|-|E||

Very short but important news for our little adventure! The Release Candidate 1 has been already sent for the final testing  :D It is great because we managed to put it together way sooner than expected!  :D

Dubliner

Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 11:01, 09 August 16
Very short but important news for our little adventure! The Release Candidate 1 has been already sent for the final testing  :D It is great because we managed to put it together way sooner than expected!  :D

Very good news indeed! It was so fun to test the beta, i can´t wait to get a physical release :)

ldaneels

For those who didn't see the website: https://doomsdayproductions.org/
Yummy ! I can't wait to play the game.
Any news on a physical release ?
See you in 8 days !

||C|-|E||

Oooh dear!  So yes, we were preparing everything yesterday evening and my idea was to do the announcement today, but you were faster than me and discovered the stuff on your own!  :D :D

But the summary is still the same: the game is ready to launch, you can enjoy the trailer right now and we expect to have everything ready to be downloaded the next Tuesday. Then, it will be your turn and you will be able to see if waiting for so long was worth it or not, hehe  ;D

Regarding the physical release, we actually do not plan it for the immediate future but, if there is enough interest, we can definitely think about it. Actually, we prepared the manual in a "ready to print" format just in case this physical edition becomes true. We would need to discuss what would be the best physical format, though. Remember that the game requires either a 3" and a 3.5" floppies or a couple of 3.5" floppies to run  :) .

robcfg

Shut up and take my money!  ;D


Jokes aside, really looking forward to play it!

Gryzor

Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 17:03, 24 October 16
Regarding the physical release, we actually do not plan it for the immediate future but, if there is enough interest, we can definitely think about it. Actually, we prepared the manual in a "ready to print" format just in case this physical edition becomes true. We would need to discuss what would be the best physical format, though. Remember that the game requires either a 3" and a 3.5" floppies or a couple of 3.5" floppies to run  :) .


Poll time? ;)

ldaneels

oops, I hope I didn't ruin your plans. I was just so exicted to see the trailer, I had to let everybody know.
It does look very nice indeed.
Well, I'll definitely keep an eye out for a physical release should you decide to make one. If that can help, I can provide my own 3" floppy and I imagine a lot of people should be able to. Well, if you decide to make a physical release. At any rate, it's just a possibility if you're short on ideas.
Cheers,

Loic

Dubliner

Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 17:03, 24 October 16
Oooh dear!  So yes, we were preparing everything yesterday evening and my idea was to do the announcement today, but you were faster than me and discovered the stuff on your own!  :D :D

LOL i was wondering myself this morning why i haven´t seen any announcemente when i saw the trailer on Youtube via Gryzor. I even posted about that on retromaniac  :D

||C|-|E||

Quote from: ldaneels on 20:08, 24 October 16
oops, I hope I didn't ruin your plans. I was just so exicted to see the trailer, I had to let everybody know.
It does look very nice indeed.
Well, I'll definitely keep an eye out for a physical release should you decide to make one. If that can help, I can provide my own 3" floppy and I imagine a lot of people should be able to. Well, if you decide to make a physical release. At any rate, it's just a possibility if you're short on ideas.
Cheers,

Loic

Hahaha, of course you did not ruin anything! Do not worry!  :D

Quote from: Dubliner on 20:59, 24 October 16
LOL i was wondering myself this morning why i haven´t seen any announcemente when i saw the trailer on Youtube via Gryzor. I even posted about that on retromaniac  :D

I was just looking at it right now!! Thank you so much!  :D :-*

About the physical release, we can start having a look at it when the game is released. If there is enough interest, why not?

||C|-|E||

#215
Soo... we released the trailer just a few days ago and it seems that people are really looking forward to play the game. That is awesome, but I would like to clarify a few things regarding some questions that have appeared here an there, mainly to put the hype in place  :-X . I know that most of you guys know exactly what to expect from an Amstrad text adventure, but I have found that  many people that is not so familiar with the machine is reading just the final posts of this long thread and have quite a lot of questions. This goes mostly for them  :)

- The trailer is a cinematic video that Dani made to promote the game. It looks really great because he is a professional graphics artist, but keep in mind that the adventure has static graphics and no music!

- We put a lot of care and love in the game, but it is made with PAWS and its official graphics patch. They are great tools, but old as well. Nothing that can be compared with the awesome custom game engines we can see here from time to time. So, do not expect to find another amazing Orion Prime with music, mouse support, etc. (we are really far from it!). There are no jaw dropping effect besides the mb0 loading screens.

- The adventure only runs in 128KB computers and they need to have a 3.5" floppy drive or an HxC floppy emulator.

What you will be able to play is a game in line with some classic titles, like the AD adventures, but with a parser that is way more flexible when it comes to understand your commands and more than 60 graphics in pixel art that contain important clues and puzzles themselves. Besides, the game has the three endings we mentioned in before, the secondary missions, a big easter egg and lots of little things to examine and discover here and there. We tried to keep the production values as high as possible  :)

Gryzor

Heh, I had the nagging feeling that some, watching the video, would think it's going to be cinematic indeed... but it's such a great trailer, really!

||C|-|E||

Dani had time to play with his pixel art, that is for sure!  :D

||C|-|E||

It is over. It has been a super long trip but we have finally released the adventure. You can visit Doomsday Productions homepage and download the game from there.

Now it is your turn to try it and see if you manage to enjoy our little production  :) There has been a surprising amount of expectation (probably due to Dani´s great pixel art) but remember that you will just find a PAWS adventure here, nothing close to the magic of Rhino, Targhan or many other great programmers. However, we put a lot of care and dedication on the game to make it enjoyable. We hope that you will have no major trouble with the parser and the learning curve will feel just right. We also hope you will not encounter any major bug when playing but, if this happens, just report us the problem and we will try to to fix any issue.

Thank you all for your continuous support! This would have been impossible without the suggestions of many of you and the contribution of lots of great people that shared their knowledge, time, and dedication with us  :-*

All the team

[attachimg=1]



khaz

#219
Downloaded, but haven't played with it yet. The readme.txt on notepad++ shows a bunch of control characters in the middle of the text. GS and US, which shouldn't be here. They are invisible in regular notepad.

The pdf is gorgeous though. It needs to be printed out.

[edit] Something worth mentioning I believe: the game won't start if the discs are write-protected, or in winape if they are loaded from an archive.

||C|-|E||

Thank you for the comments! I have fixed the TXT and we will upload the corrected version during the night! :)

Regarding the write protection, actually at least the second disc should be unprotected all the time, because it is best to use it to save your games while you are playing  :) (there is space for around 140 saves in there!)


khaz

Quote from: ||C|-|E|| on 03:23, 01 November 16Regarding the write protection, actually at least the second disc should be unprotected all the time, because it is best to use it to save your games while you are playing  :) (there is space for around 140 saves in there!)

That did throw me off at first, as I loaded the rar into winape without really thinking. I was surprised to get a write error while loading, it's a bit counter-intuitive; I would have expected an error when trying to save the font or the game, not before. Is writing a mandatory step during loading? I know some people like to keep their data on write-protected discs, and use a separate disc to save their game, to try to minimize the risk of corruption. Though it's much less of a problem on a non-copy-protected game like yours, which can be rewritten at will.

In any case, that's completely inconsequential to my enjoyment of the game. It's way too late here to even try to understand the story, but I can look at the pretty pictures! I do want to see these high-res intro pics on a proper CRT, not in emulation.

arnoldemu

I just started to play it. I wish I had read the PDF because it answered a lot of questions.

Presentation is nice. :) Descriptions and location graphics are really atmospheric.

First thing I found is that I needed two drives to play it properly. If I tried to play it with one drive, then CPM was asking me to insert disc into drive A, then B, then A etc LOL. After I used two drives it worked much better.

Question: Is there a command for viewing the room graphics and description again? I tried "look" and "examine" (on it's own) and neither work.

I discovered "exits" lists the directions.

I also tried to use "take" and that didn't seem to work but the I found "get" works fine.

Now I will go back and read the manual ;) :-[




My games. My Games
My website with coding examples: Unofficial Amstrad WWW Resource

MiguelSky

Quote from: arnoldemu on 07:58, 01 November 16Question: Is there a command for viewing the room graphics and description again? I tried "look" and "examine" (on it's own) and neither work.
Try with R o REDES (from REDESCRIBE).

||C|-|E||

Glad you are linking the graphics!!  :D

Quote from: khaz on 03:40, 01 November 16
That did throw me off at first, as I loaded the rar into winape without really thinking. I was surprised to get a write error while loading, it's a bit counter-intuitive; I would have expected an error when trying to save the font or the game, not before. Is writing a mandatory step during loading? I know some people like to keep their data on write-protected discs, and use a separate disc to save their game, to try to minimize the risk of corruption. Though it's much less of a problem on a non-copy-protected game like yours, which can be rewritten at will.

In principle you can use a different disc to save your games, but then you would need to introduce the disc of the adventure back as soon as your game is saved because although the game itself stays in the RAM all the graphics are read in real time. To load a game this way you would need to exchange the disc again, type "load", write the name of the file and insert the adventure´s floppy in the drive when the game is loaded :). Good news is that you have RAM save and RAM load commands, so you would only need to do this once if you want. In any case, since the game is not write protected, I think that I would just stick with the "original" floppy, hehe.

Quote from: arnoldemu on 07:58, 01 November 16
I just started to play it. I wish I had read the PDF because it answered a lot of questions.
First thing I found is that I needed two drives to play it properly. If I tried to play it with one drive, then CPM was asking me to insert disc into drive A, then B, then A etc LOL. After I used two drives it worked much better.
Question: Is there a command for viewing the room graphics and description again? I tried "look" and "examine" (on it's own) and neither work.
I discovered "exits" lists the directions.
I also tried to use "take" and that didn't seem to work but the I found "get" works fine.
Now I will go back and read the manual ;) :-[

So yes, all the info is in the PDF, hehe  :D . To pick and drop objects the commands are GET and DROP. To wear a wearable thing you need to use WEAR and to remove it REMOVE. You can re-describe a location with R, as Miguel said, and typing EXITS or Z you will see all the possible exits. The reason of this is that in English we have many verbs that can be used in different contexts with different meanings as well. For example, you can say "take the stick", but also "take off the sweater". You want to avoid using words that in the game could have different meanings depending on the situation because it would make everything much more difficult to parse. It is possible, but we would be using lots of precious RAM writing condacts to deal with these situations :).

Regarding the use of two floppy drives, it is very recommended but not strictly necessary  :) . For example, I am using just one in my modded 464 Plus. The thing is that the first floppy is in charge to load the CP/M plus and configure it in the proper way. It sets the text font and executes a tool that sets the drive B as a high density one. Then, it switches to the drive B and loads the game. If you only have one drive, in my computer there is an error when switching to the unit B, so you have to manually insert the second disc, type B: and then DOOMSDAY to load the game. This is somehow a bit annoying but we were not able to overcome the problem :'( .

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