Doomsday Lost Echoes - Released and now with Physical Edition

[robcfg]

The font selector is cool indeed!

Have a nice Christmas!

[Puresox]

Superb ! Problem Sorted with style!

[dcdrac]

this really shaping up nicely

[FloppySoftware]

It's just a little contribution to a big project. I wrote the font selector fully CPC / PCW compatible because I have the hope of a PCW version of Doomsday. 

[||C|-|E||]

Thank you all, guys!! Actually, the font selector was an important contribution, very important indeed!  It should be easy to port the game to PCW. As soon as the final CPC version is released we can work on it 

[khaz]

That's a fantastic project you have here, I can't wait to play it!

I'm probably way too late for that, but I want to nitpick about the text:
Traditionally, texts adventure games have the player as the hero and addresses them as "you", effectively putting the player at the centre of the action. In your game however it feels like the player isn't part of the story, they only dictate what should happen next, but what's happening doesn't happen to them, it happens to that character in the game. Using "I" instead of "you" puts a distance between the character and its player, and I really think it's detrimental to the immersion. I, the player, am the guy moving around in a space station, solving puzzle. For a moment, I am Mike, the space explorer with a mysterious past, trying to save everyone from an impeding doom, amass gold and save the princess.

If I take the screens you have shown as examples, and only change this part:

It's been a long trip but you are finally here. Just a few miles away you can see the Regus station, silently orbiting Pollux b. The old spaceship is where this Arnold guy was last seen thirty years ago. Luckily, the landing pads seem to be in one piece and even some of the navigation lights are still working. It should be quite easy to land the Doomsday in the docks and enter this giant piece of junk! OK, landing time.

You are in your ship, the Doomsday. You can see the enormous dock of the station illuminated by the nearby Pollux through the cockpit windscreen. The ship is resting on a landing pad.

What should you do now?
>_

A huge medical scanner dominates the room. The scanner is empty, but a corpse still rests on the wheeled patient table. It appears that the body rot here because everything around is stained with dry body fluids. To the left, behind a room divider,  you can see the monitoring computers on a table. There are some shelves with papers to the right.

What should you do now?
>_

In my opinion, "I" is only good when the character is directly speaking, with quotes. Which is how the genre evolved when it started using third person characters to control, a la SCUMM games, and completely discarded text descriptions.

I would also remove "What should you do now?" before the prompt, it will be annoying after a couple of hours/minutes. Or put it only on the first screen, before the first interaction. That way it shows the new player that there is something to do when they see the prompt, while also not overstaying its welcome.

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
>_

[||C|-|E||]

Thank you for your message! 

Actually, I was thinking about what you said for quite a long time before writing the adventure. At the end, I decided to make Mike to speak in first person and I would say that it was just a question of personal taste and letting the player know more about Mike through the text, like in a dialog. Most of the adventures I played put you in the skin of the main character and I never liked the approach much because I always felt that the computer was an impersonal narrator situated between me and the action. However, I agree that maybe this is more immersive. Sadly, now is too late to change it, all the texts are written and the game is close to the beta release, let´s hope you guys will like it as it is  .

Regarding the sentence before the prompt, I completely agree with you (and the rest of the people involved in the production as well). We removed it long ago and you only see the > symbol now. This also saves space in the screen and everything looks more neat!

[attachimg=1]

[Gryzor]

So, we're talking about first- and third-person text adventures now?

[||C|-|E||]

After coming back from holidays, it is time for another monthly update! 

- All the graphics have been already included, everything works very well and the game looks really nice. Although the pixel art is finished, we are considering to do some minor tweaking for better use of the free space in the screen.
- I continue testing and correcting things, many things. When I left for holidays I thought that everything was more or less OK but it seems that I was actually quite wrong  . I started testing again from scratch and I found a number of things that were still not completely consistent and needed to be polished. Nothing game breaking, but still. I am close to finish this testing round and I do not know if I will do another one before releasing the beta or not, probably yes .

- The instruction manual is almost ready and has been already corrected by Gryzor and Dthrone (thank you guys!). It is quite exhaustive and it should have enough lore and info for anyone to play the game, even if he/she is completely new to the world of text adventures.

- FloppySoftware (thank you too!!) is working in a game loader for CP/M, something that lets you to configure your computer and decide if you are going to run the game using one of two floppy drives. We wanted to do automatic detection, but this is far from easy, so we are exploring other possibilities .

- We are making mouse mats with the artwork of the game! Dani has created this cool cover and I have ordered three, just to check how they look and their quality. I will post some pictures as soon as I receive them! 

[attachimg=1]

- Finally, looking for something in a drawer Dani found this old cover! 

[attachimg=2]

[reidrac]

Very nice artwork

[dcdrac]

wow that is amazing

[TFM]

Aber so was von!!!

[Zoe Robinson]

Guys, this artwork is beautiful. Any chance of it being made available as desktop wallpaper, or maybe something we can buy and frame? 

[||C|-|E||]

We are very glad you like it!!!  Thank you guys!

So, we are actually discussing how to present the artwork in the case of an eventual physical release. It turns out that we have very very high resolution images (the artwork itself is vectorial, although the color was added in Photoshop) and everything would be possible from a technical point of view .  We also have a beautiful and huge pixel art poster with the game map, intro, cutscenes and endings, but there are no plans to make this one available at the moment because it contains massive spoilers, as you can imagine 

[Zoe Robinson]

there are no plans to make this one available at the moment because it contains massive spoilers, as you can imagine 

Please teach Hollywood this lesson; maybe they'll then stop putting spoilers in their trailers.

[||C|-|E||]

Hehe, I really dislike when somebody shows me too much of a movie or a videogame. Nothing like a completely fresh experience, in my humble opinion  . Of course, everything needs testing, but testing is a necessary sacrifice that some people make to help some others to better enjoy a game. So, I think that they really deserve a special gift when their job is done 

[TFM]

Just an idea. It would be nice to choose text with a brighter blue (maybe 2 or 11 instead of 1). I have a hard time reading it. Didn't pass the mole test.       Anything else... just pure awesomeness! Will be one of the biggest CPC games for sure! 

[||C|-|E||]

That is actually a very good point, although a little bit out of our control  . PAWs automatically chooses the color of the text based in the palette of the image, this has a good side and a bad side. The good side is that the color of the text changes with the color of the location and this is actually quite immersive. The dark side is that some locations have a text that it is just a bit too dark. I have to do a bit more of experimentation with this to see if I can solve the issue, but I am not 100% sure. In any case, if this turns out to be something annoying we can always choose another palette for the image (you will tell me when you are testing the game  ). Luckily, I think that this is more a problem of reading the text again the bright color of the PC screen. I am telling you this because I was playing the game in the CPC and the color of the text does not seem to be a big issue  .

[TotO]

Looking the screens, you are using 4 colours like that:
- Background: Black
- Dark: undefined
- Middle: undefined
- Light: White

Instead of using the "dark" colour for the text, you should allow to use the "middle" one. (change with the context too)

[||C|-|E||]

I have some good news! 

[attachimg=1]

[attachimg=2]

I solved the issue! I cannot specify the color of the text (PAWs always chooses the second color defined in the palette) but I managed to rearrange the positions of all the colors and remap them in the game. I just need to do this for all the locations that need it 

[MiguelSky]

Exactly!!

[dodogildo]

Great news.

[||C|-|E||]

I have additional great news! Some mouse mats! 

They are only a prototype because we need to adjust the final image (it needs to have bigger margins, in this one the things are too close to the edges) but they look very cool already and the quality seems to be superb. I am testing one in the lab to see how it behaves  .

[attachimg=1]

[attachimg=2]

[villain]

I never understood what those mats are for, but they really look great!

[robcfg]

Ooooooh! Sign me in for one of these! XD