Two quick and dirty examples of our character sprite coming to life in the Visionaire Engine. The scene artwork isn’t representative of the artwork that will be in the final game! :P
An update on the engine (Visionaire Studio): It is an absolute dream to work with! I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in making a classic point n click style adventure game.
The un-mastered version of the title theme for our (Gizmogi) point and click adventure game. Joe is doing a fantastic job on the audio, and Scott is coming up with some fantastic artwork.
Be sure to check back soon for more updates!
The title theme for the new, currently un-named, Gizomogi project is almost complete! All thats left to do now is mixing and mastering! Just an hour or two more and the soundtrack to this epic game will be complete!
Project “X” is now in full swing!
A sample soundtrack created by Joe Tommany. This is an attempt to establish a style and overall feel/melody for the game. (If you want a better explanation than that, ask Joe over at http://joewtommany.tumblr.com - he’s the musician not me! :P)
After testing Wintermute (As well as AGS), it was clear that development using the engine was not going to be a smooth ride. The interface felt clunky, unintuitive and sometimes unresponsive.
In an act of desperation I did one final Google search for a suitable engine for our project. Et voila, Visionaire Studio.
Visionaire Studio is an engine by a group of German (Deutch?) developers and has been translated into English (Though translations are clearly still not entirely finished - however, this is not a big issue). The engine is the gears behind the widely successful game, The Whispered World, which was recently released worldwide (and available here in the UK at GAME).
The interface is brilliant, very intuitive, and very responsive. That’s not to say it is without fault. Items placed in a scene don’t always appear, and as previously mentioned there are some places where translation has not happened - resulting in some buttons still being in Deutch.
However, despite these few issues, I think we have found our new engine. At least for now. :)
So, if you haven’t already heard, I have started a project along with 2 of my good friends (Scott Norris and Joe Tommany) to create a point and click adventure game - akin to Broken Sword, Longest Journey, Monkey Island and the likes.
We are going to be developing this game under the studio name “Gizmogi” and we have therefore acquired the domain Gizmogi.com.
We have not decided on a title for the game yet, but we have some concept art and have begun to flesh out the story for the game. I won’t give anything away at this point, but I CAN tell you that we will be using the Wintermute Engine for the game’s development.
Wintermute Engine is a game engine purpose built for adventure games (both 2D like Monkey Island, and 2.5D like Longest Journey). Whilst it is an engine dedicated to creating adventure games, it is not an engine for “wannabe” game developers. It sports a C like scripting language that allows you to add whatever features you want to your game. It is also free for commercial use, and funnily enough I noticed one game in the shops (Art of Murder) the other day that just so happens to be developed with the Wintermute Engine. This game wasn’t a triple A, but was selling for £7 a pop. We would be thrilled if our game could reach the same success!
That being said, this is being worked on as a hobby and in our spare time - so do not expect loads of posts about it’s current status, as I am expecting development to be fairly slow. Over the next few weeks I will try my best to keep you updated, and I’ll see if I can convince Scott to let me release some of those sweet concept artworks for you guys to salivate over :)
If your wondering why I haven’t made any posts relating to the development of Aries Engine lately, it’s because Aries Engine is… well… dead. Kinda.
The engine still exists, and it is semi-capable of rendering COLLADA models. I say “semi” because there seems to be some discrepancies between COLLADA files, produced by different 3D modelling software packages, that Aries Engine cannot handle. Specifically in the way textures are specified. It can, however, render some COLLADA files perfectly - including texturing and normal mapping.
There also appears to be a hidden memory leak in the application that is proving almost impossible to debug with XCode. This causes the engine to crash randomly when being launched - sometimes it works fine, sometimes it crashes on launch. When the new version of XCode is released, maybe I can rectify this.
Due to these issues, and the fact that I managed to get it to a semi-capable state, I am currently writing this off as a proof-of-concept.
Despite all this, I am very proud of what I was able to achieve in the short time I spent developing this engine, and it has in no way deterred me from wanting to continue along the game development path.
Texturing is finally working! This is an example with a simple diffuse light source placed in the scene. This video also demonstrates the different drawing modes available (Vertex, Wireframe and Polygon).
What was the problem I hear you cry? The depth buffer was set to 0 bits!! It’s now set to a 16-bit depth buffer, which has fixed the “culling” issues (It was actually z-fighting, not culling).
