Figured it was time for an update. We've been so busy churning out point-n-click sweetness, we forgot all about taking the time to get down and dirty with some good old spamming. We are slowly closing in on release after all, and with zero money for advertising, ranting on forums is just about our only option for being seen, pre release.

Progress is moving along beautifully. We recently changed game engine from AGS to our own home-grown Gobby engine, which at a start pretty much put production to a complete stand still, but now that we've settled into the new milleu, it really turned out to be a good idea. Not only does it allow for easier multi-platform porting, it also gives us artists a wider range of new neat tools to work with to make the environments blend together better, without bogging down the system.

Working with Adventure Game Studio has been great though and I'd still recommend it to anyone who wants to get into point-n-click game making. It's a brilliant tool with incredible possibilities and it's got a great game developing community attached to it to boot. Our main reason for changing was the single-platform issue. Our in-house programmers decided that understanding and reverse engineering the innards of AGS would be more work and less fun than simply building our own streamlined, TJD specific development environment, built from the start with the intention of porting the game to several different platforms.

We are currently aiming for a PC, Mac, Android and iOS release some time Q1 2012.

Work on in-game assets is slowly starting to get wrapped up. Most backdrops are ready and animated, almost all characters have been built and animated. Music and speech is all pretty much in place except for maybe a third of our main characters lines, (There are over 1300 of them, heh.) The only major parts missing are some scripting and working on the intro+outro cinematics. In short, we are slowly getting there!

Please drop by the dev-blog a little now and then to catch up on or progress.

It looks as though your game is coming along rather well - and if I may say, you do seem to have a rather striking art style in use here. ^_^

I'm interested to read about your change in engine - and it looks as if you're developing a good one!

If I may, I have two questions:

1) Do you have plans to release the engine at some stage for others to use?

2) Did you ever look at Unity?  While not specific to adventure games, I do seem to recall that it allows for multi-platform builds, and I seem to recall my development experience with it (albeit again not specific to adventure games) being rather positive.

1) We are considering doing so. We have however realized that releasing it without supporting it would be pretty pointless, and supporting it means a lot of extra work. Writing documentation and keeping it up-to-date, etc. This is extra work that we'd prefer to avoid alltogether.

2) Yeah we've looked a lot at Unity. Our programmers aren't really satisfied with Unity's handling of 2d assets, though one must admit that unity nowadays is an incredibly impressive development environment in many other aspects. Also, I think our programmers wanted to build something from scratch for the very simple reason that it is more fun that way

Thanks for your kind comments.

Hey, just thought I'd share a pic from our dev-blog. Sketches from The Journey Down. Thousands of sketches.

Originally Posted By theo

1) We are considering doing so. We have however realized that releasing it without supporting it would be pretty pointless, and supporting it means a lot of extra work. Writing documentation and keeping it up-to-date, etc. This is extra work that we'd prefer to avoid alltogether.

 

2) Yeah we've looked a lot at Unity. Our programmers aren't really satisfied with Unity's handling of 2d assets, though one must admit that unity nowadays is an incredibly impressive development environment in many other aspects. Also, I think our programmers wanted to build something from scratch for the very simple reason that it is more fun that way

Fair enough on both counts. ^_^

As to the first, you might get around the support issue by passing the project on to others, perhaps even the community, if you're comfortable with doing so (I imagine that I'd have at least a little reluctance to let go of such a thing made by myself).

(It just seems to me to be a pity to lose a potentially good engine for other projects, especially since it seems to fill a niche that isn't occupied by another. :/)

If you're curious about some of our technical thoughts and motivations regarding sharing / not sharing, Me and Markus, the lead programmer on Gobby/GobEd have been doing some ranting over on this thread on the AGS forums. Maybe that sheds some more light on things. Or just confuses you furhter, heh. Not sure.

Anyhow this definitely seems to be a pending "issue".