Aeon of Sands : The Trail - Dungeon Crawling RPG love letter to the 90's!

[Neil79]

it's with great pleasure to announce Aeon of Sands : The Trail. Developed by Two Bits Kid, based in Germany, Aeon of Sands is a "Dungeon Adventure" story-driven RPG love letter to the golden Amiga, PC classics of the 90's

http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/0...-crawling.html

PC - MAC - LINUX

[Marcuz]

Ahem, sorry maybe I should point that it's Aeon, not Aoen, not that I know anything about it

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Marcuz

Ahem, sorry maybe I should point that it's Aeon, not Aoen, not that I know anything about it

I took the liberty to fix the typo in the thread title

[Neil79]

And we fixed our article

[Marcuz]

Thanks! I would have not mind, as RPGwatch too myspelled Trail for Trial, I was just waiting for someone to invent Snads in place of Sands

[lilalurl]

Originally Posted by Marcuz

Thanks! I would have not mind, as RPGwatch too myspelled Trail for Trial, I was just waiting for someone to invent Snads in place of Sands

You mean misspelled (or misspelt) I guess

Too bad your game is not a rougelike (as I have often seen written).

[Marcuz]

ahahah, yeah, after writing and correcting three times the dialogues for the game, I'm still lost without the proofreading tool!

By the way, this is what a dialogue, midway through the game looks like

[ransom1122]

Pitty theres no amiga release. But this indeed looks amazing another game I'll Play away from grimlock
The devs certainly know how to bring back old school dungeon crawlers.

[Neil79]

A few RPG comments and tweets have given a negative crit that the game view screen is too small. I think I agree with this, less of the surrounding detail and more size given to the game itself could be of benefit

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Marcuz

ahahah, yeah, after writing and correcting three times the dialogues for the game, I'm still lost without the proofreading tool!

By the way, this is what a dialogue, midway through the game looks like

Cool man. Wouldn't mind a development diary

[Marcuz]

Neil, yeah I know, we too have get criticism about that.

Short answer is: our screenshots show the whole area of the interface, while it can get cropped to the active area (the one comprehending the dungeon's view, the portraits and stats bars, the direction arrows) depending on the monitor the game is played on.

We have also considered active resizing, but that has a technical downside in the artifact creation, it would be as using resize shaders on Winuae.
The cropping is already in game, the resizing will probably not be there, but it will be up to Florian.

Long answer is: basically, we have a limit in what we can do with interface that's not different from the games from the early nineties.
Our dungeon view is small not for memory constraints, but for the capability to produce the amount of graphics required with the workforce involved (only me); by the fact that we want to show an inventory that does not cover the dungeon, that never pauses the action there; by the need to show text for the story and a compass, direction arrows for future, possible touch screen devices implementation, etc; all in bitmap graphics.

All of that and more, made the dungeon's view small, and with no possibility to make that alone go full screen (actually I can, in debug, but, uhm, that's supposed to be secret.)
So I needed a present and real interface, and to use the same solutions games like the ones that inspired us used to address those problems.

So, to make it a bit interesting, I made at least the interface telling subtly a story in itself, that will be more clear if we ever get to the second chapter of the game


Gimbal, that is planned, I hope we will be able to do it after the summer: basically we have to finalize our presentation of the game before that (with an in-game video).
Luckily (or not) even after that, there will be so much work for us to do (for me graphic content, at that point), that we will be able to mantain a more steady diary.

[Neil79]

Originally Posted by Neil79

A few RPG comments and tweets have given a negative crit that the game view screen is too small. I think I agree with this, less of the surrounding detail and more size given to the game itself could be of benefit

Hi there,

I'm the other guy working on this game. Thanks for your responses and feedback! Now I realize, that we really need todo a developer blog to explain more about the game :-).

I aggree with the complains about playable are size. In addition to Marcuz I want to say, that the maingame are is cropable & scaleable. The published screenshots show a larger boarder, because we thought it looks much nicer when viewed on a 16:9 screen.

Take a look over here:
https://twitter.com/aeonofsands/stat...983040/photo/1
https://twitter.com/KyoshoLP/status/...111360/photo/1
http://aeonofsands.com/presskit/imag...s_1280x800.png

Fullscreen
A problem arises, when you want to play a pixelbased game in Fullscreen in nativ resolution. LCD-Screen all have different resolutions and aspect ratios.

Aeon has no 3d engine! It's fake3d or flip3d like the old dungeon crawler games. We choose this for a couple of reasons, but mostly because we want to achieve the same look and feel of the old ones. We you use Unity3D or something else...you always get this smooth texture stretched look and this was a nogo for us.

When you do a pixelated game and want to scale, you always want to scale square pixel (Just like all emulator shader-scalers!). In this case you need to scale by even numbers 1,2,3 and not 1.4 or 1.598.

Here a sample:
Your pixel game is drawn in 640x480 pixel.

1.)
You want to show it on a lcd-screen that has 1280x1024 ...you can display it in the center in 640x480 or you can scale it.
You scale it by 2 and get an image of 1280x960.
So you get (1024-960=) 64 pixel larger boarder than on a 640x480 lcd-screen. But the scale image fits into the 1280x1024 lcd-screen.

2.)
But what if some people have a lcd-screen that has a nativ resolution of 1366x768?
So you scale by 2 and get (1366-1280=) 86 pixel and (768-960)= -192. Ooops. Lcd-screen is too small to display the game scaled by 2. So you have to display the game in 640x480 in the center of a 1366x768 screen and have large dark boarders.

So we thought, why not add a nice background art to the game, that users with such lcd-screens don't see large dark booring boarders :-).



I wrote a longer explanation in my blog.
http://crankgaming.blogspot.de/2013/...d-scaling.html

But notice, that this problem only arises when you want to play in fullscreen on a square pixel scaling! You can freely scale or crop gui in window to playable area.

Maybe I add a freescaling option to fullscreen, but I really see no reason why poeple want to play a nice draw pixelated game that lives from this pixel graphics in non-square scaling. This looks sooo ugly. You can't even read the fonts. That's why most pixelated games can only run in window mode or look distorted or you have to adjust your lcd-screen.

cheers
SiENcE

[ptyerman]

Looking forward to it.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by SiENcE

cheers
SiENcE

Wait wait wait, are you the same SiENcE who worked on the Iris-Client for UO?

Yes, and a lot of other things: sience.schattenkind.net

Do you still use Iris?!?

[Marcuz]

I thought you guys might be interested in watch, well, peer at, more accurately, at the first public live footage of Aeon of Sands, taped at the presentation SiENcE did at Devmania, Mainz, last weekend
[ Show youtube player ]
The entire talk is there too, but be forewarned, it's in german language!

[Jgames]

When it's released?

[Marcuz]

When it's completed!
We aim for 2015, though.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by SiENcE

http://aeonofsands.com/presskit/imag...s_1280x800.png

That link from your earlier post no longer works. I removed the image from the link and have been browsing the image folder. Some impressive artwork
Any objections to me (or anyone else) including the promotional images as adverts in my (or anyone elses) game? My game is for Amiga only though

Oh, the latest image you added (aktwork, added 1st Oct 2014) you might want to rename it so the 'k' is an 'r'... unless the 'k' is deliberate?!



Edit: Just realised my question is a moot point as you put the images in a presskit folder