Rat Channel - New Spectral Adventure released

Spectral Adventures released the new interactive Motion Picture "Rat Channel".

A Rat Hunter has to hunt rats in a distopic future.

http://ratchannel.univert.games

Play for free. No Ads. No Spam. Like always.

Proxima Centauri B

Proxima Centauri B has been discovered yesterday. This tide locked planet is probably the next habitable planet to our solar system. One side of the planet is always dark and the other one is always light. Does this sound familiar to someone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b

Sunlight Report 4

This time the Sunlight report focuses on the concept art for "A Second Face". I showed the sketches to my friends and they convinced me to share them with you. This will give you a small insight on how some of the game's cutscenes look so far.

I use markers to get an idea of how the colors will look once in the game. Shading is mostly done by applying pastel colors. The basic structure is made with a 4H pencil, which sets up the layout and proportions of the drawings. Animation instructions and game related numbers are overlaid with red markers. This is great help when planning the direction of the whole scene.

Important dialog segments get added to the backgrounds and become part of the scenographic viewpoint. Plot descriptions that describe single scene parts are placed in the middle to create separation.

http://lewoltaire.deviantart.com/gallery/

Sunlight Report 3

Developing a full-length adventure game is a hard task that requires a lot of discipline especially when you do it basically alone. I've done this two times and I will hopefully do this several times again. However the second part of "A Second Face" is becoming a neck breaking work. More than 200 backgrounds are already done. 50 Characters are ready. The full story and screen play exists. But still there is so much work left.

60 minutes of music still have to be composed. Thousands of detailed scenes still have to be drawn and animated. Tons of dialogs have to be put into a scripted form. More and more details rise with every decision. This is my largest game project so far and it has accompanied me through three countries, several other jobs, good and bad times. Anyway I am sure this is going to turn into my best creation so far.

A Second Face version 1.7 released "Gameplay Edition"

I am glad to announce that version 1.7 of "A Second Face - The Eye of Geltz is watching Us" was released. In this "Gameplay Edition" the verb coin mechanics were improved and the game runs much faster than before. Apart from that the Intro was polished up with better grafics so you might want to rewatch it. Music recieved a sampling update aswell so the main music is much more atmospheric now.

Website with new content!

The website of "A Second Face" has been updated. It now contains press comments, videos, larger screenshots and the best thing: A virtual scetchbook for those who want to know how the game was developed.

AGS Awards 2010

So the awards ceremony took finally place and I was invited to be part of the committee for the lifetime achievement award and the best innovation award.

I was happy that the whole committee didn't argue a lot and that we decided to make Mark Lovegrove the winner of the lifetime achievement award. He really made some consistent soundtracks for amateur adventure games and I couldn't imagine a Trilby game without his music.

The best innovation award was given to the guys who try to make amateur adventure games more cross platform so that many games from the independent scene could be played in flash or java script soon on different devices. I really hope that they will be successful with this idea and they still have a long way to go.