Hello everyone! I will keep this short and sweet so I can get back to work. I'll have a more detailed post in the next week or two, but I'd like to tease the opening lines to an upcoming project. Its not much, but it drips of venom:
"Red smeared across the blacktop. Strobing red and blue, oscillating between foreground and background. A silvery light sheathing the world in an otherworldly glow; the full moon glowering above. The night is cold, and long. And there are creatures waiting for the darkness to overtake us all. Welcome to Horror at Adesaw."
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Wow! I'm slightly ashamed to say, but it's been nearly a full three months since the last blog post here at Fishopolis Ops. Life has a funny way of completely ripping your attention away from your hobbies when....well, having to deal with 'life' stuff. In the last few months I've completed graduate school in Japan, moved to the opposite end of the world, and dealt with the inherent headache of setting up life in a new city i.e. apartment hunting, furniture buying, job begging, friend finding, ad infinitum.
Needless to say that is (mostly) behind me! I'm about all settled in the strangely always-sunny weather of Southern California, and cackling to myself as friends are forced to trudge through the freezing, wintry months. Hopefully this means I'll have some more time to devote to game development, and to keep you all aware of the progress being made. With that, let's make this a very long post to make up for lost time. After the jump, I'll discuss the latest update to Prologue, the google play store, and some general information on what's happening with Initiation and NEON DARK Hey everyone! I told you I wouldn't disappear after regular dev diaries went on hiatus :P It's been a while since I've given some love to Horror at Adesaw: Prologue (HaAP) so I decided to tinker with the code a bit this week.
One of the most frequent criticisms I received about HaAP is that it was too easy to get stuck. This isn't a problem specific to my game -- it's an overall problem for a lot of interactive fiction in general. While some of the fun of this genre is the sense of exploration, it can be frustrating to open and closer a drawer for the 100th time trying to find that hidden item to get to the next stage of the game. To solve this, I introduced a hint system to the game that can be accessed via the menu bar. The process is simple: be stuck, click "Get Hint" in the menu bar, view ad, get hint. Hooray! Currently there are about 13 (very fitting?) hints you can receive that will dynamically display based on your progress in the game. As a warning, IT WON'T HELP YOU UNCOVER EVERY SECRET IN THE GAME. It will, however, guide you through what I generally considered the "natural" progression of the main plot elements necessary to get the full story experience. As interactive fiction game should really be mostly about self-discovery rather than simple hand-holding, I decided to leave out hints on a few subplots to act as easter eggs for the most dedicated players. And that's it! The update should be available on Google Play now. As a final reminder, to use the new hint system you will need to start a new game. Good luck! Hey all, just a quick notice regarding the dev diaries over the next couple months.
As regular readers have probably noticed, dev diaries have been inconsistent for the last month. Partly this was due to vacation traveling, but it's also a very busy time of the year for me. As many know, I'm a grad student that has just graduated, which means I am busy preparing for the graduation ceremony, coordinating visits from relatives to visit, and packing up my life in Japan to head back to the States. On top of that, I need a job! For these reasons, I probably won't have time to do regular weekly diaries. I'm still working on Adesaw and NEON DARK in my (limited) free time, but I don't have the time to do write about my work. Sorry! I will try to keep more active on twitter though ,and maybe make some more posts that aren't directly related to game dev. We will see. Thanks all! Hey there everyone! Just a quick update, but the next two weeks there will be no dev diary from me. I am going on vacation for the next two weeks and won't be have time to work on Adesaw or NEON DARK. I will be in a place that will allow plenty of inspiration for both though :D
See you all 8/23!~ Hey everyone! As I'm sure you've noticed, yesterday there was no Dev Diary. I assure you that I haven't been taken by Eldritch forces to be used in a ritual sacrifice. The truth is far darker...
This week is master's thesis submission week, which means that I am crazy busy! As all you know, Adesaw University is inspired by my graduate school in Tokyo, which I will sadly be leaving at the end of the summer. Needless to say, I didn't have time to write a dev diary, so things will be postponed until next week. But fear not! I'm still trying to get some idea development in during my free time. Next week we'll have a little more of an in-depth dev diary about the stats/classes involved in the next Adesaw game. BONUS: The name of the next game will also be revealed! The weekend has arrived in Tokyo! Sorry to make all you in Western hemisphere jealous, but hopefully this will lessen the sting as you're getting ready for school/work this morning: patch 1.4d has officially released on the Google Play store!
1.4d will be the final patch in the 1.4 patch series. While patch 1.4d only makes some minor adjustments (more on that soon), the entire 1.4 patch brings huge improvements to Horror at Adesaw: Prologue. I'm pleased to say that with this release Prologue can be considered a (mostly) complete game, and probably won't be seeing many updates in the near future. The dev team (i.e. me) will now be looking forward to developing the next as-yet-unnamed game in the series. For those interested, read on to get a specific log on what changes were made in 1.4d. Hello to all! Hope you all are gearing up for the weekend and looking forward to some relaxation.
We have some sad news here today regarding Horror at Adesaw: Prologue. With the release of 1.3, the save game problem has resurfaced AGAIN. At this point, I'm not sure what is causing this problem and how to fix it permanently. Quite simply, the save/load function is broken, and it makes it impossible to play the game over more than one session. With this in mind, I have made the decision to temporarily pull Horror at Adesaw: Prologue from the Google Play store. In the state the game is in now, it will only hurt us for people to download the game, get frustrated that their files aren't saving, then uninstall it forever. The best solution for everyone is to take Prologue off the market until it's in a proper state to be played! **PLEASE NOTE** If you already downloaded Prologue, you won't lose the game. You will continue to receive updates. If you are interested, please let me know if you have any comments, ideas, bug reports, etc. But fear not, I won't be going away. I'm pretty committed to get this damn thing to work, and to continue the series. I've been loving the process, and this is a great lesson for me. It's taught me a lot about what can go wrong with game development, and how to avoid these problems in the future. Remember this is my first time coding and releasing a game, so let's consider this mere teething problems! While Prologue is offline, I'll still be active. I'll be on twitter as usual, and I'll keep posting weekly dev diaries. Next week I'll go into a little more detail about what is wrong with the save feature, why it exists, and what I'm doing to fix it. Sorry for the confusion and disappointment, but Prologue will relaunch by the end of the year and it will be glorious! The Doc Fishopolis website has now launched! Hurray!
In an effort to get information about the dev company published more easily, I've added an official website for people who don't have/don't like twitter. I'll also be using this website as a general update blog for current releases, upcoming plans, and dev diaries. We definitely won't be disappearing from twitter, but this way we can have a space to talk a little more in detail about the Horror in Adesaw series, and stay transparent to our fans. As always, thanks to any and all who have interest in my humble development studio, and I hope that I can release many more games into the future. |
About the DocDoc Fishopolis Operations is a one man Android dev team. Archives
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