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General discussionRelease: Shardlight(120 posts)(120 posts)
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Posted March 08, 2016
The infectious commitment to life.



<span class="bold">Shardlight</span>, the post-apocalyptic adventure of a young woman desperately looking to cure herself, is now available, DRM-free on GOG.com with a 10% launch discount.

Amy was five when the bombs dropped. This broken, severely oppressed, and hopelessly depressed world is all she knows. Now, twenty years after the catastrophe, people are still dying in the streets stricken by poverty and disease, while the corrupt aristocrats control the regulation of the cure in exchange for cheap labor and obedience.

Amy is sick herself but she is not about to go out with a whimper. She'd rather rattle the shaky foundations of a government that has people like her slaving away for a chance at a vaccination. All around her, among the ruins of what humanity once was, people are scavenging for scraps of a better tomorrow that seems to keep moving further and further out of reach. But not Amy. She is determined to fight for her life, even if she has to pay the ultimate price.



Point'n'click at the bowels of a terminally ill world and find a cure to your ailment in <span class="bold">Shardlight</span>, DRM-free on GOG.com. If you have the bonus fevers, go ahead and grab <span class="bold">Shardlight - Special Edition</span>, which includes the game's OST, voice-over outtakes, a concept art gallery, wallpapers, and other delicious goodies, or opt to <span class="bold">upgrade</span> later. The 10% launch discount will last until March 15, 4:59 PM GMT.
Posted March 11, 2016
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Leroux: Speaking of Ben Chandler's PISS, can anyone tell me what the most recent version is and where to get it, provided it's distributed as freeware?

I got the game with The AGS Summerbatch Bundle in 2012, and I'm ashamed to admit I haven't gotten around to playing it yet, despite being a fan of his work. Now I'm unsure whether that version was final or whether he released an updated version somewhere on the internet later ...
When I was searching for it, I found some info about game here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Videogame/Piss with Dropbox link to filename called "PISS final.zip" ...
Posted March 11, 2016
Wow, PISS still looks great to me but when you compare those screenshots to his recent work, it's impressive to see how far Chandler has come.

Regarding "narrative-driven" adventures, well, by my personal definition, that does not in fact include all games of the genre.

Even if we exclude puzzle-adventures of the Myst/Cryo variety, there are still a lot of "traditional" point'n'clicks where the main pull is usually not the story/setting (like in Shardlight). I mean, you don't play Leisure Suit Larry for the story, right?

Exactly, you play them for the jokes.
Post edited March 11, 2016 by maladr0Id
Posted March 11, 2016
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maladr0Id: Even if we exclude puzzle-adventures of the Myst/Cryo variety, there are still a lot of "traditional" point'n'clicks where the main pull is usually not the story/setting (like in Shardlight). I mean, you don't play Leisure Suit Larry for the story, right?

Exactly, you play them for the jokes.
Historically, you don't play games for their story, but for the gameplay. That's kind of still the case in adventure games for me. I want a strong story and an intricate setting as much as the next gal with a degree in literature, but I can still play an adventure game primarily for its puzzles. And like Portal and Bioshock Infinite, it's the merging of story and gameplay that makes the greatest of games.

When Jake Rodkin once explained why The Walking Dead deviated so much from Telltale's former direction, he called his Sam & Max games an "interactive joke generator". And while some mechanics in these games were definitely exactly that, it was still the setting, mood and in some cases even the story that I loved in those games.

When you look at his latest, vastly successful game (that GOG needs to get ASAP :) ), it seems pretty clear to me that both off key jokes and a deeply emotional storyline with complex character relationships can go hand in hand without risking suspension of disbelief.


That said, I'm glad that Shardlight has the focus it has though. I haven't decided yet whether it's as good as Technobabylon, but they've done an absolutely rad job yet again.
Posted March 12, 2016
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shmerl: Not sure how AGS supports Android
Well, only way is to try it out:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=44768.msg636529854#msg636529854
Posted March 16, 2016
How has this escaped my frequent scans of the start page of GOG? Maybe because the release messages are cluttered by other stuff?

Anyway I like the setting but the graphics looks a bit too pixelated. I wish there would be more detail or you can turn it off.

Wishlisted for now.
Posted March 16, 2016
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Trilarion: How has this escaped my frequent scans of the start page of GOG? Maybe because the release messages are cluttered by other stuff?

Anyway I like the setting but the graphics looks a bit too pixelated.
It's the Wadjet Eye way, and always has been.

They're going for a slightly higher res starting with their next game, but it will, for all purposes, still be 'pixelated'.

So it's either miss a great game or going with 'old school' – and they really make the most out of that old school...
Posted March 17, 2016
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Vainamoinen: ... They're going for a slightly higher res starting with their next game, but it will, for all purposes, still be 'pixelated'. ...
So no hope that they kind of enable an option for depixelation. Well, I will weigh all the pros and cons when buying.

edit: Something I also don't like is that all the extras must be bought extra. This is not the traditional GOG way. It's okay, they can make it as they want, but it doesn't particularly appeal to me.
Post edited March 17, 2016 by Trilarion
Posted March 17, 2016
I don't have a problem with the low resolution and pixels, but I wish they had chosen a different font for subtitles. That one looks much too simplistic and amateurish for the detailed, colorful and professionally pixelated game world, kind of like the default font of your average AGS freeware adventure ... :/
Posted March 17, 2016
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Trilarion: So no hope that they kind of enable an option for depixelation.
That's not technologically feasible. 2D games are made for a certain resolution, and will stay that way. :|
Posted March 17, 2016
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Trilarion: So no hope that they kind of enable an option for depixelation.
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Vainamoinen: That's not technologically feasible. 2D games are made for a certain resolution, and will stay that way. :|
There are graphical filters that tries to smooth out low-resolution bitmaps when scaled up though, and 2D games could be made with vector graphics in order to have them be fairly resolution independent.
Posted March 17, 2016
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Vainamoinen: That's not technologically feasible. 2D games are made for a certain resolution, and will stay that way. :|
I mean that I would like to have the graphical content presented to me at a higher resolution, not infinite resolution.
Posted March 17, 2016
The Wadjet Eye games have a fixed, low resolution, on purpose.
It's a stylistic decision on the one hand, and a cost effective decision on the other.

You can apply graphical filters to make things a little more blurry, but I doubt many would favor the blurry version (see: Grim Fandango Remastered backgrounds).
There are methods to actually extrapolate high res from pixelated, but the results are as of yet unsatisfactory.
Games can be made with vector graphics, surely, but at a significantly higher effort and therewith cost. Wadjet Eye doesn't have that kind of money.

There's a really great article about pixelation as its own art form, one that covers extrapolation especially:

http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-art
Post edited March 18, 2016 by Vainamoinen
Posted March 17, 2016
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Vainamoinen: The Wadjet Eye games have a fixed, low resolution, on purpose.
It's a stylistic decision on the one hand, and a cost effective decision on the other. ...
Yes, I never objected to Wadjet Eye games presenting their games like this. It's their decision. But to my the sylishness is not very high and while maybe being cost effective I guess that a higher resolution (say two times as high) would not cost two times more but much less more and you would have to take into account that maybe more people (like me) would be willing to buy it. It might be a profitable move.

But who am I to critisize a well known publisher in the release thread for the style he is known for. Of course they can and should do it in the pixelated way and I'm sure enough people will like it. Only me, I would prefer a bit less pixelated graphics version. That's all I wanted to say.
Posted March 18, 2016
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Trilarion: But who am I to critisize a well known publisher in the release thread for the style he is known for. Of course they can and should do it in the pixelated way and I'm sure enough people will like it. Only me, I would prefer a bit less pixelated graphics version. That's all I wanted to say.
Thing is, they tried doing something less pixelated in parts of some of their games (like the character portraits in one of the Blackwell games), and frankly, it wasn't as good as the pixelart characters in the other games of the series. They are talented for pixelart, really, so I'm glad they stick with what they do well :)

You'll see a few examples of those clashing artstyles in the screenshots here (it's a bundle with several games, some with pixel character faces, others with high res cartoonish character faces) : https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle
Post edited March 18, 2016 by Kardwill
Posted March 18, 2016
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Trilarion: Only me, I would prefer a bit less pixelated graphics version. That's all I wanted to say.
"A bit less" pixelated is what you're going to get starting with their next game... I'm just pretty uncertain whether that will be enough for you. :)


I've finished Shardlight yesterday... and it was a really intense game. The only point of critique I have are the multiple endings, which feel all too forced to me. It's a sudden shift from the personal (Amy's life and friends) to the global (the fate of the entire society), only to add a little pang of interactivity that doesn't quite match the narrative.
Post edited March 18, 2016 by Vainamoinen
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRelease: Shardlight(120 posts)(120 posts)
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