Alpha6 is out now, along with the third Patron Commission:
January 31 2019 —
- Alpha6 release
- Added the January 2019 Patron Commission, "The Survey"
- Fixes and tweaks made to the save/load dialog system
Thanks, Maxime; am I guessing correctly that English isn't your first language? Maybe this is a bit of a translation issue. :)
The gender choices were developed after speaking with a bunch of transgender, non-binary, and intersex writers, game devs, and players to try and give a good balance of choices for everyone to pick from. Androgyne in the game is closer to non-binary, whereas "hermaphrodite" is considered an outdated and potentially offensive term. The gender choice, ultimately, has little material impact on the game itself and is just to give players more representation to enjoy the game however they wish.
As far as what the game itself is, I think if I call it an RPG people might be expecting something like Zelda or Diablo, and I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea. You pointed out that there's not much gameplay in the video — that was the Kickstarter pitch (I'm working on a proper trailer at the moment!) so it's slightly different, but it's difficult to put a text-based game into a video format unfortunately. I'm working on it, though! It's closer to an RPG than a visual novel, I think, but it's not quite either. I don't mind what people want to call it as long as they enjoy it, though. :)
Why are there graphical artifacts in the texts?
I'm not sure what you mean here, could you possibly send me a screenshot of what's happening? That's not been a bug that other people have reported so I'll see what I can do. If you can't attach it in an itch message, you can email joshua at alcyonegame dot com instead.
Hey Maxime, thanks for the post. I'm actually a big fan of visual novels and have done writing work on many in the past, so they're definitely something I'm familiar with. :) I wouldn't really agree that this should be categorised as such, since the visual part of Alcyone is more secondary to the game, but it's a tricky, subjective thing to nail down. Failbetter calls their genre "quality-based choice games" but I don't think that really helps people out much either unfortunately!
I'd consider visual novels to be games, as well as interactive fiction, and I don't really gatekeep on what level of gameplay a game must have to be considered such. It feels a bit counterproductive and starts getting into "real gamers" territory, which is something I've always been averse to.
Either way, I hope you've enjoyed the game! :)
Just a quick update to the alpha as well as the public demo — I fixed up a couple of issues that were reported after the Patron launch (nothing game-breaking, fortunately!) so hopefully, hopefully, this is the last time the demo needs to be touched.
December 03 2018 —
Alpha3 is now out on itch!
As discussed on Kickstarter, this brings in the Patron update that includes additional content on a monthly basis as a special thanks to early backers. The Patron's first Commission is an Encounter nearly ten thousand words in length, so this is a substantial amount of new content available to everyone.
Full release notes are below.
November 23 2018 —
Alpha2 is out now on itch; you can download it directly from your store page or with the itch app — the zip file (whichever way you download it) contains executables for five operating systems, so be sure to navigate to the downloaded directory and delete any you don't need.
Alpha2 Release Notes — 23-10-2018
Hey thanks tons for these posts, this is helpful.
This is probably down to how I've actually got the glossary working (there's a hacky bit of javascript that goes back after the page is drawn and looks for keywords, and if those keywords are found it retroactively wraps them in the glossary div — this way I only have to add definitions in one place as opposed to manually doing them every time I write the text out, and it detects the keywords automatically instead of me forgetting a word here or there.) I probably won't be able to do anything about this in terms of screen readers, but that's why I added the glossary button on the side so definitions can be accessed outside of a passage. Dunno why it's interactive under macOS but not Windows, but maybe that's down to their screen readers specifically.
I think that I can rectify this by adding in the img alt text that I meant to go back and do but never had a chance. Right now if you mouse over the various images it gives a hover tooltip that tells you what the secret was, for example, and I think once I go back and implement those it will accomplish the same thing for people on screen readers.
This is also in the hover tooltips and should (hopefully) be fixed with appropriate img alt text. However, are you able to interact with the buttons in the inventory to equip/unequip items once you have access? That's one thing I was worried about since it was an issue earlier on. Otherwise the inventory screen is just a pretty wall of images that doesn't do anything useful!
I'm extremely pleased to announce the initial release in the Alcyone: The Last City alpha — Alpha1!
Thank you all for being so patient as I've gotten this organised. This first release is a substantial change over the demo file I presented during Kickstarter; there's not any component of the game that hasn't been redone in some capacity. This portion of the game contains the same "areas" as in the original demo — character creation, a choice of two internship pathways with exposure to the Encounter system, and a secondary Encounter following completion of the internships. However, all of this has been rewritten and should look new even to players who saw the original demo.
Alpha1 Release Notes — 30-04-2018
If anything comes up please don't hesitate to let me know — enjoy!
Unfortunately, I did try that and it didn't fix the issue.
I tried downloading it through the itch app and launching (it just closes instantly), also I tried downloading it through itch as well as directly from the website and the same thing happens if I move the .app file somewhere else or the entire folder. I've had to resort to playing it in a virtual machine to get it to work at all.
As above, the moment I launch the game it just instantly closes without showing anything. If I launch it directly (without the itch app) it remains open but it sits in the dock and there's no game windows or anything else visible. I hadn't seen this posted already so I don't know if it's a bug on my end or what.
Hey Alterion, unfortunately I'm not a Linux user and I haven't been able to test that as much as the Windows and macOS versions just yet. I remember this coming up during the kickstarter campaign and other users had comments about it (including running the 32 bit version with extra dependencies).
I think the demo contains a 32-bit binary for Linux in the download but let me know if I've left it out.
This comment might have some useful information, otherwise try running it through the itch.io launcher (or without it, vice versa) instead of downloading it directly. If you're still having trouble let me know and I'll poke my much more knowledgable Linux friends for help. Unfortunately given the wide variety of distros out there it's hard to know what the problem is without more information, but this (hopefully!) shouldn't be an issue by release.