Devastated: Andrew‘s Dictaphone is a surreal and mysterious Point & Click Adventure with a strong focus on exploration.
You can watch our Trailer here.
It will be available in Q2 of 2018 for Linux and Windows :)
Hey :D
I want to show you our new project Devastated: Andrew‘s Dictaphone. We (Madame Yavi, StrawManChris and myself, Moaning_Clock) have been working on the project since September and plan to release it for free in Q1 of 2018. It will be available for Windows and Linux!
At the moment we are halfway down the road. We needed some time to figure out the art style but we are relatively sure that we won‘t change much of the direction from now on.
Right now we have finished most of the soundtrack, one quarter of the soundeffects, half of the graphical assets (but we need to revise some
of these graphics) and one quarter of the text finished. In the first months we mainly focused on gameplay. It may be a little bit confusing why a Point and Click Game needs this much time for the gameplay but we wanted to ensure the best possible experience. Our last
game, Intra-System:
Trust Issues, suffered
a bit in this regard and we wanted to optimize it from the start.
I‘m working mostly on the story (but also on audio and some other things; our roles within the team aren‘t really defined, especially not mine) and trying to convey the narrative in the best possible way. I want to write majority of the script this week.
Due to the fact that all of the scenes are made in 4K Madame Yavi has some technical difficulties which slow down the process (the old AMD FX aren‘t great at handling Photoshop (or Photoshop isn‘t great at working with these cpus)). Also, we want to create some gifs to give the right impression of the setting.
Chris is currently figuring out ways to make the game more performant but working with OpenGL can be a pain in the ass sometimes. We also want to ensure not only that the loading times of the game are relatively short but also that the player doesn’t need to wait for a new scene. Especially the 4K resolution may cause some problems.
We hope that we manage to finish the beta this year but we will have to see how it goes. We need to do almost all of the voicefiles soon but this shouldn’t be a big deal.
So, that‘s it! :D I want to update this devlog every monday at least but hopefully I’ll manage to do it more often!
PS: If you want to know more check out our Website and we are also on Twitter :D
Hey!
First of all – sorry! I know I wanted to make a post every week but it was quite stressful and yeah … here it finally is!
The scripts for most of the voice-files are pretty much done. It’s not yet fully complete nor are they final but it is enough to start recording (of course we will probably change/add stuff during the next weeks but that is part of the process).
Another big thing is the change of our engine. For our last game as well as the alpha versions of Devastated: Andrew’s Dictaphone (or simply DAD) we used LibGDX. However we decided to switch to Unity since the whole development-process seems to be a lot faster.
If we are going to be successful with DAD, we would need to buy a license but first of all we need to be successful and the game will be PWYW/free, so financial success won't be a 'danger'.
Angela is going to draw quite a lot for the rest of the week. In the last days there wasn't really much progress in terms of art because she spent a lot of time working on the website.
Here is a new scene from
the game!
And also check out our website! Angela spent a lot of time optimizing and making sure everything looks good :D Non-responsive websites are still a thing in 2017 ~
Christopher spent some time to further optimize Intra-System. Even though it already performs great on low-end machines, he wanted to increase the performance on older PCs even more.
There was a little stutter with the animations at the end of the game (only noticeable on old PCs) and this should be fixed with it, as well as some more minor changes :D
Also thanks to Imagoala, she fixed some errors in the scripts. I need to practice more English (no worries, for the game everything will be checked :D) and I'm watching and reading a lot to improve it (cliffski.com is great, also Jeff Vogels Blog)
It will be a little calm here until the start of the new year, mainly because of Christmas and new years (visiting family & stuff like that) :). However with the beginning of the new year we should manage to post weekly ^o^
Hey, nothing really new at the moment in regards of Devastated: Andrew's Dictaphone. We are working hard on the new game right now but after that we will fully concentrate on Devastated :D I will post a new entry to the devlog when we really start working on Devastated again, I think around the end of february :) But I have two screenshots which show the progress of the art :D
Old:
New:
Heya!
Back on track. We initially thought we would continue this devlog in the end of February but it seems that we needed a bit more time. Angela is redoing more of the old art to give the game a consistent and clean look. She also started working on the code for the game and at the moment everything seems to be working. We also are making a little game on the side with a friend of ours. It's also a Point and Click Adventure so we can reuse a bit of the code :D
We wanted to release Devastated in the first quarter of this year but after our programmer left the studio we wanted to create a smaller game first to get enough experience. The outcome was Flufftopia, an experimental clicker game: https://smokesomefrogs.itch.io/flufftopia.
We are confident that we can release Devastated in the next one or two months :D
Here's a screenshot of some of the redone art :)
Hey folks, we changed some of the plans regarding Devastated and decided to make a narrative piece instead of a more traditional Point & Click game. It will be a bit like a walking simulator but in the boundaries of a Point & Click game. We decided this way because we simply weren't happy with the old idea anymore and that meant: change it or scrap it. We changed it and we think the new concept might be even more interesting :D
I hope the game will be finished in the next 2-3 weeks but no promises here! The title won't change and the artstyle will also stay the same. We also have a new video where we speak a bit about the development of Devastated and show some of the process how we are doing the art now :)
Also
here's one of the new scenes! 
Long time no see! Sorry – this won't happen again that soon (hopefully). Due to the fact that we were in Berlin at the A MAZE. and visited Poland after that our schedule was a bit all over the place. But we have made two videos nevertheless – first of all our new DevDiary video and second the A MAZE.-Video, check it out if you want to! 
We make a lot of progress on different things – Angela is doing a lot for Devastated: Andrew's Dictaphone and I'm very happy with the new direction because it looks much better than the old art.
We put a lot of emphasis on animation so that the whole game should give you a vivid impression of the story.
Sure enough, we still need to start recording the voice part but at the moment I'm happy with the progress and I hope that we will release the game this month. But we don't want to announce anything yet and give it some freedom to evolve.
Angela also started learning to work with ProBuilder in Unity to help me when we will focus on 3D games – I will do everything related to more complex modelling but Angela can do the basic leveldesign and this should definitely speed up the development. I made a basic sink which is more or less finished right now and I'm practicing everyday.
It will take a bit longer but I'm really confident with this. It wasn’t really that useful when I was learning programming and would only have been applicable in the future and I had no real visual progress. With 3D modelling I can help with future progress and do visual art – something which I never had really access to. I really can't draw so 3D modelling is the best way for me to learn.
We also wanted to thank you for over 3000 Flufftopia downloads! This number is incredible and we never had expected this success. By the way – Angela also started a blog and she will report a bit broader about our progress. I often focus on one project and she thought it would be neat to have a wider perspective. You can look it up on her tumblr or on Steemit!
Until next week :)