Aeon of Sands: The Trail - Dungeon Crawling RPG love letter to the 90s!

[neilsouth]

https://aeonofsands.com

Spoiler

it's with great pleasure to announce Aoen of Sands : The Trail. Developed by Two Bits Kid, based in Germany, Aoen of Sands is a "Dungeon Adventure" story-driven RPG love letter to the golden Amiga, PC classics of the 90's

http://www.indieretronews.com/2014/07/aoen-of-sands-trail-dungeon-crawling.html

PC - MAC - LINUX

 

[Sputnik]

Well that one certainly looks pretty.

 

[Excidium]

Looks neat but that's a hella lot of decoration, should put the game logo there for good measure

 

[TheGreatOne]

Movement better be keyboard based. And what's with the small window?

 

[Stargazer_]

looks solid, the art sticks out pretty well while mantaining its own feel even though it is inspired by 80s-90s dungeon crawlers.

From mucking around in google Two Bits Kids don't seem to have alot of experience, but according to their site "Florian has a background in cryptography software development. He is responsible for technical direction, game-mechanic and programming.Marco is a draftsman and illustrator by trade and a social narrative artist; he is responsible for game direction, story and visuals ."

I want to see were this game leads.

 

[Dorateen]

Single character, or party-based?

 

[Siveon]

Party, maybe.

 

[Excidium]

Real time blobber

 

[Jarpie]

Way too much empty space in the screen and viewscreen is way too small.

 

[neilsouth]

Single character, or party-based?

Party :D

 

[Comte]

I'll just play Eye of the Beholder

 

[neilsouth]

UPDATE :

Short answer is: our screenshots show the whole area of the interface, while it can get cropped to the active area (the one comprehending the dungeon's view, the portraits and stats bars, the direction arrows) depending on the monitor the game is played on.

We have also considered active resizing, but that has a technical downside in the artifact creation, it would be as using resize shaders on Winuae.
The cropping is already in game, the resizing will probably not be there, but it will be up to Florian.

Long answer is: basically, we have a limit in what we can do with interface that's not different from the games from the early nineties.
Our dungeon view is small not for memory constraints, but for the capability to produce the amount of graphics required with the workforce involved (only me); by the fact that we want to show an inventory that does not cover the dungeon, that never pauses the action there; by the need to show text for the story and a compass, direction arrows for future, possible touch screen devices implementation, etc; all in bitmap graphics.

All of that and more, made the dungeon's view small, and with no possibility to make that alone go full screen (actually I can, in debug, but, uhm, that's supposed to be secret.)
So I needed a present and real interface, and to use the same solutions games like the ones that inspired us used to address those problems.

So, to make it a bit interesting, I made at least the interface telling subtly a story in itself, that will be more clear if we ever get to the second chapter of the game

 

[Scroo]

Wow, this looks really cool, but why real time?!

 

[Excidium]

what a load of bullshit

 

[thesheeep]

"We cannot produce art that looks good at modern resolutions so we just resize the screen to look ridiculously small."

Holy shit, why didn't we think of that?!
We're currently busy trying to create an engine that looks fine (and runs smoothly, bigger problem with our game) at any resolution with limited art and programming resources, also from first person perspective. With hundreds - thousands of (potentially AI-controlled/ at least scripted) objects in the player's view at the same time. I'd say we have a slightly increased challenge.
We should just set the resolution to be fixed at 800x600 and center it on the screen. And then place our inventory always in sight because that is such a good idea with a game that runs in real-time to turn otherwise boring inventory item movement into an exciting micro-management game!
That is brilliant!




... honestly, what a lame excuse. And a wrong one. This was horrible in Ultima Underworld and the developers knew it (as proven by latest UU dev commentary video). But there it was a technical limitation because PCs couldn't handle the sheer graphics.
So they shrunk the first person view and then at least used the free screen space for something.
There is no need for this in modern games, every phone can run such a game ffs. And emulating the most annoying aspects of 90s games just to be "feature complete" is not really a good idea.
I get that one man can only produce so much art, but then produce art for only one resolution and let the player decide if he wants to scale or not.

 

[octavius]

Wow, this looks really cool, but why real time?!

Because Legends of Grimrock.

 

[marcuz]

actually, because Eye of the Beholder :D

 

[Lilura]

Actually, because Dungeon Master - the first and still the best.

Meynaf custom dungeons

 

[marcuz]

I love Meynaf commitment to DM, but, trust me, EoB was the reason, as I could never get play DM much (sadly)

 

[jdinatale]

I don't understand, I'm not being asked to donate money?

 

[marcuz]

eh? Do you speak about Meynaf' custom dungeons for Dungeon Master or about Aeon of Sands?
In case of Aeon of Sands, Two Bits Kid is self financing the project.

 

[Infinitron]

marcuz Um, who are you? Are you involved with this game?

 

[marcuz]

yeah, I'm the designer, half of Two Bits Kid. I've stumbled in this thread made by Neil, and I thought to answer that comment about this not being inspired by EoB
I hope it's not in bad taste.

 

[mondblut]

90s had more inventory slots.

 

[marcuz]

EoB had 14 inventory slots, plus 12 slots of active equipment and one quiver per character; AoS has 25 inventory slots per character and 8 equipment slots per character, so I think we fare well enough for a game that's not limited to dungeon crawlling as EoB was