Age of Decadence - April Update

Dhruin

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The Age of Decadence Lead Artist Oscar has kicked up an update on the game's progress at the official forums. Here's the entire post:
Welcome to the first (but not last) monthly update for AoD! I'm pretty sure you have been asking yourselves "What are these lazy bastards doing?", so yesterday I thought that we should give you an update every month to show that we are not fucking around and we are committed to release this game.

The plan is to release a demo as soon as possible, with all the features of the full game. So let me tell you about what we have been doing in the past months:

We are implementing all combat related actions, effects and animations. That includes:

- Acids
- Bombs
- Flurry of Daggers
- Repeating Crossbow Burst
- Impale
- Brutal Deaths
- Bolas
- Liquid Fire
- Shield Bash

Most of them are fully implemented (we are working on liquid fire and shield bash right now), and some need some tweaking on the visual department (bombs and acid particles, mostly).

We also added some nice visual improvements to the combat, like opponents being pushed back by the spear interrupts instead of walking backwards, and blood splashes on the terrain for very damaging attacks.

Apart from that, we made lots of improvements to the performance of the game (as you saw on the update I posted), and we did a huge performance improvement of the NPCs. Right now are killing the loading screens in Teron, so that you get a more seamless experience. Also Vince is working on adding more options to the quests, and also on flavor text and descriptions to spice up the game. We also have some news on the GUI and ending slides, but we'll share them later with some nice pics.

Once we are done with the combat improvements, we are making a small video to show them to you
icon_wink.gif
More information.
 
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My character likely will be sporting some bolas...
 
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I personally can live with a good RPG that looks dated, but for the sake of the genre I hope that Age of Decadence will look good enough to draw in some players at the fringes of classic RPGing to show them the light. I am not talking about the Call of Duty crowd - more of the people playing Bethesda and Bioware titles.
 
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I used to joke that it will be released at the same day as Duke Nukem Forever, but that's not funny anymore.
 
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I'm eagerly waiting for this game.
I have a great patience but i have to say here that the limits of "need more time to give you a full game" and getting into a loop are thin.
What i'm saying is that you can always find excuses to delay something. Yes, it takes time but as time passes naturally something that is allready done can be updated into something better.
 
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The biggest problem is that if you spend a lot of time updating something to look more "modern" by the time you are done updating it'll look older than it did before you began updating it.
 
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The biggest problem is that if you spend a lot of time updating something to look more "modern" by the time you are done updating it'll look older than it did before you began updating it.

So when is your game coming out, updated or not?
 
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It is too early in development to even begin talking about that yet. I have already done some of the mistakes that I have warned other indie developers about making though! My main mistake is probably aiming too high though. Perhaps I'll post a first ever screen here sometime in a not too distant future. Probably going to surprise quite a few people here :D

On the other hand, I'll be okay with not making any profit ( even if I hope it'll be a big hit :D ). That's probably very different from a lot of other indie developers.
 
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It is too early in development to even begin talking about that yet. I have already done some of the mistakes that I have warned other indie developers about making though! My main mistake is probably aiming too high though. Perhaps I'll post a first ever screen here sometime in a not too distant future. Probably going to surprise quite a few people here :D

On the other hand, I'll be okay with not making any profit ( even if I hope it'll be a big hit :D ). That's probably very different from a lot of other indie developers.

No, seriously: When's the release date?
:p
 
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It is too early in development to even begin talking about that yet. I have already done some of the mistakes that I have warned other indie developers about making though! My main mistake is probably aiming too high though. Perhaps I'll post a first ever screen here sometime in a not too distant future. Probably going to surprise quite a few people here :D

On the other hand, I'll be okay with not making any profit ( even if I hope it'll be a big hit :D ). That's probably very different from a lot of other indie developers.

A lot of the other indie developers actually do this as their day job, success or failure of the game(charging money for it for example) means they can do games.
 
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A lot of the other indie developers actually do this as their day job, success or failure of the game(charging money for it for example) means they can do games.

Yes, I am well aware of that. It also adds a lot of pressure to them, and force them to take some really hard decision in the progress of making the game. It also allows them to spend full time working on the game, giving them much more time to finish than I have.

I really admire their courage and I actually sometimes buy their games just as a means of support, even if I don't think they are that great.
 
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I dont mind waiting some more. There are plenty games for me to play, or even replay (golden oldies)

I could not wait any longer for oblivion and fallout 3 and was so happy it came out. The i realized that both games where not the games i wanted them to be.

so il wait, why? because i dont care anymore for hope. Just play what is out and be happy with it.
 
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The biggest problem is that if you spend a lot of time updating something to look more "modern" by the time you are done updating it'll look older than it did before you began updating it.

The kind of graphics/art AoD sports right now tends to age really well.
 
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It is too early in development to even begin talking about that yet. I have already done some of the mistakes that I have warned other indie developers about making though! My main mistake is probably aiming too high though. Perhaps I'll post a first ever screen here sometime in a not too distant future. Probably going to surprise quite a few people here :D

On the other hand, I'll be okay with not making any profit ( even if I hope it'll be a big hit :D ). That's probably very different from a lot of other indie developers.

Cool, looking forward to more info and eye-candy (or eye-bleach? ;) ).
I guess you are a bit in the same boat as ITS, then - they too are currently doing this "after hours" - a big reason for the long development time. Vince repeatedly stated that he would love to become a full time indie game developer, but that will depend entirely on the success of AoD
 
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I haven't really kept tabs on this game, because there's no mages, but I just peeked at it and I thought the graphics were serviceable. It's not uber pretty, but it gets the job done. There's a lot of detail, considering the limitations.

I'm still hoping this game will do well and Vince and crew will try their hand at a crpg with magic. I figure that it'll be 2014-15 for the potential release of that game.
 
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I'm still hoping this game will do well and Vince and crew will try their hand at a crpg with magic.

I'd rather they started working on Cyclopean again, although I know that's not going to happen. That was the one Iron Tower game that I was really interested in.
 
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I'll repost something Vince posted on the AoD forums (same thread), because its pretty informative regarding the state of the game:
Vince said:
As you probably know, we use the iteration development style. We put something together, play with it for awhile until flaws and mistakes become obvious, then tweak, and repeat the process until we like the final version. Contrary to the popular beliefs, it's not an endless process as it's always easy to see when you approach the state of diminishing returns, and we're not trying to make a "perfect" game here.

So, as a result, there are 3 "in development" states for every feature: basic (i.e. something that works), advanced (did several iterations, ready for the final pass), final pass (pleased with how everything works, do minor tweaks and wrap it up).

For example, we have basic stealth mechanics. You click on a stealth button, the character goes into a stealth mode with a proper animation and crawls around undetected until someone spots him and based on the situation may or may not attack him. That's what you get in most games, but it still needs to be tweaked and we didn't have time to get to it yet. I don't think we've touched it since 2008, which I swear was only yesterday. Ideally, I'd prefer to go with a TB model I did, but I think it would be faster to tweak what we have right now.

Anyway…

Character system - done
Combat system - final pass, see the original post
Stealth system - basic
Journal - basic; up next
Crafting/alchemy - advanced
Inventory system - done
Interface - bumped back to basic simply because we have time (while we're dealing with quests) and a bitching new artist who has just finished doing the ending screens for the demo (each major location has its own ending screens).
Vignettes - done
AG questline - done
MG questline - finally fucking done after being rewritten 3 times. As in completely. Words can't describe how happy I am.
IG questline - done
HD questline - final pass (was done but there was an obvious content gap and we decided to add 2 more quests)
TG questline - the last quest has been bumped back to advanced.
Main quest - done
Minor quests - done

Currently, quests (writing, mechanics, flow) are the priority. I hoped to have the TG finished by mid-March, but it's still not done and it would probably take another 2 weeks just to finish writing the last quest.

And so on, and so on. We're getting there.
 
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