I’m looking for people to alpha test the demo and help me improve it - ideally one at a time. I’ll take anyone, especially those who don’t think the concept will work or who are sceptical. So far i’ve had two people test it which has been really useful (thanks DuoDave and Gray!).
It currently runs on Windows 7 & 8, and probably XP as well. It’s about 130Mb, and the game is fully playable/completable at this stage.
If anyone can spare the time/bandwidth I’d really appreciate it! PM me and i’ll send you a link to the latest build that you can test.
Not to necessarily resurrect an old thread, but I thought this would be more appropriate than starting a new one. I haven’t visited this forum in a long time, but decided to stop by and see if there was any new discussion of hybrid IF and 3D, and found this thread. So on the one hand, I’m fascinated to see where this game has gone since February.
On the other, I just wanted to mention that Vespers3D is still trickling along. I wasn’t intentionally developing in silence, I just haven’t done a great job being public and vocal about it. Plus, it’s taken years longer than I expected, mostly due to the fact that I’m doing it on the side, and it’s so hard to find good modelers and animators to keep things moving.
Also, I’ve always been a bit apprehensive about how this will be received by the IF community, so…yeah. Mostly I was waiting until it was in a more playable state. But at this point it’s quite playable (but only through the early part of the game), and I’d be interested to see how Vespers3D and this game contrast. And if anyone is interested in trying it for themselves, just let me know, I’m always game for feedback, particularly on the 3D/IF interface, and how well the two work together.
I don’t know if the game still needs any testers, but I’d love to help test. It looks like a great combo between 3D exploration and the parser.
A lot of times in 3D games I pick up something or see something and would really like more information on what it is. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those words aren’t necessarily the most interesting words. And as someone else said, the parser is illustrating good characterization of the suit AI. This sort of scenario could be done in regular text-only IF, and in that case, it would end up being a lot like Violet, where the parser was clearly the characterization of a specific person, even if that person wasn’t physically present in the scenario. But the graphics add a lot to it as well, most notably the movement aspect. In regular IF, you have to constantly type movement commands, examine, look, etc just to have a sense of where you are and what you can do. In this kind of hybrid, the moving and basic looking all happens seamlessly.
The only question is whether more complex parser interaction is better for this scenario than regular point and clicking. In terms of the story, possibly, because the suit is low on power, but it makes me wonder whether picking up a small item really uses more power than moving the whole suit around. It would make more sense when stranded somewhere like this to have to navigate a small drone around or something like that in order to find a power source for the suit, rather than moving oneself.
This was really promising, but the single game demo was all I ever saw here. Even when you go to the user’s profile, that is the only game ever released. Feel like this deserves another look.
I played a really interesting prototype of a game that was plain blocky 3D, but the castle had a texture that, as you got closer, was actually the word “brick” repeated over and over and sometimes “stone”. “torches” had F - I - R - E flickering out of them… the ground texture just said GRASS GRASS GRASS dirt GRASS GRASS key GRASS GRASS…
I think one of the Call of Duty games has an Easter egg where you can find a terminal where you play Zork 1, and if you win you get a special award. I kind of wanted to do a story where there are many points in time in the game, and each one has a different style of game.
