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tag: apartment
Well, really its just a set we’re uploading on Flickr. It contains treasured bits and pieces from our computers from the development of the game. Sketches, screenshots, little movies, whatever.
Part 2 of our ongoing postmortem is about the design of the game and some of the process we went through to get to what The Path became. The archive is the same story in images.
The “making of” tale of The Path has begun. 😉 We begin with a timeline. you can read it here.
This is just to let you know that we’re working hard with Transgaming on making The Path work on Mac, through Cider. Sadly it is not as straightforward as we hoped for. A lot of elements in the game need to be hand-tuned to make them work on Mac. The biggest problems we’re having are graphic errors. Some things don’t show up or are rendered wrong. Some shaders don’t work properly.
But we’re solving these issues one by one. And the transatlantic collaboration is going well, despite of the big difference in time zone (Transgaming is based in Canada and we are in Belgium).
This conversion has our primary focus at the moment and we won’t stop until the Mac version of The Path is ready for release.
and the official url: http://ThePath-game.com
A final view of The Path before we go
Tale of Tales publishes launch trailer of soon-to-be-released indie
horror gameGent, Belgium, 11 March 2009
One more week and then The Path will be released. To ease the pain
and whet the appetite, Tale of Tales has released a video trailer
that clearly sets the tone for an unusual experience.“At first we were going to make a traditional launch trailer.”
explain creators Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, “You know, a little
movie that explains the narrative premise of the game, shows some
gameplay and then serves some kind of challenge. And our first
sketches were just fine. But then we started cutting things up and
working with the recordings of [composer] Jarboe reading the
original fairy tale. The end result much more clearly reflects the
experience of the game: strange, disjointed and completely open for
interpretation while simultaneously feeling very comfortable and
intimate.”
Download the trailer from Fileplanet!
(requires registration)
The Path has been uploaded to Direct2Drive and Steam. I guess that’s the equivalent of “going gold” for digitally distributed games. 🙂
Working on Sunday may be against the Third Commandment (or the Fourth depending on your local flavour of Christianity), but there’s something nice about it. It’s very quiet outside. Ghent sleeps on Sunday. And all the work we do seems like something extra, so there’s no pressure, everything we get done is good. At the same time we get zero emails that we need to respond to. So we can concentrate better.
Maybe in the future we should organize a project that we only work on on Sundays while we take the rest of the week off. 😉
Just fixed the final bugs. Pity it had to end. Just when I was getting good at it. 😉
Now we have thoroughly check our release candidate.
So it’s not quite over yet…
These are the last days of bugfixing. On Wednesday we will build the first release candidate. Then bugtesting is really over and the only thing left to do is make sure nothing is wrong with the application before we send it to the distributors.
While there’s a lot of nervousness around here because of all the things that need to be taken care of, we’re not really in a crunch period. We’ve had lots of that leading up to achieving beta status. Now it’s just a matter of making the software run as well as possible. We have a long list of bugs and issues. We know we can’t fix them all anyway. So we do what we can. We’ve prioritized them and are going down the list. The further we get the better. But there’s no extremely problematic things that need to be fixed. Just details, really.
Fixing bugs in software is like playing a game. It gives a real rush when you track a problem from its symptom to its cause and then remove the cause*. Pity I’m not a great fan of playing games. 😉
* Like tracking a bullet to the barrel that fired it and placing some lead between the eyes of the evil alien wielding the gun. No wonder boys love this stuff.
Our bug tracker says that we have fixed 69 bugs and that there’s 56 new ones to deal with. Another 24 issues are in an undetermined state. So that’s 80 that haven’t really been resolved yet. I’m sure not all of these will be resolved as most of those bugs or rather minor and more serious ones will no doubt be found before we get around to fixing them. It’s a funny process.
The most serious bug that is still unresolved manifests itself only on the computer of the one person whom we need to feel happy with the game at this point because he can help the Path reach many many people. Luckily he’s very friendly and understanding. But it was a big O O P S ! when it happened nonetheless.