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Can you post a screenshot of the door dial close-up?

The solution to this puzzle doesn't involve entering the code exactly, but rather displacing the letters backwards by 4 positions, I believe. And the alphabet loops back to the beginning when it reaches the end.  So "A" should be entered on the dial as "W".

I'm not sure how the postal clerk's explanation was phrased in the German version of the game, but perhaps something got lost in translation. Anyhow, give that suggestion a try!

Nope, it's almost ready for beta testing! We've been working feverishly the past few months to get a fully-playable build to our Kickstarter backers, and we're currently in the process of playing through with all 4 character classes and fine-tuning puzzles and dialogue.

The majority of the recent updates for the game have been posted on the game's Kickstarter page. If you're interested, you can check them out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2112639455/mages-initiation-a-classic-sierra-style-adventure/updates

Not really. The AGS engine doesn't currently support it. It's being worked on, but as to how long it will take before it's a stable feature is anyone's guess.

An Android port will also depend on the sales of the iOS version. It was quite expensive to port Al Emmo (seeing that we had to do it twice) and we have to at least make that money back first in iOS sales. Since iOS sales are typically higher than Android, this will give us an idea about whether or not it's viable/cost effective to do an Android port.

This topic has been moved to Off-Topic Forum.

http://www.himalayastudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=1057.0

After a very long process spanning 3 years and several setbacks, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine has finally been ported to iPad, iPhone, and iPad touch, and is now available in the App Store! The iOS version features a new verb-coin style interface with large icons for touch-screen devices, and is optimized for single finger taps. Text size has also been increased for easier readability on smaller screens.

The game is available at the discounted price of $3.99 USD until the 22nd of July.

As this is our first title on the App Store, reviews, likes, and ratings would be greatly appreciated.

We'd also like to say thanks to Janet Gilbert for her extensive work on making the AGS port compatible with iOS8, and to Tiny Red Studio for their assistance with porting the game and helping with its release.

Thanks, everyone, and we hope you enjoy having Al Emmo in your pocket (or handbag, backpack, and wherever else you can fit him.)

-The Himalaya Team

Please note that Apple doesn't permit us to distribute free game copies to existing owners of the PC version. You would need to purchase it again if you wish to play the iOS version.

I don't think Apple have much of a one-on-one discussion policy with developers. The entire submission process feels very mechanical, much like Valve's, where you just fill out a series of forms and webpages to get your game in a line-up for release, and then can pull the trigger and publish it to the masses as you see fit. There's probably only one point where a developer is likely to have any direct contact with Apple and that's if they have any questions or feedback when reviewing the game for release on the App Store.

Regarding which games get featured, that correlates directly to which games are selling the best and which are the highest rated. Naturally, well-known IPs like the ones Telltale license are always going to have the benefit of being instantly recognizable and have a huge advantage that way; as are long-established franchises like Monkey Island and Broken Sword. For lesser known indie titles with original IPs, though, it's going to be a much harder slog to get featured, and is heavily dependent on early ratings being highly positive, and having good sales.

By the way, we've just submitted the iOS port of Al Emmo for Apple's review today! So fingers crossed it'll get through their review process unscathed and be available on the App store very soon.

The Steam Summer Sale is happening for the next two weeks (June 11th - 21st, 2015). There, you can get both Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine and Postcards from Anozira for 60% off!

You can even pick up the Al Emmo Double Pack which includes both Al Emmo games for just $5.19 USD. Giddy-up and get your western fix!

[Click to View on Steam]

Al Emmo's Postcards from Anozira is released and available to buy on Steam.

Click to View on Steam

You can also purchase the Al Emmo Double Pack, which includes both Al Emmo & the Lost Dutchman's Mine and Postcards from Anozira for a discount deal!

[Vote in Steam Client]

Please help us get "Postcards from Anozira" greenlit on Steam by voting "Yes". If you have Steam installed, clicking the first link below will open the vote page directly in your Steam client for your convenience, allowing you to bypass the web login & Steamguard. Thanks!

Vote in Steam Client

Vote in Web Browser

Funny you say this, as I was just thinking yesterday how I was going to link to App Store and Google Play store buttons from each game's website page as soon as they become available on each mobile platform. The release of our first iOS game (Al Emmo) is still a while off, but I plan on having all of the ducks in a row (read: "buy" buttons on its webpage) by the time those links are live and the smartphone versions are selling in the App/Play stores.

It does look like Janet Gilbert, who's revising the iOS port of AGS to work properly on iOS8, has almost got it working again. Changes that Apple made in iOS8 stopped AGS games from working stably, so big sections of the port and its libraries had to be recoded from scratch. We already had Al Emmo ported in iOS7 and ready to submit to the App Store at the end of last year. Then they released iOS8 which broke everything and we had to shelve the release. Once the AGS port is back up and running, we'll likely need to report it all over again for iOS8. But at least the smartphone interface and all the other tweaks are in place now, and only the actual port itself needs doing. In any event, it has, and will continue to be, a good guide for what to expect when it comes to releasing the touch-screen versions of Mage's Initiation.

Ah, excellent. Great to hear, and thanks for the additional support!

Sorry for the delayed reply, Nipples, I'm overseas at the moment with sporadic Internet access. In answer to your question, sure, those items are still available to backers at that particular tier ($100). You can increase your pledge by sending us the difference between the tier you're currently at and the tier you want to move to. The best thing to do would be to email Rachel at rachel@himalayastudios.com and let her know what you specifically want to do, so that she can give you more exact instructions on how to send the payment. Thanks!

Nope, none of the rewards (aside from the sticker sheets) have been mailed out yet. We'll be releasing the game first and then mailing the rest of the swag and physical items out afterwards. This allows us to get the game released and patched (in order to locate any sneaky bugs that manage to slip through the initial public release), so that the boxed and DVD case versions will include the most up-to-date, stable game version,  before being shipped to backers.

This won't happen for months yet. You can rest assured that we'll be sending out surveys and address confirmation requests when the time arrives. We'll keep backers updated about that through our Kickstarter updates.

Mages is a difficult game to apply real-world or fictional references to, even as Easter Eggs, due to the fact that the game is set in a distant future where an Armageddon-like event has purged the planet. As a result, the humans of this distant future have no knowledge of the events, people, history, books, religions, or places from our current time (nor from earlier history). Everything has reset and rebooted from scratch, so the Elements are essentially their new deities. This makes it hard to put in references to anything 'current' which will, at some future point, be wiped from existence and from collective human memory. That said, there's a small KQ reference in the game that won't break the time-continuity barrier. It's visual only, so that fans will recognize it instantly, and others will just see it as an ordinary thing that doesn't look out of place in the game's futuristic setting.

We haven't had any of the t-shirts manufactured yet (and also haven't requested shirt sizes from backers), so there's still a chance to grab one.

Yep, the Magus tier is the first one that comes with the t-shirt. If you'd like you upgrade from whatever tier you're currently on, you can send us an email at info@himalayastudios.com so we can arrange for you to send just the difference between your current tier and the Majus tier.

Are you guys a completely new development team? Are any of the old/original Hero 6 members still involved or has the project changed hands entirely?

I'm not sure if Daniel's screenplay was released alongside the source code. I'm assuming that it wasn't, based on what you've said. But considering that the design doc was written and redesigned with the aim of making a commercial game out of Hero6, I'm not sure he'd want to release it, as it's possible we could still rebrand the design doc as a new title, or roll some of the ideas and puzzles into a future Himalaya project.

Well, there's that, and the fact that we'd invested significant time to collate and streamline the plot/puzzles for a Hero6 redesign circa 2008-2009 (at the request of the Hero6 team at the time) taking resources away from our commercial projects to do so. The Hero6 files were pretty much released, open-source (our new work included) without any forewarning, consulting, or mention that this was going to happen, which wasn't exactly met with cheers of "hoorah" by our dev team members who had invested months of time and work to help the struggling project.

Good luck with the game. It would be good to see it pick up steam and eventually be released, but unfortunately we're unable to contribute anything more to it. (I say that not only from a risk standpoint, but also because, as Navynuke mentioned, we have our hands full with Mages' Initiation).

Send navynuke04 a PM and he should be able to get it sorted out for you.

Yeah, the video issue will probably affect Mages on iOS too unless the bug gets addressed before the game's release. Unfortunately, the guy who created on the AGS port of iOS got busy and hasn't worked on it for a while now and it appears nobody else with the know-how has stepped up to address the issue, despite the port being open source.

Of course, if it's ever resolved in a future update of the iOS port, we'd be able to re-include the original video cutscenes via a patch/update.

Congrats!

The "Makers, why have you forsaken me?" isn't a song. It's just Al yelling at the sky at the top of his voice. The rest of the songs are either set to music, or parody lyrics based on well-known existing songs.

As for the Speedrun achievement, yes, I think it's established that it's not working properly. It's actually meant to allow 2 hours to complete the game, but it's really an approximation anyway, that depends on your CPU speed and some other factors that could make the timer run slightly faster or slower. At some point, I'll look at it and try to script it to be more accurate. But at the moment, I need to put it lower down on the priority list due to Mages Initiation.

The way I've consistently been able to achieve the Speedrun achievement is to play the entire game in a single sitting, and holding your finger on the escape key to instantly skip past every dialogue line, cutscene, and all of Al's walking/running movement wherever possible. When I do this and perform every action in sequence to finish the game to the end (with minimal delays between each interaction), I can usually finish it in about 45 to 50 minutes or so.

Thanks! (Though, if I knew Valve were going to start Greenlighting pretty much everything, I wouldn't have bothered investing so much time into it. :|)

We're working on the iOS port right now. We ran into a bit of a snag earlier with the cutscene movies. No matter how we optimize the Theora video files, they just don't want to run smoothly on iOS - not even on higher-end iPads, so I had to re-script the entire cutscenes in an alternate form for the smartphone versions of the game.

On iOS, they'll be a series of (sub-titled) 2D stills that appear and disappear in sync with the audio track. At first I was concerned that the result might not look good, but it actually turned out to be pretty effective. (To the point that they probably would have been acceptable like this in the PC version, too, and we could have saved ourselves a bunch of time and money!)

Anyhow, now that the rigmarole is over, we're just implementing some final smartphone functionality (such as dragging your finger over a hotspot and lifting it to trigger interactions). After that we still need to do some testing to ensure everything's working as intended. So hopefully it won't be too much longer!

We also run into some issues with the audio in the Android port for AGS. Those are also being investigated.

Yeah, "I'm your guy" counts, but "Waiting for the Train" doesn't.

Also, number 4 on your list should trigger when clicking talk on the rocks in that screen (rather than in the small tree). There's no song or achievement associated with numbers 6 or 7.

It seems the ones you missed are:

-Look at the horse hair strand in your inventory.
-Talk to the red rocks in the screen before the Aloe Vera plateau.
-Click the Hand icon on the boarded-up doorway at the bottom of the mine elevator shaft.

The Steam Summer Sale has commenced and will run until July 1st, 2014.

For the next two weeks, you can get Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine 60% off. That's 9 full Acts of Wild Western adventure few only a few bucks! Check it out on Steam here.

As far as I recall, Daniel Stacey WAS the (unseen) creature in the haystack in our King's Quest 2 remake! 

Yes, just email us at support@himalayastudios.com with your original email receipt or license key number that you were previously given and we'll send you a Steam key.

Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine is now available for purchase on Steam.

Thanks to everybody who voted on Greenlight! We're running a 10% off discount for the next week.

Yes, for original purcahsers, please email support @ himalayastudios.com and forward us your original email purchase receipt, and we'll get a Steam key sent your way.

Backing via PayPal will still be available for several months. We'll probably take it down around the time the game enters beta testing.

Yes, the resin character figures listed on our Kickstarter page are available to PayPal backers at the same pledge levels. That is, At the $100 tier you'd get the 4 polyresin D'arc figures, Redcap Goblin figure, Bort Earth Mage figure, and Chief Hawkain Flyterian figure. And at the $150 tier you'd get all of those as well as the Priestess, Varner Fire Mage, and Masked Mage Villain figures.

Take a look at my suggestion in this thread and let me know if that solves it for you:

http://www.himalayastudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=1006.0

Another thing you can do, is press CTRL+L to toggle between hi-res and low-res cutscene movies. The low-res versions might run a bit more smoothly on some systems.

The bundle ended a while ago. The best way to get a version with the digital soundtrack now is over at IndieGameStand:

https://indiegamestand.com/store/702/al-emmo-and-the-lost-dutchmans-mine/

Yes, when it's released you'll be able to purchase it as a digital download from Steam or via other venues if you prefer a version that's DRM-Free,

Al Emmo is currently strutting his stuff on the Groupees Retro bundle 2. Pay what you want for Al and 7 other games! Plus, get the Al Emmo Soundtrack once 2,500 bundles get sold.

All purchasers will get a Steam key once the game is Greenlit.

Retro 2 Groupees Bundle

Excellent, excellent. Thanks! And the same to you, Nipples!