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I love the work of Karen Petrasko, too. Can't wait to see those portraits in motion!

How about using a hotspot mask instead of a button, then program that hotspot mask to have it press the button? I'm not sure if it's doable, but that might allow us to have shapes like the one on the image. Though now that I think about it, I don't know if you can place a mask on the same place the GUI will appear. Hmmm... anytime you try to do something fancy AGS starts to protest.

That's a weird bug, do you have a savegame file?

We were considering to tweak that interface already, but that graphic is amazing; very descriptive and would be quite easy to implement (far more than tweaking the graphics). I'll urge the programming team to implement it. Thank you very much for this suggestion!

I think it's a pretty good suggestion, actually, though I personally wouldn't make it optional. If we have the time to implement the suggestion, we will probably stick to the behaviour that makes the most sense to most people, as the rest of people can still use other interfaces (such as the right click menu).

It looks like those issues can be avoided if we had provided more information to you. In the settings panel, for example, you have the option to switch the left and right buttons during battle. D'Arc will also miss less if you raise the Intelligence stat. The final game will explain to you what each stat does before you raise it.

We have no control over the resolution issue, but we have reported it to the engine developers and might try to hire a programmer to help them fix it if we get enough funding. In the meanwhile, you can test different configurations on winsetup.exe, for example, some people have troubles with running the demo unless they set a "No filter" option. I don't think we'll be able to offer a true wide-screen option for this game as the backgrounds have a fixed size that we can't change, unless you ask for an option to center the background on the screen without stretching, which might be doable (but again, out of our control).

The crash has been reported and we are working on it. The demo has some bugs that we had to leave unresolved due to time constraints, but they'll be fixed on the final game.

Note also that the redcaps won't be the first enemies you'll fight in the game. They're just the ones we used in the demo, but they will appear much later in the game. The final game will have tutorials and a less step learning curve.

Additionally, please post your impressions after having tested the combat a few times. First impressions are important, but lasting impressions are far more useful. For example, I've playtested the combat many times and even find it a little easy right now, though maybe a bit fast-paced.

The issue is engine related and already reported. It looks like a problem that originated recently with one of the latest windows updates, but the engine historically have required users to tweak the settings until they find the one that works in their computer.

The issue with Alt+tab is engine related, already reported but out of our control. However, if you keep the keys pressed for a longer time, you'll be able to Alt+tab without glitching.

We take note about the walking animation speed suggestion.

The projectiles are more acuratte if you raise intelligence as a stat. In the final game we will explain what each stat does.  The best stat assignments for the demo are 2/2/2/2 because then D'Arc is not horrible in any aspect.

We are far enough in development that we are sure the game will be released (unless an earth mage releases an earthquake spell on us!). The funds in the kickstarter project, on the other hand, will allow us to release it in its full glory, and not a shortened version with several features missing.

We prefer not to talk about percentages as we plan to introduce as many features (from the design document) as we can fit in our available development time, that might get extended if certain stretch goals are met. In other words, we could have a game right now if we removed a lot of scenes/features from the game, but then it wouldn't be nearly as fun to play.

Once we are done with the remaining assets/coding, it will take a few months for voices to be recorded while the Q&A team removes all the bugs we can find. The estimated release date is therefore Feb. 2014, as you can see in the kickstarter project page.

Hope it goes beyond that and we can make Mage's Initiation as great as it can be, for the sake of your enjoyment.

I think I read somewhere the KQ3 poster is finally going to be used to promote the book "The Art of Sierra". Hope you can get a hand on that awesome art piece.

You're right! It serves me well for not having read the entire title before replying.

He's talking about the CD version, which I think was made in a previous AGS version, though.

Windows 7 has some troubles with privileges and games made with old releases of Adventure Game Studio, maybe it was solved if playing the game with admin rights, but I would wait for actual support to arrive, as I'm not a Win 7 user.

PC Gamer has published a list of PC Games that will be released this year. Mage's Initiation is one of them, and it looks like The Journey of Iesir will also come out in 2012. The list is incomplete and inaccurate, but it's a good reference nonetheless.

The source for Hero6 is up for grabs. The last remaining member threw in the towel a few months ago and chose to share the source code with everyone. There might be missing some resources that didn't make into the last build of the game, which could be accessed by asking deltamatrix. There's a brief mention to AGDi in its last post. It's too bad the very project that spawned the interest in fan adventure games went nowhere, but at least not everything got lost. Maybe someday some developers will take the mess and produce a cool game out of it.

http://visitors.hero6.com/

That's great! From that description, I'm a bit worried that the four mages will just solve puzzles clicking the magic icon on the same spots and show different animations to achieve the same result, but I have confidence in that it was just a poor example. :-)

I'm not one of the developers, but I'll try to help you.

You can change the resolution of the game by running winsetup.exe and choosing different filters. The available resolutions are:
1- 640x400 filter: none
2- 1280x800 filters: 2x nearest-neighbour & 2x anti-aliasing
3- 1920x1200 filter: 3x anti-aliasing
4- 2560x1600 filters: 4x nearest-neighbour & 4x anti-aliasing

If none of these work, click on the option "Run in a window instead of Full-screen" and apply the filter that looks better on your computer. The game should run fine inside a window. Have you tried changing your screen resolution, too?

There's actually an option to skip a puzzle in the game, but it's for the slider puzzle. I don't think they'll make a change for a single hardware problem reported from one single user; for example I have one problem with the mouse slider that they couldn't fix, luckily that didn't prevent me from beating the game.

I think that if you use a savegame, you might have problems later, because there's a chasing sequence where you have to run to catch the evil guy. What I can do, is offer you a possible workaround that might let you continue playing. What you have to do is:

1. Download the basic Autohotkey here: http://www.autohotkey.com/download/
I prefer to use the zip to the installer, but both works.
2. Run AutoHotkey.exe and allow it to create a sample script.
3. Right click on its tray icon and choose "Edit this script"
4. At the end of the file, write the following line (without the semicolons) "-::Click 3"
5. Save the file and right click on the tray icon again. Choose "Reload this script"

Now, everytime you press the "-" key, you will perform a double click. Run the game and see if you can run now. I have chosen that key because It shouldn't interfere with your game play, but you can choose any other key.

Once you beat the game, you can uninstall Autohotkey. Hope this helps.

EDIT: I tested it and it works, but not seamlessly. You either have to press "-" soon after you click with the mouse, or press "-" two or three times in a row to get Al to run.

EDIT 2: If you are experiencing lag, try to disable effects or close any other programs that might be running on the background.

He won't run if you double-click? Does it run in other parts of the game? I'll see if I have a savegame around here. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until the developers arrive.

EDIT: I checked and my savegames are from the previous version, sorry.

I've seen that this forum has a "quick reply" feature that you can activate on your user control panel. Wouldn't be good to have it activated by default? Cheers.

I thought the problem here might be related to me using a wacom tablet mouse. Playing the game on windowed mode fixes the problem, I've just tried it and works. I usually play on full screen because I have a very nice tray tool that gives 99% of CPU time to full screen programs so they run faster, meaning I totally skipped windowed mode.

The mouse scroll bug doesn't appear everywhere, I've found now that on some lucky occasions I can cycle the entire inventary on a same spot, as long as the cursor stays on the same place (not moving even a pixel). But seems totally erratic behavior.

I didn't know about the middle button press, but I don't think I would have used it instead of the hotkey, as in my experience wheel buttons break easily.

I've never managed to do anything worthwhile in 3D yet. I think it has be that the tools I've tried (different 3DStudio versions) are horrible. But I've seen so many awful 3D animations that finding that Al was so well animated was really surprising. I touched cactuses and talked to bears several times just because I liked the animations so much.

Yeah, finally I managed to get through this game, and wanted to thank the people of Himalaya Studios for such an experience. It was a pleasure to play a new adventure game in the style of the old ones, and from the start I knew that I had to write a review of the game with the most cacti and red rocks of all Anozira, once I had fully beaten it, that is.

The first thing of note is the amazing game cover, which shows a lot of things that won't happen in the game but are somehow related. Then an installation of 1GB so that the CD is no longer required, and a cute note about how cool you were for buying this game to support the genre, so that you have something to read while the game is being installed.

Now, the game: the first impression with the 3D isn't too good: some models are just much better than others; Luckily, Al Emmo is one of the best ones and his animations are good; he also has a strange voice, but as the game progresses it ends fitting him well, unlike the narrator who I found somewhat annoying for varying so much the pitch to sound like an old west commentator. The problem is that you cannot choose which voices you want to suppress, it's all or nothing. I ended leaving them "on" as the others were good enough to give the voices a chance, and the obxonious narrator goes away in some places, yeah.  :cool:

Soon, you find that the production values are very high on this game. Almost everything you try has unique descriptions, even objects whose use is pretty obvious and don't stand in your inventory for too long will spawn their own and unique answer if you try to give them to any other person, some of which seem to not have other purpose in the game than to give special and funny commentaries every time you give them something. The mouth icon, which in other games would give endless "I can't talk to that" messages, is in this case an excuse to display lots of jokes and silly animations specially done for that purpose only!!

There is no need to say, I spent a lot of time showing every single item to everyone, and talking with every single cactus and red rock in the game.

Now, the interface. I would say that Al Emmo fails in this aspect, having a very annoying interface that's is not intuitive and dispersed all above the screen. The map, menus, and game actions are located on different corners of the screen, so browsing from one to another with the mouse  means you'll have to cover the maximum distance ever. This is specially annoying with the inventory, as you go from hotspot to top-right corner to open the inventory, from top-right corner  to bottom-left corner to pick the first item in the list, and from bottom-left corner again to the hotspot. This is much worse than any other system I've seen in a graphic adventure. To alleviate the problem, the game allows for easy browsing through items in the inventory by use of a mouse wheel, but unfortunately that option didn't work too well with my Wacom mouse, and every time I touched the wheel, the cursor moved directly to the bottom-right corner of the screen. Ouch!

Fortunately, the designers included keyboard shortcuts for easy access to most of the game features, and so I was able to concentrate in solving puzzles instead of fighting against the GUI. Thank you!

The puzzles were good, some were a bit easy, some were hard. But none so hard that made me search for a guide (which I ended looking anyway, to know if playing for hours at the slot machine was worth it or not). They were mostly logical, and the most illogical ones had not-so-subtle hints shown on the pictures of each act. It was so logical, in fact, that at times (but not always) the game had to stop me from doing things too soon. Though of linear nature, I found the game still allows some freedom when solving puzzles, and talking to characters provided both hints and red herrings to keep things interesting. I even got one of them help me with one puzzle if I promised never to talk to him again!

Yeah! So many years with such a serious bug for which nobody really fell except me! I had to restore a previous game because of that.

By the way, who was the man in the sheriff WANTED photo?

[dead-end]

Hi! After many weeks playing the game at a calm pace and enjoying everything (and there are LOTS of things to enjoy in this game!), I finally finished it today. Hooray!

Now, I found that the last act is the glitchiest of them all. I managed to go THROUGH the death altar on the treasure room once. However, the worst glitches happen by reading the diaries at time-based events. For example, reading one at gun point (from any of the people that can kill you) will not mute the audio file during the game over screen. However, reading it while the screen bounces will mute the audio file at the time of the first bounce; in the room with the raging river it will also show a graphical glitch on the screen (some colors on the background). Finally, it will create a dead-end on the very last puzzle if you read it while the bad guy is swinging, as it freezes him forever.

Curiously (well, not quite), if you save the game before solving the second-to-last puzzle, then die on the last puzzle and choose "try again", if you then restore the saved game and die on the second-to-last puzzle, the "try again" feature will skip that puzzle and go straight to the last! :rolleyes:

I'm also got mine today! I love the Package and the note that came with the game. I thought I could reuse this thread, to avoid being redundant. :p

I will try the game this weekend to see myself if it's as fun as it sounds.