Hello, everyone!
This forum is where discussion of our newly announced game, "Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements" will take place.
First, a bit of information about the upcoming title. Based on the poll we conducted (http://www.himalayastudios.com/forum/index.php?topic=546.0) in the General Forum some years ago, as well as general fan feedback, we're taking this game in much more of a classic Sierra-style direction, but with higher resolution backgrounds and detailed pixel-art characters. Mage's Initiation will maintain the same charm that made the classic Sierra adventure games memorable, but without all the frustrating parts, such as dead-ends and over-reliance on trial and error, eliminated.
It's going to be a Point & Click adventure game which includes Role-Playing and character-building elements. It will be very similar in style to Sierra's Quest for Glory series with a series of unique spells for each character class, and a complete battle system. The background artwork of locations you can travel to are very reminiscent of King's Quest games of the 90's, as well..
D'Arc is sixteen years old. He has trained extensively in the elemental arts for the past decade of his young life, under the discerning eyes of the Mage Masters of Iginor. Confined to an existence of academics and magical mastery in their towering hall, the inquisitive initiate often wonders what it would be like to set foot outside in the world that he has been secluded from; a world that his Masters deeply shun.
As with all young Mages in training, D'Arc's moment of initiation arrives and he is summoned to the Hallowed Hall, where the four Mage Masters put him to the test. D'Arc is tasked with completing three quests which will test his magical and mental strength to full capacity. He must return to the Mage's Hall bearing a symbol of proof that he has conquered each task: a lock of hair from banished priestess, the unspoiled shell of griffon's egg, and the horn of a trihorn.
Join D'Arc on a perilous journey across the medieval land of Igninor. Brave the perilous forest where redcap goblins stalk. Trek across a barren and lawless desert wastelands. Navigate over vast bodies of water where evil masquerades as beauty. And ascend beyond the lofty mountain peaks where the hostile race of Flyterians dwell. It is time for D'arc to prove himself. Succeed and he shall be initiated as a fully-fledged Mage, gaining the respect of his Masters and peers. Fail and nobody shall remember his name. Do you have what it takes to become a Mage?
The game allows you to play as one of four Mage character classes, based on the elements (Water, Air, Fire, and Earth). Each Mage class has a range of different spells at his disposal and a unique personality to aid in negotiating puzzles and overcoming adversities. However, rather than selecting a class at the beginning of the game, your element will choose you, in-game, depending on your decisions and behaviour.
Mages Initiation: Reign of the Elements will be a full-length title with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are also reintroducing death scenes (something largely omitted in Al Emmo) and we have some gruesome and creative ones!
We are currently anticipating that the game will be released in late 2012.
As a special offer, we are reserving pre-orders for Limited Edition copies of "Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements". The Limited Edition is an exclusive collector's item that contains high-quality packaging, an artistically designed game disc, a printed map of the land of Iginor, an archaic spell book page, 3 character trading cards, a Mage's Initiation poster, and a bonus FREE KQ3 Redux poster!
The Limited Edition packaging and bonuses will no longer be available after the promotional period ends. Absolutely no advance payment is required to reserve a pre-order of Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements. Notification to make payment will be announced only when the game is nearing its release date.
Please note that pricing is To Be Announced. (We request that only customers who genuinely intend to pre-order the Limited Edition put their name on this list. For general information on the game, please join the Himalaya Newsletter instead).
To learn more about "Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements" and this special announcement offer, visit The Mages Promo page (http://www.himalayastudios.com/games/mages/).
The screen shots look great. Looking forward to this one.
The screenshots blew me away. I am really looking forward to playing a Quest for Glory-ish game, especially one so beautiful.
Thanks! Glad to hear you guys are anticipating it. :D
I preordered already. :) I always will have a special place in my heart for adventure games.
As a side note (and this may not be the best place to put this), I have done pixel-art full time for the last year., and I'd love to do some work on this game. Either as a contractor if you can budget it, or just a sprite to speed up development I'd love the chance to work on one of the games i liked as a chile. If needed e-mail codyrigby@yahoo.com and I can get you a portfolio.
Hey, thanks for offering! We can often use pixel artists, though we mostly look for pixel animators with a good knowledge of how things move. These are somewhat harder to find. Sometimes we can have our existing animators block out the frames with solid colours and then just get a regular pixel artist to pixel edit the final details into each frame.
At any rate, I'm not sure if we require an additional pixel artist just yet (nor whether our budget would permit it), but this is one field where we experience a high number of people who flake-out. So feel free to send your portfolio to web@himalayastudios.com. That way, if something comes up, I can let you know. Thanks.
Just joined the forum to tell you how excited I am about this game! Like many, I'm a big fan of the Quest for Glory series going way back (LOVED the agd remake). It really sounds like your game will have all the best qualities of that series while still having lots that is new and fresh. I can't wait!
Keep up the good work.
The screenshots are really great!
I did a spontaneous slide show of them with original music I wrote inspired by them.
I already wrote a mail to the official address but I also want to ask here :satisfied:
Do you already have a composer for Mage's Initiation?
Because I'd like to send my special showreel if there's still a chance :)
Greetings.
Thanks for the feedback. Glad to know that the game's screenshots inspired you to get creative!
Regarding the game's music, the composer's role has already been filled (and, truth be told, we get about 2-3 requests per week from musicians). But you can send your music to the email adress if you want. Due to the volume of unsolicited job inquiry e-mails we received, we don't usually reply back to these e-mails, but we do keep some archived in the event that we may be able to use their talents in the future.
Just heard about your new project - Great! I have pre-ordered the game right away.
Do you want to translate the game to German? I am your man (I am only looking for fun, not $) ! Interested?
PS: Al Emmo was a really good game. Congratulations! I enjoyed the sophisticated way to give hidden hints! And I loved your KQ 3 redux (the Sierra original was my very first adv game and made me fall in love with the genre...)
Greetings from Austria (yes, we do speak German here ;) - Harry
Thank you for resseting my password, had totally forgotten it since this forum hasn't been that active. Hope that'll change now :)
Do you have some MI art that I can make a Facebook Cover picture of?
Hey RogerXY,
Glad to see it went without any hitches! Sure, we have a few avatars, logos and pieces of artwork here that you can use:
http://www.himalayastudios.com/Avatars/
Hope it helps!
Nice, that should do it
Hey everyone, it's nice to be here! Very excited about Mages and all that Himalaya has in store for us!
Hey, Kale! Thanks for stopping by. We're all excited about Mage's Initiation here and the current pace of the Kickstarter! Good to see others as excited as we are!
Hey Brandon, I'm streaming music from the KS page right now, it just got to the Mike Oldfield cover. Great stuff! :)
Ah, thank you! Fellow fan of Mr. Tubular Bells by any chance?
Yeah, but my favorite of his is probably "Moonlight Shadow."
I'm on "Electronica" now. Where is this from?
EDIT: "Pleasant Daze" is definititely my favorite so far. Really great chillout vibe.
Sorry, I don't mean to turn this into a music discussion; we can move to a separate thread maybe?
Moonlight Shadow is definitely a great track. My personal favourite album has got to be The Songs of Distant Earth, based on the Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel of the same name. But I love all of his work.
I wrote Electronica (with a Roland MT-32 no less!). Pleasant Daze is one of my favourites as well.
And yes, if a mod wants to move these discussions that's fine. I'm afraid I don't have mod access here.
I just have to say I'm excited for this game and the QFG type style. I hope it is everything you guys want it to be and you can raise much more than the goal!!
Hello all. I'm really excited for Mage's Initiation and look forward to seeing it made.
Thanks guys! We're going to try and raise as much possible through the kickstarter so that we can include all the things both fans and ourselves want to see in the game.
There still the better part of a month on our side and we're already off to a promising start, but of course, we can always use more exposure, so please feel free to spread the word about the game and the kickstarter. The game is going to be awesome and with a large enough funding margin above our 65k minimum, it's going to make it easier and faster to do all the things we hope to do!
Thanks again for the words of support!
I just wanted to pop in, say Hi, and let you know that I'm very excited about this game, and wish you all the luck in your Kickstarter and in the success of the game itself. I can't wait for my swag, but I'm far more excited about the game itself.
Thanks, Balinaeri! And we're equally as excited to get it to you. :D
Here's to hoping we wallop our goal with a massive fireball shortly!
I absolutely love what I've seen. This game looks like it is going to be amazing fun. The battle system is fantastic, and I think it will really make this game stand out.
Good luck with the Kickstarter!
Congrats on making it to $65K in the KS! Now on to stretch goals. I really want that iPad port, but...well, we'll see.
Hope it goes beyond that and we can make Mage's Initiation as great as it can be, for the sake of your enjoyment. :D
I'm holding out for the novelization. 8)
At the time of writing, we're $3,415 away from swaths of spiders, Walking Undead, and Adopt-a-Goblin!
I have to admit, I am much more looking forward to having more areas to explore (well, and the Adopt-a-hot-Amun-Cul, of course) than any of the other stretch-goal bonuses.
Additional quests, more game world...I'm hoping we get to implement those and then some! :D
While the ports won't help me, I so want to see the Mac/Linux stretch goal make it. I've gotten to know some awesome Linux gamers and I've supported their platform for months.
Just pledged for the hardcover artbook edition.
And it's close now to the dreaded fish-faced Casipoisse and packs of Wasterland Bandits 8)
I also hope you guys reach the 95k goal in order to add those 4 expansive new quests!
Wish the team all the luck on this amazing project!!
-Arj0n (ags)
Figured I would go ahead and make an account while everyone's at the AMA in Reddit. That way when the KS campaign ends, I'll already be signed up here to continue harassing the team!
Soon $95k
I am really glad (and also a little surprised) that this KS has been so successful :D
Welcome aboard, Anaxphone!
Wow, until a few days ago I wasn't even aware that this game was being worked on. It was a pleasant surprise indeed, I think this will become a really awesome game, of the same calibre as the QFG-games in every aspect and perhaps even outshining them. I had a great time just looking at the gorgeous visuals and listening to the wonderful soundtrack. My favourite was probably the training hall, both visually and auditory. And I enjoyed the puzzles to, they were sufficiently challenging without being to convoluted. About the combat-system I personally enjoyed it. Although it is technically in real-time it actually felt more like a turn-based system since it has a slow pacing and relies much more on strategic thinking than quick reflexes. Yes, vs. ordinary me-bash-you grunts there is indeed a lot of run-and-shoot tactics involved but I understand it must be very difficult to design it in any other way, it boils down to that old problem of "linear fighters vs quadratic wizards". However, I can easily imagine battles becoming far more interesting when you have to engage in magical duels against spellcasting enemies. I also appreciated the small touches such that goblins will flee if hurt to badly and that they try to block fireballs. (though it struck me as a little odd that their shields make a clanking noise as if hit by a physical weapon and not a spell) ;) What I could nitpick on is that it is very easy to get surrounded and stunlocked to death and that the standard cursor seemed to imprecise for aiming. Also, a more general nitpick is that you couldn't load/save games by simply double-clicking, I did this on instinct several times to no avail, it would be nice if this would be included in the final version. And it seemed a little artificial that the characters in their close-up portraits never did blink.
I discovered a few bugs while playing the demo, they have likely been detected by now, but I thought I'd mention them anyway:
- The green gem can be picked up an infinite number of times.
- During combat the game crashed to desktop with the error message "Error: The character "Redcap Goblin" could not be displayed because there were no frames in loop 0 of view 259."
Oh, and my favourite line was for clicking the mouth icon on the mortar ("It can't grind stats") :D
Keep up the good work, really looking forward to play the full version. :)
Hey, ratpizza. Thanks for the great write-up (and also for your awesome forum handle!)
I'm happy to know that you had a good experience with the demo and hold it in such high esteem. Being compared to a QFG is high praise, indeed, as those games served as the source of our inspiration. Even though it's a similar game, Mage's Initiation isn't intended to be a direct facsimile of the QFG experience. Sure, a lot of elements in Mages are the same, but several of the RPG aspects differ and there's also no day and night cycle. We planned it this way so that our game would have a somewhat unique angle.
Thanks for the combat feedback. The demo you played is actually the one we released back at the very start of the year (February 2013) when we were running our Kickstarter campaign. Since then, we've completely adjusted the way the combat system works to make it more intuitive and friendly. There's now an auto-targeting system for the spells, the ability to pause the game mid-combat so the player can drink potions -- as well as a bunch of other improvements. We've released an updated combat demo showcasing these improvements, which is available exclusively to backers who helped fund the project on either Kickstarter or PayPal (http://www.himalayastudios.com/games/mages/#pre-order-the-game).New PayPal backers can still get access to the forum, download it, and offer further feedback to us in the backers' forum.
I appreciate the time you took to write this feedback, and hope that you'll enjoy the final product when it's done!