Fate by Numbers now available as free download
 

Hey everybody,
I just released a FMV adventuregame with a couple of fellow students.
Below is the press release. I hope you all like it.

Paul "Bones" van der Meer

-------------------------------------


Fate by Numbers now available as free download

a Full Motion Video adventure game in a futuristic film noir setting



Breda, the Netherlands – The Full Motion Video adventure game ‘Fate by Numbers’ is now freely available from the website www.fatebynumbers.com. The game was filmed against a green screen and features 3d pre-rendered backdrops. The adventure includes over an hour of HD-video with professional actors accompanied by a soundtrack written for the game.



Private eye Alice Sanger is assigned to get a briefcase, but quickly finds herself immersed in a web of corruption and shadowy motives. It becomes personal when she finds out that one of mysterious people behind the briefcase is none other than her ex-husband whom was declared dead several years ago. What follows is a mysterious journey through the layers of a future metropolis with 50’s noir influences.



The download on the website consists of a torrent link. Downloading this link (tracker) will enable people with torrent clients (uTorrent, bittorent, ABC) to download the game. The players can choose from two versions. A version with high video quality of (1,2 GB) and a version with normal video quality (800 MB). Both versions feature the same amount of video.



Revival :

Fate by Numbers was made as a graduation project for Communication and Multimedia Design (Avans) in Breda, the Netherlands. Revival is the name of the fictional company behind the game, set up by four students. The game was made on a shoestring budget.



Purpose of the game was to make a FMV-game to satisfy old school adventure gamers and introduce new players to the genre. But also to see if it is now possible to make a game using technology previously only available for big budget game companies.



Website: http://www.fatebynumbers.com

Email: [email protected]

Looks very interesting.
I am downloading it already.

download
 

Thanks.
I hope you will like it. And hopefully you can give some comments, positive or negative. Every bit of feedback is welcome.

Paul

Paul, and the rest of your team... thank you for an opportunity to have one more chance to play some fresh Noir title. As soon as I manage to fiddle how to start the download I will share my opinion and comments. :)

I finished the game; it took me between 90 and 120 minutes. As a graduate project on almost zero budget, as a tribute to FMV and an exercise in style it is, I think, a full success. So thumbs up. :) As a game in its own right-- let's say I'd play a sequel if it was free, but won't lose any sleep waiting for it. ;) My main likes and dislikes follow.



The Good:

To my knowledge, first freeware FMV adventure. That's 1000 points for ambition right there.

The setting and atmosphere of "future noir" is realised perfectly. I was expecting to bump into Tex Murphy or Ray McCoy any minute. :D The liveliness of the world is helped by the fact that, for its length, the game had more optional stuff to do than I could ask for.

The acting isn't award-worthy, but exceeded my expectations. The actress who portrayed Alice's mother was particularly believable.

Story was fun: just the right mix of cliche and unexpected (the reversal of traditional sexes of the protagonist and femme fatale, for example, or the fact that

Spoiler:

you don't end up helping the Resistance

). I even liked the way some loose ends were left unresolved (and I usually hate it, so that's saying something), like

Spoiler:

Who shot at the beginning?

I wish they were less similar, but I digged the multiple endings. Especially the countdown and how procrastinating with the first decision caused you to have less time to make the second one, was a nice touch.



The Bad:

The lack of subtitles! Especially since a couple of lines were recorded in distinctly worse quality (some of the taxi driver's lines, for example).

Perhaps that was deliberate homage to "interactive movies" of yesteryear, but the gameplay was the weakest aspect. I don't mind linearity as such, but the order in which things have to be done is sometimes completely arbitrary:

Spoiler:

After all the ordeal to place a tracking device on her body, Alice says she has a hunch Denton will go to the Victoria Station? And when she's not there, we are suddenly able to find the hidden passage? It makes no sense. We already knew the Station is important, and haven't learnt anything new. So why wasn't it possible to check behind the candy machine before?

Ironically, despite its linearity, the game often failed to recognize what I have already done.

Spoiler:

The worst example was when I visited Alistair Security for the first time and the receptionist greeted me with "Again,...". Also, Alice commented that she left the gun in a car, although it was already taken by the Resistance.

What was the point of the flashback in the middle? I was expecting either more flashbacks to flesh out characters' backstory (yes, I like Lost) or some kind of pay-off to this one. Neither happened, so I am not sure why you put it there.


That's all I can think of now, hopefully you'll consider feedback to be constructive. Also, welcome to the forums. :)

feedback
 

Thanks for the welcome.

AFGNCAAP,
thank you for playing and giving the feedback. I'm glad you liked the game. And the dislikes are fair enough and insightful, some of them I already knew, for instance the fact that the desk clerk can say 'again' when she has never seen you. The one about the gun slipped by me. And regarding the Victorian station puzzle: Yes, guilty as charged, we should have handled that better.

About the subtitles. That was one of the things on the wishlist that never got done. In the end we decided it was too much work. We were already struggling with deadlines, our team consisted of four people (I don't think we finished anything on time). We also planned a couple of small mini-games to break up the pattern of puzzle solving. But they never got out of concept phase.

I want to write a post-mortem article about the production and what went right and what went wrong. When I have some free time I'll write it down here. Maybe some people would like to read it.

Just a quick question in the end. Did you see one or two flashbacks? There are two. But you could miss one, I think, if you do some things in a different order.

Thanks again for playing and giving feedback.
Paul

I finished the game and liked it. The only weird thing I noticed was that when I play I only get sound from my left speaker. So I had to exit to the desktop with the game running and move the wave balance slider to the middle then it worked fine. I was checking gamespot and it says this game is episodic. Will there be more parts of this game coming?

ok, i downloaded this, extracted in with winrar but when i click setup it says it's corrupt. am i missing something here?

thanks.

episodic
 

The game was set up as an episode with two follow ups. There is a thin storyline that is hinted at in the first episode. The most important thing is the relationship with her father. It would be nice if we could tell more of the world in a follow up, since most of what you see in the first episode is pretty basic and the characters aren't very fleshed out.

But this game was possible because we could make it within a school system. And since we're out of that now it's a different situation. But if the game is picked up well maybe we can make a follow up with extra finance. Or make new version and release it commercially. That was the idea anyway. ;)

Iceadventure:
I don't have a clue why you only got music/sound out of your left speaker. The audio channels in flash should always be stereo.

fruithead:
In the first week of this game going live several sites picked up the game and started to host it. So I don't really know where you got it from. As far as I know if you download the iso through a torrent and then use Deamon tools to run the setup, it should run fine. I don't know what happens if you download it from gamespot, gamespaces or gamershell.

The "small" version I downloaded from GamersHell wouldn't run - said it was corrupted. The "large" version was fine though.

I used "Virtual CloneDrive" to mount the image.

But, I wonder why you decided to have an image file in the download, and not just a normal setup .exe?

Bones, I finally got the game working... I sent you a private message. I like it.

i downloaded the iso through limewire and the file through gamershell and neither worked for me. i'm not too familiar with iso files so i extracted it with winrar but it wouldn't install after it was extracted.

use a program like DAEMON or Alcohol ... and mount the iso image... or just burn it to a cd.

I have no idea why you went with a mandatory .ISO file download. Just release an .exe file.

EDIT: Just finished the game. Great job! One of the best underground games I've seen in a long time. Just one question: Is the save system functional? Because I couldn't get it to work.

save game
 

Glad you liked it, Legolas.

The save game system should work under XP. But we already heard it doesn't work under Vista. Something of a rights-issue, you probably can tell I was not the programmer of the team ;) I do know it's on the 'to do' list, along with getting it to run on a mac.

Paul "bones" van der Meer

EDIT: about the iso-issue. The reason for the ISO is because we included a nice cover image, and short manual that can be printed and placed
inside the case. With the iso you could burn it and have a nice dvd-case for your shelf. I don't know if anyone would do that, but we had a small
amount of dvd's we sent to the actors and people at school, and we used that method.

Nope, I have XP and it doesn't work.

It's too bad, as I wanted to go back and try different dialogue paths, but I'm not going to go play through the whole game again five times.

Seems to save ok on my XP (Media Center Edition SP2).

I think you'd have been better off not using an .iso in the download - it's a tad confusing - and since it's a download, I don't really want to put on a DVD, or print out a cover (but I see your point). And the .exe file could still be put on a DVD, and the cover art could have been included in the .exe and installed wherever you wanted, or even simply made available to download separately on the game's website.

But I'm not exactly complaining about it - the game's free after all. :)

Well done anyway - it's a very cool game.

Black Screen
 

Hello! I've just downloaded this great game! I installed it, and I wanted to play it, but I can't saw anything, just a black screen. I heard some noises, like "Muhahahaha" :) or something like that, and then somekind of music.
I have Vista and the I have the last codecs (KLite Codec Pack 3.3.0).
Could you help me please, Bones?

Yes, it SAYS it saved your game, but have you tried to load it? That is what doesn't work for me.

Yep - loaded it, and it put me back where I saved it. So all is well. :)

black screen
 

Rowland,
that's a new error you've discovered. I didn't hear about a black screen before. The sound is correct, but apparently there's no image that goes with it. The codec shouldn't really matter since it is standard flash video. And when the music comes on you should have seen the menu, which is a png image.

Do you have trouble loading/playing other flash-games? I'll ask our programmer if he has any ideas what could have caused this.

Paul

A Mac version would be nice. :) It looks like something I might enjoy.

Just thought I'd mention this too:

Once I exit the game, the "wave" slider in my volume control has been put right down at the bottom, so I can't hear anything else on my computer until I put it up again.

I tried it several times, and it's definitely the game that does it.

^ I can confirm this as well. My wave slider was also turned all the way down after playing.

Sounds like a video problem with Vista.

Try this :
See if that helps.

Yes, it was the flash! Now the game is running perfectly! Thanks, Paul! ;)

Same here actually!

And it was right after I installed a new sound card, which got me momentarily worried... :)

Very nice game, thanks.

Just one, the one that is displayed just after

Spoiler:

Alice is hit unconscious.

Also, reading other people's posts in the hint thread, I realised I've never been to the Boris's gunshop and I am not even sure whether that location ever appeared on my map. Is it possible it didn't?

boris
 

It's possible to miss Boris his gunshop. It's part of a side story where you can try to figure out who shot you. I included this path to make the game feel less linear. It's not necessary for the main line, but was a nice set up for a next episode, if we ever get the chance to make it.

Paul

ps. Good to hear about the dark video solution. Also the sound issue is good to know. We probably have to update the webpage with a FAQ. Thanks people!

But she never gets to know who shot her. Or did I miss something.

shot
 

No, you don't find out who shot you. That was a big part of the episode 2 storyline. If there ever will be a episode 2 it will focus on that question and on the relationship with her father.

I made a short outline for three episodes and developed the first episode. Most of the characters were supposed to be recurring characters.

Paul

I expected to like this game, but so far it's been nothing else but frustration with it. I have the same sound problem that was mentioned above - the sound balance is being shifted by the game all the way to the left. Problem is, the game doesn't even allow me to alt-tab so i can manually correct the issue.

It's a pity, for all the effort and talent that probably went into the game, to have people not even get into it because they get to frustrated in the first 10 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong with the sound and not being able to fix it.

I run winxp pro with the latest updates, my sound card is a Creative Audigy 2 sound blaster with the latest drivers and it has never caused me any troubles in any game ever ( i have it for a good amount of time now and i have played many many games).

Here's to hoping you fix the issue soon, as for the game, i can't tell you anything about it, i am not going to play it with only 1 of my headphone speakers on, it's frustrating.

EDIT: it's not switching only to the left, sometimes to the right too.
Workaround i thought of 3 seconds after i posted this: the game seems to only mess with the WAVE balance, so if , before i start the game, i shift the Playback balance half-way to the opposite side and increase the volume by 50% the problem is "solved".
You should still try to fix it though.

Sweet. I really enjoyed it, got sucked in by the atmosphere, the "dead end" lead was cool. Apart from the few technical issues and inconsistencies mentioned before, it's more than I'd expected from a free game, if a bit short one.
Great job <thumbsup>. Don't keep me waiting for Episode2 for too long, will ya? ;)

patch
 

A patch is now available to clear the Vista-issues. The patch should solve the 'save issue' and the soundproblem some of you were having. Also the patch fixes some minor consistency errors.

I hope this will work for the people who had problems running the game the way we wanted it to. Thanks.

The patch can be found on our homepage: http://www.fatebynumbers.com/

Paul van der Meer

I second the desire for a Mac (non-Intel) version.

Will there ever be an exe file uploaded somewhere. I don't want to mess around with an ISO ?

Cathy

In that case, let's agree to wish for a Universal Binary. (Mine is an Intel.)

patch
 

You don't have to mess around with an iso to install the patch, Cathy. If you installed the old version of the game, you can just download the patch file and run that. If you haven't downloaded the game, the updated total game download will have the patch already installed. But that is still an iso.
(gamershell still freely offers the old (non-iso) version)

Hope this works for everyone.

Paul

I'm still hoping for a mac version as well. But if this means that a lot has to be redone, it's not likely. I think a large part has to do with a software we use to run as a shell around the flash-programming. If that doesn't support mac, we can't do it.

How much of the game is flash-based? Can it not be compiled as a SWF? That would make it playable on almost any platform.