Heartland of Darkness (Warning: Violent imagery)
 

Hey all,

I'm currently working on a freeware indie adventure title, thought this looked like a good place for a shameless attempt to drum up some publicity:) Well, onto the spiel then.


In short, Heartland of Darkness is a psychedelic horror adventure.
The story revolves around a young man who finds himself within the bowels of a hellish nighmare.
Not sure who to trust and dogged by horrific apparitions at every step, he must escape at all costs.
It's going to be a medium length game of around the 40-60 screens mark. Full soundtrack.

I don't want to give away much of the plot yet, as I want to get my box art done and nut out a few more details first. I should have a trailer finished by the new year.

http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/751/test4g.png

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/7238/test7.png

http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/6259/test6x.png

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/7238/test7.png


"The curtain has been lifted. Time now to play your part in this tragedy! Smear the greasepaint over your face and whimper.
The Chamber of Horrors is simply a wooden box my friend. It's all just a mirror, not a miracle. Just think of this as therapy...
'The words rang inside my skull and then subsided. I lifted my eyelids and saw nothing but faces swirling,
jutting forth from every surface, stabbing at me like needles thrust into a straw doll.'"

Do I detect any "Silent Hill" influences, or is that purely coincidental? Also some BASS.

Love the backgrounds. Not "quite" sure about the characters. But the text is putting me a bit off, but I don't whether it's the color, the font, or the whole deal. Could just be I'm so used to VO's, it's been a while since I played the no-voice classics.

Hmm, I think my influences for this project are more along the lines of the Elvira RPG's, Dark Seed, and Pathologic. But BASS is a game I care for a great deal so I imagine that influences me somewhat too.
The text is just placeholder, I agree, it's not great. Many things are still on the backburner I'm afraid. I haven't ruled out the possibility of voice overs yet, but it looks unlikely that will eventuate.

Yeah, I can imagine that takes a lot more.

The reason I mentioned "Silent Hill" is because that creature in the middle pic made me thinkg of the sniffer dogs in the subway level of "The Room", even though this one looks more monkey-like.

But your project sure looks interesting. I like horror games. Just don't make those mixing puzzles (if that's what the last pic is showing) too tedious ;)

No way that looks awesome, I love those ones! Ah well...

I really think this is looking great from what's shown here. And that blurb at the bottom -

That's pretty interesting, well written. You've won me, I'll definately give it a go when it's done. And on the topic of influence, it reminded me straight away of 'I Have No Mouth And Must Scream'. Not sure if you've already played it, if not you should try and track it down - it definately seems to carry the same atmosphere about it.

Nice work though, keep it up :)

Fantastic work,Pinback.
I visited the AGS site and read more about your upcoming game.All i can say is keep up the good work!!! :):)

Looks good!

One piece of advice... Try hard to make the figures stand (when they're supposed to) firmly on ground and not hang somewhere in air. In second screen the protagonist (?) (or both figures actually) hang, in third he stands. Makes a lot of difference, especially since the backgrounds look so nice.

Looking forward to this the artwork looks great also. Only thing I'd say is try to steer away from sam and max type GUI if that's what you're using as it gets very annoying lol.

Thanks for the comments guys, I appreciate the input.

Little writer: Mixing items will only be a big part of the game spell-wise. The spell mixing UI is very streamlined though, and I think, fairly well implemented, and fun to use.

Mapoco: The main user interface is simple left click interact, right click look. Seeing as the player has to use spell casting to survive, and this feature is rather complex, I wanted the other game interactions to be fairly straightforward on the surface. It works so far, playtesting will be extensive though and nothing is set in stone.

Smulan: The poses and shadows will all be cleaned up along the way, I may even drop some of these earlier sprites too, so it will look more realistic down the road.

Update 24 Nov:I changed the screenshot to show the main spell user interface, I love programming this thing! Now to draw all the spell components... A lengthy task to say the least.

Okay that great, a simple GUI is always the best. Look forward to more updates!

Looks very interesting!! I'm always up for a dark story! ;) It definitely sounds promising.

My latest update, a trimmed version of the opening cutscene.

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/1946/picd.png

Looks interesting I can't wait for this game.