Adventure Gamers - Forums

Pre-ordered a boxed version of this game, haven’t received my download link, Steam link is not available to the 25th. Is anyone else experiencing this bullshit?

Thank you. I’m getting all excited for playing this game after seeing this video;

I don’t want to be left out of the discussion.

I too had preordered the game but had no download links sent to me…..i just sent an email to the Dave and he immediately sent me links and a Steam key.

Like tramponline said they are very cooperative so don’t hesitate to head over to their forums.

The game is very good.Good length.Hope you guys like it.

Hey everybody!  I’m glad you’re all enjoying the game!  I was super excited to see the amazing review from AdventureGamers!  I was so nervous on launch day, but after I saw that review, I calmed way down.

I just wanted to drop a few notes here for those interested, because I love talking about these kinds of details and there’s already lots of really good discussion of the game in this thread!  Long post ahead!

Regarding the maze, this was kind of a challenge to myself.  I know that mazes are almost universally reviled among adventure gamers, so I thought to myself, “Challenge accepted!”  So, I set out to make one that I would enjoy.  The rules as I defined them:
1) Optional.  You can skip the maze at any time by forcing yourself to wake up.
2) Top-down viewpoint.  Looking at the maze from a perspective camera, either first-person like 7th Guest or third-person like Inherit the Earth, is really confusing when the camera changes viewpoints each time you go around a corner.  Top-down addresses this issue.
3) Has a legitimate reason to exist in the story.  Anna’s dreams are a figurative maze of childhood fears and suppressed memories.  Making them a literal maze helps express that.
4) Has some strategy to solving them other than exhaustive search.  You can drop coins along the way, marking your path like Hansel and Gretel!  The third level of maze has at least one loop in it, so you may not be able to solve it just by following one wall.
5) Well rewarded for solving the maze.  On each floor, you can unlock an optional memory which gives Anna’s past a little more depth.  If you collect each memory and fall down the last chute, you will be rewarded with an achievement.  And if you have opened Morales’ journal without breaking it, you will also get a fourth memory which gives you half of the symbols needed to decode the journal!

After a brisk nap - 23 June 2012 06:25 AM

[...] the degree of detail and polish is absolutely mind-blowing. There’s a ton of effects animation (clouds drifting, smoke blowing, birds flying, cars driving, lights flickering, reflections, etc.), a half-dozen functional in-game computer interfaces, and plenty of mini-games and logic puzzles, each one completely unique. I mean, just that locker key puzzle must have been a ton of work to implement in AGS. Did Vince or Janet write their own physics engine, or what?

I hoped these details would help make the game something special!  I spent a lot of time on all the effects and especially on the more tactile interaction scenes!  That locker key puzzle was an “if we have time” puzzle and I’m really glad we had time!  It took me several evenings of programming to make that work!  I documented some of it’s creation here: ( http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/21113525 ).  The randomized, rotating maze was definitely the hardest to program though, and that was done over three years ago!

After a brisk nap - 23 June 2012 06:25 AM

[...]when you die, the game actually rewinds to let you try again. [...](I seem to recall from the developer diaries that this mechanic was originally intended as a bigger part of the game, but in the final version it’s just a neat bit of eyecandy.)

Yeah, this was a very late-game change for us.  Originally the points maxed out at 99 (though you could get many more than that, they just wouldn’t add to the total if you were already at 99) and were expended to rewind the game.  If you run out of points, it’s game over.  It just didn’t work very well as a mechanic and seemed better to just give the player infinite rewinds.  Janet really wanted to keep the points, however, so we turned the counter into a three-digit counter and made the points go up only. 

The rewind is supposed to relate to the theme of fate/predetermination that you talk to an important figure about later in the game, but that theme was also scaled back a bit from my original designs to be more of a detail, being mostly relegated to some optional dialog in the final game.  So, the rewinding remains as a cool eye candy and as a courtesy to the player who may not be saving in every room of the game.

marcd2011 - 25 June 2012 06:22 PM

looking back on Resonance a day after playing it, one thing did bug me about the game, which was how the characters all instantly knew things that one of the other characters had discovered. For instance i could find out a password with one character one place on the map then enter it with another who’s somewhere else, or find out about an item i needed and then fetch that item with a character who wasn’t in the room when i found out about it in the first place.

Only a minor gripe and i guess the alternative was to have to long term memory converse with a character every time you solve a puzzle, so perhaps this was the only way to go with it..

Trust me, I thought about this! But considering all the reviews out there who found it super annoying to have to backtrack to something to add it to your STM, or having to walk to another character to share an inventory item with them (I guess the alternative would be a magical inventory that all characters share?), I can’t imagine how much flack I’d catch if I made the characters need to explicitly give information from one character to another in order to solve password or code puzzles when the player already knows the solution! But yeah, I definitely considered this!

One place where something similar comes up is when Bennet needs to know that Tortoise wants the will, so that Bennet can go and ask for the will at the City Archive.  It’s a really tricky balance!

Thanks again, everyone!  Let me know if you have any questions I can answer!