riadd

I tried YAML for another game prototype in the meantime. I like it as well but I feel the whitespace syntax can be very error prone if not all your team members come from a technical background and know about whitespace settings in the editor.

Thank you! Good idea about the tech choices of Codecks. Maybe that would make for another good blog post.

Thanks! The character/location illustrations are drawn by Garen Ewing. He is amazing.

Thank you! We struggled a bit with coming up with a new interesting art style for CE2, but once we stumbled on art by Garen Ewing we knew we had something exciting for us.

Did you see our comparison with Renowned Explorers by the way? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fD5IJrZrJE

Thanks so much! I appreciate it! The animation style that you suggest has come up in discussions before. We're still figuring out how to exactly deal with different scenarios where the diary text is much more detailed than what we can achieve in animation. That will be an interesting problem to tackle as we add more and more content to the game.

I only used Google's Closure Tools for optimizing and obfuscating the code. Should probably add that to the post. Thanks

Thanks for the tips! Will check out them out.

Thank you! I think the main inspiration for the logo gradient was actually the Indiana Jones logo :)

Thanks for the playing Curious Expedition! Sorry you're not feeling the new art style. It is based on Ligne Claire as popularized by Tintin. I hope once you see the whole game, we'll be able to win you over!

Yes, no helper libraries and I coded quite close to the metal.It's probably even a stretch to call it an engine. It's just built around the specific game mechanics. It wouldn't make sense to open source that part unfortunately.

When customers of a PC distribution platform spend money on your game they want to be able to own it by downloading it and having it live on their computer and work offline as well. For this you need to deliver them something that is completely packaged and contains everything to run the game.. so even if that means basically shipping a full browser with your HTML5 game.

We also have a web version which can be played online via the regular browser.

The implicit collection problem can be prevented by making sure that you put explicit return statements at function ends. This goes contrary to the dense syntax argument but at least there is a workaround for performance critical code.

Thanks! We made extensive use of Canvas caching and only redrawing if things changed.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...

Added this to the blog post as well. Thanks for the note!

Yes, CoffeeScript was quite hot back then - no pun intended. Even though its not as used anymore I think it pushed the development of JS itself forward.

Fun fact: there is a hacking forum that still have failed to create trainers for Curious Expedition due to "weirdly changing memory addresses". I think if they would have realized that it was just a browser game it would have been much easier for them.

Unfortunately also being on Steam barely gets you store exposure anymore.

I added some more mentions:

- Buzz! / FFmpeg - SugarJS - tween.js - hjson

I've extended the blog post with more information on the libs that I used.

Cool! I hope you find it worthwhile!

Yes, Visual Studio!

I barely used any libs, but I should add the ones that I did. Will extend the article. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks! I used https://buzz.jaysalvat.com/ and converted all our raw .wavs to mp3 and ogg with python using ffmpeg. I should probably add that the post as well.

Thanks for the heads-up. Will fix that!

Could you let me know your browser and OS?

Sorry about that. The sound issue is a bug. We'll fix that.

Yes, he's not a character because we leaned more towards figures from the late 19th century and Humboldt was born mid 18th century. Maybe something for a later update or a mod though.

Too bad :( Did you try the web version already?

The demo is hosted on http://layershift.co.uk whereas the rest of the website is hosted on our regular simple web server. It is probably related to that.

I've never played Gods Will Be Watching so I can't say anything about gameplay being similar or not. There was no creative connection though.