Mysterious Song release delayed again!

[ceti alpha]

There will be 1000 copies of the game, and Red Frog will NOT be distributing it. We were originally going to have it distributed through TZD, but fortunately the game took longer to finish than expected...I guess it's better for all involved that that happened, since we'd be ashamed to have Red Frog represent us, and the game's had major overhauls since then anyways.

 

Phew! Patience really is a virtue.

[Arjak]

I went to the Frozen Utopia website and saw the new screenshots of the redone cutscenes, and WOW! They look incredible! Even though they are the same moments as in the old samples, just the new character design and art style make it look so much better. After the game comes out, I would love to see a comparison between the old cutscenes and the new. The game now looks really professional. Great job, Black Tiger!

There is one thing that's bugging me, though. The character portraits used in battle and status screens now look NOTHING like their cutscene versions. I hope it's not too much trouble, but that looks like something that really needs fixing.

Still, I'm now more excited than ever! Around what time of year can we expect the game to be released? The site still has the old release date.

[nat]

The character portrait "avatars" is artwork ported straight from the original PC game. This has come up before, but I think the decision was made that these won't be changed in order to stay true to the original.

[Keranu]

Regarding the portraits, the portraits for all three characters were originally taken straight from the original PC version. GUTS mentioned how they didn't look good, so I actually updated Tiger and Ryanna's portraits to make them look better and more accurate. However I didn't update Spear's portrait because I was lazy and thought it looked pretty good to begin with, though it has been something I've been meaning to tackle with more. Maybe I'll try coming up with something tonight, Black_Tiger's new artwork should come in handy. Might have to update the other character portraits a little too.

[nodtveidt]

Yes nat, the original decision was indeed to never change those portraits, since they were from the original game and there was no need to change them. However, I was in contact with the original developer and he stated that that was one of the things he would have done differently...hence hinting that the portraits are better off changed. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak...so I gave clearance to update them. The guys are working on it back at the Frozen Utopia forum's developers area.

[esteban]

Yes nat, the original decision was indeed to never change those portraits, since they were from the original game and there was no need to change them. However, I was in contact with the original developer and he stated that that was one of the things he would have done differently...hence hinting that the portraits are better off changed. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak...so I gave clearance to update them. The guys are working on it back at the Frozen Utopia forum's developers area.

I think you fabulous folks will do the right thing... see if you can come up with something better... no harm in trying

[nodtveidt]

Keranu already did make a better image for Tiger, but Equuskia and I both agree that Tiger looks better dark-skinned like he was originally.

[esteban]

Keranu already did make a better image for Tiger, but Equuskia and I both agree that Tiger looks better dark-skinned like he was originally.

I was thinking darker than the original.

As an aside, researchers must have examined the potrayal of race/ethnicity in games... it would be an interesting topic.

[nodtveidt]

In many RPGs, ethnicity doesn't come into play a whole lot since game worlds are generally not Earth or are a different representation of Earth. Furthermore, making an RPG that is representative of the races on Earth would be pretty boring IMO. To that end, I personally don't care what a character's ethnicity is as long as the characters are interesting and do their jobs as story devices.

[nodtveidt]

A quick update:
Thanks to malducci's assembly wizardry, it may be possible to re-combine the battle program with the map program. That means no more load time before and after combat, which also means better performance if we are unable to have the discs properly pressed. I'll be experimenting with this over the course of the next few weeks. I'd do it quicker but wifey's pregnancy is almost finished, so you never know when the baby's gonna decide to crawl out.