This game has a truly brilliant skeuomorphic user experience for the interactive flip book. It’s really awesome how it simulates pages in such a way that the back transcript becomes the previous pages, while clicking to turn to the “next” page always magically shows the map. It does evoke some of the excitement of using a physical book, and it’s actually far less an unnatural marriage with the interactive parser than you would think if you haven’t tried it.
I’m not talking about the story and I’m not reading anyone else’s comments about it, because I’ve only just started playing and I like fantasy. But this is truly a wonderful production that should have been promoted and critiqued extensively for its high design values alone. It’s really not just eye candy. The last time I tried playing the free demo before the whole thing was free, I was too burned out from playing typical games out of a sense of obligation. We really do miss the good ones far too often, I think.
No one appreciates this comment more than I do and a great deal of the credit for its implementation goes to Thomas Lynge and the company he worked for back in 2009. They allowed him to do the work in his down-time and he did an extraordinary job. Some of the things we had to implement were handmade and not “controls” pre-built by anyone.
We did implement a version of Shadow in the Cathedral using the same foundation and we also ported Eric Eve’s Nightfall to it as well, which turned out beautifully.
It did look gorgeous. Shame that it was plagued with memory leaks until the day I just decided to stop playing - saving the game made the game slower and slower and slower.
It actually changed how I play my IF. I changed my font to Baskerville, the font it used, and I started using sepia-toned colours for my background. I just thought it was a perfect combination and kept it ever since.
I also personally disliked how it was dependent on Microsoft Silverlight, but we can’t have everything can we.
I remember seeing Nightfall in that fashion, yes, now that you come to mention it.
Those memory leaks were all cleared up pretty early on. The latest download doesn’t have any memory issues, although I suspect some of that is due to our mainframe like PC’s compared to 2009.
That’s just an attempt to mimic an “old book”. I think it’s nice too.
Given what we were trying to accomplish, there really was no other way to do it. I’m not a Java guy, so that wasn’t an option. I also wanted it to work on a Mac and PC, so although we toyed with some of the cross-platform C++ libraries, we opted for Silverlight because C# was easy and XAML (although new at the time) had all the foundations for making something interesting.
I may re-implement the theme in AngularJS or ReactJS if it’s possible. I think it should be. It would be nice to see it carried forward.
Then it’s quite possible I never actually got the latest download. My bad. Thanks for clearing that up.
If it were at all possible to make a standard terp look like that (with the caveat that some games, quite technically/visually inventive, would probably not work) it would be a gorgeous thing.