Melan-Comic: Maker's Eden Demo

Confirmation of my belief that several weeks of 2013 simply didn't exist, I realised this morning that I haven't mentioned the comic book stylings and bleak futurism of Maker's Eden since July. Now, I know what you're thinking. July only ended a few days ago but shift your cursor to the bottom of the screen and observe the calendar's face. October is upon us, or at least that's what we're supposed to believe. Personally, I think chunks of time are being extracted from the normal flow and stored for later use. There's a shortage of existence approaching and the fat cats are stealing the days of our lives to add to stretch out their own. With what little time is remaining, perhaps you'll choose to (re)visit the Maker's Eden demo, which has been updated. Preorders for the first act are now open.

Despite the first-person perspective, Maker's Eden is very much an old-fashioned point and click adventure and the early scenes in the demo hint at strong world-building of the sort that makes me very curious. Preordering the first act will set you back $4.50 and Maker's Eden's makers have this to say:

Ah yes, pre-orders, that fantastic system where you get to support developers by purchasing our as yet unreleased game. In return we give you a severed bikini-torso as a pre-order bonus. Nah, just kidding - but we would appreciate your support a great deal.

The soundtrack is available as well for an extra $4.50. It's a clever thing, with tracks that overlay and can be played alongside each other for added effect. That's because they are parts of the same, scene transitioning as the mood changes, in an iMUSE sort of way.

That's not the only smart piece of programming. The team are also working on "a Twine to Unity parser". This allows dialogue and pop-up descriptions to be written in Twine and imported directly into Unity, where it appears almost immediately in teh game. It's a tool to help writers with dialogue visualisation in-engine, so that it can be seen to fit the layout and adjustements can be made without harrassing a programmer for assistance. When the code for the parser is ready, it'll be released for free as an open source project. Excellent!

But, for now, the game's the thing. Do try it.