Old Skies - time travel adventure by Wadjet Eye! (DEMO AVAILABLE!)

Dave Gilbert · Fri 01/04/2022 23:14:51

Been working on this for a year so figured an In Production thread was due!

Wadjet Eye is super proud to present: Old Skies!

Trailer

Story
Time travel is real and history is up for grabs! Playing as Fia Quinn, a time agent for the ChronoZen agency, your job is to keep close watch on seven travelers who have the desire (and the bank accounts) to sightsee in the past. Some are simply curious. Others have unfinished business to resolve. And they've all put down a lot of money for the trip, so it's vital that you keep them happy while ensuring they follow the rules. But what could go wrong? It's only time travel, after all.

Written & Programmed by: Dave Gilbert
Backgrounds and sprites: Ben Chandler
Music: Thomas Regin

Features
• Seven time periods to explore, from the speakeasies of the Prohibition era to the vicious gangs of the Gilded Age to the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001.
• High resolution 1920x1080 graphics. (That's three times higher than Unavowed!)
• Puzzles that require temporal thinking to solve.
• Death! You CAN die in this adventure game, but time travel means you can try again. And again. And again.
• Musical score by Thomas Regin, the composer for Unavowed and the Blackwell series.
• Professional voice acting with Wadjet Eye's largest cast yet.

More news as it comes!

heltenjon · Sat 02/04/2022 00:32:40

This is looking extremely good, and sounds like it will be very fun to play!

Cassiebsg · Sat 02/04/2022 09:46:36

Looking fantastic!

AndreasBlack · Sat 02/04/2022 10:08:45

Looks promising. The art improved a lot from previous games(!) nice with a highres Wadjet Eye game feels like a natural transition to be honest!
I'm always up for some time travelling

Dave Gilbert · Sun 03/04/2022 18:20:40

Quick little sizzle reel of some of the game's animations:

newwaveburritos · Sun 03/04/2022 23:28:54

Very exciting! Big time travel fan so this is a natural. Good luck with production!!

eri0o · Mon 04/04/2022 00:25:09

The graphics look SO GOOD!!! Also, so many different ways to die! I appreciate the incredible variety!

Snarky · Mon 04/04/2022 10:15:56

Looking gorgeous. It's clear that Ben has really upped his game on character art/animation. And I really like that you are exploring different (story) genres in the same universe. I have hopes for the temporal puzzles!

cat · Mon 04/04/2022 10:41:07

Babysitting rich people doesn't sound too exciting, but temporal puzzles sound awesome! Ben has really improved his animation skills

Rik_Vargard · Mon 04/04/2022 21:05:33

This looks so beautiful and I love time travel stuff!

SarahLiz · Wed 06/04/2022 00:48:47

WOO-HOO!!!!

...and I'll leave it at that.

Michael2968 · Fri 08/04/2022 22:23:43

Looks like this is going to be a great game. I am really looking forward to playing it when it is released.

Hobbes · Sat 09/04/2022 05:30:54

Wow - this is looking absolutely phenomenal!! Getting very strong Broken Sword-esque vibes from the art and animation style. Would be curious how long a single background takes in this resolution compared to the lower-res stuff. Unavowed was already a significant step up, this is... impressive! Working on Nighthawks art must've helped?

selmiak · Sat 09/04/2022 23:46:24

now that is very interesting! Great art and a compelling story, lessgo!

stu · Thu 14/04/2022 11:58:34

This looks great.

Love that 'death' animation, revealing the car headlights behind her when she collapses. Very nice!

Dave Gilbert · Wed 20/04/2022 22:36:57

IGN preview!

Dave Gilbert · Thu 21/04/2022 12:49:15

Quote from: stu on Thu 14/04/2022 11:58:34
This looks great.

Love that 'death' animation, revealing the car headlights behind her when she collapses. Very nice!

Total accident! The headlines are coded to flicker at random intervals. It's just a coincidence that they flickered at just that moment!

ThreeOhFour · Fri 29/04/2022 05:32:45

Thanks all! Definitely been pushing myself to try and bring my work into HD res and not feel so stiff & awkward. A ways to go, but overall pretty happy with my progress.

Quote from: Hobbes on Sat 09/04/2022 05:30:54
Would be curious how long a single background takes in this resolution compared to the lower-res stuff. Unavowed was already a significant step up, this is... impressive! Working on Nighthawks art must've helped?

It usually takes 2-3 days per scene. Much longer than low res, where I can usually do a scene per day, but a lot of that isn't so much the actual time spent drawing as it is time spent laying everything out. To get this background style to work I have to have everything broken up into lines & flats layers, and then everything broken up into layers beyond that. In low res I'd just paint everything straight onto a single layer. So a huge amount of the time is spent on layer management, which is quite awkward and obstructive to my natural approach. Necessary, though, while I was able to make some decent scenes in this res and style with a single layer, it wasn't able to be consistently replicated, which is definitely a problem in a game with dozens of scenes!

And yep, Nighthawks did help, to some extent! It normalized the use of 3D as foundational layouts for my scenes, which I do in every scene in Old Skies. And working at 4k resolution kind of cured me of my fear of working at 1080p res!

newwaveburritos · Fri 29/04/2022 18:12:05

Thanks for taking the time to write a bit about your process as I'm always curious about such things.

Nowhere Girl · Sun 01/05/2022 17:11:36

Looks ay-may-zing.

But... 1920x1080 is my screen's resolution. Does it mean that I will be unable to efficiently play the game in windowed mode?

Or will a slightly shrunk redolution be available as well? Remember that 1920x1080 is a lot, not everyone has such big screen...

And no travel beyond the Prohibition era? That's not very far away...
Will the 1960s, the hippie era, be available as well? If I was to travel in time, than probably there...