Something Classic Games

Hey everyone!

In just under three years, Shadows of Adam is nearing completion! This post is going to be a brief look at what’s new, what’s left, and the future of Shadows of Adam.

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What’s New
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Credits:

Finishing our credits sequence was a big accomplishment because it finally hit me that the game was nearing its end. It also includes one of SoA’s best compositions, a 7 minute long melody of Shadows of Adams themed timed out to a thrilling ending sequence. All composed by the sexy guy listed above. That’s all I can say without spoiling it!

More Save Slots:

This was something that was added just yesterday. But sometimes you get these little gems late in development. Before you only had a measley 3 save slots. But “This is 2016” shouted the masses! Voila and now you have 15 save slots! Now you can save before every boss just so you can get that perfect RNG roll which will shave 1.5 seconds off your speed run.

Kickstarter NPCs:

The town of Dradora houses a vibrant cross section of people from all walks of life and backgrounds. However none are quite as eccentric as the ones our Kickstarter backers designed! Backers who pledged enough were given the task to create their own NPCs. The result…well let’s just say it has made Dradora a whole lot more interesting!

Backer’s Dungeon:

One lucky backer, with the expert guidance of our own level design guru Luke, designed his own dungeon for the players to experience as an optional side quest at the end of the game. Ladies and gentlemen we present to you the “Lost Cave”. Tough as nails monsters who will pound you into the dirt? Check. Challenging puzzles designed to make you pull your hair out? Check. Legendary swords, game changing artifacts and more treasure than you can shake a stick at? Check, check, check.

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What’s Left
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Testing, Testing, Testing:
The biggest hurdle left is more testing. While the team has made many full playthroughs – fixing up to 50-100 minor polish issues in the last month alone, there are always issues that we miss; edge cases not yet found or oversights from staring at the same game for three years. The game will be going out to testers this month and we are looking forward to tightening up the project even more.

Kickstarter Quests:
We are currently finishing out the remaining Kickstarter Backer quests. These are a collection of side quests that allow you to find some of the game’s most powerful weapons and armor. You’ll want to nab these items before trekking through the final dungeon!

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The future of Shadow of Adam
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New Website:
We will be launching a new Something Classic and Shadows of Adam webpage this month. These streamlined sites will provide info about the game and the five handsome men that make up the Something Classic team!

Pre-Orders:
Once our new websites are live you will have an opportunity to pre-order your own copy of Shadows of Adam. Get it while it’s hot as the early copies may be selling for lots of gil years from now.

Trailer:
We will also be launching a new action packed trailer to get people totally psyched about our game!

It will be an exciting month and we’re glad you chose to join us! Thanks again for all your support and please keep visiting this site for more updates on the project. Questions, comments, ideas for “Shadows of Adam II: Racing”?

E-mail: info@somethingclassic.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomethingClassc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomethingClassicGames/
Forums: https://forums.shadowsofadam.com/
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/somethingclassic

I have updated the Alpha Demo to v.0.90.3-alpha. You can download the update via your download page. If you have not received an e-mail with your download link, or have lost your download link, send us an e-mail or message us on Kickstarter: info@somethingclassic.net.

v.0.90.3-alpha Change Log:
– Crash Fix: Fixed game crash when you open the menu by pressing X and S simultaneously and then immediately pressing Z, X and S simultaneously while on the world map.
– Crash fix: Fixed crash where game would freeze if you entered a battle with 0 HP and then used a Revive.
– Crash Fix: bug where the final boat sailing scene does not load. (0.90.0 works but 0.90.2 does not)
– Crash Fix: Fixed crash involving broken inns caused by 0.90.2 update (0.90.0 has working inns)
– Fixed bug where talking to Captain Blackrot does not show the choice window.
– Potential fix for performance degradation on Wind Tower base screen and Wind Tower boss fight.
– Performance: Reduction in RAM usage on game start.
– Mac OS X: Fixed crash where loading bar freezes on game start.

If you have not yet filled out the survey, and you bought a gravestone, NPC or quest tier, please fill out your survey as soon as possible so we can get your content created. If you lost your survey, send us an e-mail or a Kickstarter message.

Hi all,

To those who pledged at the Dradoran Soldier tier ($12) or higher, you should be receiving an email today from Humble Bundle with links to the Shadows of Adam alpha build! There are multiple versions to choose from. Currently, we support Windows 7, 8, 10, Mac OS X 10.8+, Ubuntu 12.04+, Fedora 21, Debian 8.

We worked tirelessly the last few months to make this alpha as great as possible for you all, but it’s possible we may have overlooked something. If that is the case, we’d love to hear from you on our forums!

SoA Forums:
https://forums.shadowsofadam.com/

SoA Bug Report Forum:
https://forums.shadowsofadam.com/forums/bugs-and-feedback.3/

Bug Report READ ME:
https://forums.shadowsofadam.com/threads/read-me-bug-report-template.31/#post-91

The alpha demo offers approximately 2-3 hours of game play, from The Tangle through the town of Borges. The alpha build is nearly feature complete, but we still have some missing sound effects and minor music looping issues. These will be addressed in our final build. 🙂

Thanks for your wonderful support and getting us this far. The Kickstarter has allowed us to go above and beyond. The fund have ensured that we have the best quality graphics, sounds, and assets needed to make Shadows of Adam an incredible experience. Thank you a million times!

Something Classic Team,

Tyler, Ty, Josh, Luke and Tim

P.S. Sometimes Humble Bundle emails get sent to spam or promotion folders, so if you don’t see it in your inbox, please check there!

Hello again everyone! Our deepest apologies for missing last weeks scheduled development blog post. We have been in crunch mode eliminating all of our outstanding alpha demo tasks and we only realized we missed a post when it came time to write the next one. D’oh! I’ll try to make up for last weeks missing post by announcing some awesome news in this one :).

First, the game is playable from start to finish. We have all of our planned content for the main story complete and implemented. Our art assets are all finished with the exception of backer-specific assets. We are working on those now, so if you have not yet finished the survey please do so as soon as possible! Currently, we are working on implementing the last of our skill animations, AI logic and our credit sequence. Once those are all wrapped up the core game will be content complete! Exciting stuff 😀

Second, if you are a Kickstarter backer, expect to have the alpha demo on July 22, at the latest. The Alpha Demo will have two to three hours of extra content and will let you play through Dradora, Sea Side House, Wind Tower, and Borges. Please note, we have spent a lot of time fixing as many bugs as possible, but it is possible we will have missed some. If you experience any difficulties or have any suggestions on improving the game, feel free to post in our Bugs and Feedback forum so we can start public discussion on your bug/suggestion :D.

Lastly, we are going to use the Humble Bundle Widget to help us automate our backer specific content. The Humble Widget gives us a lot of flexibility regarding distribution and saves us precious time so we do not have to build our own solution. More time we can spend on the game sounds great by us :D. So what does this mean for you? On July 22, all backers will receive an e-mail from the The Humble Widget with a download page link. Clicking this link will take you to your download page where you can associate your Humble Account with your purchased content from the Shadows of Adam Kickstarter. Once we launch the game, you will be able to redeem your special backer content (digital wallpaper, art book, strategy guide, ost) or Steam keys from your download page. You will also be able to download DRM-free versions of the game from the same download page, should you choose to do so.

We want to thank everyone once again for all of the support! The finish line is in sight 😀

If you have questions, or want to say hi, contact us at one of our official channels:
E-mail: info@somethingclassic.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomethingClassc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomethingClassicGames/
Forums: https://forums.shadowsofadam.com/
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/somethingclassic

It’s testing time! We’ve sent out a demo of this game to some very fortunate testers, who have been tasked with not only playing the game… but breaking it. And break they did. Our testers managed to find bugs and collision issues we never could’ve imagined:

Collision Problems

The most common variant of bug in this game is definitely collision issues. Our engine requires us to “paint” all of the collision tiles on the map, which is prone to error on some of the larger maps. Without all of the necessary collision tiles, it is easy for a persistent player to find holes and go out of bounds. Or onto tables.

Typos and Character Encoding 

The next most frequent issue is typos. Despite having watched this opening scene hundreds of times, none of caught that awkwardly phrased sentence. Meanwhile, this tester probably noticed it within a minute! This is why it’s so important to have a fresh pair of eyes.

Others pointed out character encoding issues, which are the nemesis of any who works with web programming.

Game Breakers

Game breaking bugs are relatively infrequent, but obviously the most serious. In the above figure, Curtis had just finished suplexing the dragon (cliche, I know) and moving the dragon into his hurt state. But… now what? The menu for the next turn is supposed to appear! However, it never has and the tester is setting there waiting for his next turn to this day. These sorts of bugs are generally the result of fast and loose programming, which is one of the perils of a language such as Javascript. Perhaps an unexpected value was returned somewhere and the program did not know how to handle it. The conditions to start the next turn were never met.

Oversights

The last set of issues we noticed were what I would classify as oversights by us a team. For example, a lot of testers noted that we do not have a quit button in the menu, and they are absolutely correct! We’ve been testing on the browser for so long that we totally forgot to add this basic and essential feature for desktop players. Whoops! Another oft-requested feature is the ability to skip cutscenes, since there are so many. In this case, that was a debug feature that we explicitly removed… but may have to work in if these suggestions of any indication.

Conclusion

Testing is not fun for the developer or for the tester, but it’s a necessary evil. It’s amazing how things we as a team have seen for ages now totally went unnoticed and testers managed to spot it within minutes. This shows the importance of a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind in developing the best game you can make as a team. We are grateful for our testers and are currently clearing a mountain of bugfixes. The work of a game developer never ends.