Adventure Gamers recently got a chance to sit down with
Their impressions are of course positive, and will probably heighten your anticipation even more for this highly promising and long-awaited game.
Gameplay in A Vampyre Story is very conventional, but with a few tricks up its cloak. The game is entirely point-and-click, but makes use of the “verb coin” type of interface, where holding down the mouse button over a hotspot reveals use, talk, or examine options. There’s also an additional fly option, as Mona can turn into an adorable little bat herself at will, though this is used only for places Mona can’t reach by walking. Which is too bad, since she won’t run at all and walks very slowly. Fortunately, the space bar can be used to skip directly to her destination, plus skip dialogue. Conversation is carried out in straightforward dialogue trees that you’ll exhaust in their entirety, and while some responses provide player choice, the differences are mainly cosmetic. Many of the topics are non-essential, but you’ll want to click through everything just for laughs and background details.There's a lot of new information scattered throughout the preview, which you should really read while waiting for November to roll around.
Too bad. I really hope that non-linear adventure gamesa la Quest for Glory with multiple ways to solve puzzles are going to make a comeback one day. Why not take full advantage of interactivity and throw railroading out of the window?
Also, fixed.
"Generally you won’t see radical changes in my art, but occasionally I’ll try something different, and as long as it retains the same appeal as other stuff I have done, it seems to be successful. The game is about a vampire so it has to place at night which is obviously dark. But a game that used a lot of black and was dark I felt would be too gloomy, which would be great if the game were serious and not an animated comedy. So I had four or so color schemes that might have worked for the fell of the game: brown, blue, green, or purple. Red, yellow and orange would be great for day or sunset but not really for nighttime. Most night scenes are blue and I felt that had been done a lot before and was pretty safe. I had used a teal green in Curse of Monkey Island and I didn’t want to repeat myself. Brown, or earth tones, has worked for evening skies before but I thought it wouldn’t be vibrant enough for the feel of the game. Purple is a color associated with goth kids and vampires, and is the darkest color temperature on the color wheel, so in the end I decided purple was the best way to go.
So I stared with that basic hue and then added color they I felt were related like magenta, red and pink. Then to complement those colors I used yellow and orange. And occasionally I used a muted blue, which kind of looks purple, for some highlights. That being said I wanted each location to have its own color scheme so that the player wouldn’t get sick of seeing the same thing over and over again. I hope I succeeded. But that is basically how my color schemes for this game came about."
I think he made a mistake with having the ENTIRE game at night, because too much of a good thing is bad. Maybe I'm wrong, though; hopefully I'm wrong. Maybe the art will be so beautiful it'll shame most other developers and we'll never get bored of it.