After considerable hours of toil, we've managed to get Absence ready for public release. Absence is a 3rd-person adventure game, taking influences from ye olde point'n'click adventures, and combining them with the technology of the half-life 2 engine.
This game demo is a final year project for the Computer & Video Games degree programme at the University of Salford, so there are a couple of things that have been carried out more for demonstration purposes than for the benefit of the game itself.
Please do have a look at our mod, and let us know what you think. We've tried to do something a bit different with it, and I hope you enjoy our work!
The first release version is 172MB, and available from moddb here.
Hehe, first of all this mod "looks" very nice. I realy like the model style, and the voices suitably expressive to the models. The puzzles are great and not to easy. The only thing what makes the mod not good playable is that much camera and walking bugs :D
keep up the good work guys !!!
Seems... Interesting...
Gotta check this out!
This is actually pretty cool
Lol this came out of nowhere! Do you get marked on your marketing because you could have told us a bit more about the game or provided us with a link to more information, or even stated that more information's on the profile page, considering you've kept a very low profile so far. I have a feeling this might get overlooked by many when all it would have taken is a few urls to the relevant pages in this newspost.
It'll be good to see what a British university mod team can come up with in light of Guildhall at SMU's effort, Eclipse.
eclipse was a fun mod, and i hope that this will be just the same, always nice to have random mods unexpectedly released =)
Teh sux0rs!!
Okey with that introduction of myself i know i lost all your respect all ready but, i think you have a nice idea with using the source engine for puzzles and such, good idea. only you put it out wrong. inte the second room after edgar or whats his name you have to pick up these huge crats and put them in the middle to create a bridge, who would think. aha! little girl pick up large friign box and put there. then when youu solve the puzzle you dont want to be carrying the stones for about 2 minutes thats boring, when you solved the puzzle you want to get out of there not do things you feel is totally unesessary. for example use one stone to solve the puzzle. then in the next room with the lady i just putt stuff down the top of the machinery and then i saw the ball that i was supposed to put there, i couldnt move the other stuff i put there already so i said **** you positive side and deleted the mod. things that this mod SERIOUSLY NEEDS?
1. proper introduction to what you are gonna be doing in the rest of the game
2. proper models, animations, textures and maps. if you are satisfied with them ill only say good bye, cause you aint staying in this business for long
3. proper coding, okey i can buy that the cam ***** up and you can duck even tho the char doesnt snice its a beta right? but not a very good idea at all to even release it with that, no one whos got scared away by the bad codings is gonna come back again.
not pointing the finger at you guys, i really think you can do better. they gotta learn you something in the university right?
If you want to make a good mod you really need to make everything perfect, otherwise no one will play it. couse theres always the better mod with better ideas and better graphics around somewhere to pe a pain in yourass.
A great attempt and EXCELLENT VOICE ACTING!
However the gameplay and overall feel of the game seem to lax.
This needs a more static camera, correct 'strafing animations' or some fix for it. And more of a guide for what to do. The puzzles were long and relatively boring at that pace. Please try to incorporate some form of tension or something to keep the player thrilled. However the idea is great and I'm glad to see a new spin on fps mods.
Good work and keep working on it!
It was... decent.
Strengths:
-Good voice acting, I was impressed by how well syncronized that was.
+Nice music, not sure if you wrote it, but if you did it's fantastic stuff
+interesting concept of a world. It reminds me of a slightly darker version of Alice in Wonderland.
Weaknesses:
-The models are, how can I put it? Terrible. Honestly, if you'd like some help, I'd be MORE than willing to (if your class allows). I can at least give you some concept art.
(ex)
=The girl's face was HORRIFYING. She looks like a 4-year old's crayon doodle of her auntie's noggin. Her anatomy also leave a great deal to be desired.
=The frog guy was okay, but his texture was very flat. Geometry could also be resposible for this, but I think that you might want to add some form to his colors.
-I wasn't too impressed by the animation either
=The girl seemed to glide acrossed the floor and had only a walking animation for movment. never a good thing, it's too distracting when things don't behave they way they should.
-The maps look very incomplete and unpopulated. Too many long flat surfaces, you need more things like bushes and jutting architexture, you NEED to populate your world, otherwise it feels empty.
=The flowers were nice, but they looked too... rigid. You need to give them some curve, bend, shape of some kind. If you want individual flowers, you are making them way too small; the same job can be accomplished with just a sprite. If it's many flowers you want, do a bush of some kind.
=Whoever lit your map had far too many spotlights that had the same color and brightness. You need some contrast and variation like the blue of the night as it meets the orange floresence of the lightposts. Monotany is your WORST enemy.
Well, that's all I noticed on my first pass. Don't quit, I think you have a lot of promise. If you guys could work on your visual quality. Get more animations, fix your models, improve your maps, and fix that coding. Also, make sure that your puzzles make sense. A 12 year old girl picking up a 800pound crate seems pretty stupid to me, and "it's how the world is" is no excuse. Even surrealism has realism.
I think the characters supposed to look like that :P
The art stlye in the mod is wonderful! I really think it was really welldone,I have been on a few mods before and I can tell this mod had to have had alot of work put into it,I really think moddb should give a award out to you guys
That was very interesting, A pleasant surprise to find on the moddb homepage.
Obviously it is a beta, but i was oddly let down when i got to the "end" and i hadn't learned anything about who or what i was.
Some nice puzzles. a little tedious at times but fairly well crafted.
I hope to see more from you guys. 8)
acid trip puzzles isn't a bad idea kinda fun, but that was painful :( missing animations see threw model when swimming list is quite big of the fixes needed. But in the End you made something playable and thats a lot better then most ppl do.
Yeah, you got a point there. Most mods never get to the playable stage.
Wow, looks cool :D
i didnt like that the camera got stuck to the wall and no facial animation kinda made me sad.
Well - I gave it a try. Here are some issues you need to deal with first and foremost:
Installation & Uninstallation
1) The installer does not automatically find the location that it needs to install to. It tried installing to C:\Program Files\Valve.... when on my machine (and on many others) it should have done C:\Program Files\Steam...
2) The uninstaller DOESN'T completely uninstall. Why wasn't this done? Do I want your game on my computer when I'm done with it? No. Then why should I have to go manually find all the files you installed and delete them?
Gameplay
1) When the game first started some kindof message appeared on my screen so fast I couldn't understand it. It looked like some kindof game error
2) Like another poster said - this little girl moves these huge boxes? Whatever
3) In reconstructing the machine, I too put pottery into the machine, only to find the little ball in the corner later. Not only that, but since I had to use sv_cheats and noclip for 20 minutes just to get the stuff out of the machine, the little ball rolled out of the room and down the street. Could you make this more apparent?
Graphics/VoiceActing/Other
1) Graphics looked decent (but very poor for a source game. This could have been done on the HL1 engine if you had physics to play with)
2) Voice Acting was okay. I had to crank my speakers up to thear them though. It's also kindof odd that the people only speak when you speak with them. Some ambient talking from the NPCs would go a long way to making the game more involved
3) I had alot of problems with camera issues. If the camera got near a wall, you'd suddenly switch to looking at the front of the character. She's one ugly little girl, so this wasn't exactly pleasant. It also made control frustrating.
I'm hoping you guys/girls spent maybe a couple months on this as a final project. It seems to lack quite a bit of polish.
heh downloading now :) nice to see somethin from ur uni... just 20 mins from me.. :D grats guys what year u guys in anyway ?