Up-World's website is up ! And the Demo is LIVE !!!

Just watched your website. I'm curious of what you guys gonna bring up.

I found the podcast somewhat creepy, "sister o' mine! > brother of mine!", yeah ok, whatever...

At first I thought you was American, then I started hearing a bit of your French coming through, which (both of) you ended up sounding more like the longer the podcast went on.

I take it the game will be pixel graphics?

@Unreal : thx mate . We will be upping some screenshots and concept arts as time goes, that and the "demo wich is not a demo, more of our first shot with visionaire", both should give you some satisffying tease.

@MasterAFRLme :
Yep the podcast is ... what it is :p
And we warned you in the title !
We were both nervous and we would have redone it in other circumstances.
But, we want it to be a 30 minute top investment each week (reccording + some low level editing). So we went with our first shot. and decided to face the circumstances ! :p
I'm confident that the quality will improve with time and experience ... I think ... I hope ... Oh god please make it go better!

The expressions you'll hear come from our pop culture.
As you said we are french, and we mostly learned English trough books, movies, and mainly games.
And since we both are on the theatrical side of the weird, we tend to reproduce the idioms that we enjoyed and wished we had in our mother thong.
I mean, you have now idea how boring "sister of mine" sounds in french !

The game will indeed be pixel graphics. We are going for a 256 colour mood, we are cheating though, in order to use bigger resolutions.
Basically we grew up in the 90's and those were the kind of graphics we played with. And some of my best childhood memory are linked to games such as sam&max, Day of the tentacle, Prisoner of ice, the dig and quite importantly Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis, which is, for me one of the best around.

We would like for this game to reproduce the sense of wonder we had when playing those game. Basically you got enough information in your drawing to know exactly how cool or awesome the character is, but its pixelised enough so you still have to imagine the details. This is what makes us tick !

Thank you for taking the time to check us out the both of you.

I grew up on the point & click games of the late 80's & throughout the 90's also, though I have to be honest that I'm more of a fan of the British adventure games such as Simon the Sorcerer 1 (+ 2, though 1 is my favorite p+c game out of all the ones I've ever played) & Broken Sword 1, Beneath a Steel Sky, etc. I was a fan of the Lucas stuff as well; especially Monkey Island 3, 2, 1 (yes in that order), Full Throttle (loved the duracell bunny bit at the end of that game) & Day of the Tentacle (of course). Actually probably played most point & click games that were out in the 80's & 90's including some really obscure ones from Delphine Soft, which as it turns out was actually from your neck of the woods.

I got to play those Brit gems too, really enjoyed the broken sword series.
The drawings were awe inspiring, the only time I genuinely found graphics to be that stunning on a p&c was with memoria from daedelic.
But when we were kids, the house was under Apple totalitarianism, so I got to play those game (broken sword, beneath a steel sky etc ..) much later with access to ScumVm..

I've always been a windows person, though I do have a mac mini that was kindly given to me for testing purposes for a game I'm helping develop.

I have Memoria, but I've not gotten round to playing it yet. Actually got most of Daedalic games, most of which I've yet to get around playing or finishing. Finished Deponia 1, Chains of Satinav, Whispered World & A New Beginning, so far. Can't remember if I have finished any of the others off the top of my head (have terrible memory).

If you like 2D arty stuff, I recommend checking out "Child of Light", it's not a p+c game mind, but the artwork is amazing. Sort of watercolor wash with fluid animations. Just looks really nice.

I'm into two mindset when it comes to Daedalic games, Some just blew my mind, Memoria is in my top tier P&C games, but a lot of time, their pacing seems off, both in the way the characters move and the way the animation (though very nice) behave (Deponia is a prime offender) and the games interface/gameplay usually grind my gears. The whole game ends up suffering from this, and quite often I fail to get into the story because of that.

I'm kind of more attracted to the way Wadjet Eye deals with those kind of thing.
There are very few games in their library that I did not like.

Child of light is on my (oh so long) list of "must try this out" games. The art style appears to be indeed out of this world.
And the rhyme themed narration is definitely up my alley !

Yeah the dialogs are all spoken as rhymes / poems in Chile of Light.

I've played quite a few of the Wadjet Eye games as well. I quite enjoyed the Blackwell series. Plan on getting the complete collection on Steam at some point. I've only finished a couple of others though there are a few recent ones that came out that I wouldn't mind playing at some point. & then there's that Kathy Rain game that was released recently that looks like it might be quite nice.

In regards to artwork, I don't mind pixel art, but I prefer hand drawn art more, especially if it's painted nice or pretty unique looking. The cartoon artwork of Curse of Monkey Island (3) is one of the reasons why I prefer that over the first 2 games, then again I consider MI3 superior anyway as it was just a fun game overall. The remakes of MI1 + 2 were nice, but I would have preferred they'd gone with art similar to MI3 instead.

Not really sure I understand what you mean about Daedalic games & pacing being off. The only thing that irritates me about some of their games is they often default to using generic interaction animations rather than unique animations for each interaction. The prime example would be the pick up (take) animation or general use interaction - Broken Sword 1 + 2 on the other hand had amazing animations for everything, including begin / end walk animations, step animations for if you clicked a destination too close to the character & they had character rotation animations too. All the attention to detail was one of the things I liked the most about it, unlike the two 3D games & the latest one, which felt like they rushed it for the sake of releasing it faster as despite the nice artwork, it just felt janky & uninspired.

I guess that what I like about pixel art, is all the thing it leaves for the imagination. Basically it gives me enough info to figure out what is the thing I'm looking at, or what is the general "feel" of the character, but leaves all the detail to my imagination.
With cartony graphics, what you see is what it is, and quite often it does not work for me. Not that it is bad or anything, I just can't get pulled inside the universe.
One game that illustrate it quite well is the recently remastered Days of the Tentacle.
I'm a sucker for the original graphics. Each characters looked unique and cleverly designed, the environments transported me and the overall artistic direction was on point....
But when they apply that HD cartony coat, I found the characters to look dull, the environment bland, and the artistic direction reminds me of the early days of flash animation on the internet.
I very might well be a special kind of weird though!

Note: it is not something that applies to every game. Again, the Broken swords games were fantastic (I only played the 3 first I think). And both enticing and poetics. Little trivia for you on the subject : The french title for this series was "Les chevaliers de Baphomet" or "Baphomet's knights". There, useless trivia for you!

When it comes to reusing animations, that generaly depends on the kind of game. I usualy don't mind it with 2d games, if the animation is "snappy" enough.
If I am to see the same animation several dozen of times during the game, I don't want it to drag on forever :p.
On 3D games though I found it more hurtfull. A good example for me is Daedalic's Alcatraz. Among some of its flaw (I still enjoyed the game for the most part) it used "standart" animation for every take/give action. It was quite iritating. Plus the animation cycle was kind of long, which added to the overall cumbersome feel.

Pixel art has always been a bit hit & miss for me. I really enjoyed it in Simon the Sorcerer 1 as they crammed in loads of tiny details into the environments & animations in general, though I would like to see an HD remake of it, maybe something done in a similar art style to that of Child of Light. I used to like cartoons as a kid (like most kids, I guess) which is probably why Monkey Island 3 really appealed to me at the time. I also liked the fact that the animators can be a lot more dynamic with animations when you can actually 100% tell what is going on.

I'm not so keep on 3D adventure games, I also find generic animations in 3D games annoying because the 3D artists should be able to rig up new animations due to skeletons / bones a lot easier & faster than an artist hand drawing frames 1 at a time.

The German title is similar to your French title, Baphomets Fluch, don't ask me what it means as I forgot. I've never understood why most countries never use a direct translation of the VO title. Spain is quite notorious for coming up with completely random titles for translated movies, tv shows & games etc.

I've played the first 4 Broken Sword games & the first episode of Broken Sword 5, got to get around to finishing that at some point.