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A New Beginning first look archived preview

A New Beginning
A New Beginning

When visiting Daedalic Entertainment in Hamburg recently, we naturally got to take a look at how A New Beginning is coming along. While it is still in a very early stage of production, one chapter is largely done already.

The story starts off in the distant future. Humanity has ruined the earth’s climate, rendering the blue planet almost uninhabitable. The damage is irreversible and the only possible way to save humanity from impending doom is to go back in time. Thus a team of time pilots is sent back to the year 2050 with the goal of halting the climate change at an early stage. Unfortunately though, the scientists have miscalculated: it’s already too late in 2050, as humanity has done irreversible damage to the planet by this time. Time pilot Fay, a junior team member with a slightly naïve idealistic streak, manages to make a second time jump, along with her colleague Salvador. This time they are going to our present, the setting for a large part of A New Beginning.

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The year 2050 is plagued by natural disasters.

 

Here the supposed heroes part ways. The player follows Fay, while the more aggressively inclined Salvador, who finds any means justifiable to knock some sense into people, becomes the first major adversary. Fay seeks out scientist Bent Svensson, who has retired at this point and leads a secluded life. Svensson has managed to harness bioenergy from blue-green algae [aka Cyanobacteria], and in such an efficient way that it could provide a clean solution for the whole earth’s energy problem. The only trouble is that the industry is not interested in his technology, as there’s no way to make money out of it.

Fay eventually manages to convince Bent that the future of mankind depends on his invention, and so they set out to resume work on the project at his former research station, a run-down oil platform. Besides Salvador, they are opposed by another adversary: Indez, an unscrupulous industrialist who sees the blue-green algae technology as a threat to his wealth.

A New Beginning is primarily intended to be not so much a puzzle game as a serious story, a story that is believable despite the science fiction theme, has strong characters, and makes a statement as well. [Creative Director] Jan Müller-Michaelis stresses that the individual characters’ motivations are always understandable and that dramatic turns and conflicts add suspense. Yet while the issue at hand is serious, they want to avoid finger-wagging. After all, A New Beginning is meant to be a piece of entertainment as well.


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The background is made up of almost 20 levels that move at different speeds when scrolling. This results in a convincing sense of depth.

 

To get things right scientifically, Daedalic has enlisted the aid of Professor Schulz-Friedrich from Kiel. While the perpetual motion type of energy generation in the game is of course impossible, there actually is current research into generating energy using blue-green algae. The expert corroboration should lend more credibility to the technobabble used in the game.

Daedalic is being pretty ambitious, all in all. They’re promising over 130 screens and more than 30 characters. And all of that is to be done exclusively in 2D. Even the characters, which are usually real-time rendered these days, are made up of classic handdrawn sprites. The developers are going with this highly costly approach so that they can have the faces show emotions convincingly – not to mention the fact that a number of Daedalic employees are fans of the old 2D style.

 

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For the backgrounds in A New Beginning, simple drawings are made first, giving an overview of the scene. They define what should be seen and how the rough layout of the scene looks. Then on the basis of the prelimary drawings, more detailed sketches are done.

 

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The detailed sketches are used to create colour tests. How does the scene look in different light moods? How does the lighting change if the door in a room is opened and sunlight from the outside comes in? Then the developers select from different alternatives which one they like best. In the end, the pre-drawing is filled with the final details and is upgraded to a full adventure game screen. Additionally, animations are made, e.g. the moving clouds on the sky. Currently this is performed by external employees who do not work in Daedalic's Hamburg offices. Then the pictures get their final finishing in-house.

The chapter we got to play didn’t have any cutscenes yet. However, it did have a number of stills that showed a clear potential to be made into exciting cutscenes later on. The storyboards, which Daedalic has recently started to do in-house professionally, are also very dynamic, so we can expect the full game to have some strongly cinematic sequences. This is certainly a good sign, since getting an exciting story across effectively requires proper stage direction.

 

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This is where the storyboards for A New Beginning are created.

 

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The completed storyboards give a good impression of the flow and dynamics of a cutscene.

The interface is slowly starting to take shape as well. The look hasn’t been finalized yet, but a variation of Monkey Island 3’s good old verb coin has been decided on. However, instead of a fixed number of default actions (Investigate, Take/Use, Talk, etc.), the game offers specific useful options for each item. For instance, if you click on a door, you can choose between Knock on, Open, and Listen.

On the one hand, this offers greater flexibility and possibly more complex puzzles, but on the other hand it means you have to check what your options are for every hotspot you encounter. We’ll have to play with this interface a bit longer before we can say how well it works in practice. In any case, a nice consequence of this approach is that A New Beginning will not have such lines as "That doesn’t work."

Ever since Secret Files: Tunguska, recommended interface design has included the hotspot-revealing hotkey, which Daedalic would like to include here as well. The developer is otherwise using mostly tried-and-true methods: you don’t need any reflexes to make it to the end, and you can pick up items as soon as you find them. There are also a few red herrings; that is, items that take up inventory space without being needed for any puzzle.

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This is what the game will look like in action.

The music is done by Hamburg’s young Studio Periskop. The pieces we got to hear sounded very impressive. And the orchestral audio comes with a twist as well: like with LucasArts’ old iMuse system, dynamic music is used, allowing smooth transitions from one piece to another at any point during the game. We’re looking forward to seeing how this intriguing feature will work out in the full game.

It’s a bit too early to predict how well everything will come together. After all, it’s still a full year before the planned release date of Q1 2009. The first signs are telling, though, and if the game realizes the cinematic look seen in the storyboards, players can expect a lot of drama and excitement. The 2D approach is working out very well so far. The backgrounds give a great sense of depth, and the character drawings show a lot of personality, even when the animations aren’t quite done yet. A New Beginning has a lot of potential already on display, so the next twelve months will show how much of it Daedalic can fulfill.


This article was originally published on the German website Adventure-Treff. It has been translated and reprinted here with permission. Translation provided by Harald Bastiaanse.

 

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