jettpack

i like him, but hes wrong a lot. and has a lot to learn.

@Rattle618: yeah our Audio designer composed all of the music himself and was the major reason for the way the musical mechanic was implemented. He's great. The guy built a little sound studio in his house specifically so he could record his friend playing live cello for the pieces he composed. he totally killed it.

@SSully: haha, thanks. Im an illustration student, so hopefully at the very least i can make something that looks good. Our other artists happened to be super talented, so that was helpful.

@Voidoid Thanks so much for playing! and I'm glad you found it tolerable, that means we accomplished something, it's actually really difficult to make the genre not painful. haha.

And no, making a hidden object game that wasn't bad was only part of our goal, we wanted to take the limits of the genre and see if we could work a narrative into in a significant and thematically/contextually consistent way. It was definitely an experiment in design, and in terms of research we found that it is hard to combine a narrative with hidden object gameplay without accidentally making an adventure game. A large number of our prototypes veered dangerously in the adventure game direction, which would be fine except that that wasn't our objective. As far as the genre being obsolete, I would have agreed with you 100% before i worked on the project. We played dozens of hidden object games and found that most of them were really bad and tedious (as one might expect). However, we found that there was a certain kind of quiet atmosphere that is unique to the genre which we tried to emphasize with our setting. We ended up with a game that feels like you are exploring this house in first person, but in 2D.

If you want to know more i suggest you read the research description and watch our interview video near the bottom of the page here http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/thelastsymphony.php. I would love to answer you more in depth, but I have to get back to writing this paper for finals. lol.

again thanks so much for playing!

Woah! so nice of you to mention me! please, AND thank you. haha

and yeah, clogged as fuck. I just finished halo 4, walking dead to finish, have been replaying fallout 3 with my girlfriend and have xcom, farcry 3 and dishonored to start. so i feel you man.

Thanks yo! I was one of 4 artists on the game. I didn't do any of the character art but i did design about(ish) half(ish) of the environments(ish). but putting it that way is weird because really everybody touched everything to some degree.

Edit: @gaminghooligan Thanks man! yeah, our audio guy was fantastic ( goes to Berklee Music Conservatory). If you have the time and the desire, i suggest you play it multiple times, you can get totally different items that give more history to our characters. I'm so glad you were into it!

Edit: just looked at my topic subject line. miss typed. anybody know how i can change that?

Check it out here!

http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/thelastsymphony.php

Its called The Last Symphony. I was part of a 10 person team of students, half from Singapore and half from the United states. None of us had worked together or made a game before. It was a program within MIT called Gambit. We had two months to build a game that accomplished our reasearch goal which was to make a Hidden object game that doesnt suck (which is incredibly hard, because they are almost universall awful) and uses the objects you find to tell a narrative.

I was an Artist on the game and designed a number of the environments, i also contributed (as many of us did) to the design.

Just FYI, the game has 4 possible endings, The objects you need to find are all randomly chosen, so it is possible to have multiple playthoughs without repeating opjects. This is a game about Narrative and music, so it is very important to read and listen. Paying attention to the music and the writing is very important. I think most people find that it is worth playing multipe times though, and was designed with that in mind, (its not very long) anyway, thats all!

I would love to hear what you guys think! Thanks!

Driving at night to this is like nothing else.

@ThePickle: Frank Ocean Forever

The summer is coming to an end, but that doesn't mean we cant keep listening to the much fabled "SUMMER JAM".Check this out

you guys got any summer jams you'd like to share?