Box Art

I know I'm biased, but I think this is bloody ace:

'Nuff said!

New Scenery

Whilst Clover: A Curious Tale is in QA over at Blitz Games Studios, I've been filling in the thrilling paperwork - things like descriptions of the game for online portals, icons, banners, manuals, readmes, and screenshots.

Part of this process has involved making bulleted lists of features. Naturally these include things like pointing out the new animations, 50% more puzzles, and basically all the sexy stuff.

There's been a lot more work than just that going on in the last few months though, not all of it worthy of a whole bullet point to itself.

An example of this is some of the new background scenery that's littered throughout the game. XBLIG has a limit of 150Mb, and we were on the cusp of that with the original. Now we're on PC, we've had a chance to draw more loveliness to make even the backgrounds more interesting.



Unfortunately I haven't got a matching screenshot of the same area in the original, but suffice to say there wasn't a sexy assortment of parallax-layered town houses in the background. Nor did it have glowing streetlamps. Nor a bin, for that matter.

New Art Gallery

I can't show you the new box* art.
I can't show you the new trailer.
I can't show you the new manual.
I can't play you the new soundtrack (yet).
I could show you the blissfully small buglist from the QA process, but that would just be tediously dull.

I can show you the new Art Gallery. Now normally at this point I'd do some comical comparison with the old version, but as it turns out the old version was so utterly pants that I didn't even bother to take any screenshots of it in the first place.

So, what's this new noticeboard next to the church?


That'd be the new village noticeboard. As you progress through the game and solve puzzles, you'll unlock bits of concept artwork, reference photos, and sketches of contributors. Along side each is a little bit of explanatory text.

If you press the use button on the noticeboard, you get the Sams-Eye-View of the gallery. From here you can see each asset in fullscreen if you want.


Now the noticeboard's an in-game feature, you don't need to exit to the main menu to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Hurrah! Plus, because the game is at least 50% bigger than before, there's even more loveliness to be witnessed.

*Box art? For a digital game? Well, it might not always be that way...

A Curious Tale - New Logo

Created by the spiffy Phil Joyce, here's the new logo that I've cropped rather unflatteringly:


To prove that he doesn't just knock stuff out, here's some wanky design blurb he wrote directly after knocking it out:

"I did quite like the font you'd originally used for the logo, but it's not particularly clear - I think for something that might be shown on a box in a shop or the box art shown on an online shop you need something super-legible. Also it's a bit tudor rather than mock-tudor which I believe you were after. I thought we could retain some of that feeling but doesn't necessarily have to be in the letters...

"So I went for a font based on Goudy's Kennerly which was developed at when the mock-Tudor era was starting. I still liked the large initial fonts used in the mood board , so tried to use that to get across the lo-fi, distressed wood Tudor-ness but with something still highly legible.

"You said you wanted to convey a suggestion of death in the logo; I created a custom pattern around the 'C' which is made up of shapes of the nightshade plant - plenty of symbolism there, but not immediately obvious."

Clover Music Demos - Part 3

Clover: A Curious Tale is both out for compatibility testing with the wonderful peeps who signed up to Blitz 1UP's testing scheme, and also now in internal QA at Blitz. When you hear feint echoes of screaming, that'll be me drowning in bug reports.

Anyway, on to the music.

Annoyingly enough, my favourite part of the Clover soundtrack started life as an exceptionally hasty rock demo. Something worth bearing in mind about Christopher Chillingworth is that he writes a lot of music around a very busy management job. A lot of the stuff he does gets recorded down very quickly, and then - BANG! - he's off on to the next song. We have a shared folder with most of his tracks in, and there's bloody tons of the stuff he lets me listen to, let alone his scratchpad ideas.

This track is called Rocky (because it's in the rock genre), and falls into the category of "I have an idea, let's bosh it out before I forget." I absolutely love the hook in the 'chorus'. In fact in the Cubase project of the final track, it's actually called "sex bit."



Here's the XBLIG version of the track, so you can see how we went from rough ideas with a rock instrumentation, to bare-bones piano sounds of the game.



Naturally, there's a newer, even sexier version as part of the A Curious Tale soundtrack!

A Curious Tale Enters Testing

If you were sensible enough to sign up for Blitz 1UP's crowdsourced testing scheme, you could be playing Clover: A Curious Tale right now!

Clover Music Demos - Part 2

For Clover: A Curious Tale the entire soundtrack has been expanded upon and re-recorded. No doubt we'll be sharing that with y'all at some point in the future, but today we've got another one of the early demos Christopher Chillingworth created for the original XBLIG version of Clover.



This one's called Midway, quite simply as he thought it'd be good for about halfway through the game. This went on to become Sanha Theme.

Notice there's all sorts of stringy and bass stuff going on here that we decided against for the final version. We wanted to keep the instrumentation as simple as possible to try and evoke some of the simple melody found in the 8-bit era. Maybe I look back through rose-tinted glasses (headphones?), but Speccy music had to have great melodies as instrumentation and production values couldn't compensate.

Clover Music Demos - Part 1

One of the parts of Clover that lots of people have enjoyed and sent fan mail about is the music. Whilst we're working on other loveliness relating to the spiffy new soundtrack, I thought I'd share some of the very early demos that Christopher Chillingworth worked on.



This one is called Alone, and features some rough-guide vocals towards the end. This was one of the first bits of music we integrated into the game, and brings back memories of being in a freezing flat in Elephant & Castle, coding under blankets and hot water bottles in order to save money on heating.

Part of the track ended up becoming one of the indoor themes, but the majority of it was too slow, sparse and depressing for the main soundtrack.

Testers Needed!

You can tell we're getting close to release now, as we need testers for the wonderful new Windows version of Clover: A Curious Tale.


If you'd like to see all the new improvements in A Curious Tale, sign up for Blitz 1UP's testing scheme. You'll be contacted and sent a demo build of the game to try out, and you'll get a free copy of the final retail build too when its ready.

In other news, all that's left to do is finishing the boxart, logo, polishing a few sound files, deciding what to do with a certain cat, and some art gallery sketches. Nearly there!

Not Dead

..Nor snowed in.

As ever there's lots going on, but I haven't had time to knock up any screenshots or videos of pretty things with which to wow you. It had been my plan to upload some videos of the new animations, but alas between PCs bricking on me and chasing payments I've not had the time.

• The last retakes for the dialogue have just been done
• Framerate is now much improved on crapper machines
  
• Our guest actor has finally received the necessary equipment to do his parts
• A new logo is being done by PFJ Design
  
• The installer now works (this was pretty painful)
• Fullscreen bugs have been squashed
• 95% of the new sound effects are now in courtesy of Owen Price
• The unlockable Art Gallery is now many times more spiffing
• Trailers are being worked on
• Menus now make noises
• There's now more wildlife in the game that'll follow you around