ASA-R: A Space Adventure - Remastered Edition
In 2057, an astronaut finds a strange Black Cube in Space, and is teleported
onto a mysterious spaceship called the Ark. You soon discover that he's not the
first astronaut from planet Terra to arrive here: Philip Forte lived through the
very same experience in 2011 and, fortunately, left a diary explaining his story.
With this help, you visit the Ark, with one single goal in mind: getting back home!
The icehouse, online creators collective, is very pleased to announce a new version of ASA: A Space Adventure by Simon Says: Play!. The game, originally released in January 2013, was greenlit in April 2014 and will be published via Steam as a Remastered Edition, created specifically for the occasion by Simon Mesnard and Andrea Rinaldi. We plan to release ASA: Remastered Edition in February 2015.
About:
ASA: Remastered Edition is a first-person slideshow adventure game made in tribute to Myst and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Visit a vast spaceship called The Ark, and discover the truth behind the Cubes... You will face challenging puzzles and have to solve them on your own. Exploration and discovery are the keywords for this exotic journey through space. ASA: Remastered Edition is an improved version of the original game that received good reviews and a warm welcome from point & click fans in January 2013.
Why make a Remastered Edition?
ASA: Remastered Edition is exactly the same as the original ASA game, except that
we've worked on several new features specifically for the Steam release. Despite our many efforts in the past, the original version had several different issues that could not be resolved, so we decided to restart from scratch with a new game engine!
Key features of ASA:
•Challenging puzzles, gameplay reminiscent of games like Myst or Rhem
•Varied environments, aboard the Ark and outdoors
•Up to 10 hours of gameplay
•2 possible endings
•An immersive and cinematographic journey illustrated with several CG movies
•An original soundtrack by Karreo, composed by Stélian Derenne
•A narrative experience : read the diary of Philip Forte to find clues and help the storyline evolve.
New features of Remastered Edition:
•Play in HD 1920x800 (original version was limited to 1024x432)
•Entirely redeveloped with Visionaire Studio by Andrea Rinaldi
•More stability
•We've added some visual aids to help identify the hotspots (can be disabled)
•More inbuilt language translations, no need to patch! (English, French, Italian, Spanish and German)
•Available for Windows, Mac and Linux
Media:
Official WebSite
Pictures (rar archive)
Steam Trailer (can be downloaded)
Comparative trailer (can be downloaded)
ASA on Steam Greenlight
3 Kommentare
Regarding the black bars:
I like the 12:5 aspect, I think it’s good-looking and reminds the look of several movies (many movies have this ratio nowadays). I want my games to be immersive, and if possible give a kind of cinematographic experience. I can understand why some people are shocked by the black bars, but it was the same several years ago when we were having 16:9 movies and games played on 4:3 TVs. You just need to get used to it
Also, and this is the true reason, 3D prerendered pictures are very long to calculate if you cannot afford a powerful computer or a render farm. I’m working at home with my own funds and hardware, so I had to find tricks to reduce the calculation times. By adding black bars, the picture is faster to render. Instead of rendering 1920x1080 pixels, I can just render 1920x800 pixels. You save a few seconds on each picture. It may sound weird but trust me, when you have thousands of pictures to work with, you save a lot of time (not just seconds, but hours and days). This is mainly due to the time needed to render CG movies within the game.
I explained this problem of rendering times on the Adventure Gamers forum if you’re interested.
(very end of page 2, paragraph “Render Times”)
I also explained my choice for using Visionaire on ASA and Catyph and how simple it is to create actions and puzzles:
The remastered edition of ASA is based on the graphic resources of the original game (which was developed with Adventure Maker at the time), so the black bars remain.
Why the 1920x800 resolution instead of 1920x1080 (full hd: 1080p)? I'm assuming it was because you (Simon) wanted it to look more wide-screen with the black bands at top & bottom.
I would have added my vote to greenlight thing but it seems you don't need it!