Why not? Shaz literally said:
" we do have another surprise "coming soon" "

In any case, I'll get excited when there is official news, besides Shaz teasings about the upcoming games.

@raxo

They can to make two games at once. They just have never released two games at once. It may be a typo, or it may not be one. It probably is two games.

To my knowledge, Aveyond 4 is not about Stella. We do, in fact, have 2 different games coming.

Who said Amaranth never produced 2 games at once? I think shaz mentioned that Curse At Twilight's production was already underway while Aveyond 3 is in production.

And why's so many people against Stella? I won't mind a Stella game, except that it honestly would make no sense. She's already married to Edward and have her happy ending in Aveyond 3, so there's no reason to drag her out for another adventure. Unless they do something like "Aveyond 3 chapter 3.5" (between TLO and TDP). But Amaranth Games never does that before and I doubt they'd start doing weird things like that anytime soon.

Oh well. We'll hear something when we hear something.

Also, why is the Butterfly Adventure topic merged into the Aveyond 4 topic? It has nothing to do with Aveyond!

Why was it merged? Unless "Butterfly Adventure" IS the subtitle for Aveyond 4 and they forgot the colon when putting up the announcement?

It was merged because there is already a topic talking about the two different games.

And no, as Shaz said, it is two different games.

Ah, I see.

I went ahead and separated the topics again (sorry Mopiece for the confusion). We'll leave this one talking about the next Aveyond game, and the other one can continue discussion of the other game.

Do we see Stella in Aveyond 4 as NPC?

I think that game would be like 20 years after Aveyond 3 (possibly Uma and Nox and darlking (Ymetite))

Oh there's NOTHING to "think" yet about Aveyond 4. Nobody knows when the game is set yet. For all we know, Amanda herself doesn't even know about it yet LOL Who knows what kind of approach Amanda use to brainstorm stories. Some people make the setting first, then make the story. Some make the story first then make up the setting to fit the story as it goes along.

I always start with a daydream then go to planing in my head. Once done I map out a map tester to test out sprites (the ones I made). Trust me the sprites look better than my previous but still childish. That's the possible approch that has been done except on paper. Every game was once a daydream. So let Aveyond start as a daydream for all!

I'm sure Amanda won't mind if I share with you the little bit of the process that I'm familiar with.

First, she starts with a brief overview of how the game will go - who are the main characters, where they start, what conflict arises, half a dozen hurdles or events that must happen along the way, and how the game ends. Whether she begins with a couple of characters in mind and works the story around them, or the other way around, I'm not sure, and I suspect it might change from one game to another.

Once that's done, she writes up a VERY detailed plan of the game. By the time I get a look at it, Amanda has usually listed all of the characters, their personalities, weapons, skills, and their relationships; all of the locations and in what order they'll be visited; most of the main-plot-related NPCs, monsters, and a complete list of quests (related directly to the main quest) with their pre-requisites and rewards. She also creates the detailed world map.

From there, all the cutscenes and the complete game script is created (we're talking 400+ pages), and side quests are added.

Only when all of that is done, do we think about opening up the game engine and starting to create maps and events, scripts, and set up the database. And it's still a slow process, as custom art is created for the tilesets, and not much can be done in the mapping area until we have those.

That's what takes up most of the development time - the planning and documenting everything, to make sure the actual development goes smoothly.

well...that means we'll have to wait a while before we see the new Aveyond. But I think it would be foolish to think that it'll be released earlier than this autumn (maybe even later...)
But I'm still looking forward to it

Quote:
See? There's a chance that even Amanda doesn't even know when the next game is set yet!

I personally start with the basic overview first (e.g: "the story is about a princess who has a vampire servant" or something of the like), then flesh out the characters and story next, with a generic setting [e.g "it's set in a medieval fantasy world mashed with Victorian era!"]. Then the timelines and details on the setting comes later. And then I make notes or rant about my thought process somewhere, but mostly the stuff come off the top of my head. I'm not good with scripting stories. They just hinder me LOL.

Quote:
Holy spam! Does this script look like DD or does it look different? Can't imagine just what those 400+ pages of stuff look like.

Quote:
And this means? Aveyond starts as a daydream for everybody? But.. in the end it's still the developers who decide what happens... And as far as the trends goes, we haven't seen an Aveyond be set that close to the previous one...

Oh Right. Amanda mentioning that Uma and Nox totally should be in the next one in an FB post. Insert wild mass guessing and a whole lot of stuff that fans wanted. Still, Uma and Nox's presence doesn't guarantee anyone else's presence beyond the immortal Galahad and Te'ijal and maybe the darklings (who knows how fast they age and how long do they last). And... people stuck in Demon Realm, coz who knows how many other relevant characters made their way in there? Like, I don't know, maybe some other Darkthrops before Mordred?

What's DD? The only DD I know of is a Design Document, and the 400+ page script is not that - that's all the stuff that comes before.

The script is just that - like a movie script. Where everyone is, what they say, do, etc, word for word. It includes when quest items are given, used, when there are boss battles. It does not include talking to non-plot-related NPCs (at least the initial version doesn't), normal battles, items found lying around or taken from battle, etc. All of that is added in right at the end.

Yikes!Games I make are short. I guess a lot of help is needed to make it happen. And for the daydream part, I meant for the design team. Well I bet AV4 will be the best one yet if given the time. Let us cross our fingers that no issues come our way.

@shaz: Yep, that DD. So it's not, huh? Oh wow. Movie script. Wow. I totally can't bear doing that. It just feels so tedious writing the things out twice.

I'm very happy that Aveyond 4 is comming out, maybe this year or the next year, but I must ask this because I really don't know, what did it means "page script"? Is it the character designing, dialogs and the actions of the characters (the story of the game) or the game's programming? (sorry about my english, I am from east Europe)

all of those things are sorted out during development. The "script" is the dialog and actions. But characters and programming are both done either before or after.

But we're getting a little off topic here now.

Still. Those kind of planning I usually do in my head. I only write down things that takes a lot of work to get right, like how the story universe works and the character relationships. Writing things out is a hard task for me LOL



Moving on.