Although this is a revisiting of my old project Dark Age, which was supposed to be a Morrowind+Gothic mix, it also is a premiere.
Why is that you might ask, well: I never released a demo or beta or techdemo. Ever. But since this project is pretty much on ice in it's current form, there's no harm in letting you play what some of you might have been waiting for back in the day.
But first a little history. Dark Age I (or DAI) was my first attempt at an RPG. When I was still making it, I wasn't even as experienced as I am today and therefor a lot of the scripting sucked as soon as I started to move away from the templates. The textures were stolen from Gothic, then Gothic 2 but eventually I found an texture artists who made new textures, that were basically the same as the Gothic textures but on a second look were totally different so I could keep them where they were, without having to re-adjust them.
The very first time I started the Project the world was quite different. You would start out alone, in a home close to a neutral traders camp up in the mountains. The level design then was very crude, simple blocks with no shaping whatsoever. But then my harddisk crashed, unrecoverable, and I started over. I found this wonderful Block level design tutorial by [If someone remembers his name, please tell me]. And so the "new world" started. Which is basically also why there is a curve right at the start of the game. I was just following the tutorial.
Over time this basic "starting" area got improved upon. More detailed surroundings, nicer mountains surrounding the forest, and eventually even the rest of the world between Louis' Farm and the capital city of Ostlon, "Feelin". Now the problem here was, A6 really wasn't laid out for big, open, block terrains, so even today with my modern machine, as soon as I get out of the little valley of the farm and into the big open plains, the framerate drops to a slideshow. But back in the day, I accounted most of it to my bad, bad system. Funny that I basically get the same framerate now.
But enough talk now, you are here to play and mock, so here we go:
This is the very first demo, it was still with the Gothic 1 textures and basically just the tiny starting area and the forest. Pick up things by right clicking. Be sure to pick up the "blue sparkling hand" before you pick up the mana and hp bottles. No inventory system here yet, so there is no managing of things you picked up. If you speak German, you can try yourself on a crude first try of the dialog system with the serious looking guy that is looking over the not-animated farmers. If I remember right, there was also a Goblin in the forest you can fight.
More screens:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Screens1/And the download:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Demo1.zip (24.9 MB, don't ask me how it got that big)
Then I started making a small techdemo to release to the community, but I never really got around to it and so this is what it amounted to. It was after I implemented the Inventory system (so feel free to pickup the mana before the hand) which you can activate with "I" and dont forget to press "M" to activate the mouse cursor. You also have a handful of baddies here which you can fight, and the first implementation of the weather & wind system (watch the fires). If it doesn't start raining while you are playing (or it doesn't stop), restart the game or open the console with the TAB key and type "time_factor=20" that should help to speed things up.
More screens:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Screens2/And the download:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Demo2.zip (33.1 MB, smaller world and the file size got even bigger)
Now here is the final demo I could find which practically resembles the world in it's almost final stage before I froze the project, there are some things missing but we'll get to that later. You can accept the first quest from Luis and explore the dungeon in the forest, but good luck coming back up with the bugged jumping, I suggest you go there as the final thing you do. You can also go to the city and go buy the bread (I haven't really tried if in this version I already implemented the part where you can also bring the bread back to Luis) and some milk if you like. There is a lot to explore in the city (See if you can find all the "hidden" gold pouches), that is, if you can get over the totally screwed up camera/movement system. Also the inventory system got changed after that so you don't start out with all the items present, but got added when you picked them up. But that was a newer version of which I couldn't find the fully pieced together thing.
Oh, and depending on your system, it might take from 10 seconds to well beyond 5 minutes to load the "world". So don't press the reset button, you computer is just loading a lot of info, it's not frozen.
More screens:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Screens3/And the download:
http://7a-media.com/files/DAI_Demo3.zip (92.8 MB, beware, NOT a typo!)
I said earlier I would show you how the world looked in the end (and the GUI, which is horrible in all 3 shown versions). Well here it is:
