It has already been 5 months since we announced Twinsen’s return… Seems like yesterday! We’ve been busy with starting the studio proper, chasing funds and recruiting new people to join our happy little family!
The main news from the past weeks is that the studio is working on rebooting Twinsen’s story: Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure. Be sure you read Didier’s letter to understand the reasoning behind this choice.
In today’s devlog, I’m going to talk to you about the Classic development plans. If you missed the news about what stands for Classic editions, you can check this blog post.
Our plans for the Classic Games
We want to bring the legacy games to more players, so we are working in parallel on the Classic versions with a former Adeline developer: Sébastien Viannay. We scoped each version carefully to -hopefully- reach a wider audience as well as keeping the game as authentic as possible. Let me explain a bit more about them.
Give me all the versions !
Assembly This is the original engine code that we open-sourced last year. We cleaned the code and reencoded the characters but we won’t work on this version in the future. Retro Edition Except for the in-game language selection, you’ll be able to play the original game as it was developed, but playable on Windows (no DOSBOX). Classic + This was our main focus the past months :
> Complete C port for both games => required to consider other platforms that don't support Assembly code
> Controller support
> UI changes (new options in the menu)
> Platform SDK implementation : achievements, cloud savings Console Currently not planned, but we are considering several target platforms.
This sounds good but you may ask, where will I be able to play those versions, and how much is it going to cost me?
Good question, thanks for asking! 😏
The best news is that if you already purchased the games on Steam, you will get those updates for free:
And if you’re new to the game on Steam, you’ll get the Retro Edition on top of the Classic + version as a free DLC. Easy and simple. Right?
Don't miss the release by adding the DLC to your wishlist!
You can also expect new releases in the following months on different platforms.
Focus on In-game language selection
Depending on the platform you used to play the games it was not obvious at all that you could play the game in different languages.
On Steam, you had to guess that you could use the game properties to switch languages and on GoG there was a small language switcher shipped with the game. Some players thought it was an English-only build …
That’s why we integrated the language selection in the game so you can switch to your preferred language and benefit from the great dubs from the past.
📉 The end of mobile support
One of the downsides of being a very small team is that sometimes we have to make some hard decisions that will lead to disappointment.
This one was not easy to make but we decided to stop supporting the mobile versions of Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure Classic game (iOS / Android) as we want to focus on PC and Consoles and we don't have the capacity to support mobile platforms anymore.
The mobile app won’t disappear from your phone though, unless you remove it yourself or the OS installed stop supporting it (it was already the case with latest Android releases).
📈 And a 10 years old audio bug finally fixed *wink Seb*
When DotEmu released the enhanced version of TLBA1 in 2012, an audio bug was introduced and was never fixed. The voices were lower than in the original version and no one could figure out why.
In the Assembly version, the audio files were boosted by an x4 factor. But when porting the code to C, the developers, not aware of the fact, didn’t take this into consideration.
Now it’s finally fixed! Yay to Seb for finding the needle in the haystack! 😁
Thank you for reading this far and don’t forget to leave us some comments down below!
Gwen