The Dark Zone is a new RPG/Action game that is
currently in development for the Amiga by a team called Vivid Imagination. The
game is still quite in an early stage of development, however, the team have a
lot of plans for the game and if things go to plan I'm sure it will turn out to
be a great game.
The game is played in the near future. You control two agents that work for a company. A teenage daughters of one of the employees of this company dissappears and since the company cares so muc for its employees they send you out to find her. This will be no easyt task it itself, however there is more to do. One you have found her, you then have to find the people who did it. As you get further into the mystery you will start to find that not everything is what it seems to be, and your not too sure who you can trust, but one this is for sure...Someone isn't telling you all that they know about the kidnapping...
The game will be played using an isometic view, similar to that which was made so popular in Syndicate. All of the in-game graphics will be rendered so you can be sure that things will most certainly look the part. I haven't got any in game graphics yet but the examples dotted around this page give you and idea of the quality of the stuff that they are currently producing.
The game is 1 player, you oontrol the two agents mentioned earlier, one male and
one female. You only have control of one of the agents at any one time, while
doing this the other agent will tag along automatically. Both of the agents
have different skills, some of which may be unique to them. It is up to you to
use the skills of each agent at the right time, for example, a charactor on the
game might give a different answer when the male agent asks to when the female
asks.
The game has many different locations to move around in, the main one is the city location, this is quite hugh and is the place where you will gather the clues and information you need to finish the game. You can pickup objects that you find for use in a later part of the game. However, some objects are useless, and have been placed in the game just to make it harder for the player. What makes it even harder is that some objects might seem useless at the time, but will be very important later on in the game. It's important to think carefully what you decide to keep and what you will throw away.
One nice feature that the game will incorperate is the ability to completly
configure the controls to your choice, you will ba able to assign
movements/actions in the game to virtually any keyboard, mouse or joystick
combination. For example, you may want to use the mouse for moving your agents
around using a point and click method or even to use the joystick to move them
around, all this will be possible. You will even be able to combine the use of
the three interfaces, maybe having the mouse to move around and have the rest of
the commands on the keyboard, something like what you can do in Quake.
The game will use a non-linear storyboard, meaning there will be more then one
way of getting to the end of the game. This means that you can play the
game over and over again and still find new things and secrets which will
lead to another way of finishing the game.
The game will use three diffrent screen modes to play in. The user can
choose from low, medium and high res modes. The low-res mode is played in
320*256, the medium-res in 640*256 and the high-res 640/512 Hires
Interlace/DBLPal. The high-res mode will only really be playable for people
with GFX cards. Currently, the authors plan to make 2 versions of the game, one
for AGA and one for GFX card users. They also plan to make processor optimised
compiles for 68030, 68040, 68060 and PPC.
The game uses a resizable display area, which the player can reduce or increase at anytime. This is very good if you want to run the game in high-res mode, and have a slow computer. The display area is just like in games like Quake where you can choose how big part of the screne should be used to display the game in. The game will also have built in support for other things including AHI. It will be a CD-ROM only game, and needs a minimum specification of 030/50Mhz, 4Mb Fast, 4x CD-ROM and AGA. The recommended specs is 060/50Mhz or PPC, 8Mb Fast, CD-ROM and GFX-Card.
Like I said before, the game is still in the planing stage and the story and game engine is being designed. The project is getting quite big now and Vivid Imagination are looking for more members to join them and help with the project.
They are especially looking for:
If your interested then please contact Andreas Håkansson, founder of
Vivid Imaginration for more details. Please state what you think you can
help with, and if you have any previous work that we can take a look at. For
graphic artists this should be pictures and renders that YOU have made. And for
writers some kind of story or text that you have written yourself.
For the
writers, its important that you like SCI-FI, since the game will use a bit of
that.
The email address of Andreas Håkansson is:- andy@bjuv.mail.telia.com
More news on the game itself as soon as I get it.
