Tales of Esferia: ARCHIPELAGO
A downloadable game
**This short demo was an entry to the Indie Game Maker Contest 2018 and came in 30th place out of over 300 entries.
Current status: under development (estimated time of release: 2022)
Our first game and the first part of the Tales of Esferia saga, Tales of Esferia: ARAXIS, can be found here!
In this story-driven non-combat puzzle adventure you play as Edward, the sarcastic and slightly kooky sea dog, who finds himself stranded on a mysterious archipelago. Venture deeper into the islands to uncover the secrets they hold...
(More information to come later)
Development log
- Some new screenshots :)Nov 28, 2023
- New, updated screenshotsAug 01, 2021
Comments
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Hi, is this beautiful game still in development? I sure hope so. If not: Is there a way to get the old contest version?
Heya! Unfortunately we decided to take the demo down, since in many ways it didn't represent very well the full version we were working on. Honestly I can't even remember all the changes we've made, but there were quite a lot of polishing done.
We just posted some new screenshots here :)
After the demo we actually moved back working on our main title, Tales of Esferia: Araxis and it's currently available on Steam.
If you want, I can throw you a free code for it via email, if it would somewhat scratch the itch of playing Archipelago :)
Lately we've been super busy with our day jobs and barely had much time to work on Archipelago, but we really want to get it done, but it will most likely take a little while. The goal is to release it on Steam (and most likely on here too) as a free game when we get it done.
Are you doing any new projects? I'm seeing if I could pitch something to you?
I'm also making a sci-fi themed adventure game with similar gameplay to Archipelago :)
Nice! Still, is it fine if I pitch it to your studio?
What a pretty game. Usually I'm not swayed by the pretty but this game is very pretty. The gameplay isn't bad, either. I will say that some of the maps are a bit full and hard to see the paths you need to take, but that's pretty typical of jungles so it's forgiven.
I'm not a big fan of the key set-up, personally, but I do appreciate that there's a handy reminder at the top of the screen. The E button doesn't really do much. It'd be neat if it flashed hidden objects or things you could interact with on the map - that would make it a lot more useful, since you don't really get any use out of it.
Overall, it's a pretty game and decent, too. The writing is well done and I like the character of Edward even if I want to smack him upside the head when he tells me that I can't use something. Smarmy git.
Heya!
The E-button actually inspects the points of interest, for example when you press E at the Overlook spot (where you used the bundle of vines) Edward says that maybe he could get some vines to lower him down there. All the points of interest have additional information when you press the E-button so, I very much recommend using the E-button if you feel like you're getting stuck :)
Thanks for the feedback and it was nice to watch someone play the game! :)
I do know it has a use, just that the use isn't really... useful, I guess. It's more, sure, we can figure that we need vines to get to the cave, but it was only luck that I'd interacted with the vines in the first case (and only because I thought I could climb those ones). I didn't even notice the first vines you come across as anything other than decoration because, well, they looked like decoration. It was lucky chance I clicked on the others. Which is why I recommended they light up interaction-based things in the area - because that way you'd be able to figure out what can and cannot be interacted with. (I would have found the spear a bit easier, noticed the vines, seen the jawbone, etc.) Only my pedantic need to click on stuff saw me through the game.
Just, you know, pointing out that it's easy to get stuck in the game and not know where to go or what to do next since everything looks like decor and is easy to miss. It's an idea is all.
Hey. Sorry it was sudden but, I want to ask a solution about this game.
Everytime I tried to open the game, it just doesn't want to properly opened. I'm really stuck here.😥
And there was some warning that saying: "Script 'Chainsawkitten's Disable F1, Alt+Enter, 'line 17: RuntimeError occured.
LoadLibrary: System/F1AltEnterF12"
I'm already installed the fonts that was inside the game, but it still didn't work. Is this some kind of error or something? Please tell me, what should I do??? 😢
Hi!
The only reason why this would happen (that I can think of) would be that the F1AltEnterF12.dll file is missing from the Archipelago\System folder and I don't know why it would be missing :O But can you check if that file actually is in the folder? And if not, try to reinstall the game :)
Oh, is that so? Thank goodness 😌
I've thought it was because the game wasn't compatible with my laptop 😅
Thanks for let me know, I'll try re-installing it 😁
*edit: Hey, so I'm already look at the folder and try to re-installing the game. Still didn't work, and the program file you mentioned before doesn't lost or anything, it's still there. I guess it means the game really don't compatible with my laptop afterall 😥
Hi, late response. I'm not familiar with this game and I don't know if you're still interested (I'm just name searching myself like some loser). The F1AltEnterF12 DLL requires the Visual C++ 2013 redistributables to be installed. You can get it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784
Oh, so that was the reason. Thanks for sharing this with us :)
This was really good! I absolutely love pretty much every map and the setting itself. The archipelago seriously feels so lush and alive. The story is simple but definetly gets the job done. The humour never made me laugh out loud, but I enjoyed it none the less.
I did have a few minor nitpicks, though. For one, I kind of wish you could run. The slow speed really became annoying after a while, especially since I got lost a few times and ended up having to slowly walk around the entire island multiple times. That's my biggest complaint, actually, I found it really easy to get lost because you weren't always given proper directions or clues on what to do. Other than that, found it kind of weird how I never ended up using the spearhead or finding the other ruby to unlock the two remaining doors in the temple. Also wish there was a little bonus content or something for finding all gold coins. Ended up finding a few bugs, but nothing too major, mostly being able to walk around during some cutscenes in between dialogue. Lastly found it a tad weird how you cut off mid sentence right now instead of just making the dialogue box slightly longer so everything actually fit in it.
I do hope this one wins because I would love to explore more of the archipelago, even for the visuals alone.
Thank you for the feedback and I'm super happy you liked the game!
Originally I actually had the running option in the game but it was way too fast for my taste and like a lot of your other issues, it got pushed further down the list of things to do because I was starting to run out of time. The Jungle map with the temple and the Gadget puzzle took much more time to make than I anticipated, so it was all time away from things like the coin collecting, which I actually added in on the last day since I did make the maps with those coins in mind and really wanted to get them in the game :)
Also the spearhead and the other ruby were planned to come in play later in the game when you get to the other islands and the temple to be a place where you keep returning and venturing deeper into. So, my thinking was that missing the other ruby and having that spearhead would tell the player that there is more planned but it just didn't make it in to the demo.
The dialogue is something that I feel I struggle the most with (from the actual dialogue to the formatting etc.) and it's definitely something I can improve in :)
But anyways, thanks again for the feedback! You have no idea how much it actually helps <3
Oh, thank you for the clarification! That makes sense, I assumed a few items were left over to be used in the future. The dialogue was more than good enough, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. As well as the other things, really, most of them are just very minor issues that do not hinder the game that much.
I'm glad my feedback was helpful!
Ok. So, when you launch the game, it just extracts the files from the .rar and then closes. To actually play it (after you click "launch" to extract the files) you have to go to your appdata roaming folder (search for %appdata% on your computer), go into the "itch" folder, then the "apps" folder, then the "archipelago" folder, but the application there isn't the game itself. Open the folder also named "archipelago" inside that folder and that's where the game is.
Hi!
This happens with any .rar file you download from the web, if you don't save the .rar file to a location of your choosing but instead choose to just open the .rar file when it has finished downloading. Then the default destination path for extraction is C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\Temp\Archipelago.
But if you choose to save the file instead of opening it, then it goes to your downloads folder (default is C:\Users\YourUsername\Downloads) and when you then extract the files, the default path is C:\Users\user\Downloads\Archipelago.
From there on you still need to extract the actual game from the Archipelago.exe file with blue icon. This is an unnecessary step which I could've avoided, but I pretty much just copied the process from an igmc 2017 entry which had success in the competition.
Hopefully this clears things up a bit :) But if someone has problems just hit me up and I'll be more than happy to help out!