This page is for everyone interested in "technical stuff" regarding our game.

     Tools     

We're developing SOTE using the popular and powerful Adventure Game Studio engine by Chris Jones, but we're doing our best to expand its default behaviour with heavy scripting to make something original and innovative.
At the moment, the AGS global script of SOTE by Dusk is about 3,400 lines of code, and it's just the beginning. :)

Boba Fonts uses Paint Shop Pro 7, Animation Shop 3, Adobe Photoshop CS for graphics and animation, Adobe Flash CS3 for additional animation work, Sony SoundForge 9.0 for sound editing, and Microsoft Word 2007 (.rtf format only) for the 'screenplay'.

     Graphics     

SOTE features 640*480 pixels 16 bit color graphics — in our opinion the best resolution and color depth for a "not-so-retro'" adventure game running smoothly without high-end hardware requirements.

     Gameplay     

No frustration in SOTE. In the LucasArts great classics tradition, there won't be "dead ends" in the game; and you'll always have a way to get out of a situation. No dying, of course.

     Backgrounds     

At the moment Boba Fonts has edited about 50 backgrounds. He's using his own particular technique of graphical-editing, a mixture of photo-editing, digital coloration, photocomposition of pre-esistent images with stuff painted pixel by pixel, and custom filtering. The task is to get an uniform style, not too painted and not too photorealistic.

     Sprites     

At the moment character sprites are our principal weak point. By the way something is moving, and we've decided to recreate them at a higher size.

     Graphical user interface (GUI)     

The SOTE user interface is born after hours spent analysing most of the adventure games GUIs of the last 10-15 years, from the glorious SCUMM system to "Broken Sword"/"Syberia" modern interfaces, passing through "the Dig" and "Beneath a Steel Sky". After many discussion about advantages/disadvantages of each interface, and hundreds of lines of code, we are proud of our interface, featuring intelligent cursor, non-blocking interactions, mouse and keyboard shortcuts...

     Characters     

SOTE features 4 swappable playable characters (Luke, Leia, Dash Rendar and Lando), some NPC followers (R2-D2, C-3PO, Chewbacca) and a very big number of in-game characters to interact with. Each one of the playable characters will have its interactions, its puzzles, characteristics, special abilities. Some puzzles will be solved in team mode.

     Dialogues     

We're trying to make complex, narrative and quite varied dialogues. And hey: funny! SOTE handles dialogues thanks to the D.E.M.I.U.R.G.I.C. system, written by Dusk to expand the AGS dialogue capabilities.

     Code disclosure     

There's a good possibility that — only after the release of the complete game — the full source code of SOTE will be available. The AGS community is very friendly and it will be a pleasure to make available to the others this useful (I hope) code. If for some reason the full code won't be released, there will be a "SOTE game template" and maybe some tutorials.