Mage's Initiation - Out Now!

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Mage's Initiation - Out Now!

#1 Post by Anonymous Game Creator 2 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:13 am

Update: 28th November 2018

After a decade of hard work, Mage's Initiation finally has a release date!
Set your calendars for January 30th, 2019.

We also have a new preview teaser video to whet your appetite for what's to come.


youtu.be/CKW-32Qki_k

The game now has a page on Steam and you can start wish-listing it. So be sure to do that and help us spread the word!
We're also in talks with GOG.com about releasing on their platform.

Last but not least, we are currently working on native Mac OSX and Linux ports and hope to have them ready for release day. Fingers crossed.

Thanks to everyone for your patience. The long wait is almost over!


Update: 4th June 2013

Win a $450 Prize Pack: Simply Upvote & Comment!

We're running a giveaway to help promote Mage's Initiation on Greenlight!

For the chance to win a huge bundle of collectible items valued at over $450 USD, just follow these simple steps:

1) Visit the Mage's Initiation Greenlight page and click the "Yes" button to upvote the game.

2) Click the "Favorite" and "Follow" buttons (under the screenshots).

3) Leave a comment (This step is necessary so that we can choose winners from the list of usernames assigned to the comments).


And that's it! Three entries will be randomly chosen when Mage's Initiation gets greenlit and this contest will remain open until that time. Comments/votes that existed before the contest was announced will also be eligible to win.

We need all the votes and comments we can get, so please help us out by upvoting and spreading the word to your friends with Steam accounts and getting them to do so as well!

Second Prize: Two runners-up will each be gifted one game of their choice (of any value) to their Steam account.

First Prize: One lucky winner will receive all if the items below:

Image

  • - 4 Game boxes (Fire, Earth, Air, and Water) containing game and soundtrack CDs
    - 1 Standard DVD Case/copy of the “Mages Initiation" game
    - 4 D'arc Polyresin figures - Fire, Earth, Air, and Water (4" x 3" x 3")
    - 3 Digital Copies of the "Mage's Initiation" game
    - 1 Digital Copy of the "Al Emmo & the Lost Dutchman's Mine" game
    - 1 Digital "Al Emmo & the Lost Dutchman's Mine" soundtrack (53 Tracks)
    - 1 "Mage's Initiation" Poster (18" x 24")
    - 1 "Mage's Initiation" 50-page Hardcover Art book
    - 2 Bronze "Severed Circle" Pendants
    - 3 Complete sets of character trading cards (15 foil packs, 120 cards total)
    - 1 Art Lithograph, Signed by JP Selwood (8.5" x 11")
    - 2 Cloth Maps of the Land of Iginor (11" x 17")
    - 2 T-shirts (Mens or Ladies sizes)



Update:February 24th, 2011

A link to the Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements site is here:

http://www.himalayastudios.com/games/mages/

If you'd like a Limited Edition version with pro-packaging, all the cool swag, and a Mages poster, we're currently taking pre-orders via PayPal.

Also, there's an information thread on the Himalaya Studios forums that contains more info on the game.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#2 Post by Angelus3K » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:27 am

Looks amazing!!!!!!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#3 Post by pbpb33 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:35 am

Wow!! This is so cool!!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#4 Post by Fender178 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 12:30 pm

Man Im impressed. This game looks cool.

I have yet to play Al Emmo which I will in due time.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#5 Post by ThreeHeadedMonkey » Thu Feb 24, 2011 1:08 pm

Definitely signing up for this.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#6 Post by ChronoSerge » Thu Feb 24, 2011 2:35 pm

Look's great. Seems like a good time to be an adventure game fan.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#7 Post by pbpb33 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:12 pm

I think it's ingenious how the KQ3 poster blends in all those elements from the game. I love those kinds of montage posters! Your QFG2 poster was very good, but I like this one so much more!

By the way, thanks for putting all that effort into the limited pre-order package. Seriously, this is awesome!! The cloth map reminds me of Ultima 6. I love all that cool collectible stuff.

You guys rock!!!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#8 Post by Angelus3K » Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:25 pm

Cloth map reminds me of Lunar Silver Star Story lol!!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#9 Post by Bobbin Threadbare » Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:49 pm

Looks promising. I hope this time it goes high-res. Kinda tired with regular 320x240 resolution. :lol

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#10 Post by Anonymous Game Creator 2 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 4:04 pm

Is 640x480 hi-res enough for you? >D

Mage's Initiation has detailed pixel art characters, so they are quite time-consuming to animate in even this resolution. I'd hate to think how long they'd take if we were using 800x600 or higher! :eek But either way, 640x480 is more than 4 times the detail level of 320x200, so although the backgrounds are in the same style as our KQ games, they are also more detailed and crisp. We'll get some proper screenshots posted soon.

Yeah, the collectibles will be great! Eriq is like a master of producing and printing high-quality materials like this. The Mage's Initiation poster will also be a treat; it's one of my favourite drawings for any of the games we've done. The reason for the early pre-order is to guage the level of interest for such collectibles. They're not cheap to produce, so hopefully we'll hit a certain number of pre-orderers so that we can make the entire package really shine.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#11 Post by Bobbin Threadbare » Thu Feb 24, 2011 5:53 pm

good enough. :)
even better if in HD resolution, but I'm too pushy here. :lol

the caps will decide if it's good enough, which are already great by those on the web. :D

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#12 Post by Anonymous Game Creator 2 » Thu Feb 24, 2011 7:10 pm

Actually, sorry, my previous statement isn't quite correct. The game was designed at 640x480 but it runs at 1280x960, since the 2x-filter is necessary to run it with all the details at their optimal settings. Just like the new 3.0 version of Al Emmo, this makes the character sprites more well-defined and clearly detailed when scaled-down to small sizes on the screen.

So, technically, it's 640x480, but detail-wise, you get the benefits of 1280x960 when sprites are scaled down.

Now, you can actually run it at plain 640x480 mode, but it doesn't look great, so I would always recommend the D3D driver and 2x-filter combo. ;)

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#13 Post by Sargon » Thu Feb 24, 2011 11:23 pm

Mage's Initiation looks amazing and it is exactly the type of game I think AGD (or Himalaya) should be making. Hopefully this will be the start of a new series along the lines of Quest For Glory. I appreciate all the work you have done on the classic Sierra games and look forward to a brand new adventure!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#14 Post by goatmeal » Fri Feb 25, 2011 12:06 am

Cloth map reminds me of Quest For Glory II EGA !!!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#15 Post by aozgolo » Fri Feb 25, 2011 12:56 am

This looks awesome, I must admit I haven't bought any of your games yet mostly because I love fantasy and sci-fi type of scenarios but it finally seems you've struck a chord with me, and I'm definitely pre-ordering this, that's definitely the type of Limited Edition stuff I will want to own! (and tack all over my walls)

I do have one question though which might be too early to answer, will the game be priced similarly to Al Emmo? I'm presuming at least that the Limited Edition will be slightly higher which is fine I just like to know in advance so I'm sure to have the money when it arrives! :)

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#16 Post by edenwaith » Fri Feb 25, 2011 2:21 am

pbpb33 wrote:I think it's ingenious how the KQ3 poster blends in all those elements from the game. I love those kinds of montage posters! Your QFG2 poster was very good, but I like this one so much more!
That reminded me of the various comics that fans would submit to the Sierra newsletter (back in the 80s and early 90s). One person made a nice collage drawing with a screaming Gwydion in the center, surrounded by bandits, pirates, and an overlooming wizard...

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#17 Post by Bobbin Threadbare » Fri Feb 25, 2011 6:44 am

that's actually great. BTW, do you also provide the widescreen support, since displays nowadays are in widescreen resolution?

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#18 Post by Anonymous Game Creator 2 » Fri Feb 25, 2011 1:39 pm

No wide-screen option, unfortunately. At the time of starting development, the AGS engine didn't support these kinds of resolutions. However, we have very cool parallax scrolling foregrounds in nearly every game screen for this title. This really adds a lot to the magical atmosphere and setting. Take a look at Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga to get a rough idea of the effect I'm referring to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnHY7qUPPro

Instead of looking at static, flat, and unchanging 2D backgrounds in each screen, this gives them the element of illusion and 3D depth. It's something that I don't think has been tried in an Adventure/RPG game before.

As for the cost of the Limited Edition, I'm sorry to say that we don't have any accurate ideas at this stage. We really wanted to get the pricing confirmed before we put up the Mage's Initiation promo page for the game, but doing so, we would have delayed the opportunity to cross-promote/announce the game to coincide with King's Quest III's release. We want all of these items to be high-quality, custom-cut collectibles that don't skimp on the details. Anybody who owns a copy of Eriq's QFG2 poster knows how much effort he went to get them printed in cinema stock at Paragraphics and shipped in tubes to prevent them from being creased. We want to put the same amount of attention and care into the Mage's collectibles and make them high quality, but not so expensive that nobody will be able to afford a Limited Edition copy of the game. Oh yeah, and the packaging design will be very nice, too.

All of these factors mean that we still need to source the best prices for everything. We'll keep pre-orderers up-to-date on all this via mailouts, though. We'll announce the Limted Edition price and show images of the collectibles well before the game starts selling, so that people will have time to save for it. :) You can also request removal from the pre-order list at any time.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#19 Post by Lady Pyro » Fri Feb 25, 2011 4:32 pm

Whoa, it feels like forever since I've been here haha!
Sorry guys, things have been insane! I had to stop in again once I got the newletter though, this is all fantastic news! I'm so excited to play!

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#20 Post by Bobbin Threadbare » Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:51 pm

I remember SotB, never played it but I think I understand.

Well anyway, good luck! Hope for the best. :D

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#21 Post by oberonqa » Sun Feb 27, 2011 4:53 am

Well definitely count me in for the Limited Edition. I have been dying for a new adventure/RPG hybrid for quite some time and this sounds like it's right up my alley.

:)

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#22 Post by JohnWWells » Sun Feb 27, 2011 10:53 pm

Magic User's my favorite QfG class, and this looks like a great idea! A hard idea to do well, given how tough good magic puzzles are to write. But I'm looking forward to it with my fingers crossed.

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#23 Post by Klytos » Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:51 am

Chris,
However, we have very cool parallax scrolling foregrounds in nearly every game screen for this title.
Is this where the different portions of the screen scroll at different speed?

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#24 Post by DrJones » Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:08 am

Klytos wrote:Chris,
However, we have very cool parallax scrolling foregrounds in nearly every game screen for this title.
Is this where the different portions of the screen scroll at different speed?
Yes, it is the one first used in Bambi, which also appeared with much success in the games Mortal Kombat and the wonderful Shadow of the Beast (the amiga port, that is).

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Re: Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

#25 Post by Klytos » Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:18 am

Oh, well sorry then mate, but IA uses it in SQ2 for one scene. :)

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