Beta test for Silk Dust, a new text adventure

[DarwinNE]

Dear all,
many of you may know that I published some text adventures in the past.
As a follow-up to The Queen's Footsteps, I thought it would have been fun to write another game with the same protagonist, called Emilia Vittorini. The new game will be called Silk Dust:

For the moment, I only completed only parts 1 and 2. I am now working on parts 3 and 4. The game can be freely downloaded from my blog, at the present state of development:

http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php ... ge=English

I have already received some feedback, but I am sure the game deserves to be much improved. If you are willing to accept a certain "roughness" and play to it, please don't hesitate. As with Two Days to the Race and The Queen's Footsteps, the VIC-20 version of Silk Dust requires a 32KB expansion and exploits a 40-column display

I will be more than happy to receive comments and feedback about parts 1 and 2 of Silk Dust (in PM, so not to spoil). I will be particularly interested to know where you get stuck or where you find "hunt the verb" situations. Being a non-native English speaker, typos or grammar errors may be frequent (especially in part 2).

[orion70]

Davide, great news and a great Christmas gift for all of us denialers . Thank you! I am currently stuck with the work in my lab, as due to the pandemic emergency we had to split into morning and afternoon shifts (7-13 and 13-19), alternating them every week. Morning shift means doing the father in the afternoon, and afternoon shift being too tired to play the VIC at night .
So I'm sorry I won't be able to help here.

Hope to see the game finished soon. Are you planning to make it a (superb) commercial release like TQF?

[DarwinNE]

Thank you, Orion70!

Are you planning to make it a (superb) commercial release like TQF?

Not for the moment, but I haven't discussed about it with my editor (who is confronted with production delays from their suppliers, by the way).

A very sad news is that Ralph Niese has sadly passed away about ten days ago. He was only 37 and was the incredibly talented artist who drew the amazing covers for many games distributed by Poly.Play among which The Queen's Footsteps.

[orion70]

Very sad, indeed. I just read about his life & works in the German wiki page, and the obituary by a colleague. So young and talented.

[DarwinNE]

Hi to everybody!

Just a few lines to say that in the last weeks I could work extensively on Silk Dust.
The game is now complete, but by no means finished!

I'm currently working with some beta testers to improve it, but if you want to play and to let me know if you see something strange or that can possibly be improved, I would be very happy to have your feedback. Feel free to download it freely from my homepage (link in the first message of this discussion).

[DarwinNE]

Thank to the awesome work of Orion70, the VIC20 version of Silk Dust has a new splash screen:

I got extensive feedback about the game and worked to improve it during the last few weeks. Parts 1 and 2 are now almost finished. They should be perfectly playable now and pretty close to the final version. I will not implement anything new, just correct details or fix bugs.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you see something weird (a typo, or a bug).

[orion70]

That's too kind of you... it's only a quick conversion from the C64 intro screen, and you added a final touch by slightly modifying it. And it wouldn't ever be possible without Mike's miracle Minigrafik suite.

But yes, it's way better than the previous one .

[DarwinNE]

Dear all,
I will have a little bit of time during the next week (in vacations, yet locked down ) so it is the perfect occasion to work on Silk Dust. The game is complete, now, but requires some beta testing and typo-hunting. If you find some "hunt the verb" situations, I can improve them! It's a good moment for providing feedback, so that the game can reach version 1.0 soon

http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php ... ge=English

[orion70]

Didn't have any spare time lately, sorry

[DarwinNE]

Hi to all, the game reached version 1.0

https://darwinne.itch.io/silk-dust

http://davbucci.chez-alice.fr/index.php ... ge=English

[ral-clan]

Your text adventures are a pleasure to play. I'm looking forward to this one!

[DarwinNE]

Thank you very much, ral-clan!

[orion70]

Yep I second that, Davide writes excellent interactive fiction - the player really feels like being immersed in the plot and the atmosphere of that particular era.

Hope this summer will bring more time to play this.

That said, too bad that Silk Road won't have a big box edition - not yet at least.

[DarwinNE]

Thank you, orion70, you are too kind!

For the physical edition, for the moment nothing is foreseen, but who knows?

[DarwinNE]

Some news.

First, the big one: Poly.play has decided to distribute a physical version of Silk Dust: https://www.polyplay.xyz/index.php?jtl_ ... st&search=

Then, the last few weeks I have practicing some different kinds of keyboards. I wrote some music for Silk Dust.

This is the theme of Villa Monastero, where the game starts:

https://soundcloud.com/user-375194295/villa-briccorosso

and this is the Augusto's theme (Emilia's father):

https://soundcloud.com/user-375194295/augustos-theme

Hopefully, you can hear that he deeply loves and respects his daughter but he is somewhat concerned by her adventurous nature.

I may write other music in the next few weeks that I'll post on Soundcloud.