A lovely new interview for us all
 

I'm so surprised this hasn't been posted yet!

http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/05/you-...ll-things-odd/

It has some good info in there, such as how puzzles and mechanics will work in AO HD, the "announcement" of some games and also some neat pictures.

Modeller Tom Bramall has posted a couple of higher-res versions of two of those images.

http://thomasbramall.blogspot.com/20...ew-models.html

I'm loving the pictures

Thanks for posting this Jordan :D

I'm liking the tweaks they've been making.

Someone get a message to Gilray for me: In the HD Stranger, put Abe's Moon in some of the skies. There should be more visual links back to the Abe games, and a heavily visible moon that has been in orbit around the entire planet for billions of years is clearly the obvious choice. Its presence in the game needs no further explanation, its absence raises difficult questions.

A scattering of some of Stockyard escape's other moons wouldn't go amiss either.

Questions like "Are we expected to believe that Abe's Moon orbits Oddworld or something?"? Eh, tweeted him a link to your post nonetheless.

I'm liking the textures on the Big Bro's legs.
The perfectly symmetrical vein patterns on the Intern's belly are glaringly half-assed though.

Just saying. It should swing into view every day as the Oddworld rotates. Day or night. Day would be cool. I can't think of a single game that put a moon in during its daytime.

Yay!

Surely that should be "half-bellied".

*rimshot*

Half an hour's* Photoshop will clear that right up.


*Not a guarantee

Less than half if my experience with making skins is any indicator.
Its like paper art, its all symmetrical. Putting in a little asymmetry is imperative to making a character look more natural.

The best thing is he loves enough to reference us in a big blue box with quotation marks:

Also the new stuff looks fucking awesome.

Doesn't it feel great to be a back-seat game developer?

Pretty sure he's referencing the Steam forums there.

I think i was more excited to read 'The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot'

Ok so normally you are 100% spot on, however there are some things you need to be aware of ...

1. That model is for Munch's Oddysee only, as such we have to use the way the original game engine worked and that is the models use MIRRORED UV's as such we have to continue with that practice.

2. We have other versions for our new game engine that are modelled without MIRRORING, so do look like that.

3. We cannot use the new game engine in MO.

:)

Well the PC gaming as a whole, but primarily the Steam Forums :)

Thanks for the tweet :)

Yes it's an ACE idea, however we're going to have to looking how to do it...

1. I don't believe there are ANY moons in the sky at all, not even in the "night" levels.

2. We would have to add it to the night sky... somehow ...

I'll let you know :)

Oh REALLY.

I remember a few in the Free Fire Zone level in Abe's Oddysee.

He's talking about Stranger's night levels.

Ah.

There weren't? I can only remember one night level in SW, when it was pissing down. I guess there wasn't a clear sky, then.

In Western Mudos, perhaps the moons are too small to be seen across the whole planet. I don't think you can see IO across the whole of Jupiter for example.

For all people know, Abe's Moon's orbit might be synchronised with that of the planet and therefore only visible from one area of the planet only, much like Pluto and its moon.

Would be cool to see it in SW though, but apart from when it's raining after the part where he kills yo- Uh, I mean, gets revealed to be a steef and escapes (why does he sleep in the rain anyway when there's a big cave right nearby?), are there any night parts of SW?

Oh and cool interview, it certainly answers a bunch of questions that people were asking in the speculation thread about Abe HD.

Maybe Abe's Moon is in an oddeosynchronous orbit, but I doubt that means it would be completely absent from the sky on the other side of a country the size of Nicaragua on a planet ten times the size of Earth.

Depends how high above the planet's surface it is, I suppose. Actually, since this is a planet where objects can levitate, maybe it's not a satellite at all, maybe it's just a hovering rock.

I found it very interesting what was said reguarding the barrell and the sleeping Slig.

I found it interesting that there are plans for HOO, Sligstorm, the Brutal Ballad and a still yet to be announced game as part of the Quintology. Gilray if you read this then thanks for bringing our favourite franchise back to life!

Yeah, I think the Fangus mention was what piqued my interest the most - all the concepts and stuff that were revealed before the project was shut down (evil sheep, rabies, cats-and-dogs, eastern Europe inspirations) made the game sound really interesting, and it's probably the project I'm most disappointed about being cancelled.

For me it was HOO because I lurve RTS but I agree, if they make Fangus less human like, maybe redesign meeps to make them hardcore instead of Earthly sheep, then it will be perhaps thebest game yet.

Even more games have been announced! Wow! I'm just so excited! I can't wait!

Just picking up on this - I was reading a thing recently which basically pinned the uninspired human-looking pre-production stuff that came from Fangus on EA, which was their way of trying to blackmail Lorne into giving them the Oddworld IP.

I don't remember coming across anything official about that, so is that true, or is it just conjecture?

I believed that to be true, so hopefully we won't have the humanity they gave the game.

Not EA. They weren't the publishers, anyway.

http://oddworldlibrary.net/toe/The_B...uction_history

Hmm, was OWI's production still done in-house at that point, or was Majesco in charge for Fangus?

It's weird. It was still in-house, which we know because there's art and level designs by Inhabitants. But realtime model animation at least was outsourced to Alcazar Entertainment.

I'm a little surprised that OWI's in-house production team would churn out such uninspired designs. Hopefully if Fangus does come back, Lorne will have more input.

EDIT: Whoops! New page.
After the SW fiasco, there was never any deal between OWI and EA for Fangus. They had signed up to Majesco. Also, the human-looking designs were because of the OWI staff, not the publishers. See here.

I must say, The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot deffenaty sounds like the most interesting and in-depth of OWI's cancelled games. Not that we really know much about the other games but I find it hard to to take a charecter called Squeek or Nod seriously.

Yeah, but I'm still looking forward to Nod's Oddysee!

Where actually is the source for Nod?

http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?t=14890
I looked through the links here but they all lead to you denying delusionality.

Nod was the rumoured name of the fourth hero in the Oddworld Quintology for years before it was confirmed as being apocryphal by Lorne Lanning. According to the rumour, Nod would have starred in Oddworld: Nod’s Oddysee as per the nomenclature of the preceding Quintology stories. The rumour did not detail the character or story of Nod in any way, and to date these, along with the genuine name of the fourth character, remain unknown.

The persistence of the rumour is largely due to its being repeated on the Oddworld Forums by Max the Mug for a number of years, from which it spread to other sources: initially fansites, then other Oddworld fan communities, and eventually even the Oddworld article on Wikipedia. Over time, Max was increasingly criticized for not being able to show a source for this information, which he claimed was an interview with an Oddworld Inhabitant that had been lost since 1999.[1] When Max asked members of the Exoddus Club in February 2000 if they’d heard of Nod, member George_T_Gimp said he thought he could also remember Nod being named in an interview.[2]

Lorne explicitly identified Oddworld: Nod’s Oddysee as a rumour in an interview with Russian gaming magazine Игромания published in September 2007,[3] but news of this did not reach members of the Oddworld Forums until member MeechShrykull1029 posted a link to the online copy of the interview in April 2008.[4]

1. Max the Mug (15 November 2007). Post 924 in ‘Oddworld Questions & Answers VI’. Oddworld Discussion. Oddworld Forums.
2. George_T_Gimp (18 February 2000). "Get Me Outta Here!" Windows Wallpaper. Exodduc Club. Yahoo! Groups.
3. Lanning, Lorne (September 2007). ‘Отступники. Интервью с Лорном Леннингом, главой Oddworld Inhabitants’, interview with Игорь Варнавский and Михаил Новиков. Игромания 9: 120. Издательский дом "ТехноМир.
4. Oddworld Forums members (24–26 April 2008). Posts 30–41 in ‘Obsolete OWI Official Ideas: The Habitales (tm) & The Fearietales (tm)’. Oddworld Discussion. Oddworld Forums.