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Just going through some of the material from the index, you can see that the first article is a small piece about Delver's status. In January of 97, Gandreas says the engine is basically done. This one's not too interesting except for reinforcing that it was too bad the game didn't get released until September of 99. Gandreas mentions in a couple places that the Diablo engine is a lot more advanced, but Delver-based RPGs would have been more popular since it was among the best in its early days. I think this may be true since Diablo wasn't released for the Mac until mid-98, although it was available for Windows in early 97. Cythera probably could have met with a little more success from the Mac community if it had been released a year or two before Diablo, which no doubt made competing in the RPG market pretty tough for a while. This isn't to say that all of Cythera's problems belong at Diablo's doorstep; they are different in that one is more of a slasher game while the other is more plot-driven among other things. But still, one can see how when Gandreas was developing Delver, before the much larger and wealthier Blizzard released Diablo, he felt the engine had a lot of promise because of its technologies.
This article also mentions an old game called Manse, which I hadn't heard of before. It apparently never made it to release, but they have several articles about it in the Times. You should check it out in the index. Looks like it was going to be some sort of first-person horror game where you're wandering around an abandoned mansion or something. I didn't read the description too closely, but the pictures looked fun and different from a lot of the other stuff Ambrosia has released.
The second article in the index is much more discussion-worthy. It's a full article discussing a bit about what Delver can do and how Cythera works. Those screenshots are really different! For starters, it looks like the main character originally did wear a t-shirt and blue jeans. To me this would have made a lot more sense for a person supposedly living in the modern world being pulled to this foreign land. I think playing with a character looking like that would have really served as a constant reminder that you are a stranger in this world, and that Earth is your home. As it is, I often forget that my character isn't a Cytheran native since apparently he runs around in skirts all day.
Tables, potions, trees, bushes, beds, fountains, everything looks just a little different, although a lot of the layout is the exact same. Clearly, they wanted to redo most of the graphics, but I'm not sure they've changed the feel of the game all that much. The dialogue window was radically different. Apparently, character responses used to appear in little speech bubbles, and there wasn't a formal background to the dialogue. I think the redesign is good in this case since it puts the dialogue front-and-center. Also, I find it funny that the typo "The Kind is Alaric and Alaric is The King" has been in the game from the very beginning, and that it was apparently the first screenshot of the game's dialogue ever shared!
This was in March of 97, which is part of the reason I'm shocked Cythera took until late 99 to get released. it looks basically done! I do not think it benefitted that much from the extra development time very much at all.
The next item is a short interview with Gandreas that we've probably all seen at some time or another. It reveals his deep love of puzzles (no surprise there), that the first line of code for Delver was written on Labor Day of 1995, and that he already had the Cythera sequel planned at this point in 97 but he wanted a fully-3D engine for the game. It also shows how reluctant Gandreas is to share pictures online since he chose to use Magpie's portrait instead of an image of himself. He's a secretive man, that's for sure!
The "What's New" part of the Nov 97 issue is tiny, but they do have a full piece on Cythera's interface. By this time, it's starting to look a lot like the game we all know and love. Indeed, the hero has already gotten rid of his jeans. Drawers and scrolls and some other small things look different, but the game looks virtually ready to go.
I encourage you to take a look at the March and May content for Cythera in the 1998 issues, but they're nothing we haven't seen before. The screenshots from July of 98 are not too special, but I did enjoy seeing how different Ferazel's Wand looked back then! Now that game really did benefit from entirely redesigned graphics; the final version still looks pretty good today in my opinion. Not to derail the conversation and get too much into Ferazel, but you can look at some of the development screenshots and interviews about it in the Times as well. One of the most notable differences you can see in the screenshots from above is that weapons and standard items used to be separated from magical spells. If more of the spells had been completed and implemented in the game, I think that would have made sense to keep... Anyways, Ferazel's history is interesting as well. As is Harry the Handsome's. Manse is on that page as well. You should just browse around through the Times a bit yourself to get a better appreciation of the history of some of these games. It really is pretty fascinating to look at.
For your convenience, the Cythera pages I found not listed in the index are Sep 98, Nov 98, Jan 99, Mar 99, May 99, Jul 99, and Sep 99. Those are all direct links to the relevant pages. I know it looks like a lot, but they're all screenshot pages except the release announcement in the September issue. Really nothing much at all can be learned from these screenshots except that the water used to be a bit more of a purple-like color. The "Zippy the Wonder Boy" one is pretty funny from the May issue of 99.
This topic is kind of a mishmash of all the material in the Ambrosia Times pertaining to Cythera, but I didn't find the later stuff that interesting. The most fascinating pages to me were the very early ones that showed Cythera back in 1997. The other major takeaway for me was about the release time. They initially planned to release Cythera in fall of 1997, and I think it's a pity they weren't able to. It's just weird looking at all those screenshots for two years of a game that barely changed visibly. I'm shocked that there was so much development left when it looked basically ready for release at the end of 1997. It makes one wonder if it would have had a larger following if it had been released earlier. Or would its following have waned more quickly? Would we all be here on this forum if it had been two years older? Hard to say.
There's a lot of other fun stuff to look at in the Times. Many of the games have revealing early development shots, and they tried to do interviews with a lot of the developers. You ought to take a look! Hopefully, Ambrosia won't decide to take the old Times page down any time soon.
P.S. As an example of one of the things you can learn browsing through these pages and a reminder of how small a world it is, I see from Matt Burch's interview that he too received a Computer Engineering degree from KU but about 20 years before me! I wonder if any of my teachers remember him... undoubtedly some of them are the same.
This post has been edited by The Wizard: 08 July 2015 - 02:13 AM
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