Bitten by the sidescroller bug...

[Ninja Crow]

So I calibrated my monitor using these two sites while I waited for the third intro to download.  Wow, no wonder everybody on PJ said my avatar was so desaturated!  Anyway, on your posted image:  Sky gradient, tree layers, and glowing mushrooms all show up just fine now!  I may have to darken it back a bit, because it seems a little too bright at a 'perfectly calibrated' setting, but for now I have:

• gamma = 1.6
• brightness = 1
• contrast = 45

(How does your monitor compare to the sites' calibration charts, compared to mine?  If I can match yours, I'll be safe in the future!)

And when I activated your intro, it played!

\o/

Definitely worth the wait - it was simply amazing.  Dynamic, exciting, efficient, colourful, and a great tease for the rest of the game.  Great ship, great font, and great fireball (I like how it spits off a smaller bit for a real feeling of breaking up, and maybe even foreshadowing pieces to recollect).  I love it.  I watched it in awesome full size, since the default resolution plays buried in the lower right corner of my screen.

I would consider it perfect now, and I can't wait to see the forest level!

(and thank you very much for being so patient with me )

[Howard Day]

Phew. Okay, glad that seems to work for everyone. I'm re-building the sound effects, and I'm going to need to re-build the dynamic music switcher. Which is probably going to be a lot of work, but hell, challenges are what I live for. Well, challenges and awesome artwork.

[Deidara]

I love this!

Although I liked the enemies better before you make orange the main color. The white fits better IMO.

[ElectricGrandpa]

I'm brand new here, and I've just been browsing this board for the past couple hours and stumbled upon this thread... Sorry if I'm breaking any rules or whatever, but I'm just wondering what happened to this project? It looks absolutely awesome, but none of the download links work anymore, and I've search high-and-low with Google any can't find any info on it.

-Matt

[Howard Day]

Oh, hey! Sorry about the lag, and the broken links. I am still working on this, on and off. The reason for the missing links is a rather upset e-mail from my web host - I had close to 15GB of stuff stored on his server. I may have been a bit overzealous in clearing it up.
 So, here's the plan: I've got a couple of other projects I've got to complete, then I'll power back on this. The major change is the re-coding of the dynamic music system, since the current plugin is apparently very unstable and was causing an irregular crash. After that, I've got the spider bot that needs doing...then the level boss.
That should do it for one level. Then I've got to figure out if I've got interest in doing a full, or even short game.

Thanks for your continued interest!

[Ninja Crow]

Howard Day, Thanks for the update, it's hard to be patient when the project is this awesome!

[Kaito]

isnt looks like he is shooting, he looks like he is recieving it....

[The 7th Sin]

Hey Howard,
I just finished watching the demo of Absent Eden on Pixel Prospector.
Let me just start by stating the obvious, your game is beautiful, and I really do hope that one day there is a mac version. (Without it I'm sadly left in the cold)
The only criticism I have to offer is that when I was watching the video, I kept losing the targeting reticule on the screen, especially when it would zip into the midst of a large group of enemies.
My suggestion to remedy this, would be to change the color scheme of the reticule, from whites and oranges, to mainly blues.
I think this would help it stand out from the enemies.

Well, that wraps things up for me, I will be anxiously monitoring this thread for future developments.

Sincerely,
The 7th Sin