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Hi everyone and welcome to the first developer diary of Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage, which is currently scheduled for a late Q1-2010 release. In this chapter, I will give you general information about the game.

First, let me introduce to you Zoetrope Interactive. We are a small independent game developer from Istanbul consisting of three core people with sometimes some outside help. Galip Kartoglu is doing all the programming and scripting works and me and my brother Oral are doing all the 2D and 3D graphic work, the story, SFX and music. Erkan Erturk is helping us for this project with the modelling of some of the game characters.

The Dark Lineage will be the last game in the Darkness Within series. It takes place right after the first installment “In Pursuit of Loath Nolder” that was published at the end of 2007and tells players the rest of the ominous and dark story of Howard E. Loreid, who was once a police detective.

The main difference between two games is that The Dark Lineage was built upon the enhanced version of our in-house game engine, CPAGE. You will now be able to roam freely in the game worlds, in contrast with the first installment which was a pre-rendered adventure game where you had to use pre-defined nodes to explore the environments. This new feature will add more realism to the game which is based mostly on exploration just like its predecessor. The Dark Lineage will also introduce real-time physics and lighting to improve the gaming experience. Imagine you're alone in a dark and abandoned place that you would never want to be in, carrying only an old lantern to light your way, trying to see what is in the thick, lingering darkness and dancing shadows that are created by the light of your own light source! I will talk some more about all of these features in detail in the next entry of the diary.

In The Dark Lineage, the previously introduced “Thinking Screen” and “Clue/Thought Combining System” will make an improved upon return. This time however, combining clues to progress in the game won’t be a necessity. So you may forget about the list of clues in the “Howard’s Mind interface” and can now finish the game without even reading these! Still, this may be a questionable thing to do, since you’ll miss so many details about the background story. We made this design decision because we wanted players to spend more time with the game world, than in a menu with a list of icons that should be combined to prove to the game that you are aware of what to do next. Of course, clues and “secret” clues will remain present and combinable. We just wanted to keep these clues separate especially for players who wish to delve into the game’s mysterious story and discover every detail to get a high score at the end. And yes, the scoring system will be present and identical to the one in “In Pursuit of Loath Nolder.”

In contrast with its predecessor, The Dark Lineage also will have more characters. We prepared a lot of new and out-of-the-ordinary characters for The Dark Lineage and I must say that one of them is really disturbing! Also, some returning friends will be there but this is topic of a future entry.

That's all for now. I hope you enjoyed this first diary entry. If you have any questions, I encourage you to come and post on our forums at www.zoetrope-interactive.com/forum. Thanks for reading!