Flashvalley - Flash games - The exchange student

The exchange student

Official website	http://www.theexchangestudent.com/
Release date	3rd week of August for PCs, a couple of weeks later for Macs and Pocket PCs.

Screenshots :

If you are a fan of point-and-click adventure games like the famous Monkey Island, Discworld, Simon the Sorcerer and so on, you will surely enjoy the episodic game "The exchange student". Dimitri Manos, game designer and project director kindly sent me a little demo to play with.

Short history of the development of the game

Dimitri Manos : "We started developing the game for a publisher of mobile phone games a couple of years ago, but at some point the publisher wanted to terminate its development but at the same time they wanted to buy the rights for the game. I decided to keep the rights and look for another publisher. After a while I realized that it would be wiser to release the game for PCs & Macs than for mobile phones. Some of the team members of the mobile version had moved on to other things and we needed more staff so it took some time before we had all the developers we needed. And now we are only a couple of weeks away from the release of the first episode. Rest assured, we are all very excited!

Although the budget for the first episode was quite limited, we managed to have some very prestigious members in our team. Bill Eaken, our background artist, is the most famous one. He has created art for several legendary gaming titles of the past such as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, Leisure Suit Larry 3,Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, The Curse of Monkey Island, Shannara, Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity, Star Wars: Rebel Assault II - The Hidden Empire and The Secret of Monkey Island. Dave Rigley, our animator and character designer, is the creator of the online comic 24 and a half http://www.24andahalf.com/ . The lead voice actor, John Bell has been a voice actor for several adventure games. One of our voice actresses, Irene Tuomainen has been the dialect coach for Jennifer Garner for the TV series Alias. Some of our voice actors are very famous in their own countries! (like Julie Bataille, Lara Parmiani and Johan Lindqvist).

We are very pleased with the opportunities that flash has given us. It will be possible for us to release the game for several platforms with minimal conversion costs. We are also very pleased with the way flash handles animations. Its simplicity can give 2D games a second chance in gaming!"

First impressions

Storyline : The story of The exchange student is about Emilio Carboni, a 22 years old Italian student who has never had a girlfriend in his entire life. His friend Vicenzo just came back from an exchange program in Sweden. Vicenzo was really satisfied with the program since he met a lot of very attractive ladies during his stay in Sweden. Emilio decides to follow his friend's path. He travels to Sweden to spend a semester there, studying in a city of Sweden called Västerås. The game follows the events taking place from the moment that Emilio leaves his house in Italy until he completes his exchange program and returns home.

Graphics : The look and feel of the game is very much similar to "Discworld", I was a great fan of the serie and I always loved this type of graphics, cartoony and arty at the same type with shapes not clearly defined a bit like in a blurry dream.

Interface and gameplay : the interface is simple and effective, you just hit the top of your screen with the mouse cursor and the interface bar will drop from the top. Like in most adventure games you have an inventory for items you will be picking up and that you will need to use in order to progress in the episode.
You can walk anywhere by clicking on the place you want to go to and you can browse your screen for hotspots. Once you find a hotspot you can click it and interact with it using the heart interface. If you click on the eye icon Emilio will give you a description of the item/person you have clicked on. If you click on the hand icon Emilio will try to interact with the item/person you have clicked on and if you select the mouth Emilio will try to talk to this item/person.

The demo is short but it gives a good impression of the final product, the humor is very good and you can't wait for Emilio to arrive in Sweden. Flash is a great platform to develop point and click adventure games and I strongly support any initiative that goes in that direction, I wish good luck to the team and I hope you will enjoy the first episode as much as I enjoyed the demo.

flashvalley.com