Surprise!
We are very pleased to announce the release of the Jacob's Quest 10th Anniversary Edition!
This special edition marks the ten year (wow) anniversary of Jacob's Quest's creation. (its our oldest game) With this release (that's free to all current owners, they will be upgraded to it automatically), we have a BRAND NEW game engine, as the old one was very archaic and was really showing it's age.
We've combined the power of Unity, C# and the latest AI tools to bring Post-Processing, full HD/4K and HDR support to the game.
Of course, the game is still presented in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but you can now choose to unlock the aspect ratio and fully resize the game window to fit your liking if you wish.
Every part of the game from the ground up, being the code which has had bug fixes throughout, performance and FPS improvements, the graphics, sound and more have been fully re-done. It is now future proofed for the modern era of gaming, and supports Steam Deck through Proton.
The game now pops to life in vibrant colours with super smooth framerates and upscaled sprite and fonts.
An example of the post-processing and new upscaling
Some major specific issues that were a gripe for players, was the battle system, in which a redundant window would appear after each turn, forcing the player to select Battle each time they could carry out an action. That's gone. It only took us 10 years! Since we re-did the source code all of this was possible.
More specifically, here are just some of the top new features in this upgrade!
- Now supports the Steam Overlay and ability to use it's full feature set from in-game.
- OpenGL 4+ Render engine powered by Unity. This was a major work for us and much of the game had to be re-done from scratch. The game engine is now a modern C# implementation with some brilliant support from partners we are working with in the open source community.
- Post Processing effects- The game really now comes to life with realistic bloom, lighting and HDR. The game has never looked better and colours really pop on the screen!
- Fully resizable window and option to turn off aspect ratio lock.
- A brand new front-end with gorgeous animations and easy settings.
- Much more easier and refined control options (F1) with full game controller support. Many players had difficulties getting their controllers to work before as the original engine only support the ancient DirectInput. Now the entire game supports any controller you plug in.
- A brand new in-game UI with crystal clear fonts, and anti-aliased edges.
- Upscaled sprites, backgrounds and maps.
- The final boss (Dark King) has an entire new look and is no longer nerfed as you say. We know you'll absolutely love this fight.
The new game front-end
There is so many changes in this release that its pretty hard to list them all without boring everyone, but the technical work behind this is mind boggling, so we will leave it to you guys to play the game and find some neat surprises!
Caveats
- As with any major rework of a older game, some features have been dropped and are currently not supported as we work to restore them.
- Currently, Steam Achievements are not supported in this initial release. In-game trophies are still present, but they will not link to Steam currently. We are working on this for a future update.
- The game internally is still in a 4:3 Ratio (even though it is now rendered in 720p as opposed to the tiny 320p that it was before). The resizable window / aspect ratio unlock really helps to mitigate this, but we are working to further modernize the game by removing the hard locks in the ancient code so that everything looks right on a 16:9/10 aspect ratio. Bear with us, we are working on it.
- Previous save files are now unsupported. We've been supporting them for years since the very first release but it's now impossible to use them since the game has been reworked. But we are sure you'll enjoy the new version so much more that it will be worth starting again.