Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The Random Adventure Game News Thread

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,099
Easily in my Top 10 adventures and would probably be ranked closer to the top higher if not for somewhat clunky keyword and later on smell systems it relies on for puzzle solving. Kinda surprised to hear the team wasn't at all inspired by something like Garrett P.I. considering it's Discworld Noir in literary format.

Stefan Lubienski: Whilst we’re aware of Sir Terry’s involvement at the start and end of Noir, do you know if he ever played the finished Discworld games and, if so, what were his impressions?

Chris Bateman: Terry played all the Discworld games. He played the first two with his daughter Rhianna (now a successful writer in her own right), but he played Noir on his own.

As if there was ever any doubt. :salute:
 

index.php

Arcane
Joined
Jul 5, 2013
Messages
872
ScummVM 2.0 is out!

Just in time for the holidays, the final release of ScummVM 2.0 is here! This version adds support for 23 brand new old games, including almost all of the 32-bit Sierra adventures:

  • Cranston Manor
  • Full Pipe
  • Gabriel Knight
  • Gabriel Knight 2
  • King's Quest VII
  • King's Questions
  • Leisure Suit Larry 6 (hi-res)
  • Leisure Suit Larry 7
  • Lighthouse
  • Mixed-Up Mother Goose Deluxe
  • Phantasmagoria
  • Phantasmagoria 2
  • Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
  • Police Quest 4
  • RAMA
  • Riven: The Sequel to Myst
  • Shivers
  • Space Quest 6
  • Starship Titanic
  • The Dark Crystal
  • Time Zone
  • Torin's Passage
  • Ulysses and the Golden Fleece
There’s more than just new engines, too! Many existing games have been improved, a lot of work has been done to improve the overall audio and video systems, and some players will also enjoy improved joystick support and various small enhancements suggested by other users. A more complete list of changes in this release can be found in the ScummVM 2.0 release notes.
 

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
http://www.pcgamer.com/broken-sword-dev-working-on-prototype-that-marks-the-future-of-the-adventure/

Broken Sword dev working on prototype that marks 'the future of the adventure'
By Joe Donnelly an hour ago

Charles Cecil delivers Revolution Software's Christmas message.

XPKGvbho4T2zbEBUQ8Ac3f-650-80.jpg

There was a time following Broken Sword 5's Kickstarter campaign where it seemed like Revolution Software was working on a sequel to its point-and-click classic Beneath a Steel Sky. It never came to be, however the York-based adventure game veterans are now working on something behind the scenes.

As mentioned in its Christmas message, Revolution head honcho Charles Cecil speaks of moving the studio to an area in the "historic heart of York" and working on new versions of Broken Sword 5 beyond its original PC variation. Cecil also speaks about a prototype they've been working on away from the spotlight.



"Most of our work has been focused on a prototype, which is, for us, exploring the future of the adventure [and] how we can create wonderful stories with great characters that can move around a compelling world," says Cecil below. "It's very much looking forward to the future of the adventure, but also taking inspiration from some of the things that we did previously."

Cecil follows the above by underscoring his appreciation for virtual theatre, wherein characters live and interact independent of one another. He says he "always felt frustrated" that he and his team "never really" developed the foundations laid by Revolution's first game Lure of the Temptress in this regard.

Cecil adds: "So we're in this fantastic position of being able to explore what we believe all of these ideas could translate into to make a great adventure game."
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
I've never heard of the game in this tweet.




Unforeseen Incidents is a classical style interactive mystery set in a beautifully hand-painted world. When small-town handyman Harper Pendrell meets a dying woman in the street, he unwittingly stumbles into a diabolical conspiracy – a mystery only he can solve. An unknown disease is spreading across the country, and between them a scientist, a reporter and a reclusive artist hold the key to stopping it. A perilous journey awaits, and every step brings Harper closer to a cabal of dangerous fanatics. Before he knows it, he finds himself in a fight for the future of humankind armed only with his trusty multi-tool.

Can Harper find the courage to expose the truth and prevent an epidemic, even if it means succumbing to contagion himself? Join Harper and experience a challenging investigation, smart dialog and a rich cast of characters in this thrilling new adventure game from Backwoods Entertainment and Application Systems Heidelberg.

Features
  • Uncover and solve the dark mysteries behind the ongoing catastrophe and try and save the human race!
  • Explore plenty of intriguing locations with challenging puzzles
  • Listen to an elaborately arranged soundtrack and full English or German voice acting
  • Enjoy a classical style mystery adventure game
  • Behold beautiful, lovingly hand-painted 2D graphics with over 60 backgrounds
  • Meet lots of interesting characters
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,107
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.pcgamer.com/how-scummvm-is-keeping-adventure-games-alive-one-old-game-at-a-time/

How ScummVM is keeping adventure games alive, one old game at a time
Meet the team reverse-engineering old game engines in one of the most amazing preservation projects on PC.

Retrogaming, or for us older folks, ‘replaying modern classics’, has never been bigger. Part of the joy of being a PC gamer is that no matter how many years tick past and new games fight for attention, we can always go back in our virtual time machine and re-explore the games that made gaming, like Doom, and the ones that have arguably yet to be beaten, like Monkey Island.

There are many revival projects out there, from DOSBox to single-game engines like Exult for Ultima VII. One of the biggest and oldest is ScummVM, launched in 2001 and named for the classic SCUMM engine—Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion—which gave us all of Lucasarts’ classic adventure games.

Since then the project has widely opened its remit to support FMV games like Gabriel Knight 2, obscure games like Full Pipe, and for reasons that must have made sense at the time, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties (one of the worst PC games of all time). If you want to run Day of the Tentacle on a Raspberry Pi, chances are it’ll be ScummVM doing the heavy lifting.

ScummVM hit a big milestone on December 17 with a 2.0 release that added even more supported games, along with some of the most lovingly anal release notes around. You know you’re dealing with serious perfectionists when tweaks include stuff as specific as "Fixed nightclub arcade sequence speed for Manhunter Apple IIgs version" and "Fixed subtitle speed setting in the Hebrew version of Simon the Sorcerer 1."

Just never call it an emulator.

"ScummVM is not an emulator," confirms Eugene Sandulenko, current Project Lead. "It has been confused a number of times with one, and actually it does contain several, though mostly for sound cards. When it comes to the games though, we don't emulate the originals—we rewrite them. The pioneers, such as Ron Gilbert of Maniac Mansion, figured out that instead of writing their game logic in assembly or Pascal or whatever, they would create a separate language tailored to the game, and which would be easy enough even for the artists to make use of. SCUMM for instance has op-codes for moving an actor from Room A to Room B or around the screen, while the implementation also covers playing walking animations and so on—it's pretty high level. This then ran in a virtual machine so that it would play on multiple platforms without everything having to be reimplemented. ScummVM does that again, this time in C. Currently we have 64 supported engines and growing."

Many as one
This hand-crafted approach has given ScummVM a well-deserved reputation for quality. It does however mean development can look quite slow on the outside, especially since these days you can drop more or less anything into DOSBox and have it at least run acceptably.

"Well, the key words are ‘these days’!" Sandulenko points out. "ScummVM started in 2001 and some of the platforms we were running on were only 25... 30Mhz. This is the major difference between emulators, like DOSBox and reimplementation, like ScummVM. Something like Monkey Island was written in the CPC era, on slow machines, and our requirements for it are about the same. Something like DOSBox, you'd need about a gigahertz to run it. Secondly of course, not all games were written for DOS or Windows. We have games based on SCUMM engines for Atari and Macintosh and Apple 2c and Amiga... even NES. You want to run the Macintosh version of Indiana Jones, which was in black and white? We can do that in ScummVM. Not in DOSBox."

This, unsurprisingly, is a lot of work.

"We take the original binary, and if you know the process of compilation, you'll know that turns high level programming code into assembly and then binary code. Along the way you lose all the function names, all the variable names... all you're left with is taking an address from memory location X and use it as a pointer to another byte, and so on. You have no clue what's happening. We call the process of figuring it out 'mapping.'"

That mapping can take months, and then the ScummVM team has to convert the code into C or another language. There's a lot of trial-and-error, and it's not a one time process. Those different game versions each require more work. Sometimes all this takes years, not months.

Sandulenko demonstrates with a look at his last implementation, an obscure adventure called Full Pipe. "I started on it in I believe 2013. It took ten months to implement it and start bug fixing, but it was only in 2016 I was able to pick it up again and finish it this year. So, that's a year and a half on one game."

It’s hard to imagine taking on this amount of work in the name of a completely forgotten Russian adventure game notable for little but being an early-ish Steam release. However, there is method to the madness—even the madness of devoting time to resurrecting Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties.

"Ha. Well, in short, because we had a crazy developer willing to invest the time, maybe because of the... childhood memories? Maybe not. But it's funny. Full Pipe, that’s about 31,000 lines of code. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties… 485. There’s versions of Hello World longer than that! So it was pretty easy. We originally announced it as an April Fool’s joke, but… why not? Go play it!"

Back to the source
The two most common ways a game or engine gets into ScummVM are:
  • One of the developers being particularly passionate about it
  • The group being given the source code
"If we have source code and right, we'll try and implement it, even if it's something like this freeware 'Drascula' game. It's awful, but we got source and support... and I can say it's awful because they told us they were 14 or 15 or so and learning programming while doing it!" Sandulenko says.

Often the ScummVM team avoids using much original code. It primarily serves as a reference. But there are exceptions, like Mission Supernova. "Because it's written in assembly, it's a pretty tough one. If the source is in C or whatever and the author is okay with us just stripping out their comments and stuff, that's much easier."

The project hasn’t always had the easiest relationship with developers and publishers, though that has slowly changed over time. It got a big boost when Revolution Software re-released Beneath A Steel Sky as freeware, with Dreamweb, Lure of the Temptress, and Flight of the Amazon Queen joining a couple of smaller games as free to download demos. ScummVM has also been instrumental in getting games back on sale, either with or without the help (or appropriate credit) of the team.

In particular, Sandulenko recalls working on the game Tony Tough, whose IP owners wanted to return to shelves. "They told us they'd give us the source for reimplementation because they wanted to put it back in stores. Of course, we're volunteers, so we couldn't make any promises, but they patiently waited and then we helped them bundle it with ScummVM for distribution."

One of the stranger success stories involves the animal-themed fantasy Inherit The Earth. Due to a glitch in development, one of the intro sequence dialogue files was lost, leaving players suddenly wincing at a low-quality sample desperately ripped from the floppy version. "Luckily I have seventeen copies of Inherit the Earth!" laughs Sandulenko. And one of them, the Australian version, had the sound-clip. We were able to supply it, and now the intro is restored."

Down in the trenches
Even with a familiar game, getting a good port can be harder than expected. Sierra for instance primarily used two graphic adventure engines, AGI (King’s Quest I, Police Quest 1, Manhunter: New York etc) and SCI (King’s Quest 5, Quest For Glory 4, and so on). But that doesn’t mean the ScummVM team only had to implement each once and call the job finished. Far from it.

"Sierra’s code is a horrible mess. Our implementation is much better than the original engines. Every game they made, they were doing a fork of their source code, so even games released in the same year aren't typically compatible. That means every change we do, we have to do game checks, make sure later versions of the engine aren't broken, etc."

Luckily, ScummVM’s namesake is somewhat easier. "Oh, that's much more advanced and the games much better tested. There are seven major versions of the engine, and games running on the same one just work. Then of course later Ron Gilbert left Lucasarts to make edutainment games at Humungous Entertainment, and those games are also SCUMM. The crown of the engine though is this game Moonbase Commander—in my opinion, one of the most underrated strategy games—and that's built in SCUMM as well, using the same scripting as those classic adventures. GOG helped connect us with the rights owners to get the source for that one."

It’s not always as easy as wanting to support a game or engine. For starters, ScummVM sticks specifically to 2D games. The complexity of moving to 3D is exponential, as seen by the fact that after years of work, 3D spin-off project ResidualVM runs just Grim Fandango, Myst III Exile and Escape From Monkey Island. "if you look at the number of lines of source code, we're talking hundreds of thousands. Usually the games are all different too. We're lucky with ScummVM that we have engines like SCI that were used and re-used, so we don't have to start afresh with every new game."

The most notable omission though has to be AGS—Adventure Game Studio. This is the software behind 99 percent of freeware and indie adventures this side of the millennium, ranging from the Chzo Mythos and Larry Vales to the Blackwell series and next year’s Unavowed. Early versions are a pain, to put it mildly, as anyone who’s ever tried getting something like Quest For Glory IV 1/2: So You Thought You Were A Hero to run can attest. (Top tip: don’t!) The audience and features seem perfect for ScummVM. Yet still, no support.

"AGS is... unfortunate for us," admits Sandulenko. "Once the original author published the source code, we were pretty excited and we started working on it. We really had high hopes. But then when we mentioned it in the AGS forums, where the game authors are, there was a huge uproar. They didn't want it. They disliked the idea. They jumped on our poor developer so hard that they left in disgust, not wanting to touch it any more. I don't know why there was such opposition. We wanted to do it in the proper way, in the ScummVM spirit, and keep it updated as AGS was upgraded and improved over time. Later there was some talk of 'letting' us handle old game compatibility and so on, but... well, yeah... thanks? That’s not really in the spirit of our project."

Future Scummery
While that dispute will hopefully be settled one day, for the moment the ScummVM team has more than enough to be getting on with—and interest in their software is booming. "We used to joke amongst ourselves that before we released support for a new engine, every developer should quietly snag a cheap copy of its games on eBay, because that price was going to skyrocket."

On top of simply getting the games to work, of course, much of the project involves experimentation and building in new features. Sandulenko for instance recently implemented 4-colour CGA and Hercules (an ancient monochrome graphics standard) support for Monkey Island 1, allowing players to get the full 80s vibe of a bright magenta version of Melee Island.

But what’s the current holy grail of support?

"Blade Runner," he answers immediately. And the challenge is obvious. Not only was the raw logic of much of that game held together with sticky tape, it uses lots of technologies that rarely saw play in adventures, including voxel characters and full-screen background animations segueing seamlessly into the blocky action. "We're working on it, and it's 60-70% done. A few years ago, I said my top ones were that, the Neverhood and Full Pipe. Now those are done!"

Sandulenko is also slowly working on Macromedia Director, an authoring tool used by many-mid 90s games, but is rewriting it from scratch instead of reverse-engineering it. "I'm even working with the original creators on that one," he says. "It's a big project though."

The more engines that ScummVM can support, the more games can be dusted off and re-released for a second chance without needing a full remaster project like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle.

Legally speaking, it couldn’t be a much more generous deal. If you’re the rights holder of an old game—or given the state of the industry at the moment, the insurance company or whatever that bought up the assets after the last insurance company that bought its assets folded—you can just bundle ScummVM with it in exchange for a credit, and releasing the source of the version of ScummVM you’re using and any tweaks made to it.

"Not their game data or engine code or anything like that," assures Sandulenko. "Just our code, and any changes that they've made to it. Just like Carmack's games. He releases the engine, but you need the assets to play it. It's pretty easy. Don't be like Atari, which used our code and removed our copyright. Just give us a little recognition for our hard work—that's all we ask."

If this week is any indication, more publishers will start using the team's free preservation work to start selling their old games. Disney just released Maniac Mansion on Steam running on, you guessed it, ScummVM.

Download the latest ScummVM here. Need some legal games to play on it? Click on the Games link. Beneath A Steel Sky is especially good.
 

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/34247



Table of Contents

00:20 – Double Fine Productions (Full Throttle Remastered, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin)
00:42 – Alasdair Beckett-King (AdventureX, Nelly Cootalot)
02:07 – Chris Bischoff, The Brotherhood (BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION)
02:45 – Joe Richardson (Four Last Things)
03:16 – Studio Fizbin (The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk)
04:05 – Maho Williams, Cherrymochi (Tokyo Dark)
04:54 – Simon Mesnard, Simon Says: Watch! Play! (Catyph, RealMYHA)
05:50 – Ben Chandler, Wadjet Eye Games (Unavowed)
06:06 – Stephen Downey, Outsider Games (Jennifer Wilde)
06:30 – Amanita Design (CHUCHEL)
07:02 – Camelia Cuibus and Liviu Boar, Stuck in Attic (Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure)
07:25 – Theodor Waern, SkyGoblin (The Journey Down)
07:52 – Cyan Worlds (Obduction)
08:25 – Francesco Liotta, C.I.N.I.C. Games (The Wardrobe)
08:37 – Spooky Doorway (The Darkside Detective)
09:26 – John Torkington and Koriel Kruer, White Lotus Interactive (XING: The Land Beyond)
09:50 – Josef Fares (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out)
10:14 – Btf (Trüberbrook)
10:23 – Jan Müller-Michaelis (aka “Poki”), Daedalic Entertainment (Pillars of the Earth, State of Mind)
12:02 – Footprints Games (Detective Gallo)
12:38 – Zein Okko, Goodwolf Studios (Code 7)
13:32 – Jean-Baptiste de Clerfayt (Lancelot’s Hangover)
14:54 – Headup Games (The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk, Trüberbrook)
15:24 – Bob Bates (Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way)
15:58 – Chris Jones and Chaotic Fusion (The Poisoned Pawn: A Tex Murphy Adventure)
17:05 – Charles Cecil, Revolution Software
18:31 – Thomas Regin, Wadjet Eye Games
 

CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,535
This just got released today : Captain Disaster in: Death Has A Million Stomping Boots

Captain Disaster takes a job delivering a package from Acturus-1 to Proboscis Major - not realising that he is actually transporting something that will put the entire galaxy in danger! Though just getting the package in the first place is quite a challenge in itself...

Our intrepid nitwit investigates interesting peculiar people, puzzling places and panicky problems along the way to saving the day, once he finally realises that something is wrong. Expect lots of laughs and head-scratching dilemmas before you reach the shocking conclusion and find out what all this "Million Stomping Boots" business is actually about!

Game Details:

  • Classic point-and-click adventure gaming action with a few new twists
  • Retro 320x200 resolution graphics
  • Fully voiced
  • Epic music score
  • Plenty of puzzles
  • Plenty of adventure
  • Plenty of comedy
This game has been a labour of love by 2 devs (CaptainD and TheBitPriest) - who should know better, but just can't help loving the genre - with help from multiple other people over time. We were inspired by the classic adventure games produced by Lucasfilm Games and Sierra, and believe we have created something that will hopefully, like those games, stand the test of time.

We hope everyone who has been looking forward to the game (yes, all five of you! - though we suspect 2 of you might be bots...) and anyone who takes the plunge to buy this enjoys playing it as much as we enjoyed making it! Without, you know, the frustration, heartbreak at finding a new bug, lack of sleep, feelings of despair etc that go hand in hand with indie game development.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,099
Outstanding bundle and I'd get it in a heartbeat if I wasn't just gunning for Gabriel Knight remake and Yesterday Origins.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
1998 horror text adventure Anchorhead is coming to Steam by the author himself:



With illustrations added:

ss_68698e136a0a9c9b2e5680d2a463aa52d3a8a477.600x338.jpg


ss_6a656687968b3632e86e1c665a7955bfdb9e3367.600x338.jpg


You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Anchorhead is a text adventure game in the style of classic Infocom games from the 1980s. No graphics, no menus, no point-and-click — you navigate a written story using typed commands, and read what happens next.

Travel to the haunted coastal town of Anchorhead, Massachusetts and uncover the roots of a horrific conspiracy inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Search through musty archives and tomes of esoteric lore; dodge hostile townsfolk; combat a generation-spanning evil that threatens your family and the entire world. A sprawling, meticulously detailed setting, brought to life by finely crafted prose and illustrated with dozens of spine-chilling illustrations, ensures that the story will stay with you long after you finish playing the game.

A sullen belch emanates from the clouds, and the rain starts coming down harder — fat, cold drops smacking loudly against the cobblestones. Shouldn't it be snowing in New England at this time of year? With a sigh, you open your umbrella.

Welcome to Anchorhead . . .
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Lisssn, "a point-and-click adventure game for listeners" by the developer of RHEM:



"Lisssn" is a point-and-click adventure game for listeners in the style of adventure classics such as "RHEM" with many puzzles and mysterious machines to set in motion. But instead of having only to look closely and to combine, this one is especially about hearing and listening closely. The player is thus carefully introduced into the basic ideas of music.

At the beginning of the game we learn that "La Musica", the music, was kidnapped by dark forces and imprisoned in a dungeon. We are facing a future without her bewitching sounds, which have made the world so much more colorful. In the search for the abducted, the player explores numerous locations such as a dark park, a scary cemetery, a mysterious castle and a huge underground world with a lake and a strange underground railway. Accompanied by four well-known composers, the player must overcome obstacles, initiate mechanisms, collect objects, and find hidden ways to finally free "La Musica" from her dungeon.

The riddles were arranged carefully: At the beginning it is easy to distinguish sounds from noises, later different pitches and finally notes and rhythms have to be recognized. "Lisssn" is a game that is suitable for both children and adults, where the player collects musical experiences while playing.

features:

- Non-violent and nonlinear playing principle
- numerous, didactically arranged puzzles
- Learn some basic concepts of music
- From the people who created the mysteries of the RHEM series
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,107
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The Digital Antiquarian's article this week is about Legend Entertainment's Timequest. It includes an interview with Bob Bates, who has revisited his own game after many years: https://www.filfre.net/2018/01/timequest/

So, how goes it with Timequest?

Well… I’m not done. As I play, I’m sitting here going, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe I did that!” The number of restore puzzles that are in there… the overall level of difficulty is so much greater than anything I would today.

Ha!

But before we get into your recent experiences in the game, maybe we could talk just a little about this idea of Timequest as an experiment to see if there was still a market for a very complicated, very taxing adventure game. That’s a theme that goes back even further in your career. You’ve mentioned before that you took the name of your first company, Challenge, quite literally. You had thought that Infocom was losing their edge, becoming too accessible. You wanted to create more difficult games, harking back to the early Infocom games. Of course, that vision changed once you started actually working for Infocom.

Maybe you could talk about this desire to do a really difficult adventure game, and to what extent Timequest in fact met that standard. It’s a very difficult game in that it demands a lot of note-keeping and planning from the player, but I think that most of the actual puzzles — with maybe one or two exceptions, which we can talk about later — are fairly straightforward. It’s more the combinatorial-explosion factor that makes it more difficult.

I come from a family of puzzle-doers — doers of hard puzzles. During the four years I spent living in England, I was exposed to the English style of crossword puzzle. Are you familiar with English as opposed to American crossword puzzles?

Are you referring to acrostics, or…

No. English crossword puzzles are regular crossword puzzles, but they’re an order of magnitude more difficult. In an American crossword, a clue might be “a kind of boat,” and the answer might be “yacht” or “raft” — very straightforward. English crosswords rely on really obscure puns and references and clues hidden within the clues themselves. A clue might be “united undone.” And the answer is “untied.” In other words, if you “undo” the word “united” by scrambling the letters, you come up with “untied.” That would be considered a no-brainer clue. Take that and make it much harder, where the answer involves a Medieval English word for “plow” or something. They have dictionaries dedicated to these really obscure words. These are the kinds of puzzles my family did; my dad was a cryptographer for the NSA. That’s the level of mental challenge I was used to.

I therefore thought everybody was the same. As you grow up, you think your family is normal and does the things all families do. So, when I’d play an Infocom game, I’d say, “Yeah, okay, it’s hard. But it’s not really hard. Isn’t there a market for really hard?” And that of course was the mistake of Challenge: no, there wasn’t a sufficiently large market for really hard.

So, Infocom comes along and I do games for them. The push there was to make the games easier. Then Infocom went away, and the point-and-click adventure games that were left out there weren’t hard at all. It’s not so much that I wanted to make a really, really hard game with Timequest. I just wanted to make one that was as hard as a Standard-difficulty Infocom game. I wanted to find out if the Infocom market was still there, but hidden within this larger market of point-and-click players. Is there still a market for a reasonably difficult game, or do we have to make all of our games easier?

I have to assume, based on the games Legend went on to release after Timequest, that the answer to that question was yes — that you did have to make all of your games easier. I like the Gateway games and Eric the Unready a lot, but they’re different from Timequest in that they’re much more narrative-driven games — there’s a constantly unfolding plot pushing you through, so that you always have a pretty good idea of what you should be doing. But in Timequest you’re just thrown into this huge labyrinth of time periods and locations, and the game just kind of says, “Okay, figure it out.”

Yeah… I had started out to make a Standard-difficulty Infocom game, but it turns out I made a game that was harder than that. I didn’t understand why people found it more difficult than I had intended. I’m speaking with two minds here because as I play the game now, I’m saying, “What was I thinking?” Now I’m playing like a player instead of like the designer, having not looked at it for a quarter of a century. I’ve forgotten most things in the game, so I’m approaching it fresh.

I remember being bewildered that people were finding the game so hard to approach. I’d put in these mission papers with the critical events. Obviously what you needed to do was to go to the time periods and locations that were called out and look at what clues and puzzles were there, then fan out from there. But I remember the testers saying they didn’t know where to start. So I said, “Okay, I’ll make it even easier.” When you first get into the time machine — the interkron — it will be preset to Rome in 44 BC — a clear indication of where you should go. That’s a self-contained little puzzle environment. When you finish with that, Cleopatra tells you to come see her. So, obviously the next thing to do is to go to Cairo in that same year. And then you can continue to go to the places in the briefing papers. That was my thinking at the time.

Fast-forward to two weeks ago. I picked up the game and started to play, and realized I had no idea where to go or what to do. So, I started in the oldest time slot on the left-hand side of the map — Mexico, 1361 BC — and worked my way across the map. Then I went to the next one, 44 BC, and did the same, and so on and so on. I’ve been doing that for the last ten hours or so, and just before this call I got up to Dover in 1215 AD and the King John puzzle.

My notes are pretty funny. “I did this, then I died. So I restored. I tried this and I died. So I restored. Then I learned this — but I died.” Here I am, priding myself on being a designer who doesn’t make restore puzzles… and, my God, they’re all over the place!
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
5,866
Speaking of Discworld Noir, has anyone managed to get it running under Windows 10? Last time I tried it was a clusterfuck.

I'm going to give it another try with Dxwnd.

edit: welp, that was easier than expected
dwnv6oea.jpg
 
Last edited:

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
"The best 80's adventure game creator"?!?

Lebling, Blank, Moriarty, Meretzky, heck, even Doulgas Adams all come to mind. Still, the sheer weirdness and audacity of that ad fills me to the brim with delight.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be annoyed about (I read it fairly quickly). The only thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the casual and gratuitous imputation of bad faith ("endemic carelessness" and "trifecta of lazy design"). It seems like the presumption, particularly when dealing with a company as successful as Sierra and developers as storied and beloved as Williams and Marx, should be that a designer might carefully and diligently make design decisions that in retrospect look bad, rather than assuming that they could easily have done better but were too sloppy or irresponsible to be bothered with quality. It is sometimes hard to see outside the conventions you're working within, and so stuff like mazes or action sequences might be there based on a misimpression that players enjoyed or expected such things. Moreover, almost every game has at least a few bad spots, which should tend to make us more generous in assuming that they are a sign of negligence rather than the fact that if even Homer nods, we mere mortals snooze often.
 

Sceptic

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 2, 2010
Messages
10,871
Divinity: Original Sin
I can remember the days when Maher wrote actually interesting and relevant pieces that unearthed less-known histories and made him deserve to be called "antiquarian". I don't remember when he started turning into an obnoxious twat who goes on for pages about personal opinions that have nothing to do with facts (though he tries, very hard, to present them as such), but now that he refers to himself as "this reviewer" I guess the transition is complete.

And then there's the totally retarded stuff like "hard pressed to come up with another developer that was employing even one female designer".

Oooooooooooh boy.

Origin had Sheri Graner Ray. Electronic Arts had Amy Hennig. Go back a few years and you have Amy Briggs at Infocom.

Then if you go back to the fucking seventies Atari had superstar Carol Shaw. And of course Electronic Arts had Anne Westfall, and since this was EA in their early days her name features prominently on the cover of Archon, one of the best-selling, best-reviewed, cult classics of the early 80s.

And these are only the ones I could remember off the top of my head.*

You call yourself a historian and can't get basic facts right? This is pathetic.

* though to my everlasting shame I had to google Ray's name to get it right. 26 years later and I still don't know how to spell it.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,236
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA
That still was an interesting article to read. That merger of Sierra and Broderbund (which then died) was fascinating. I also remember that time, when suddenly that new CD technology had so much promise (and the very few selections utilizing it at the time).
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom