Sweet, Sweet Posters

By Rubes | Published: March 3, 2010

Every once in a while you come across something that reminds you how awesome the intertubes can be. Zazzle is one of those things.

Sure, more people probably know about Cafepress, and this sort of thing has been around for a while already. Making a custom T-shirt or mug with your own artwork is no revelation, for sure. But over the years it has developed into a pretty slick process, and it’s pretty cool how easy and fast it is to whip up a prototype of something, order it, and have it delivered to your door. The process has basically become how people imagined it should be. Pick the item you want, upload your artwork, fiddle around with it until it’s just right, and order that sucker right up. And the fact that these places allow you to order even a single copy of your item, rather than mandating cartons full of them, opens up the market to just about anyone.

I was going to use CafePress to print some Vespers T-shirts for the crew helping out with the game, but someone recommended I give Zazzle a try instead. They’re pretty similar, but there are a few things I like a little better about Zazzle. So I went with them, and I had a few shirts printed up. Small “ORS” logo on the front breast, larger Vespers logo on the back with the blood stain. Simple design, easy to set up, bing, bang, boom. Vespers shirts for all. Yay Zazzle.

Vespers Shirt

You know you want one. Just say the word.

Yeah, I feel a little goofy wearing this around, but hey, it’s my own freaking shirt, you know? (Funny story about the tag line. I think it was Jason, the game’s author, who felt we needed to have a tag line to go along with the blood stain logo, but none of us could come up with something that didn’t sound embarrassingly bad. He finally came up with “Say your prayers” which, I have to say, is both incredibly corny and perfectly brilliant. Get it? Say your prayers? See the double meaning? Awesome, right? No? Meh, never mind.)

By the way, if anyone out there feels the aching desire (without the accompanying embarrassment) to wear one of these around town, let me know and I can make it available on the Zazzle site. Ponder for a moment how much coolness awaits you.

Anyway, this isn’t about the shirt. It’s about the posters. Ah, the sweet, sweet posters.

One of the cool things I always liked about Jason’s Vespers is how many of the items in the church morph over time as the monastery sinks into evil darkness. One of the best: the frescoes painted on the church ceiling. They aren’t described in much detail in the game, starting out as follows:

>EXAMINE FRESCO
The soaring vaults are as vast and open as the arms of God. Frescoes depict the fall of Satan, with angels singing as they cut down the wicked.

That left us a lot of room to interpret, but you get the picture. As the game progresses, the image changes, reflecting the worsening struggle between good and evil, angels and demons. So for instance, at some point in the middle of the game (not really a spoiler):

>EXAMINE FRESCO
The Fallen are overrunning the angels, climbing through holes in the ground and spreading across the Earth. An angel's eyes meet yours and do not break. He is coming.

So this presented an opportunity and challenge for us in depicting the fresco and the changes that occur over time. Part of the problem is that we couldn’t realistically put the frescoes on the church ceiling, since it’s just too high up to see very well in the game. So we came up with an alternative, which was to have the frescoes painted on the walls of the church foyer.

The wall fresco

Behold, the fresco. Click to enlarge.

Anyway, the big challenge, of course, was to find someone who could actually, you know, make a fresco. I mean, that’s not easy. People don’t make frescoes very often these days. You don’t want someone just whipping together a little somethin-somethin and calling that a fresco. It has to be at least partially convincing. If I had the big AAA budget, we’d be looking for someone to research the artwork of the time in order to make a historically accurate rendering. Since it was just me working with the C- budget, I did most of the (hack) research on my own–using works by Giotto and Signorelli as a guide–and gave the information to a few prospective candidates from the most excellent ConceptArt.org, crossing my fingers.

The call was answered, quite impressively I would say, by Régis Moulun, a French artist. Here’s his gallery site, if you’re interested.

The art majors out there may look at these (eventually, when the time comes) and argue about the stylistic accuracy, but in my decidedly unartistic view, the frescoes he created simply kick ass.

Not to give too much away, but there are a half dozen of them. The one you can see in the image above is the first fresco, the one described as “angels singing as they cut down the wicked.” It’s beautiful, but it’s the tamest of the lot. They get progressively more disturbing, and I love it. Here’s a better view of the first fresco in full, with an additional shot of some of the close-up detail.

Weep at the beauty of the first fresco. (Click to enlarge)

Weep at the beauty of the first fresco. (Click to enlarge)

A closeup shot of the fresco. (Click for a bigger closeup)

A closeup shot. (Click for a bigger closeup)

So like, these are really nice pieces, the kind I think would look great up on a wall. Slapping up a set of the original images might look a little odd, though, but that’s where the whole poster idea comes in. A little creative clipping, some small, well-placed logos, and a little Zazzle, and we have ourselves a pretty nice set of posters. To wit:

The first fresco, poster style. (Click to enlarge)

Your wall is begging you for this. And the other five.

We’re currently doing some renovations to our house, and when it’s finished we’ll have a new office with, I’m excited to say, a lot of empty wall space. I’ve got all six of these things printed up and ready for framing. I’m really looking forward to seeing them all framed, hanging side-by-side. Is that excessively geeky?

Now, I could show you the other five frescoes, but that wouldn’t be any fun, would it? Suffice it to say that I love the first fresco, and it’s probably my least favorite of the set. But if there are enough requests, sure, I can show them. And if people think this is something they might be interested in, it might make a nice gift, say, for those who pre-order (when that time comes). What do you think? Posters, anyone?

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Musings

By Rubes | Published: February 17, 2010

Question: Can high drama be produced from a wide-open simulation?

Creating a game that tells a story is one thing. Creating a game that tells a dramatic, moving story is quite another.

Can you really get a dramatic, moving experience from a game that is not tightly scripted or linear? Can high drama truly emerge from an open, unbounded simulation-style game?

Everyday life is a wide-open sandbox. Clearly, there is high drama in real life. But, as mentioned a while back on rec.arts.int-fiction, “Most people’s lives are not filled with high drama all the time. Some events will be dramatic, but creating a dramatic story from those requires editing out all the mundane parts.” (greg)

That editing, in game terms, is what I imagine is the scripting, restriction, or forcing of linearity onto the game narrative.

Isn’t high drama really the product of the manipulation of people’s emotions through selective presentation?

More from same thread:

“I’m not convinced that truly open world designs will lead to the kind of epiphony-based stories that are real emotional milestones in the world of art, literature, and gaming.” (Paul Furio)

“All games (not just IF) are an attempt to fit several impossible things into one package, and then fool the player into not noticing the hack.” (Mike Rozak)

“A deep worldsim and smart, reactive characters (AI or human) may be enough for great interactivity, but to make that interactivity dramatic requires a third component that knows when and how to meddle.” (Ron Newcomb)

“I’d propose that there’s a hierarchy of dramatically interesting: at tier 0, you have real life, where you’re frankly happiest if there’s not all that much drama happening to your avatar; at tier 1, competent but formulaic static fiction, say, CSI; tier 2, open-ended simulations, like table-top RPGs and MMORPGs; and tier 3, the really good stuff, with the ephiphanies and so on, like the best books and films. I guess the question is whether IF or interactive media in general have a place in tier 3.” (Mike Roberts)

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Reviving the Past

By Rubes | Published: February 8, 2010

For those of you who don’t know, I did write one other computer game in the past, The Missions of Starship Reliant (aka, Missions of the Reliant). I had always wanted to write and release a game throughout my childhood, but all I knew back in the 80s was BASIC, and that never got me very far. And so, at one point in my mid-twenties, and being a Mac fan and all, I decided to pick up some books and learn Pascal. In 1994, amid great imaginary fanfare and to much fictitious critical acclaim, the first version of Missions was released in all of its $20 shareware glory. (The sequel, Missions II, was released in 1996, but it was really just an expansion of the original and not truly a sequel. It just sounded cool.)

Missions of the Reliant, 1996.

Missions was based on the (really) old ASCII Star Trek games that once graced the mainframes and dialup services of the 70s. I didn’t know much about the origin or full history of that game, assuming that it began around the time that David Ahl published the DEC BASIC game Space War (later renamed Super Star Trek) in his most excellent 1973 book, 101 BASIC Computer Games. Even Ahl, however, refers to a first version appearing in 1971, when Mike Mayfield wrote a version in BASIC for the Sigma 7. According to Mayfield himself:

Back in 1971 I was a senior in high school. My school didn’t have any computers, but I had managed to “use” (read “steal”) an account on a Sigma 7 at University of California, Irvine. I was trying to teach myself BASIC from a book. At the time there was a program that ran on a vector graphics terminal on the Sigma 7 that was a simple “shoot-em-up” space war game. I wanted to make a game like that, but I only had access to an ASR-33 Teletype non-video terminal (hey, there is only some much I could “use” in high school).

This was back when Star Trek was hot. A bunch of my other geek friends from high school and I spent a lot of hours brainstorming what we could do if we didn’t have a video terminal. Since I was the only one in the group that had any knowledge of computers (little as it was), we ended up coming up with a lot of unimplementable ideas. One idea that did stick was the idea of printing a galactic map and a star map to give you some idea what to shoot at, and having phasors reduce power exponentially, like they would if they shot in all directions. It may seem pretty simple now, but for a bunch of high school kids in the early seventies, it seemed pretty cool.

The program went through dozens and dozens of iterations, mainly over the summer after we graduated. I didn’t have any disk space allocation, so I had to punch a paper tape each day when I finished and load it back in again the next day. Working on a 10 character per second terminal forced me to keep the program small. Otherwise, I probably would have gone crazy adding feature after feature.

Late that summer I bought HP’s first programmable calculator, the HP-35. I ended up going down to the local sales office several times for help on the programming. One time they mentioned that I could use their computer if I would convert my Star Trek program to their computer so that they could use it. Since their BASIC variant was so different from the BASIC on the Sigma 7 and the program had gotten pretty messy by then from all the changes, I ended up just doing a rewrite. The program was added to HP’s public domain library, which is where Dave Ahl got it.

It appears that, even though there are earlier versions of a game called Space War that date back to the late 1960′s, Mayfield’s version was considerably more advanced, and became the de facto Star Trek standard in 1973 when it made its way into the HP contributed program library. For those interested, there is a great writeup of the history on a web page by Maury Markowitz. (If you’re really nerdy, you can see the code to Mayfield’s 1973 HP BASIC version here.)

Mayfield's original game, ca. 1972. Historical information suggests the Klingon typo was likely not in the original.

In the old ASCII game, the idea is that the Klingons were invading Federation space, and it was the player’s job to scoot around in the Enterprise from sector to sector exterminating every last one of them in a thrilling binge of pure xenophobic annihilation. Space was divided up into grid-like quadrants and sectors, with short-range scanners (as above) showing the contents of the current quadrant. ASCII characters represented the Enterprise, Klingon ships, starbases, and stars. Long-range scanners showed the contents of each quadrant numerically in the format XYZ, with X being the number of Klingons, Y the number of starbases, and Z the number of stars. Players then used phasers or photon torpedoes to wipe out the invading forces before moving on to the next quadrant, and so on.

The Not-So-Long-Range Scanners.

I thought it would be fun to convert the text-based game into a 2D, sprite-based game, and introduce some Star Trek: The Next Generation flair. Paramount, naturally, was really into protecting its intellectual property back then, so I had to change things enough to keep it under the radar. If I remember correctly, when I chose the name Reliant, I had in mind the ship from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and I think early versions of the game may have even used a similar ship design. But I ended up modifying the design later on, while keeping the name.

Getting my ass kicked, Beginner level.

Like any decent inexperienced, naïve game developer, I was far more interested in development than in all of those important post-development marketing strategy tasks, so once I had finished making the game things were fairly haphazard afterward. I recall uploading it and promoting it on a number of BBSs and community sites, like AOL, CompuServe, and yes, even eWorld. I also took mail orders and sent floppy disks by mail, as difficult as that is now to fathom (it took a bit of effort to cram the whole game onto a 1.4MB floppy, let me tell you). In the end, I probably spent more on memberships to those communities and on postage than I made from the game. But of course I didn’t really care, I enjoyed the whole experience. I even got some recognition from it, earning honorable mention for Best New Shareware Game from the old MacUser magazine in October 1994. I still have that copy sitting around my office somewhere.

I did keep track of all of the registered users in a database, but I don’t recall ever coming up with a final tally of how many people paid the shareware fee. I do remember a couple of things, however: (1) the number of registered users wasn’t many, somewhere around 250-300; (2) Steve Wozniak was one of the registered users (woot); and (3) lots of folks seemed to make money distributing CDs with the unregistered shareware version on it. So it goes, as they say.

No space game is complete without a rift in the space-time continuum.

I didn’t think too much more about the game over the years, until sometime around mid-2007 when I decided to Google it to see what evidence of its existence might still be out there on the tubes. Aside from a few references to old archived files, not a whole lot — except for one thing, a thread on the MacRumors Forums from somebody wondering what might have happened to the game.

I responded partway down the thread, offering a free registration code to anyone who was still able to run the game and wanted to unlock the full version. Thanks to the magic of SheepShaver, I’m still able to run the Unlocking Tool program that generates registration codes, and it’s not like it takes any effort on my part. I’ve actually been surprised at how many people since then have found their way to that thread on that forum. Seems like a couple times a month I’m getting an e-mail from someone interested in reliving a bit of the past.

This month, though, was a little different. About a week ago I received an e-mail from Gwynne Raskind, apparently a Missions fan from back in the day, but also a talented Mac programmer. Maybe you can see where this is going.

She asked if I was interested in seeing an OS X port of Missions, and volunteered to take on the Mac Toolbox-to-Cocoa port if I still had the source code and was willing to share it. It’s a pretty fantastic idea to me, really. I’d love to see the old game running again on today’s systems, and SheepShaver doesn’t count since (a) the sound is messed up, (b) you need an old Mac OS ROM file, and (c) it’s kind of an unsupported mess to get up and running.

My only stipulations were that first, the port would need to be released as free/donationware, and second, that she couldn’t laugh at me while reading my old code. At least, not to my face.

One of the more interesting parts of this process was digging up the old files. These are files that I’ve been holding onto, and passing down from one system to the next, for nearly 20 years now. I can’t even remember all of the different systems I’ve had over the years, but I’m reasonably sure I started the project on a Mac IIci, and did most of the work on a Quadra 840AV. Good times. Not sure why, but it just seems strange and a little crazy that somewhere in the depths of my hard drive are decades-old files that, for the most part, are still readily accessible, a quick glimpse into an earlier period of my life.

Of course, that meant that I proceeded to spend a couple of hours sifting through all of the goodies buried within, and a number of things that I had completely forgotten about — including a couple of minor Easter Eggs that slipped my memory. It was a pretty fun trip into the past, even though the files have been sitting on my drive the whole time. Just stored deep in the basement closet, underneath all of the old clothing and board games.

Missions advertisement, ca. 1996.

Gwynne will be keeping a running blog of the whole experience over on her site, starting with the first entry yesterday. I’ll be following along closely. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting, too.

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The Brew Turns Two

By Rubes | Published: February 3, 2010

Programming alert: The Monk’s Brew officially turns two tomorrow.

As far as blogs go, that’s hardly enough to impress anyone. My two initial reactions are (1) I’m startled that I’ve stuck to it even this long, and (2) sweet, another way to mark the passing of the years while Vespers still isn’t finished. So, for those of you keeping score at home: four years of development, two years of blogging, zero finished indie games. Closer, but not there yet.

This is not a high volume, high visibility blog by any stretch of the imagination, so I appreciate all (ten) of you who stop by here every once in a while to check up on things and see if the furniture has been moved around at all. It does help.

A year ago, I reflected on the occasion by noting how much admiration I have for those who blog (and write) well, specifically mentioning people like Jason Scott, Emily Short, Corvus Elrod, Shamus Young, and of course, Jay Barnson. A year later, I only admire them more. I think the common link among them all is not necessarily that they blog regularly or often, but that they each write with a unique voice that draws people in and keeps them coming back for more. It’s always a welcome sight to see a new entry from these folks waiting to be read. Good stuff, always. It’s something to shoot for.

Thanks again for coming along, and raise another brew with me to a third year.

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Anticipation III

By Rubes | Published: January 24, 2010

I don’t play as many games as I’d like to anymore, but I do try to sneak in as many as I can. For the most part, I don’t spend much time with the big ticket AAA games, in part because I don’t have a console, and in part because my desktop is getting a bit long in the tooth (is 7 years too old?). So while I figure out if I’m ever going to rectify that one way or the other, I keep my focus largely on the indie scene. And so, every now and then, I catch wind of a new indie game under development that stirs my interest, and I follow along in anticipation of its eventual release.

Such was the case back in October last year with Amanita Design’s Machinarium, and prior to that about a year ago with Tale of Tales’ The Path. Both have since been released, and both have made a notable impact on the indie game scene—and in my opinion the wait was well worth the experience of the final product.

Another game I’ve been eagerly anticipating, for quite some time now, is Cliff Johnson’s The Fool and His Money.

Johnson first came onto the gaming scene in 1987 with The Fool’s Errand, a low-res black-and-white puzzle game for the Mac (and sundry other platforms) that was like crack for us computer-puzzle-game fans. He followed this up in 1991 with one of my personal favorite games of all time, 3 in Three, another fabulous collection of puzzles that told the story of the number 3 lost in the innards of a malfunctioning computer. Both of these games, as well as his others from that period, are available without charge on his website for downloading and playing, although you’ll need an appropriate emulator to get the job done. The graphics may be dated, but the gameplay is timeless.

The Fool's Errand, 1987.

These are games that appeal to the pure puzzle solvers out there. Maybe not so much the puzzles like you find in many adventure games, but rather the kind you’d expect to find in Games magazine. Johnson describes both Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three as “storytelling metapuzzles”, a series of small individual puzzles that fit together within a larger global puzzle, interwoven with a story. There are a wide variety of puzzles ranging from easy to hard, and enough in each game to keep you occupied for a long, long time. As one person described them: “You don’t just have to figure out the answers — you also have to discover the rules.”

3 in Three, 1991.

Speaking of a long time, after what appears to be an extended hiatus from game development, Johnson decided around 2003 to make a sequel to The Fool’s Errand, which he is calling The Fool and His Money. He stated in an interview back in 2008 that it was the confluence of creating his own website, the evolution of Flash, and the emergence of Paypal that led him to believe he could create, publish, and distribute a new game entirely on his own, and so he embarked on the long journey that has been Fool and His Money.

The Fool And His Money, 2010 (we hope).

Unfortunately it has not gone entirely as planned, with the project experiencing a series of obstacles and delays. More than once the shipping of the game was described as imminent, only to see the date get pushed back. That’s too bad—this is sure to be a gem of a game. He has now been working on it for seven years. This is clearly a labor of love, and I admire his persistence. Almost hard to believe someone has been working on a game longer than I have.

Now he believes he’s heading into the final lap, and is announcing the release of the game is set for May of this year. He certainly sounds serious about it. The game has been available for pre-order for some time now, and he’s stated in interviews that this is his main source of funding. While that model may not work so well for an unknown such as me, for Johnson it’s potentially a huge untapped resource. The original Fool’s Errand sold around 250,000 copies, and thanks to piracy probably many more had the opportunity to play the game and become hooked. Add to that all of the sales for his subsequent games At the Carnival and 3 in Three, and you have an impressive group of loyal customers, many of whom (like me) are looking forward to the next installment and are willing to support the effort. He estimates that there are somewhere around 200,000 people closely following his progress on this game, and probably well over 1,000 who have already pre-ordered.

The ultimate plan for Fool is a trilogy, with Fool and His Money followed by a third installment, The Fool’s Paradise. And he also plans on making a trilogy out of 3 in Three, with sequels 3′s the Crowd and 3′s No Charm planned for some time in the future. I assume he’s not planning on seven years for each sequel.

But then again, as I can attest, you never can predict how things will go. But when it’s a labor of love, does it really matter?

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In Backups I (Should) Trust

By Rubes | Published: January 22, 2010

I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.

My main backup is a clone of my desktop development machine. I use an awesome program called SuperDuper! for this. It basically just makes an exact clone of my computer’s internal drive onto a secondary internal drive. I have that running nightly, so at any point in time I have an exact clone ready to go, losing at most a day’s worth of work.

In addition to that, I also use Apple’s Time Machine software to create hourly backups of the main internal drive to a separate partition on the secondary internal drive. So if I somehow do lose a day’s work and it’s something I really need, I can access the Time Machine backup and get what I need. So in this case I would lose, at most, an hour’s worth of work. Not that I think I’ll really need a backup of that frequency, but that’s how Time Machine is set up, and that’s good to know.

Those are two pretty good backups to have, and that alone would constitute a decent backup system (except for the fact that they both backup to a secondary internal drive). For Vespers data specifically (and really, that’s the stuff I care about the most), I also create a few mirrors.

I use another nice program called ChronoSync to create scheduled nightly synchronizations of Vespers files to other drives. One copy is kept on my external FTP file server (the one my artists use for uploading and downloading), and another on a separate external drive I had hanging around looking for something to do. I also keep an up-to-date copy of the latest files on my remote MobileMe file space, so I’ll always have an off-site copy of things available in case of disaster.

Because I often work remotely on my laptop, it’s also nice to have a copy of the most up-to-date build readily available. So for this I use the excellent DropBox. That keeps a local copy of the latest build on my laptop, which is a mirror of the version on my desktop. So any time I make changes to the desktop version, it’s automatically updated on my laptop. It’s mirrored through a version stored on the DropBox servers, so there is also always an off-site copy available. I could easily do the same thing with my existing MobileMe storage, but DropBox is just exceptionally cool, and works a bit better (and faster) than MobileMe.

Of course, that’s kind of overkill. But once you get into backup solutions, it can get a little addicting. Once the home renovations are done and I’m back in the new office space, I’ll probably consolidate these a bit, but since they’re all managed automatically with scheduled sync’s, it’s not like it interferes with anything or is troublesome in any way. It’s good peace of mind.

The interesting thing comes when the backups are put to the test, as I am experiencing today.

When I woke up today, for some reason my main desktop machine was running, when it should have been asleep after the previous night’s backup routine. That’s never a good sign. It turns out there was an error during the cloning process, with a dialog box telling me that the main internal drive was full. I knew that there should be somewhere around 20-25 Gb of free space still available, so this was perplexing. After some poking around, it did appear that the main internal drive was being interpreted as completely full, for entirely unknown reasons. Where those available 20-25 Gb of space went is a complete mystery. And although the machine still appeared to be functioning normally, some weird issues started popping up — for instance, I couldn’t open my e-mail program since it could no longer find the designated “temp” folder. I ran some disk utility programs on the main internal drive, but no errors or abnormalities could be found.

I rebooted into the clone, and all appeared as it should. It still had the appropriate open space on the drive, and e-mail was working fine. So it would seem like the best option would be to revert to the clone. Who knows what other weird things will pop up with the main internal drive? And besides, I don’t know how I would go about finding where the missing space went and how to get it back.

Still, that would mean erasing the main internal drive and repopulating it from the clone. Cloning back from the clone, so to speak.

I’m not sure why, but that makes me a little uneasy. It shouldn’t—in fact, that’s entirely what the clone is there for. But I guess I’m just programmed to question what might happen when you lose the original and start working from a copy of a copy. It’s one thing to lose a file, or a folder of files, and to just recover a new set from a backup. It’s another to restore a complete system from a clone, or at least it seems that way. Still, it’s nice to have options.

Kind of interesting to think that my DirecTV receiver’s hard drive failed over the weekend, and now this. We’ll see if things really do happen in threes.

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Shamus Does IF

By Rubes | Published: January 18, 2010

If you’re into RPGs (the tabletop or computer variety), or video games in general, you’re probably already familiar with Shamus Young and his blog, Twenty Sided. You’re probably also familiar with his excellent webcomic series, DM of the Rings. You certainly should be.

But, if you’re more of an interactive fiction person than an RPG or FPS person, maybe not.

Shamus does a great job with his blog, and I really enjoy his writing. There are only a handful of blogs I enjoy following because of the writing, and his is one of them. Whether it’s a skillful disemboweling of a popular AAA title, a recounting of his role-playing experiences, or his tireless raging against the evils of DRM, it’s always an enjoyable read with the right mixture of insight and humor.

I’ve always suspected he had a soft spot for text games. He’s spent some time getting to know Inform, one of the programming languages for IF that uses a more “natural language” approach to coding. And although he found it maddening at first, it seems like he’s seen the light.  He’s even gone so far as to make a game with it, and now he’s put it out there for anyone to download and play. (Be warned, however, the page contains a Java applet to play the game that may piss off your browser when it loads.)

It’s a text representation of a standard Sci-Fi first-person shooter, with a few puzzles thrown in. Some of the puzzles are straightforward, and some are a bit out of left field. There are a few guess-the-verb situations, a number of verb-noun combinations that you think should work but don’t, and a lot of objects that probably should be implemented but aren’t. He makes liberal use of the USE <noun> command, something many IF authors tend to shy away from. And plenty of typos, room description glitches, and other minor issues, all of which can be easily corrected. But there’s also plenty of his trademark writing and humor, like when you try to TAKE something that wouldn’t normally be taken.

All in all, a reasonably good effort for a first try. It’s not completed yet, but I’m sure he would appreciate some additional eyes taking a look at it. If you’re interested, give it a shot. Pun only slightly intended.

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Riding The Wave

By Rubes | Published: January 17, 2010

Things have been relatively quiet here on the Brew lately, particularly with respect to Vespers. I don’t generally post very often, averaging about one blog per week, but even that is being stretched lately, and this is the first blog of the new year. Oftentimes silence reflects little to report from lack of progress, but in this case it’s actually a Pretty Good Thing.

Game development often goes in fits and spurts, especially if you’re a small (or solo) team. This has been especially true with Vespers, particularly on the animation front. N.R. has been steadily productive over time with all of the models and 2D art, which has helped us maintain at least some momentum over time. But, as I’ve blogged many times, it’s the animation work that has held us back for so long.

The two main reasons for this are (a) it takes time and effort to orient new animators to the project and bring them up to speed, and (b) for a variety of reasons, animators only seem to stay with the project for a short period of time, forcing me to find new ones and then go through the orientation process again and again. That’s been mighty frustrating. But with each new animator comes a renewed sense of hope and purpose, and so we end up with this seemingly endless cycle of disappointment and hope.

And so, as we start yet another year on this project, we enter the next cycle of optimism and anticipation. My latest call for character animators was met with a nice response, and I was able to work it out so that we actually have three animators currently working on different parts of the game. What’s especially nice is that two of them have good experience with the Torque system, so I’ve been able to skip that part of the orientation with them. While it’s exciting, it has also meant a good deal of work getting them all up to speed with the project, and getting them the necessary materials so they can start working on things.

So I have some very experienced hands working right now on finishing up the animations for Act I, which means making some final adjustments to Drogo’s animations and getting things started on Cecilia’s. The work on Cecilia is a lot more complicated and challenging than the work on the other characters, for a number of reasons, so it will be nice to finally get that out of the way. And since there are three animators, we’re at last beginning to tackle some of the first animations for Act II which, even though we’re not yet finished with Act I, is an exciting and rewarding feeling.

In the meantime, N.R. continues to plug away at the remaining content, working through the list of objects for Act II and beyond. One big milestone was reached this month as he finished up the last of the stained glass windows, which is huge. Because the four windows change six times over the course of the game, 24 different designs were required, eating up a big chunk of his development time. Now that that’s out of the way, he can concentrate on the numerous other church objects that change over time, as well as the objects in the cellar and the other objects from later in the game. One interesting challenge was how to design a lock for the calefactory door for Act II — given the design of the doors, with the ring handle in the center of the door, it wasn’t a simple matter to come up with a makeshift lock that Constantin could quickly put together and look like a convincing means of keeping the door from opening. I think the design he came up with should do the job well.

So if development goes in waves, I’m definitely riding the wave right now. Still lots left to do, but we’re creeping ever closer to the finish of Act I and the demo, which means we’ll be open for some testing soon. Very soon.

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Umberto or Geraldine?

By Rubes | Published: December 30, 2009

One of the interesting things about working on Vespers is that I’ve become so intimate with the original text and code that I probably know more about the game at this point than even the author, Jason Devlin. Often, I’ll come across an issue or question about the text game, and I’ll pop off an e-mail to Jason to see what he thinks we should do. The irony is that I’ve been so engrossed in every detail of the story for so long that I’m probably better able to address these things than Jason, who likely hasn’t even thought about the game in 3 or 4 years. (Mental note: really have to finish game soon.)

Throughout development, but particularly when Jason released the text game (and also when we started production), there have been many people drawing close comparisons between Vespers and Umberto Eco’s famous novel, The Name of the Rose, which I read back in the late 1980s. I can see that, at least on the surface; it was probably the first story I thought about after I initially played the game a few years back. But really, if you try to make a list of the similarities, I don’t think you get very far.

  1. Italian monastery setting in the middle ages
  2. A monk as the protagonist, whose life becomes threatened
  3. Several people die as the story unfolds

And that’s about all I got. Granted, those are fairly big ticket items, but they really don’t scratch the surface much. And I think it’s really just #1 that draws most people to make this comparison. But whereas The Name of the Rose is predominantly an intellectual, historical murder mystery that focuses on the scholastic method and the power of deductive reasoning, Vespers is more of a (for lack of a better description) suspense/thriller that explores the personal relationship between good and evil, and the roles of sin and virtue.

Contrast that with the graphical adventure game, The Abbey (also called Murder in the Abbey). I’ve played through about a quarter of this game (for research purposes, I swear), and it’s hard to imagine a game being more closely linked with The Name of the Rose than this one. The setting, the protagonists (including the young monk sidekick), the subject, the objective, all bear a far closer resemblance to Eco’s novel than Vespers does. I’m guessing that the story progressively deviates from Rose as the game advances. I don’t know if I’ll ever get through it, but if I do I’ll have to post some thoughts on it.

Year of Wonders (© Viking Press, probably)

On the other hand, I just finished reading Year of Wonders, the international bestselling 2001 novel by Geraldine Brooks. Wonderful book, by the way, I recommend it. It’s a historical fiction novel about the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire, which quarantined itself in the 1600′s to protect against the spread of the Black Plague. Reading this novel probably would not remind people much of Vespers, but there are some definite similarities in the themes.

  1. Setting in the middle ages during the Black Plague
  2. Group involving the protagonist quarantining itself to prevent the spread of the Plague
  3. Many people die as the story progresses, some by Plague, some murdered
  4. Story explores the personal role of religion, and the individual struggles between good and evil, and sin and virtue

Granted, that’s still a pretty superficial analysis, and few people would likely see a very close resemblance between these two stories, but it still (to me at least) comes across as a much more supportable and convincing comparison than with Rose.

I suspect that the population of people who have played Vespers and read Year of Wonders is probably much smaller than those who have played Vespers and read Rose (or saw the Sean Connery movie, more likely), so we’re not likely to read a critique that delves into the themes of each. But I thought it was an interesting thing to point out after having read the Brooks novel, and never having been satisfied by the past comparisons with the Eco novel.

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“Get Lamp” Discount Deadline Approaches

By Rubes | Published: December 29, 2009

A gentle reminder for those interested enough in text adventures to be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jason Scott’s sure-to-be-singular documentary on the matter, GET LAMP: the pre-order discount ends on January 1st.

According to Scott, the documentary will be priced at $40 for a 2-DVD set that will reportedly include additonal “wrap-ins” in the package, although no word yet as to what those are. It’s set to be released in March 2010, around the same time as the PAX East convention, where the movie will be premiered alongside (hopefully) a host of other interactive fiction-related panels and presentations, which is pretty neat.

But if you know you’re going to buy the documentary, you can pre-order it now for 25% off, or $30 (plus shipping).

Ordering now is helpful for Scott because, as he says, it “helps build up the money to do a good production run, to make the deposits to the duplication firm, and to order any wrap-in objects that will accompany the packaging.” I’m sure it will also help him in some way to finish it more quickly, as he now has the ultimate do-or-die deadline coming up soon.

Based on my own experience with Scott’s writing, presentation, and production skills, particuarly with his previous documentary on BBS’s, GET LAMP has to be about as close as you can get to a sure bet, assuming you have an affinity for the subject matter. It promises to be an entertaining, high-quality documentary piece that will surely set the standard for historical accounts of the history of text adventures.

Seriously, if you’ve read this far and you haven’t ordered it already, why the hell not?

>PRE-ORDER DOCUMENTARY
Link to the GET LAMP 25% discount pre-order special, ending January 1st

>WAIT
Time passes…

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