Adventure Game Heroes: Al Lowe

Working for Sierra On-Line in the 80s and early 90s, Al Lowe, one of the pioneers in the industry, was responsible for one of the most renowned adventure game series ever: Leisure Suit Larry. It was about this middle aged loser trying to score with the most beautiful women he could find, no matter how much the odds where against him; but his toils would be neverending, and the women always came out on top in one way or another. All in beautiful, 16 colors of low resolution.

"Leisure Suit Larry" - The Original

What prevented it from being a sleezy lowbrow sexcentric game was the comic genius of Al Lowe. This wasn´t about sex, but pure plain and simple gaming entertainment with a cheeky flavor to it, the hot ladies were just the cream on top. Was it male chauvinist? Sure, but not misogynist in any way. For me, it was a revolution - a revolution that introduced me to the world of graphical adventure games. I would later play better adventure games, but I would always have a softspot for Larry.

Someone please remind me why I like this game;)

Al would later be involved in games like "Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist", and "Torin´s passage" which are a testament to his continued brilliance. Unfortunately, he´s no longer active within the gaming industry.

But what does this have to do with game development, you say? Well, you see Al has his own website, and has kindly invited us to view some of his design documents(!). Al never writes dialogue until the game is made, but the documents still let us get into Al´s mindset to see how he structures his games, with general design decisions, plots, character development, and even technical aspects. In short, it´s a goldmine of adventure game developing genius. The link for the site is below:

Al Lowe´s Humor site

The stuff you want is in the downloads section. Make sure to scroll down past the games.

Next time I hope to get some new sketches and designs up. Until then,

Hasta pronto!

Compiling your own preview of MyPaint 0.9.0

Getting a little restless waiting for a new MyPaint build, I did a little research into compiling my own, mainly because I didn´t have anything better to do. I found this link, where a MyPaint user called TumaGonx have put up detailed instructions for compiling the program, but not only that - he´s supplied an autobuild package that will pretty much do all the work for you.

So what do you need to do?

1. Download the autobuild package from here, and uncompress the archive in a location that suits you.
2. Download and overwrite the default ´mypaint.nsi´ from here.
3. Download the latest source from here, and copy the folder that contains ´build.bat´ into the ´src´-folder.
4. Excecute ´build.bat´. When finished, your MyPaint-build is situated in the Win32-folder.

Tada!

Now you too can play with the latest MyPaint 0.9.0 beta, and make ugly paintings like the one below;)

"Ugly Castle on a Hilltop"-sketch by me

If you find bugs, you can help out in the development by making a bugreport.

If using beta software is to hardcore for you, a final version will likely be out within the month. I will report the news here, and of course go more indepth on what´s new and what´s improved. until then,

Hasta pronto!

Time to get on with it!

Although I haven´t really done much as of yet, I guess I could still share with you the basic premise of the game I plan to complete sometime during the next century=P The idea I´ve had in my head for a couple of years now.

The tentative name is "Philemon Troy and the Positronic Puppets". There´s nothing very original to the story really. It deals with a teenage boy by the name of Phil who enlists in a new school, after having been thrown out of his last three for various reasons. At the new school he quickly realises that something is really wrong. People tend to disappear and come back changed. Talking to his new classmates, he realises that this has been going on for the last three months, and strangely coincides with the arrival of the new Principal, Stuart Hardy.

Yes, it´s kind of a bodysnatchers theme, but I plan on making a humorous adventure, much in the air of classics from Lucas Arts or Sierra. There will be a lot of sidequests, easter eggs and naughty humor. Furthermore, it´s really an adventure that introduces our protagonist and lays the seeds for more games. I have ideas that will find Phil on adventures in the most unlikely places, not revealing too much of the plan ahead;)

Hopefully I will have more to show soon, but for now, here are a few concept sketches that gives you the general idea.

A little pixel pushing

I thought I´d put a little time aside to talk about this neat little program called Graphicsgale. Japanese in origin, it has a nice english translated version which is likely the best free pixel pushing application out there.


It has a free and a commercial version, but if you can do without .GIF-support, the free one will do just fine.

Whereas MyPaint is for simulating real (and not so real sometimes) world media, for realistic painting, Graphicsgale is for those who prefer the aesthetics of the adventure game classics of old, like Leisure suit larry, Maniac mansion or Kings quest. More importance is put on each pixel to compose a pleasing image. Graphicsgale gives you all the tools for this and more, with Onion skinning, animation and Layers to add to the usual drawing tools.

You can find the download HERE!

Try it out, and post your results on Pixelation, a forum dedicated to the art of pixel pushing. It´s also a place to find tutorials and tips to improve your craftsmanship.

Well met, and hasta pronto!

Not so much news as lack of any

So nothing much new has happened on the adventure game developing front lately. I´ve been caught up with real world issues, and have thus not had much time (read none) to allocate for creativity *sob*. Furthermore there have been no interesting releases of my favorite tools so nothing much to write about. I still check up on them semi-daily, though.

There is a "final" of AGS 3.2 in the forums of the AGS website, with the new improved soundsystem, but it still has some issues that probably need to be adressed, and therefor it hasn´t been made official yet. When that happens I´ll write about it here.

There is word of a new version of MyPaint coming out in a month or so. Me and my tablet are eagerly awaiting this fabulous event=)

Blender seems to be haunted by a mountain of bugs, and to tell you the truth, I haven´t really laid hands on it for the last 5 months or so, since I curently only possess a measly netbook, that wasn´t really built for advanced graphical applications.

Well met, and hasta pronto!

MyPaint tutorials

MyPaint is the program I´m using most right now, and it´s easy to understand why, once you dive into the program. It´s deceptively simple. It is in fact very powerful, but the interface is deliberately scaled down, to promote art, not technology.

Ramon Miranda is, a part from being a contributor to the brushsets in My Paint, an amazing artist in his own right. He´s made available a bunch of tutorials, concerning how to use his brushes. The first one of eight is produced below:

If you go to his profile on YouTube you´ll find the rest, and more. I´d set aside a better part of the afternoon if I were you;) This is a treasure trove of information for the budding artist.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Boy, life sure got in the way of any creativity this year so far. But let´s just pretend it didn´t happen and get on with it, shall we? This blog is a good resource, and I plan to make it better. Since I´m no longer very envolved in the 3D-community, that part of this blog will be cut down. I have bought a tablet for drawing, so expect my doodles to infest a post or two every now and then. I have some ideas for what I want to do, and I will be more transparent in my process. I want this blog to be for people who are just startin out, by someone who´s just starting out. A joint journey, if you will. I want to share my successes, and failures both. I think that is the way that works best for me. As a starter, here´s my first doodle (don´t say I didn´t warn ya!;)