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** YOU HAVE WON ** Your final score is 1000, which gives you the rank of "really proud creator." I just finished playing the game completely through from start to finish. There are voices, there are sounds and there are complete cut scenes. I know I've been all mushy about this project from day one, but the amazing thing is, I still am. I'm just as excited now, if not more so, than I was the day Mark approached me on this. Talking about it is one thing; Mark and I talked about a lot of projects back in the day. This is actually a complete story, written and animated by me, produced by Mark, featuring some outstanding performances by actual voice actors. I even wrote an ending I didn't completely hate! There's a lot to be proud of here, and I hope the internet-at-large agrees with me in the coming weeks. We start beta testing next week, barring any sudden disastrous discover this weekend, as I do my final "AAlpha test." It's been a long five months (holy crap, it's AUGUST?? There was snow on the ground when we started this!), but I've loved every minute of it. I even mentioned the word "sequel" to Mark the other day and he didn't punch me square in the face. Will there be one? You never know. I have stirrings of ideas, and we've certainly learned some valuable lessons with this. So anything's possible. The important thing is, even if I never make another game — or indeed, if I never write anything at all — again, I can rest comfortably on the accomplishment we've made here. And that's one more thing off my "things to do before I die" list. You Are Carrying: No Tea. It's hard to believe we were worried about voice casting two weeks ago. As I started seriously panicking about who was going to play my lead, Mark began trolling his own sources for voice actors. Two excellent candidates emerged from this, and it was very painful to have to choose one. As a consulation prize, the runner-up was awarded two supporting roles. But then the serious problems started. I had originally intended to do one of the voices myself, and my home equipment was proving not to be up to the task. Additionally, two of my other supporting people were having similar troubles — one because he recorded at my house. This left us with four solidly cast roles and four that were highly uncertain. Those are not odds that fill a man with confidence. Then there was The Damn Promo, which was now the official title for the one-minute teaser I'd animated a month ago and still couldn't find anyone to narrate. So I decided to take a chance, and I punched in "voice actors" into Google. I poked around a few of the more promising sites for matching up voice talent with productions in need, and thought nothing of it beyond that. Well, now it's 6 days and about 50 professional auditions later. Never mind that I clearly stated this would be a non-paying gig, or that these people would be expected to do all their own recording... tons of people seemed more than eager to be involved, on the merits of A Case of the Crabs alone! (I keep telling Mark that the New York Times thing is like money in the bank.) So, needless to say, we have plenty of voices now, all professionals. Yeah, I had to go and "fire" all my friends, but they took it really well when I explained the reasons. Everyone's still really excited (Mark and I included!), and we're really really close to being finished. About 50% of the voices are now in the game, and it remains only for me to complete the final animated scene and then for Mark to add some special effects and implement it into the game. Then we need to fill in the last few voices, music and sound effects. I imagine there will be one last run through for bugs, and then we turn it over to the beta testers! August is almost here, and I'm still as thrilled as I was at the beginning of this thing. We're learning a lot of lessons the hard way, but we've also been really fortunate in a lot of ways. I can't wait for you to see what has us all worked up. It Is Completely Dark. You Are Likely to Be Eaten By A Grue. I've been having real trouble finding someone to play the lead in this game. I had originally conceived the character as being similar to another that had already been voiced by my friend Bob. But as I explored the background of this character a little more, I realized that wasn't the case at all. So Bob was out for this guy (though in as another). Then my friend Dave — a guy with a nice deep announcery voice — came up with a perfect angle for the character: Sam Elliott from The Big Lebowski. And then Dave promptly dropped off the face of the earth. I've been trying to reach him for weeks by cell phone, home phone and e-mail, with no luck. He does this occasionally, so it's no surprise... it's just really bad timing. So I started trolling for voice people. I got thirty (30!!) volunteers at a comics message board I frequent, but most of those were of the "I've never done anything like this, I'll try it for fun" variety. We're trying our best to make this as professional a product as possible; consequently, I want the actors (especially the lead) to be as reputable as possible. I found a couple of potential candidates, and had them both audition for the role. As of this writing, I've heard from one of them, and while he's not a bad actor, he's not at all what I'm looking for. Mark has produced another candidate that fits pretty much the same description. I'm not panicking yet, but what if we can't find anyone? I'm prepared to do it myself, but I don't really want that. I think I did a decent job in A Case of the Crabs, but I only had a few lines in that. I haven't properly acted since high school (12 years ago!) and I don't know if I have the acting chops. Beyond that, I really don't want to be the writer, animator, co-developer and lead voice. I just don't. But if I can't find anyone to be my Ed, I might just have to do it. On other fronts, things are continuing to move forward. Mark finished all but one character interaction, which leaves just the cut scenes. We got into a fairly heated (for us, anyway) argument over design elements for the game site — he wanted it to be an extension of Pinhead Games and I wanted it to be an extension of the Tales of the Odd site. I ended up conceding, but only on the condition that he help me overhaul what will soon be www.talesoftheodd.com. I know this game is going to generate a fair amount of traffic for the comic, and I want everything to look nice for that eventuality. We had a second argument yesterday — this time over over the ending of the game... and once again it was entirely civil. We both saw each other's points completely, we just disagreed. We ended up coming up with a decent compromise I think. Anyway, that's pretty much it. We're shooting for a release date of August, which is a little more than a month away. I'm still excited, which is a good thing. I'm worried about a few things, but I think everything will come together in the end. I would feel a lot more like that if we had a lead voice actor though. Gas for the Chainsaw The big news this week is, of course, the New York Times article featuring the first Pinhead Games adventure, Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs. As Mark pointed out, the photo in that article is actually bigger than the picture of Reagan's casket on the front page. Oddly though, Mark didn't see a substantial spike in his web hits following that article's publication — his numbers, which are still amazingly respectable, remained pretty consistent. I guess what it did accomplish was buying that project (and all projects to come) some valuable street credibility. If I were Mark, I'd be announcing myself with "The New York Times says that Mark Darin is 'clever,' and 'amusing'" until people got sick of it. And then I'd probably keep doing it. We also had an offer from a German company to box and sell Brain Hotel when it's finished. Mark has turned this offer over to the Pinhead Games legal department (which may be small, but does actually exist) to determine its legitimacy. Even if it ends up being a total fraud, it still means that some company thought we were worth the time and effort to attempt scamming. Which tells me that, either way it goes, there's probably a few bucks that can be made from this thing. Of course, this isn't our goal. I think Mark wouldn't mind making a for-profit game in the future, but right now it's all about the smaller projects. Honing the craft. Perfecting the game engine. And giving his talented friends an opportunity to realize their creative dreams. ;) As for me, though... I've never had much interest in selling my stuff. Yeah, I published a couple of books, but that was always more about making them available than making a profit. The important lesson to be learned here involves marketability as a concept. As the aforementioned respectable numbers for A Case of the Crabs proves, there is still a healthy audience out there for adventure games. Mark's innovation of basing them in Flash tears down the barriers of special software and platform finickiness. Now there's nothing coming between the creative vision of the artists and the potential audience. That's encouraging, and yeah, a little scary. There's definitely a little pressure here — to live up to the performance of Bounty (though I've tried to avoid thinking that way so far), to continue the good name of Pinhead Games and to keep people engaged in a genre that's not quite dead yet. Like all moody artsy-types, this causes a fair amount of anguish in my mopier moments, but for the most part, it's inspiring. I'm working without a net now — no longer can I blame lack of exposure on my lack of success. Now it's all on me: this game will fail only if the material fails. And while I will freely admit that my writing appeals to a more specialized audience, I still think I'm up to the challenge. Yesterday, I recorded the first voice featured in the game, and I put the finishing touches on a 30-second promo. I'm still just as excited — if not more excited — than I was in the earliest planning stages. And that enthusiasm is exactly why I think everything will work out okay. I Can't Pick That Up! I had a week off the project — I was on a business trip in Texas — but now I'm home and we're really on a roll right now. I think this current bout of momentum should carry us to the end, which is actually in sight from here. This past week, I finished writing all the incidental dialogue: the stuff that doesn't really affect the story but should still be slightly informative or entertaining on its own. Now Mark is going through, room by room, and adding the entire range of possibilities. This means lots of frustration on both our parts, as he attempts to incorporate lots of conflicting elements into a cohesive whole, while I am faced with my own illogic at every turn. "Hey AAl," Mark will say. "In the script, Ed says 'screw you,' but in the dialogue tree, you have him saying 'never mind.' Which is it??" It's hard to remember what I came up with 2 months ago, and it make it all match perfectly. Writers would like to have you believe that they have one master vision in their head and everything perfectly fits the continuity that they've already planned out, but my experience tells me that most of those guys are lying. The fact is, most of us make things up as we go, and if we have petty annoyances like day jobs or home lives to distract us, it's hard to keep everything linear. So that's been a lot of fun. Also, now we're to the point at which the bulk of the animation is inserted into the game. We've had a working version in which the main character can wander the various rooms for some time now, but now he's beginning to be able to do more than just walk around. Each unique action requires an animation to go with it, and since I volunteered early on to animate everything in Poser, that means more work for me. I don't mind it at all — it's just that I'm not very good at it. Poser works in a very strange way. It's designed for figure animation, and in theory, all you need to do is tell it the starting position and finishing position of your character, and it extrapolates all the movements in between. Simple, right? Well, if you're just having your guy extend his arm or shake his head, sure. The problems arise when you bring outside objects into play. I spent a good 4 hours fighting with making a guy lift a bottle to his mouth and appear to drink from it. Poser kept having him shove the bottle through his cheek, then back out his mouth before he tilted it back and drank from it. Don't ask me what the computer was thinking... I'm just the talent. Only I'm not actually very talented. So yeah. We're almost done inserting the various incidental movements into each room. Then comes what I can only assume will be the most excruciating part: the cut scenes. I think Mark wants to keep the animation as limited as possible for these, which suits me fine. At ths point,I'll be happy if we go the Hanna Barbera "endless loop" route. But I'm sure it'll work out... everything has so far. I should also mention that voice casting is well underway. I have tentatively matched my available talent to roles, and I have already received an audition recording from one of them that makes me grin every time I listen. I like the game the way it is now — the voices are just gonna completely push it over the top. Just put that down as yet another thing about which I was wrong. Seems to be a lot of that on this project. A Hollow Voice Says "Fool" I keep having these really cool voice casting dreams. A few weeks ago, I dreamt that Snoop Dogg was doing the voice of... well, in the interest of not spoiling the game, I'll just call him the most over-the-top comic relief character in the game. This character was not written with Snoop in mind, but somehow my subconscious found them to be a perfect match. Then, earlier this week, I had an incredibly clear, perfectly sensible dream that involved me attending a convention or some other similar event. At this event, I had the opportunity to meet Colin Mocherie of Whose Line is it Anyway? fame, and we chatted as we walked across the parking lot to our cars. We discussed Wayne Brady's recent appearance on Chappelle's Show, and I very deftly steered the conversation toward the adventure game I'm working on. I described the premise to him, and his face brightened. He told me that this sounded exactly like the sort of thing he wanted to be working on. I think I upset him slightly when I asked if he thought Ryan Stiles would be interested too, but I hadn't scared him off the project with the question. I remember thinking about revising the game to include two bickering characters, in order to allow for the comedic rapport that I'd seen unfold over a decade of Whose Line episodes. Then, as all dreams do, it ended. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I was actually angry for a minute there, because part of my brain actually thought this whole experience was real. So yeah, we're getting to the point now where I'm thinking pretty heavily about voice casting. This is simultaneously the most exciting and the most frightening part of the process, because it means so much to me. I had actually considered not including voices at all in the beginning — partially as an homage to the earliest "silent" Lucas games and partially because I just didn't want to make the wrong choices. It's kind of like making the jump from book to movie — everyone has their own idea of what the characters are supposed to look and sound like, but once you see them on the screen, you're almost always disappointed. I know what my characters look like, and since I'm designing them, that's what they look like. I know the words they say, because I write them. I know what they sound like in my head, because I hear them speaking their dialogue as I write it. (It's just the way I think — Mark sees pictures, I hear sounds.) I'm scared that I won't be able to match what's in my head with the talent we end up recruiting. This has nothing to do with the abilities of said talent, especially since everyone I've recruited thus far is exceptionally talented. In my mind, a certain character sounds like Soundwave from the old Transformers cartoon. Another sounds like Lex Luthor from Superfriends. And a third (now) sounds like Snoop Dogg. They all have a basic frame of reference, and I'm just not sure if the actors we get can fit inside those frames perfectly. They're not supposed to anyway. This is the part where I really learn how to collaborate — to have faith in the performers, to allow some improvisation and to be able to say "that's not what I came up with... it's better!" I've spent a lot of time working on solo projects, now I need to learn to play well with others. Don't Put Your Lips On Anything So I guess I'm a control freak. The big development this week, as we start populating the game with the actual linear story, is that I hadn't actually accounted for the player doing very much. When I wrote my script, I had pictured a small sequence in the beginning, a huge cut scene after that, the main body of the game and another big cut scene at the end. Mark informed me, quite sensibly, that people are going to be frustrated if they feel like they're watching a cartoon in which they only occasionally have any input. My knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of "shut up, stupid head," but once again, he's right (damn him). So I took an entirely different approach and rewrote my script in the form of a "walk through." As I did, I tried to think from the perspective of the player, and I tried to make every closed scene as open as possible. The result is, I hope, a more entertaining experience for the player. Plus, now that I'm thinking more along those lines, I'm realizing that other bits of the game might work better if they weren't on "auto pilot." Sure, it's more work for us now... but I think it's worth it. With these new instructions, Mark is proceeding forward with making things linear. Now I'm back to the same obstacle at which I've been stuck for weeks now — cleaning up the dialogue. When I scripted this, I was concerned with story and puzzles. Some of the dialogue is halfway decent, but much of it isn't. Even into the second draft, there's much of it that I would classify as filler material. For example, if I know a character is expressing anger, but I don't want to stop my plotting momentum to get his dialogue exactly right, I'll throw in a line like "I'm angry." I then mentally flag that line for revision at a later date. Ideally, the "later date" is when I'm feeling inspired to write clever dialogue. Unfortunately, my pathetically fickle brain has yet to bless me with such inspiration. Worse than the generic dialogue, though, is my tendency to write needlessly long conversations: "What's that?" This sort of thing comes to me instinctively for some reason. I know it's crap, but it doesn't feel like crap when I'm writing it — it feels like banter. In the interest of saving time, file space and the attention span of our potential players, I need to whittle that down to something like "nice hat." Only funnier than that. And you thought I had the easier of the two jobs on this project. You Don't See Any Communication Here • I completed the first draft of the script, which was solid enough to start building production elements from. • I did the character design in Poser, the 3D modeling software I use for Tales of the Odd. • I built the game locations ("rooms") in Poser, based on stills I found around the Internet. To date, this has been the most exasperating part of the process. I suck at locating graphics on the web, much less graphics that perfectly fit my vision for the game. • I've made a few basic animation loops for Mark. The advantage of doing this all in Poser is that it's built for character animation. So not only can I make 3D representations of everything in the game, but I can also make people walk around with about 5 mouse clicks. Compared to the classic "animate everything frame by frame" method, this has probably cut our production time in half. Plus, it allows me — a guy who's all about words and has very little in the sense of visualization skills — to perform valuable work with which I would otherwise be utterly useless. • Mark has now assembled these elements (cleaned up and improved by him) into a basic "walkaround" version of the game which incorporates his newest version of the game engine. You can now maneuver the main character through the various rooms and pick up the loose (ie, not relating to a puzzle) objects. Some of the non-player characters are in place now also. A major problem we're running into so far involves what I mentioned earlier — my lack of visualization skills. I fancy myself a decent enough writer, but the written word is pretty much where my aptitude ends. I think in words and sounds, not in pictures. Had Poser not become available to me (and been so easy to use), I certainly would never have made my own comic book. What I do with Poser isn't so much art as it is building my own action figures and taking stills of them. Mark, on the other hand, is a very visual person. When he writes a scene, he knows what everything looks like and where the camera is. He can picture a scene in his head and tell you what's not going to look right before you get past the discussion phase. Naturally, then, we run into communication problems. Scripts for my comic actually say things like "there is two pages of fighting, character X wins." And that sort of thing, undoubtedly, drives Mark nuts. He's always asking me to change angles on things, or explain how a character can walk through a certain area. It would annoy me, except... he's right. Every damn time, he's right. I'm not used to collaborating, see. My comic, for better or worse, is entirely my creation, and the only person I risk annoying with my vague stage directions is me. So now I'm in a situation where I actually have to consider another person's perspective and compromise to their wishes. This is absolutely a good thing, but it is frustrating at times — I'm making my brain work in ways I never have before. Ideally, at the completion of this project, I will not only have a full playable adventure game, but also a better sense of knowing what stuff is supposed to look like before you actually draw it. This is definitely something I need. So Mark, keep whipping me into shape. It's for my own good. So You Want to Be a Hero... I have — and I think most people have this — a list of "things I want to accomplish before I die." I am, and always have been, a writer, so in addition to stuff like "see Europe" and "go skydiving," my list contains a lot of creative things I'd like to try at some point in my life. I've already written a novel, made a short film and am currently involved in the production of a comic book, so I'm well on my way to dying with no unfinished business on this earth. One item on my list always nagged at me though — "write an adventure game." Until a few weeks ago, I seriously thought this one didn't have much of a chance. After all, the genre is effectively dead these days. Also, all of the good adventure game construction packages are made for PCs, and I have a Mac. But my old pal Mark changed all that. Mark and I originally bonded over adventure games around the time we first met, which was also around the time LucasArts (then Lucasfilm games I think) released The Secret of Monkey Island. Monkey Island, if you are unfamiliar (shame on you) is the greatest adventure game ever written — it was the perfect combination of cutting edge (at the time) graphics, clever (often impossibly silly) puzzles and an interface that killed off the "manual typing" adventure game once and for all. It was the beginning of a golden age for the genre, and specifically for LucasArts. We spent many evenings huddled around my old 286, doing our own voices for the characters, trying to adapt to Rob Gilbert's screwy logic and, most of all, laughing. It was some of the best time I spent in those days. Adventure games have always been a big part of my life, and I learned a lot from them. Zork taught me to always bring a light, lest I be eaten by a grue. Monkey Island taught me to be prepared to face my enemies with scathing insults. And Kings Quest taught me that hours and hours of effort could be negated by accidentally walking off a cliff. Important lessons, all. I can honestly say, except for perhaps the Star Wars films, no entertainment had a more profound effect on me in those formative years than the games of Infocom, Sierra Online and (most significantly) LucasArts. It's a genre, as I said, that seems to be dying out — replaced by fighting game, car games, games where you fight in cars and those damn RPGs. (Side note: did you know that if you translated Everquest's economy into real money it would rank about fiftieth in the world in terms of GDP?) I don't know if the genre will ever be properly resurrected, but it seems that there's a rabid internet fan base that insists that it's still displaying lifesigns. With Mark's more-than-capable programming and producing abilities, I'm happy to say that we'll soon be part of that community. Okay, so he already is. His Nick Bounty adventure, A Case of the Crabs, was the inaugural run of what he generously calls MAAGE: "Mark and AAlgar Game Engine." (I didn't have anything to do with it, but I'm not complaining.) I can honestly say with no hint of hyperbole, that this is one of the most exciting things I have ever been involved with. I have to stop every now and then and grin like a madman when I realize what we're doing here. Mark has already put together a basic "walkaround" version of the game, wherein my character walks through all the rooms I designed. I have spent literally hours just doing that, with no real purpose. If you're one tenth as excited playing this as we are making it, you're gonna love it. |