30th Oct 2021 A beginning
A BEGINNING IS A VERY DELICATE TIME.
Know then that it was in the early 1990s, when I first laid my eyes on Ron Gilbert‘s incredible The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and its even better sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991). To this day I can’t possibly fathom how on Earth these absolute masterpieces were created only one year apart. It’s uncanny.
Ever since those times, point & click has been my favourite genre and ever since those times, I’ve dreamed of one day creating a P&C adventure game of my own.
I’m no coder. Absolutely not. When I started 3rd grade (aged 9) there was a computer classroom in my elementary school full of Macintosh Classic II computers. A few years in, around 1995, I began learning HyperCard to create the first thing distantly resembling a game. At home, my father had a PC 286, which I only used for gaming. Christmas 1995 saw a major update as we got a new PC, a Pentium 75MHz that had QBasic on it. I went through the code of some of the .BAS files it came with and taught myself some of the simplest commands that enabled me to do something of my own. Soon enough, I was creating text adventures.
By the beginning of high school I realized that my maths skills would never be good enough for making it in the video game industry. I gave up on the dream I had had for 10 years already (an eternity at that age). Nevertheless, having always been a creative, visual person, I decided to turn to films. I gathered my friends and formed a filmmaking group called Amazement. That’s also the name of my production company today. Between 2001 and 2005 we created around 10 short films, starting with Mad Tricks (2001). Try and guess the source of inspiration for that film…
Vield enjoying The Secret of Monkey Island back in 2007
In 2005, I got accepted to a film school. Soon thereafter I met Vield and together we ended up playing Notpr0n, a tough web riddle. We spent a lot of time solving its levels, found an excellent IRC community, loved everything about it and decided to make a web riddle of our own. Swell was released in June 2008. “If we can do this”, I thought, “what’s stopping us from realizing my old dream of creating an adventure game?” Vield hadn’t played a lot of adventure games before so I gave her the first Monkey Island to try. She loved it.
We put our heads together and came up with the character Sixtus Flaming who would start an epic journey from a swimming hall locker room. We had some other ideas, too, but as fate would have it, we went our separate ways and the project was shelved in the process.
luuk with his lead actor at Fantasporto 2020
Fast-forward 10+ years to the 40th Fantasporto International Film Festival in Portugal, March 2020: my first feature film, a self-funded teleportation drama I had spent 9 years making, had just won a jury prize at a major European genre festival! On Sunday, March 9, I returned home to Finland – two days later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
As you well know – as we all know – that was the historic turn of events that changed everything. Almost two years later, we’re still fighting this thing. But it was during that first crazy month – whilst searching through the supermarkets for the last available toilet roll – that I realized I needed to do something.
I had just made my dream come true: I had created a feature film of my own. I knew shooting for the stars COULD end well. With a deadly virus running loose, the whole world had just turned upside down. What better time to begin realizing my other, even older dream: the point & click adventure game!
Obviously I still couldn’t code and for the lack of practice I was even worse at maths than before. Despite all of that, as the years had gone by, I felt this wouldn’t stop me anymore. Creating an adventure game was now easier than ever: with the help of Adventure Game Studio, Visionaire or Unity with Adventure Creator and the likes, it was possible to create one without writing a single line of code. At this point, everything seemed to finally click together.
Nevertheless, I didn’t want to do this alone. After going through our old notes, spending a few days writing a synopsis for the game and noticing that ideas really started flowing, I wanted to see if it was possible to find people who would be interested to join me in this crazy undertaking – even though I had no previous experience of creating a P&C adventure game.
Well whaddaya know, the project might be crazy but people are even crazier. After a month, I had gathered around 10 people with various backgrounds, some of them with quite impressive CVs, having worked previously with multiple AAA titles and whatnot. What had they NOT done before but remembered dearly from their childhood? Exactly. P&C adventure games. While I had no previous experience, I had the mad 9-year long feature film experience to prove that I’m serious about this and I’m no quitter, so they jumped onboard. Vield joined in as well, albeit in a smaller role than before.
Fast-forward another 1.5 years and here we are. The website has now been released and work is well underway creating the game and the playable demo using Unity + Adventure Creator. And we’re doing our utmost to make sure it’s going to be FREAKING AWESOME!
As I type this, we’re in the process of setting a roadmap that will pave the way to our current goal to release the demo at some point next year.
In this devlog, I’m going to go through what it means to make a game like this. I won’t set up a strict posting schedule, so new posts will come simply when I feel like writing them. That won’t be very often, because I want to concentrate on making the game. I’m the project leader and in charge of the development, the design and the writing, while doing some work on character sprites and animation on the side. I have some experience with creating tracker music back in the day, but will leave that department to the pros! That’s just to say that I’m also very much interested in music and sound, too. They play such a crucial part in delivering the correct mood and atmosphere from scene to scene.
So, my following posts will cover a broad spectrum of topics regarding the development of a classic point & click adventure game. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll join me for the ride! 🙂
-luuk
A BEGINNING IS A VERY DELICATE TIME.
Know then that it was in the early 1990s, when I first laid my eyes on Ron Gilbert’s incredible The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and its even better sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (1991). To this day I can’t possibly fathom how on Earth these absolute masterpieces were created only one year apart. It’s uncanny.
Ever since those times, point & click has been my favourite genre and ever since those times, I’ve dreamed of one day creating a P&C adventure game of my own.
I’m no coder. Absolutely not. When I started 3rd grade (aged 9) there was a computer classroom in my elementary school full of Macintosh Classic II computers. A few years in, around 1995, I began learning HyperCard to create the first thing distantly resembling a game. At home, my father had a PC 286, which I only used for gaming. Christmas 1995 saw a major update as we got a new PC, a Pentium 75MHz that had QBasic on it. I went through the code of some of the .BAS files it came with and taught myself some of the simplest commands that enabled me to do something of my own. Soon enough, I was creating text adventures.
By the beginning of high school I realized that my maths skills would never be good enough for making it in the video game industry. I gave up on the dream I had had for 10 years already (an eternity at that age). Nevertheless, having always been a creative, visual person, I decided to turn to films. I gathered my friends and formed a filmmaking group called Amazement. That’s also the name of my production company today. Between 2001 and 2005 we created around 10 short films, starting with Mad Tricks (2001). Try and guess the source of inspiration for that film…
Vield enjoying The Secret of Monkey Island back in 2007
In 2005, I got accepted to a film school. Soon thereafter I met Vield and together we ended up playing Notpr0n, a tough web riddle. We spent a lot of time solving its levels, found an excellent IRC community, loved everything about it and decided to make a web riddle of our own. Swell was released in June 2008. “If we can do this”, I thought, “what’s stopping us from realizing my old dream of creating an adventure game?” Vield hadn’t played a lot of adventure games before so I gave her the first Monkey Island to try. She loved it.
We put our heads together and came up with the character Sixtus Flaming who would start an epic journey from a swimming hall locker room. We had some other ideas, too, but as fate would have it, we went our separate ways and the project was shelved in the process.
luuk with his lead actor at Fantasporto 2020
Fast-forward 10+ years to the 40th Fantasporto International Film Festival in Portugal, March 2020: my first feature film, a self-funded teleportation drama I had spent 9 years making, had just won a jury prize at a major European genre festival! On Sunday, March 9, I returned home to Finland – two days later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
As you well know – as we all know – that was the historic turn of events that changed everything. Almost two years later, we’re still fighting this thing. But it was during that first crazy month – whilst searching through the supermarkets for the last available toilet roll – that I realized I needed to do something.
I had just made my dream come true: I had created a feature film of my own. I knew shooting for the stars COULD end well. With a deadly virus running loose, the whole world had just turned upside down. What better time to begin realizing my other, even older dream: the point & click adventure game!
Obviously I still couldn’t code and for the lack of practice I was even worse at maths than before. Despite all of that, as the years had gone by, I felt this wouldn’t stop me anymore. Creating an adventure game was now easier than ever: with the help of Adventure Game Studio, Visionaire or Unity with Adventure Creator and the likes, it was possible to create one without writing a single line of code. At this point, everything seemed to finally click together.
Nevertheless, I didn’t want to do this alone. After going through our old notes, spending a few days writing a synopsis for the game and noticing that ideas really started flowing, I wanted to see if it was possible to find people who would be interested to join me in this crazy undertaking – even though I had no previous experience of creating a P&C adventure game.
Well whaddaya know, the project might be crazy but people are even crazier. After a month, I had gathered around 10 people with various backgrounds, some of them with quite impressive CVs, having worked previously with multiple AAA titles and whatnot. What had they NOT done before but remembered dearly from their childhood? Exactly. P&C adventure games. While I had no previous experience, I had the mad 9-year long feature film experience to prove that I’m serious about this and I’m no quitter, so they jumped onboard. Vield joined in as well, albeit in a smaller role than before.
Fast-forward another 1.5 years and here we are. The website has now been released and work is well underway creating the game and the playable demo using Unity + Adventure Creator. And we’re doing our utmost to make sure it’s going to be FREAKING AWESOME!
As I type this, we’re in the process of setting a roadmap that will pave the way to our current goal to release the demo at some point next year.
In this devlog, I’m going to go through what it means to make a game like this. I won’t set up a strict posting schedule, so new posts will come simply when I feel like writing them. That won’t be very often, because I want to concentrate on making the game. I’m the project leader and in charge of the development, the design and the writing, while doing some work on character sprites and animation on the side. I have some experience with creating tracker music back in the day, but will leave that department to the pros! That’s just to say that I’m also very much interested in music and sound, too. They play such a crucial part in delivering the correct mood and atmosphere from scene to scene.
So, my following posts will cover a broad spectrum of topics regarding the development of a classic point & click adventure game. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll join me for the ride! 🙂
-luuk
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