Letters from Fans About AVS Year One

Greetings All,

So I got a few letters from people asking me some questions about A Vampyre Story Year One, our new episodic iPhone/ iPad game we are working on. So let me answer a few. This first one is from Lonely in Tampa.

Dear Bill,

I hear you are making a new game just to make a buck, and reuse all the old art from AVS1. Man! What a rip off. You suck!

Sincerely,

Lonely in Tampa.

P.S. Can you send me an autographed copy of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island?

Well if I ever got my contractually obligated free copies from DTP, I would…or would I? Hmm….

Anyway to your first point. Uh, like, yeah! We would like to make some money, no duh! That is the point of doing business. But the other reason we want to make this game is because…wait for it….we like being creative! Yep, I said it. CREATIVE. We like making stuff up. It’s really fun. You should try it some time Lonely in Tampa. If we were to reuse all the old art from AVS and AVS2 we would be severely limited in how creative we could be, so most of the art for all the AVS Year One Episodes will be original. We will reuse the models for recurring characters like, say, Mona, Froderick, and Shrowdy for example (possibly Inky too). But to explore Draxyslavnaia, it will require new character models, animation, backgrounds, props and music. Plus our rigger needs SOMETHING to do besides script. So, no, this isn’t an excuse to recycle old art to make a quick buck.

Hope that answers your question Lonely in Tampa, and I hope you aren’t lonely for very long. I suggest you buy a ferret.

Next Letter is from Snoogims Manchester, of Poughkeepsie, New York. She writes:

Hi,

I am a 6 years old girl. Can you make a game about cute kittens? Please!!!I love Kittens.

Love,

Snoogims Manchester

Aw! She said ‘love!” That is soooo cute! J And NO, we aren’t going make a game about STUPID god damned kittens. Screw that!

Actually, now that I think about it, I might be able to come up with game based on that idea…Let think about it for a while and I’ll get back to you! Thanks for the inspiration!

Next, speaking of other game ideas, we have a letter from Concerned You aren’t Focusing On One Game. He writes:

Dear Autumn Moon,

You mentioned you have a lot of games your working on. Man! Laaaay-aim. Work on one game at a time! Seriously! You have to FOCUS! Just work on A Vampyre Story Year One, not whatever else you said in the interview. Don’t be lame.

Sincerely,

Concerned You aren’t Focusing On One Game

Well CYAOOG I'll do my best not to be lame. And really, we can only focus on one game at a time, trust me. So you needn’t worry. But for the past ten years I have come up with ideas for about ten adventure games and I would ultimately like to work on them all. And we have done some art and design on them so that when a publisher contacts us about doing a game with them we have some ideas ready to pitch to them. They are called pitch documents and developers have to have a few of them lying around, so when one game ends they have some idea of what they are going to pitch next. For example we pitched a gothic horror, pirate and retro sci-fi game to DTP. They naturally picked the Pirate game because Lucas Arts at the time wasn't interested in Monkey island anymore.

So if AVS year One takes off and we can afford to do other games we have many ideas to chose from. I love AVS but I have other ideas too. So have no fear we are focused, like a laser!

Well that is it for this week. Keep those letters coming to billt@amegames.com, and I will try to answer your questions on this blog as soon as I can.

Thanks!

Happy Halloween Everybody!

CASTLE WARG, Draxsylvania (October 31, 2010) – At last, episodic vampires! Autumn Moon Entertainment unveils A Vampyre Story: Year 1, the macabre point-and-click adventure series for the iPad, with PC versions to follow.

Mona, opera-starlet-turned-vampire, and Froderick, wisecracking bat, return in this episodic prequel to the award-winning A Vampyre Story. Help the pair explore more of Castle Warg and Draxsylvania™, solve fiendish puzzles, and outwit hideous new creatures. The Year 1 series will stave off ravenous fans till the official sequel, A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat’s Tale, hopefully ships next fall.

See amegames.com.com and facebook.com/avampyrestory for more. For all inquires about A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat’s Tale, please Contact Crimson Cow.

The International House of Mojo asked me to do an interview about Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island for them and here is a link to it right here.

http://www.mixnmojo.com/features/read.php?article=autumnmooninterview

The game is apparently going to be released in February in the United Kingdom.

http://www.mamba-games.co.uk/ghost-pirates-vooju-island-p-51.html

The good folks at Mixin Mojo have patiently waited for me to get this interview done and I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks guys. So head on over and check it out.

Also I have noticed some similarities between our game and the Tell Tale's Monkey Island game- we both have leviathans and we both have mermaids, and it is a coincidence. I had no idea that TT was even making an MI game until December 2008 and at which point we had already been working on Ghost Pirates for about a year. So neither one of us copied the other. We both just wanted to add something new into the pirate game mix and we just thought up the same things at the same time. It happens all the time. I am sure the makers of the TV show Weeds and Breaking Bad have the same issues sometimes (And like TOMI and GPOVI, they are both good shows).

So our mermaids are called Muriel and Queen Aguaphina, and our leviathan is called Levy. See the posted images of the concept art. Muriel is a spoof on Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and Levy was inspired by ancient maps that had illustrations of all sorts of weird and ferocious looking sea monsters illustrated in the margins.

Also I called it Vooju Island because Voodoo is a real religion and I wanted the freedom to make up rules about my own voodoo-like religion. Plus I didn’t want to offend anyone in the voodoo religion and then feel stabbing pains all over my body form having my voodoo doll pricked by pins, or have my name painted in chicken blood on a miniature coffin and have a zombie come try and kill me- you all saw that episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker right (download it on iTunes)? Well I have my salt, red brick dust, sewing kit and white candles ready just in case. Bring it on, zombies!

I was looking at my new iPhone today, a birthday present from my family, and I saw an email about Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island coming out in Germany today. I am so happy it finally made the shelves. If someone over in Germany could take a picture of it on the shelves I would appreciate it. I want to congratulate my awesome team for all the hard work they put into it.

I also heard there was a new trailer, but that some people didn't like the FMV animation. To meet our deadline I decided that we should focus on the programming and in game animation, and if we had to make cuts we would do it in the FMVs (full motion videos). The FMVs only make up 15 minutes of a ten hour game. I was talking with Ron Gilbert one day and he said “cut scenes are the least important part of an adventure game," and that I should "keep them to a minimum and focus on the game. Players are just going to skip them anyway.” Coming from a background in traditional character animation I was a bit bummed to hear that, but I reluctantly agreed that what he said made sense, so that is what we did. Not to say all the in game animations are perfect but we definitely put more time and effort on those.

Also we learned a lot from making our first game, A Vampyre Story. We improved the in game dialog, voice acting, the puzzles, the programming and scripting. Although not perfect, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is, in my opinion, a much more ambitious and improved product over our first one. I hope you agree.

Have a merry Talk Like Ye Pirate Day

Arrrgh! Have a merry Talk Like Ye Pirate Day lads and lasses!

First Ghost Pirates Trailer!!!

Sorry for the long absence between posts. Been busy finishing up Ghost Pirates, mostly cut scens and bug fixes. Spekaing of, here is a link to our game's first trailer. Let me know what you think. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvqPrYgjexo&fmt=22

SOMI, TOMI and GPOVI

Ha! My plan worked!!!

What plan might you be asking? The plan to get Lucas Arts to make more adventure games, especially Monkey Island.

 

B*U**LL SH**IT! You might say.

 

Well it’s true! Really! You see, like many reading this, I was not all that thrilled when Sam and Max Freelance Police got canceled. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Why cancel a perfectly good game that was 70% complete and looking good to boot? I tried to get that game bought by a persons who I later discovered was.. how should I put it…"A bit naïve.” Sorry about that everyone. No good deed goes unpunished. ( I think that saying should go on my grave.)

 

Then Jim Ward later said that Lucas Arts wouldn’t do another adventure game till the 2015 or something similar, and the really irked me as it may irked you too. So at that point I was on a mission to prove that adventure games weren’t dead and that if Lucas Arts didn’t make another Monkey Island game then I would!…less the Monkey Island IP of course.

So I thought about this. Lucas won’t pay anyone to make a monkey island game, and they won’t sell the IP rights neither. What to do, what to do?

Well then I remembered a conversation I had with Larry Ahern back in 1998 about the idea of doing episodic adventure games, not one episode at a time, but three to five episodes on one disc. He said Tim Schafer would love to do another adventure game if the development time weren’t so damn long. So Larry and I got to thinking, what if we had Guybrush, Elaine, and Le Chuck all hangining out at the SCUMM bar telling their stories, and each story was it’s own adventure game that was kind of linked. Then we’d have three different Project leaders each with their own little team doing a little episode, then the company would pack them up and sell them as one big game. I thought we could call it, ironically, Tails of Monkey Island or Tales, if the pun was too stupid, which it was apparently.

 

Well that didn’t get farther than just talk that day. But it got me to thinking,- it would be fun to play other characters beside Guybrush, sort of like Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle or Maniac Mansion. So while working on Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine I started coming up with ideas for Mi4 where you played Elaine (possible pregnant ala the movie Fargo), Guybrush, and Guybrush junior, their son. And then I thought it would be cool to make it in real time 3d because the Indy game we were doing at the time was looking pretty good.

 

So just for fun I asked Mai Nguyen to build me a 3d Guybrush from CMI, and asked Reed Knight to build the Barbary Coat barber shop from CMI in 3D,and we threw it into the Indy game. It looked pretty cool. We kept it in as an Easter egg. And I evene demo it for Sean Clark and Mike Stemlle before they started on EMI.

 

But sadly I wasn’t allowed to be involved in EMI, even though I badly wanted to,- too busy on Indy Infernal Machine- which bummed me out considerably. So I realized at that moment I was never going to get to work on a MI game again. : (

 

Unless….I made my own! : )

 

Well at first I had this vampyre game idea I wanted to do, but in the back of my head I kept mulling the three player MI-like game in my head. Who would the three pirates be exactly? What do they have to do? Then I thought it would be cool to play cursed ghosts, like the members of Le Chuck’s crew. So that is when I decided , yes, I’ll make a MI inspired pirate game, but instead of a geeky kid at Disneyland/ Big whoop™ wishing he was a pirate, I’ll make three cursed pirates who start off as ghosts. But that is far as I got, and then I put the idea on the back burner for about six years.

 

Six years later…

 

In the summer of 2007 DTP knocked on my door and said “Got any game ideas?” Yes I did! ...About twenty or so, but I narrowed it down to four. At the last minute, I thought, why not throw in the Monkey Island inspired Ghost Pirate games just for $h***!ts and giggles? Then the AME team spent a week brainstorming the game based on my simple premise, and viola! We came up with the basics of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island.

 

So I pitched all the game ideas to DTP and they picked the ghost pirate game, which isn't surprising because, like me, they were fans of Monkey Island and were annoyed that Lucas had seemed to abandon the franchise. So why not make a game similar, but do some new fun things with it since we aren’t restricted by any established IP?

 

So I wanted to make this game for two reason, because as a fan of MI I wanted to make my own MI like game, and second I wanted  to show Jim Ward that he shouldn’t abandoned MI license, -that the MI series would still be a viable IP, would still make Lucas Arts money.

 

So you see? It worked! A month after Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is announced, not just one, but two Monkey Games are announced!

 

Oh alright. I admit it. Maybe I had nothing to do with it. Maybe George Lucas just realized Jim Ward was, maybe possible, just ever so slightly…WRONG!!! But the cool thing is the fans REALLY win here no matter how or why the MI games got made. Fans get Secret of MI with sound, voice and new take at the old graphics, they get an episodic down loadable game with real time environments from Tell Tale, and in January they’ll get a retail CD, full game, with hand painted backgrounds in the CMI style, but with a whole new story line and new characters, and you get to play ghosts and switch between three main characters. So as a huge MI fan I consider this a win, win, win! I hope other Monkey fans do to.