Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from all of us at Autumn Moon Entertainment!

Why Can't Mona Cross Lake Warg by Simply Flying? What up wit dat?

I got another letter from Confused By Mona Being a Bat and Not Being Able to Cross the Lake. She says:

Dear Bill,

How come Mona can’t turn into a bat and cross the lake? Why the need for a boat? What up with dat?

Sincerely,

Confused By Mona Being a Bat and Still Not Being Able To Cross theLlake

Vampires can’t cross running water. This is not a well known fact, but it is common for all evil supernatural creatures to be stopped by pure running water. It is why the Old North Bridge in The Legend of Sleepy Hallow stops the Headless Horseman, or why Mrs. Izard, the villainess in the book The House With a Clock in it’s Walls, couldn’t chase down Lewis & Jonathan Barneveldt and Mrs. Zimmerman that night in the car.

I first learned of this obscure fact also from an episode of the TV show Night Gallery, in an episode called Death on a Barge. Then I bought a HUGE book about vampire called, simply, The Vampire Book, and in it is said that this idea of pure running water warding of evil goes back to the ancient Greeks who believed the same.

Lake Warg is actually not a lake but a reservoir, where water pours in from many rivers and streams from the north and, then pour over the damn at Mortus Labs in the south, so the water is always flowing in Lake Warg, albeit slowly.

Hope that clears up that question, and sorry that wasn’t made more clear in the game. If you’d like to learn more about becoming a vampire or a just a weird sanguinarian or simply curious about vampires in general then I suggest you go to your local library, find one of there old, almost useless TSR 80, get on the Internet, and look it up. Or just look it up on your own PC.

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/vampires/

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!