
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
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.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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
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
P.S. Can you send me an autographed copy of Ghost Pirates of
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
Hope that answers your question Lonely in
Next Letter is from Snoogims Manchester, of
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!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
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.
Saturday, February 6, 2010



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http://www.mixnmojo.com/features/read.php?article=autumnmooninterview
The game is apparently going to be released in February in
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
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
Saturday, November 7, 2009
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
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.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
First Ghost Pirates Trailer!!!
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
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
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
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
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
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.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
AME seeking a Publisher for A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale

Petaluma , CA - May 28, 2009 - Award winning Autumn Moon Entertainment, is looking for a publishing partner for their exciting, dark humored, new point-and-click adventure game, "A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat's Tale (AVS2)".
Autumn Moon has also published it’s first art book entitled Art of A Vampyre Story. The book contains all the painting from A Vampyre Story 1 as well as a sneak peak at A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat’s Tale. There is even a short A Vampyre Story comic book in the book as well done by character artist Jean Louis Sirois. Fans can purchase it at
The Storyline:
Mona, the unwilling vampire who is mired deep in denial, is trapped by the vindictive Dr. Riga Mortus in his secret lab in Draxsylvania. Players will guide Froderick the bat, through the macabre town of Gothford Falls, where he will encounter old enemies and make some new friends, including an inept magician- The Great Fauxdini, conceited local Goth artist- Raven Gothguy, and Jack the Gimper among many others. Mona and Froderick will explore many interesting locations, such as Dr. Legume's Home for the Sanity Challenged, an Executioner's Practice Grounds, Mortus Labs, and, the scariest of all, a tavern full of disgruntled sports fans low on beer! Help Froderick free Mona then play as Mona as she scours hundreds of shamelessly padded résumés looking for the perfect day-time guardian to watch over her when she returns to
The game will feature over twenty-five 3D characters, forty gorgeous hand-painted locations, fifteen hours of game play, and will include dialogue written by two ex-LucasArts game designers, Larry Ahren and Jesse Clark. Their experience from working on so many LucasArts classics such as Sam and Max: Hit the Road,
About Autumn Moon Entertainment:
Autumn Moon Entertainment, the best source for all things Vampyrish( www.amegames.com ) is a Northern California-based developer, founded by games industry veteran, Bill Tiller in 2004. In 2008, Autumn Moon released "A Vampyre Story" which won awards including "Best Graphic Design 2008" and "Reader's Choice: Best Gameplay, Best Animation 2008" from adventuregamers.com. Autumn Moon specialized in adventure games with an emphasis on story, art, and quality of experience. The company is completing work on "Ghost Pirates of
If you need A Vampyre Story 2 for your catalog or you just love adventure games contact AME’s Executive Producer Bill Dwyer at info@amegames.com.
To follow Vampire Story 2 on Twitter please visit http://twitter.com/avs2
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Not Another Pirate game!

So I was looking as some forums that were discussing Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, and one thing that popped up that I wanted to address went something like this ”Aw man! not another pirate game?!!” Well I agree there are a lot out there and we did pitch a lot of different game ideas and do have a lot of original ideas for games, - don’t we all really? But the game pitch that seemed to get the most traction was Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. I love pirates and I haven’t worked on a pirate game since 1997 so for me it’s been 12 years and I have been itching to do another one.
But I also think people really liked the art I did on Curse of Monkey Island and wanted to see some more of it. Lucas hasn’t done a pirate game in a while so I think publishers like DTP/ Anaconda saw that fans were lamenting this fact. So they thought that Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island might be something fans would like. And we all have to admit Pirates are pretty popular right now, so this type of game would be less risky than some of the other unusual ideas we had proposed, and would be easier to market. The Ghost Pirate idea had a lot of positives going for it.
And in this game you don’t play a clever but awkward want to be pirate nerd, instead you play ghosts. Now I love monsters and I have always wanted play one. Whenever I play a role playing game I’m always selecting to play races other than human, something that is more exotic, - something that will give me a new experience. That was the thought behind playing ghosts in this game- lets’ play from a different perspective. Yes, we should keep what worked in other games, but let’s improve on it where we can but also give the player a new perspective to help spice up a traditional genre. So if one were a ghost, would it be fun or would it be a terrible curse, or maybe both? Would it be a help or be a hindrance.
Also maybe it’s due to my Cal Arts story training, but I tend to like to make comedy adventures similar to movies like the original Batman, Iron Giant and The Incredibles- stories that have a serious plot but have a lot of comedic situations. Tim Burton, Spielberg and Bard Bird all tend to make movies like this, so they must have been an influence.
So playing as ghost, playing more than one character, and the game having a more serious tone are what I hope will make Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island stand out from other pirate games. Plus I hope it looks good to everyone as well.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Best Adventure Game of 2008 Game Light Award!

I want to thank the voters over at Game Light www.gamelight.eu for voting A Vampyre Story as Best Adventure Game of the Year! That is pretty awesome! I know AVS wasn’t perfect, and we are a young company that is still learning, but to win the awards we have for our first game is very encouraging. So thank you so much for the vote of confidence. And we promise to make A Vampyre Story 2 and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island even better!
Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island
Ok looks like the cat is out of the bag, or the Ghost Pirate is out of the harbor, or something like that. So yes, Teal Harvest is Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. Now hold your horses, the game is not
There is going to be a preview article in PC Games in
But that is all I have to say on it now. So be sure to pick up a copy of PC Games or head over to their web site.
PS The pirate on the cover is one of a few ghost pirates in the game, not the main character, nor even the villain.
PPS And the reason we made this game is because I always wanted to make my own pirate game. Over the past ten years I have been thinking about this game and DTP gave me the chance to make it. Thanks DTP!
PPPS I like making games from the monster's perspective, which seems pretty obvious now. I mean really? Who wants to play a regular human? Monsters are so much cooler!
Monday, March 30, 2009




Wow! That was fast! My mail box is totally filled with over five million emails! Thanks everybody! Our fans are awesome! So as a reward I will put the Cabal sequence back in AVS2 as a flash back. I will have to admit, Pedro was a bit miffed he wasn’t going to get a chance to do that free form jazz number. Pity. Well maybe next time. And here are a few images from that scene and storyboards.
Friday, March 27, 2009
1st Froderick Video

Oh! And by the way, we just posted a short video of everyone's favorite wise-acre bat, Froderick, in the Stuff section of the www.avampyrestory2.com web site. Enjoy!
March Blog


Autumn Moon is proud to announce that we are working on A Vampyre Story 2: A Bat’s Tale, and that we are in the last four months of our unannounced adventure game, code named Teal Harvest: Terror Beyond the Act or Power of Forming a Mental Image of Something Not Present to the Senses or Never Before Wholly Perceived in Reality (Or TH: TBAPFMISNPSNBWPR for short).
Check out our A Vampyre Story 2 web site at www.avampyrestory2.com. We haven’t announced a release date yet for AVS2 because Teal Harvest, will come out first, and we don’t want AVS2 and Teal Harvest to compete in the same quarter. So whenever Teal Harvest is released, which our publisher hasn’t announced yet (I’m hoping for a mid September release, maybe on a Saturday), then AVS2 will be released 4-6 months after that.
So some meddling kids discover the sequence 3 voice lines from AVS1, so I guess I better fess up. We did have to cut some shots and a whole FMV sequence from the game. I was considering putting in back in AVS2, though a bit altered, but now, FORGET IT! It’s totally ruined now! How dare you! I am so angry I could spit!!! So as punishment I have decided NOT to animated that scene in AVS2,….EVER! Instead, I am going to replace it with five minutes of free form jazz.
Unless….
I might change my mind if I receive 5 MILLION emails asking me to put it back in AVS2. In addition, these emails must contain a 12 page (single space) written apology, along with a solemn pledge to buy AVS2 and TH:TBAPFMISNPSNBWP when it comes out. Got that?! 5 Million! Or just six emails.
So just email those letters to billiamreallysorry@amegames.com. And I MIGHT….might consider putting it back in.or not
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Fan Homage Video of Mona
Friday, February 20, 2009
Adventuregamers.com Awards

A Vampyre Story won some awards at Adventuregames.com, http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,981 which is great considering this is our first game out the door. Imperfect as it is the game still managed to win Best Graphic Design 2008, from the editors, and won Best Animation and Best Game Play from the Readers Choice. And AVampyre Story got honorable mention in best Story, Best Writing Comedy and Drama (?), Best Setting, Best Music, Best Sound Design, Best 3rd Person Adventure Game, and Best Overall Adventure game 2008. I think we would have won best Inventory Icons too if they had that category. Maybe next year.
I also want to congratulate Tell Tall Games, http://www.telltalegames.com/ for their win for Sam and Max Season 2. Our goal is to win this award by the time we put our third game as well. You learn a lot by making mistakes, and as the saying goes the ‘The third time is the charm.”
I want to thank the editors and readers who voted for us. We really appreciate it, and are working hard to make our 2nd game even better than the first.
We also want to thank Bay Area Sound and the whole crew over there for all their hard earned awards too for AVS, Sam and Max and Strong Bad. http://www.basound.com/pages/home.html
The games that I am going to pick up are Mystery case Files: Return to Ravenhearst, The Lost Crown: A Ghost Hunting Adventure, The Immortals of Terra: A Perry Rhodan Adventure, The Path of the Dragon, and of course Sam and Max Season 2.
Also the Aggie award itself is done in an art style fans of A Vampyre Story and Curse of Monkey Island might find familiar.
Last Blog Entry Link Here
For lame technical reasons that I am too embarrassed to go into I made a new AME blog page. But here is the link to the old one. http://autumnmoonblog.blogspot.com/

