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"The Secrets of Monkey Island" 30th anniversary livestream with Ron Gilbert


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On 10/31/2020 at 9:20 AM, Scummbuddy said:

....and yet, Adventure Game Studio is more than capable of doing this and is also free and available today.

Plus, if you want your game in ScummVM, there's Wintermute (it even has 2.5D capabilities ala Grim Fandango).

 

SCUMM is certainly fascinating to play around with (I've dabbled in ScummGEN when I compiled and added some missing pieces to the ScummGEN Indiana Jones fan game), but if you really want to make adventures, there's plenty of modern tools out there.

Edited by Jenni
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2 hours ago, Jenni said:

Plus, if you want your game in ScummVM, there's Wintermute (it even has 2.5D capabilities ala Grim Fandango).

 

SCUMM is certainly fascinating to play around with (I've dabbled in ScummC when I compiled and added some missing pieces to the ScummC Indiana Jones fan game), but if you really want to make adventures, there's plenty of modern tools out there.

 

What do you think of the european software Visionaire? I'm thinking of giving it a go after trying Unity's plug-in Adventure Creator.

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I think it's less about having a tool to make adventure games. You are right, there are much easier tools today.

But the idea to make a game in an old engine is incredibly thrilling to me. The thought of someone making a brand new SCUMM game that can be played on floppy disks on 30 year old machines sounds wild to me.

Edited by Marius
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3 hours ago, Marius said:

I think it's less about having a tool to make adventure games. You are right, there are much easier tools today.

But the idea to make a game in an old engine is incredibly thrilling to me. The thought of someone making a brand new SCUMM game that can be played on floppy disks on 30 year old machines sounds wild to me.

As a historian and president of a computer museum, I would absolutely love to have the tools for archival and preservation purposes.

 

But, as a developer and gamer - there actually already are tools to make a brand new SCUMM game that can be played on floppy disks.

 

ScummGEN already can create fully playable games in SCUMM that can be played in ScummVM on one of the many platforms it supports or with the Day of the Tentacle executable in DOS.

 

I accidentally originally said I used ScummC above. It was actually made in ScummGEN. I tried to play around with ScummC to add the triangle puzzle to OpenQuest for SCUMM using a simplified routine I discovered when I converted OpenQuest to Wintermute, but I couldn't get it to compile.

 

Here's the link for the very short playable game written in SCUMM that I alluded to above (note that it was created by the ScummGEN team - I just compiled it, added some missing elements, and fixed some bugs). If you're interested in seeing a SCUMM game created with publicly available tools, the game is here: https://jennibee.itch.io/indiana-jones-and-the-call-of-thunder

 

The source code is also here, if you're interested: https://github.com/JenniBee/callofthunder

 

3 hours ago, vandands said:

What do you think of the european software Visionaire? I'm thinking of giving it a go after trying Unity's plug-in Adventure Creator.

I haven't personally tried Visionaire Studio, but I've heard good things about it, especially its robust and easy to use interface.

 

If you're looking for something with a modern environment that's robust and easy to use, one engine that I have used and heartily recommend is Godot combined with the adventure game framework, Escoria, That engine and framework were used to create the awesome adventure game, The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy, and it's also the engine we used for the 2nd and 3rd place picks during the community prototype portion of Amnesia Fortnight 2017.

Edited by Jenni
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1 hour ago, Jenni said:

I haven't personally tried Visionaire Studio, but I've heard good things about it, especially its robust and easy to use interface.

 

If you're looking for something with a modern environment that's robust and easy to use, one engine that I have used and heartily recommend is Godot combined with the adventure game framework, Escoria, That engine and framework were used to create the awesome adventure game, The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy, and it's also the engine we used for the 2nd and 3rd place picks during the community prototype portion of Amnesia Fortnight 2017.

Thank you so much for those links, I'm from Buenos Aires and a friend of mine knows the people behind the argentine studio that made Dog Mendoça; I will definitely check Godot and Escoria out!!

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15 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

ScummGEN seems really lacking in documentation? How did you understand how to use it? 

 

ScummC seems far more fully featured and easier to follow.

Both are really programming-intensive as they require at least a moderate amount of C language knowledge to use. They both are feature-rich in the games they can make though and feature most of the SCUMM functions.

 

I never could get ScummC to compile using GCC for Windows. I primarily use macOS now, which is *nix based, so it might be fun to try to do it again on my current machine.

 

In order to compile and use ScummGEN, I pored over the C source code in order to see how it actually functioned, which is admittedly not a skill that a lot of people who want to make SCUMM games would have.

 

The actual scripting language is still SCUMM though, so once you go through the hard part of actually getting the compilers functioning properly, it's not a hard language to come to grips with.

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  • 2 weeks later...
5 hours ago, ATMachine said:

Frank Cifaldi just posted THIS on Twitter.

 

The source is apparently Game Player's PC Strategy Guide Vol. 3 No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1990), which is sadly unscanned on the Internet.

 

 

I dig this screen a lot! Copy pasting my thoughts from Twitter.

 

I love this alternate shot and am intrigued how it feels cutting to it after the title screen, as it’s a direct reverse shot instead of a „zoom in“. Plus the setting sun appears in the following room, the dock. The whole sense of space must‘ve felt very different. Also the gate framing the screen is really cool.

 

Bummer that room isn't in the source files, I would've loved to plug that back into the game.

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That perspective also gives us a great view of the back of the lookout's head, which got a makeover with a more orderly bald spot in the VGA version.

 

In the scan it looks like the lookout's sprite is a bit different, too - the edges of his coat appear to be dark blue rather than gray.

mi1baldlookout.png

mi1baldlookoutvga.png

Edited by ATMachine
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8 hours ago, ATMachine said:

Frank Cifaldi just posted THIS on Twitter.

 

The source is apparently Game Player's PC Strategy Guide Vol. 3 No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1990), which is sadly unscanned on the Internet.

mi1altlookoutscreen.jpg

Whoa! What a beautiful shot! I really love the atmosphere and lighting effects! I understand the zoom in effect the original game did, but wow, I think I actually prefer this version now.

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From an old interview Mojo conducted with Mark Ferrari:

 

Quote

Speaking of space constraints, what types of challenges did that create for the art aspect of the game?

Oh, there were some nifty BGs left lying on the cutting room floor – as always - before it was over, including one scene looking straight down over a cliff edge down a long zig zag wooden cliff face staircase at the pirate village at the cliff's base. Alas, we illustrators are born to kill half our children for 'de man'.

 

It immediately sprung to mind when this alternate angle was shared, but Ferrari seems to be describing yet a third background related to this location.

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14 hours ago, ATMachine said:

Frank Cifaldi just posted THIS on Twitter.

 

The source is apparently Game Player's PC Strategy Guide Vol. 3 No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1990), which is sadly unscanned on the Internet.

mi1altlookoutscreen.jpg

Wow, this is an amazing use of the EGA palette.

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1 hour ago, Udvarnoky said:

From an old interview Mojo conducted with Mark Ferrari:

 

 

It immediately sprung to mind when this alternate angle was shared, but Ferrari seems to be describing yet a third background related to this location.

That room sounds amazing! It fits to the vibe that I get from the town of Mêlée, which is this huge virtual place that is full of life. I can imagine how the team just went crazy with it and had tons of more rooms/screens planned/sketched.

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