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 About: Have you ever enjoyed a book and wanted to climb inside and explore its world? That's how I feel every time I finish a good book. So I made these games. Now you don't have to do what the author said, you are free to do what you want. Just stories, nothing else: I play games for the stories. Not fighting, not strange puzzles, not hidden objects, not shiny graphics, not voice acting, just the stories. And I want the best stories in the world, so these games are based on the classics. The greatest stories in the world: Most people are busy. Do you really have time to find and read all the world's classics? I want to make it easy. The standard download contains everything, and each game only takes a few hours to play. And starting with Monte Cristo, each game includes the full text of the original novel, in case you want to read more. The greatest art and music Enter The Story is famous for its classical music and art based on classic paintings and old woodcuts, and unique character art based on real people. The character art is highly simplified, because the real story takes place in the imagination.  Reviews: "creates the same sense of excitement, emotion and drama that was present in the original book" - adventuregamers "The ending is tremendously affecting." - gameboomers "perhaps his most compelling and enjoyable release to date." - justifiable anger And more... http://www.hardydev.com/2011/08/18/enter-the-story-the-count-of-monte-cristo-review/ And more... http://www.adventure-island.nl/reviews.php?do=view&id=143 More reviews to come... New and improved: After four experimental games, The Count of Monte Cristo represents a major step forward:  Read the
complete bookThe full text of the original novel is now available in the game - press B to read the book. Fewer bugsThe Count of Monte Cristo has been tested more than any other game. Easier controlsSome people found the right click -> right click control mechanism was confusing. With The Count of Monte Cristo, having just one central character, there is no need for double right clicking: either right or left click once for instant results! More
involvementThe game now focuses on just on one character, meaning dialog is more natural and less generic. More natural movementIn early games, only one or two characters had full movement. With The Count of Monte Cristo, there are now fifty different fully mobile sprites. Also, walking code has been rewritten and improved. Better gameplay, general
improvementsWith more focused dialog and better sprites, development time is not wasted on unproductive areas. All the development time now goes into the making the story better. Less jumping aroundIn early games, reviewers complained that jumping back to heaven and jumping between scenes was confusing and broke the flow of the game. In The Count of Monte Cristo, clues are delivered wherever you are. Also, the map and space bar arrow features are improved, making navigation easier. A faster storyEarly reviewers complained that the game felt too slow. Well not any more. :) More color and other
improvementsSome people felt that A Tale of Two Cities was too gray, so Monte Cristo has a little more color. Someone else asked if the mouse wheel could be supported for menus - done. There are other minor improvements, too numerous to mention. And moreVisit the library, talk to people, notice the improvements. And if you think anything else needs changing, let me know! Either on the forum or the blog or direct via email, or on the Facebook page. I'm listening. The developer:  My name is Chris Tolworthy. I live in a remote Scottish village (that photo was taken at the end of my street). I started planning this in 1997, released the first game in 2008, and will eventually release a new game every two months. Buy this game and save the world: All the profits from this game go to research to end global poverty. Yes, seriously. My real passion is economics, and this game exists to fund that. A labour of love: I don't compromise with the source material, I don't add anything that seriously changes the book, though I may interpret it in a modern way. All the "puzzles" are solved by doing the things that were done in the original book. So if the original text just has people wandering around spouting philosophy and theology then the game does as well - which isn't clever, commercially! But if I purely wanted money I wouldn't be doing this. Unique pricing strategy: All the games can be downloaded for just US$14.99 - with 5 games that's 3 bucks a story. As each game is released the price does not change. When all 100 stories are finished it will work out as 15c a title! I'm not aiming to compete with major Hollywood games studios, I just want to provide great stories in an easy, cheap, fun package that anyone can afford and enjoy. I used to be a great comics fan, back when comics were cheap, and I want to re-create that cheap and cheerful approach. The cast:  You might notice
that the games feature many of the same faces. There's a
deep reason for this: an underlying philosophy behind the
game, about archetypes, identity, roles and relationships,
and what makes us human. But most people aren't interested
in philosophy, so think of it as a theater company. Like
Shakespeare's "King's Players," or Orson Welles and his "Mercury
Theater." The character we first meet as Peri is the angel, she unites all the stories. The man we meet as Jean Valjean is the saint. He features in stories of unassailable character. The couple we see as Lucie and Darnay (in A Tale of Two Cities), or Valentine and Maximilien (in The Count of Monte Cristo), are the archetypal lovers. Other cast members include: the rogue (Benedetto in Monte Cristo), the snake (Caderousse), the mentor (plays Mr Lorry and Mr Morrel), the king, the zealot, the headstrong youth, the witch, the pure hearted woman, the suffering parent, the evil mastermind, the police officer, and others. They have different names in each story, but as Joseph Campbell reminded us in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," most stories tell the same tale in different ways. Incidentally, the first three stories (Les Misérables, Divine Comedy, Genesis of The Gods) are a trilogy that introduces the underlying themes and the character of Peri. The name Peri is short for peregrine, meaning foreigner or wanderer, and also the beautiful fallen angels of Persian mythology. A Lara is a spirit representing both the family and the illustrious dead in ancient Rome, with hints of reincarnation. The themes - family, Rome, return to life - will return in future games. Larris is also a tribute to Annie Larris, star of Zak McKracken and real life campaigner for all that is good. Finally, "Peri Larris" sounds like both "perilous" and "Polaris," the north star that guided ships to safety. Beginnings: This is how it all began. I've always loved comic book adaptations of classic novels. I also love how comics create their own shared world where anything can happen. Sure, movies do it as well, but comics are cheaper to make and faster to read. My childhood dream was to create a comic book universe full of the greatest stories and ideas in the world. Like the Marvel Universe, but with authors like Shakespeare and Chekhov. This is me, aged 16, planning world domination: Notice that I still had hair.  
Then in 1992 I discovered a computer game called Zak
McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. It was full of ideas
from the real world, and you could actually get inside that
world and walk around!Zak was a revelation! I looked for more games like that, but there weren't any. I waited five years and finally, in 1997, made plans to make my own game. It would combine the shared universe and easy approach of comics with the best literature in the world.  Long term I also want to cover non-fiction, from economics to global issues to news to relationships to fundamental physics - everything in the universe! Then when I get old the project will become open source so anyone can add to its world. But these are big plans, so I'm taking one step at a time. |
| 'Enter
The Story' version 0.1, 1997-2003 The original game was basically one big database that was created as you played. That is, if you opened a door, the computer would create rooms behind that door. If you examined a flower, the computer would add the details. You could go back and forward in time, zoom in to atoms or out to galaxies, and more. The working title was "Doors" or "The Endless Do Anything Game."     'Enter The Story' version 0.2, 2003-2007 I gave up the database idea, and looked round for an established adventure game engine, and Sludge seemed to be more flexible than the others. I planned to release the first game in 2012, and feature 100 stories. As time went on that goal became a more realistic ten stories and hundreds of worlds. At the suggestion of David Fox (name dropping!) I revised the plan, and decided to just release one story at a time. By April 2007 I had 5,000 scenes in the game, and a release date of December 15th 2007. 'Enter The Story' version 0.3, 2007 In April 2007 I sent an early version of the game to various people to get feedback. In general, friends and fellow amateur game developers loved it. But professional game developers - people with experience of selling games for money - said that I needed better graphics. So I began all the graphics again, from scratch. The only way to get the game finished in any reasonable time was to reduce the scene count down from 5,000 to about 130. The game would now be the first story (Les Misérables) without any of the background universe. The game was rescheduled for March 2008. 'Enter The Story' version 0.4, 2007-2008 Then a crisis hit. In November 2007 I discovered a catastrophic memory leak in Sludge that was not likely to be fixed before the game was released. With great regret I had to abandon my old friend Sludge. I could not afford any more unpleasant surprises, so chose the safest engine I could find, the market leader, Adventure Game Studio. Complete recoding meant scaling down the first release again, to 80 rooms, and adding four months to the development time. The game was now scheduled for July 2008. Testers suggested various changes, and things took longer than expected (they always do!) and the first release was finally uploaded just before midnight on December 31st, 2008. 'Enter The Story' versions 2, 3, and beyond The first story in the game is Les Misérables. The next story was due to be War and Peace, but the two delays (new graphics and new engine) had put me behind schedule. So the second release was Dante's Divine Comedy, a much easier game to create, and one that should ensure the next game is released on schedule, six months after the first. It may seem unrealistic to promise the next story after six months, considering that the first story took ten years to make! But most of that time was spent learning, and going up blind alleys. And I was not just creating a game, but a game creation system. A lot of extra time was spent to make sure that future games could be added as quickly as possible. The long term goal is to create a game every three months. In theory, each game should only take two months and the extra month is for working on my land rent site. But that's only the theory - I don't expect to reach that level of efficiency until 2011. A Tale of Two Cities and AGS 3.x The next major milestone was the release of A Tale of Two Cities in June 2010. This saw a completely different version of the programming engine, Adventure Game Studio (AGS) version 3.2 instead of 2.72. I didn't want to change, as it means people need to download previous games again (2.72 is not compatible with 3.x), but it was the only way to allow multiple languages across different games. A Tale of Two Cities was also the first game to closely connect with a previous game - it expanded the Paris of Les Misérables. And with four stories available, the project was starting to look like a game world and not just separate stories. This was also when the animated bookshelf was introduced (a static bookshelf image was used for the third game, Genesis of the Gods). Another major milestone was releasing Les Misérables as freeware. This was always the plan, for two reasons. First, the wonderful music by Paco Santiago (such as the Spanish guitar music) was only available on condition that the game would one day be free. And second of course, added publicity for the game. Simplifying the code In July 2010 the game seemed to be working flawlessly, until I got reports from a tester in Holland about intermittent crashes when moving between games. I couldn't reproduce the bug but I'd fixed similar bugs before. The fundamental problem was that I was pushing the AGS game engine much further than it was designed to go. Nobody else had ever made a game this big, and nobody else had tried linking games together. I realized that I was spending more time on the between game code than on designing the games! So at the end of July I simplified the code: the stories now work as separate games, and I am free to concentrate on what really matters: designing stories. Monte Cristo - the game matures Monte Cristo was the real coming of age. Released in July 2011, it took a lot longer than planned, mainly because I was so busy in my day job and personal life, but this release saw a number of major improvements. First, all major characters were now animated. Second, the story has more focus on the one star, which allows for a much simpler control system. This also allows for improved dialog (more focused, less generic). Finally, various behind the scenes code changes mean the game is easier to make and should need less bug testing. The future is bright! Motivation This project is a lot of work. This is what motivates me, from Steven Grant's advice to budding writers: "Everyone's looking for 'The Secret' but there ain't no secret. The way to do it is to do it, and every story, particularly if you're creating your own work from scratch and not working with an established, formulized franchise, generates its own needs. ... "[How do you cope with frequent rejection?] The answer is orneriness. ... Don't write to be great, write because you feel there's something that needs to be said that no one else will say if you don't. You want motivation: that's it. ... "Don't bother asking around to see what other people think of [your idea]. Because it's new. On what basis can anyone else judge its theoretical value? You can't even judge its real value until you see how you've executed the idea. ... "Just do it." |
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