This only appears for ten seconds at the start of the game, but I think it’s worth the effort. Extra points if you know who the dying man is.

I just got a message from someone who said the Les Miserables game crashed when visiting the prison scene, with a message about “too many sprites.” Has anyone else noticed that? This used to be a potential problem with the first version of the game (because Adventure Game Studio can only handle fifty characters per screen) so I wrote some code to make sure this could never happen in the new version. Or so I thought. I wonder if the person with the crash somehow found an old version? I’ll try to re-create the problem if I can.

This is probably the most complex new scene in the game, because I had to create it from a lot of different elements to suit story requirements. I hope I get an excuse to use it again in another game.

This is the island of Monte Cristo, where Edmund Dantes finds the treasure! I think I need to add some extra definition to the outline of the foliage behind Peri (compare the left, middle and right, it looks a little odd I think, but is easily fixed).

As you can see, I’m experimenting with adding cloud. It’s just so you can read the text when it’s in front of something detailed. The alternative, bleaching or blurring the scene, didn’t look right.

Hmm… I didn’t know that WordPress could show full size images – back when I used WordPress.com hosting they always squashed the images. Now that I host the blog on my own site it looks like any size is possible. This is worth knowing.

The Count of Monte Cristo will reuse more major characters than ever before. In particular, I plan to reuse the “star crossed lovers” from A Tale of Two Cities, but of course with different names and back story, as in the Monte Cristo book. Which means I need to emphasize the concept of archetypes in the game. My thinking is along the lines of “The Hero With 1000 Faces.”

So I upgraded the “meet the characters” page – what do you think? Does it make sense?

http://enterthestory.com/characters.html

This week I’m creating game characters from photos that people send in, so I thought I’d blog about how I do it. The actor Walter Neary kindly let me use his photo, and this is how I turned him into Edmund Dantes, from The Count of Monte Cristo.

All editing is with Adobe Photoshop Elements, using the basic controls plus adjusting “levels”. The clever bit is to use the freeware “Illustrator” plugin from the nice people at Xero Graphics. They produce the best free plugins I’ve ever seen.

There are a still a few characters to go, so if you want to be in the game (due out before Christmas) send in your photos now: for details see http://enterthestory.com/auditions.html Thanks for reading!

This will probably be Caderousse, the roughest and weakest of the four men who betray Edmund Dantes. The art needs a bit of work: when nit’s rotating you can see all the problems that aren’t obvious when the character is being drawn. E.g. his waistcoat and shoulders goes up and down, braces (suspenders?) disappear, etc. Oh, and he doesn’t have any legs. But apart from that I quite like the look. I want every character to be distinctive.

I plan to add four fully mobile actors to my little theatre with this game, and the rest will be static characters who are quicker to create. My goal is, in a year or two, to have the equivalent of a theatre troupe, reusable actors that I can use in every story, so Enter The Story becomes a kind of digital travelling theatre.

PRESS RELEASE: auditioning for parts in The Count of Monte Cristo (PC adventure game)

I didn’t see any point in staggering the press releases: when anyone visits the site they’ll see both the new game and the free game. Enough with the press releases! I’ll start a  couple of threads on adventure game boards then get on with The Count of Monte Cristo!

BTW what’s up with spell checkers? I checked the previous release three times and they still missed two typos. Oh well.

PRESS RELEASE: 22 August 2010 (as sent to gamespress.com)

Now the new game is out I’m catching up with odds and ends. This is the email I just sent out to some translators. I thought it might be of interest to others.