So here we are again. Another month, another exciting trip to adventure game land with Lizo.
If you remember, last month’s edition of testgame.exe: Making the Adventure included a poll for a critically important issue: whether or not to continue to include voices in TestGame. Well, folks, the ballots are in, the votes have been tallied and a decision has been made: The voices are gone. I had already been leaning this way for a little while, and input from various outside sources (i.e., not just people who are actually involved in the game) confirmed that this is the right choice to make. I may decide to re-record all the voice acting at the end of the game production (i.e., in the year 2067), but that will just have to wait.
For those of you who are now planning to throw yourselves out of the next window you come across, the voice acting that already existed is still technically programmed into the game. If you reeeeally want to hear the voices, you can just put any of the previously released speech.vox files into the same folder as the current testgame.exe file, and the voices will be there for your enjoyment. But this is completely up to you.
So, there’s one hefty decision taken care of. As far as actual game progression, you may be happy to know that the story continues to plod along. While nothing actually plot-related happens in this updated version of the game, there is a new room to explore, some new dialogue to play with, and new things to look at. There’s also an awesome uniform.
And in case you were wondering, there’s also actually a bunch of stuff that’s in the process of being implemented but didn’t make it into the game for this month’s version. I’ve been working on putting in something earlier in the game which I purposely left space for but hadn’t got around to doing yet. This will involve new items which won’t come into play until much later in the game, so look for this (hopefully) next month.
But for now, check out the stuff that’s actually in the game!
(no extra programs needed to run this file)
Things to do/new features of note:
- New Room! It’s really crappy looking, but it’s there. Continue down the path and you will arrive at the castle! (well, the outside of it anyway) There’s some stuff to do there, but not much.
- New Character! In the new screen! He says next to nothing, and he really isn’t important at all. But look how pretty!
- Fixed a major problem at least two people have mentioned to me: It’s now much easier to interact with the object on the floor in the cave of thorns side room. I essentially made the clicking radius bigger, so that should make people happy.
- No more voice acting. At least for now.
All the graphics and design are by Lizo. The dialogue was written by Lizo, with significant input by Paul. Paul is voiced (appropriately) by Paul Franzen. Lily is voiced by Lizo. Thurston and the vine are voiced by Matt Gardner. Artie is voiced by Matt Keels. Omar is voiced by Jenny. “Lets’s Go Skateboard” is written and performed by The Word Problems. Adventure Game Studio (the program used to create this game) can be downloaded at http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
