Hello all, Its blogging time again and school project side note time again. So recently in V25SP Story Thru Media (COM-1180-VO03) for the W04 Weekly Discussion -- "What if", we took a look at our favorite films and reframe them as "what if?" statements. We also discussed our own what if ideas and for mine I shared this:
Now, this idea I had isn't just one I made Up for the assignment, Its actually something I'm using for a personal project in my spare time I've been trying to work on. That project is to design a game that's meant to be superior to a genre that's I have somewhat of a disdain for: The Visual Novel genre.
The Backstory
It all started, with a LetsPlay. Picture the scene: The year is 2015, the place is the tiny town of Del Rio Texas, and I'm just a 12 year old in middle school. One day I come across a video posted by this guy, Kenneth Charles "Ken" Morrison, better known as CinnamonToastKen.
While today he's mostly known for reaction content, back then he was still mainly focused on LetsPlays. This was at a time when LetsPlay channels were huge and channels like Markiplier and PewDiePie were incredibly popular. Ken was no acceptation. By the end of 2014 alone, He had around 1.37 subscribers and over 600 thousand daily views, playing everything from Outlast and Resident Evil to Gmod and Surgeon Simulator.
But on Feb 3, 2015, he uploaded a LetsPlay video of a game called Sakura Angels. Now, I can't remember the exact day I watched the video, whether it was the original upload date or later on, But what I do remember is seeing flaws in the game immediately, even in the thumbnail. Now before we continue and I actually insert that video here for you to experience yourself, I will give a warning that the game and in turn the video does contain some lewd imagery (Or NSFW imagery if you want to be hip).
OK, So Problem #1, There is nothing moving at all. No animation in the game whatsoever. the backgrounds and characters are just static images. the only movement comes from the occasional camera shake and characters fading away to be replaced with a version with a different facial expression.
Problem #2, There no voice acting or even sound effects, just crap music! The only feedback you get is the text box at the bottom of the screen to give you the games equally bad story.
Problem #3, And this is very obvious from the thumbnail, The game make use of sex appeal, quite a lot of sex appeal, In fact there's at least 1 time you see a character in some kind of sexualized pose and or outfit. Now, the idea of sex appeal in video games is nothing new, There's games like Tomb Raider, Dead Or Alive, and there were even models on arcade game flyers back in the 1970s and 80s. Is it problematic? Yes, but for the most part it's not a big deal for most people, and I have nothing against it. The problem is the story really doesn't do it any favors, and to me, The girls aren't sexy, they're creepy!
Let's just break it down for a second: The main character's walking to school. Suddenly he encounter's a monster. Now your given 2 options: Stand your ground or Run away. Now let me ask this, If you were in this situation, you come across a monster 3 times your size, and you have no weapons on you, WHY IN THE FLYING CHICKEN MCSPAGHETTI F*** WOULD YOU EVEN CONSIDER STANDING YOUR GROUND AND FIGHTING?! I mean if it didn't look that tough or something yeah I get it, but the way this thing was described, you'd be lucky to survive standing still, let alone throwing a punch. Then finally, the main attractions start showing up with the first "Money shot" (After the 14 minute mark by the way!). They don't even really explain anything in detail, even saying to deliberately explain only as much is needed. I'm sorry, but your supposed to be secret guardian angel's and you suddenly reveal yourselves, I'm pretty sure a full explanation of everything is in order no ifs ands or buts about it! After a little more dialog your given yet another choice: You can conclude these girls are real or they're nuts. Now again, if you found people on the street looking and talking like this in real life, Why would you not going to call them nuts? I mean yeah, you did get into a tussle with a monster, but maybe you somehow imagined the whole thing or something, I mean you cant always come to far out conclusions. Plus, real or not, if this happened in real life you'd probably calling a mental hospital for these girls, as well as yourself.
Think all this is bad, don't worry, It gets far worse! because as the Ken's second playthrough reveals not only do they end up following him and posing as students, THEY END UP LIVING IN HIS HOUSE! Seriously, they dont even ask him they just burst right on in without him knowing all for yet another "money shot"! OK at this point if this was me, I'd end up just calling the cops! Thats just invasion of privacy to me!
And finally Problem #4, the whole games design and look is just plain outdated! And its not just a problem with games from Winged Cloud, The horney idiots behind this atrocious trainwreck of a video game series (Yeah did I mention there's a whole series of Sakura games with basically nothing different to this other than some minor plot and setting differences? God help us all!), its a lot of games in the Visual Novel genre, especially those that use the engine that powers most of them: RenPy, A specialized version of the Python designed specifically for this purpose.
What do I mean by this? Well have a look at the computer below, This is a Dell Dimension 2400, It came out in 2003, and it's your typical Windows PC from the early to mid 2000's. Below it, is some gameplay of the first game written in RenPy: Moonlight Walks, released in 2005.
Now, let me show you a different computer, This is an Apple II+. It came out in 1979, and was sold between June of 1979 and December of 1982. This was essentially an upgraded version of the original Apple II, which came out in 1977 and was the first computer from Apple (For those that don't know, this was what Apple sold before the Mac).
Now this is one of the games available for it: Transylvania, designed by Antonio Antiochia, and published by Penguin Software in 1982.
Now booting up the game, your greeted by the title screen and after a few seconds we're greeted with the option to load a saved game. I don't have any on this disk, So I'll type N for No. Next it askes what your name is and next of kin. After that it it gives a message saying: Far away, A clock strikes 12. (Press a key to continue). Once you do that, suddenly were greeted by a very familiar looking interface a picture of the environment and some descriptive text at the bottom. Now granted, this is a little different in that you actually have more control of the character and actually have to make him move and interact with the environment (Something you barely do AT ALL in Sakura Angels by the way, making this a big plus over that!), but the basic idea is the same.
Not only that, but during the game there's a werewolf that follows you until you collect a pistol and ammo to shoot it. Now just have a look at how it appears:
Are you starting to see the problem yet? I mean there is barely anything in these games that you cant do on a modern pc, that you cant do on an older computer like this. In fact, I would bet money that you could recreate a whole RenPy game on the Apple II, and other than the lower resolution graphics and less text space, there really wouldn't be that much of a difference!
Now lets back up a little bit here because this isn't just a coincidence is some connection between this and visual novels. You see, Transylvania is whats known as a Graphical Adventure game. and that means it's an a graphical version of a traditional text adventure game which involve interacting in the exact same way, By typing action commands into the computer to see what happens next. Now Graphical Adventure games are INDEED directly responsible for inspiring The Visual Novel genre. In fact the first Visual Novel game, Enix's Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (Or more commonly known in English as The Portopia Serial Murder Case) showed up just 1 year later in 1983.
But I think to in order understand how Visual Novels ended up coming to be we need to go back and look at their history in a little more detail.
The History Of Visual Novels
A wise man once said: You have to know the past to understand the present. And that is a saying that can very much apply here, as in order to understand how Visual Novels ended up being the way they are, we need to look at what came before them. Both the interfaces of Visual Novels and Graphical Adventures have one common ancestor, and that ancestor came about as a result of a paper published in 1950. In 1950, British computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper called: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester.
In it, he proposed that in order to prove that a computer could simulate the process of human thought, it would need to produce replies to questions that would be indistinguishable from a human. If an observer could not tell the difference, the computer would pass the test. This soon became known as the Turing Test, and it was a major influence on the development of Artificial Intelligence.
In 1964, Dr Joseph Weizenbaum, A computer scientist and professor at MIT, created a program to study communication between humans and machines using the Compatible Time-Sharing System (Or CTSS) on the School's IBM 7090 mainframe computer.
Using a specially designed programing language called MAD-SLIP, He created a program that used scripts to use a pattern matching system to create the illusion of understanding. One script he used was called DOCTOR, which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist.
Inspired by the character Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion (and the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, which was very popular at the time), He called the program ELIZA, and had it set up to use between 1964 and 1967. It was the first one of the first chatbot programs, one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test, and was a major breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence research.
It also laid the ground for the main iterface for early adventure games, The Text Parser. With this interface, a user could type a sentence, and have the computer reply back. It was this basic interface concept that would help create the adventure game genre as a whole.
Fast forward to 1975, and 4 miles away from MIT, A programmer named William Crowther is working for working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. (Or BBN), A Military defense contractor made up mostly of MIT students, which developed the ARPAnet for the U.S. government (A precursor to the modern Internet), When he has the idea to write a game on the companies PDP-10 computer.
Inspired by his and his ex-wife Patricia’s exploration of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky and the then new roleplaying game Dungeons And Dragons, He created a game called Colossal Cave Adventure and it makes its debut through the ARPANET a year later in 1976.
This took the basic concept of text interface of ELIZA, but rather than use it to discuss problems with A Rogerian psychotherapist, here your using it to navigate around the sprawling cave system and collect treasures and items.
Now, I don't know whether Crowther actually did base his Text Parser on ELIZA or not, but considering BBN's MIT connections and the fact that there was a copy of ELIZA on that PDP-10, its very likely.
Either way the game became a massive hit, and through ARPANET, managed to make its way on to many university mainframes. It was also on one of those mainframes that it would get additions to make it more popular. In 1977, Don Woods, A student at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University, expanded the game with Crowther’s permission, adding compelling location descriptions. Once again, access to the mainframe running the program through the ARPANET allows the program to become very popular among university students across the country.
Around the same time, the Micro Computer Revolution was under way. With the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET being sold to average consumers instead of just computer hobbyists, scientists and engineers, it gave the average person access to computers for the first time.
Soon, programmers began making their own Colossal Cave Adventure type games, and in turn, ushering in the rise of text adventures. Floridan Programmer Scott Adams (No, not the creator of Dilbert) creates Adventureland For the TRS-80 in 1978 as well as a whole series of text adventures, produced by his company Adventure International (Which he runs with his wife Alexis), Gordon Letwin created a home version published by Microsoft (Known as Microsoft Adventure) for the TRS-80 and Apple II in 1979, and MIT students Dave Lebling and Marc Blank create Zork in 1977 and later sell it through their company Infocom in 1980.
However these were all still text based, without any graphics at all. Now since Colossal Cave Adventure was originally designed for machines like the PDP-10, It would be more than likely the user would be using a either a Teletype, or a Glass Teletype Terminal which would only be able to display ASCII text. So there wasn't possible or even neccisary to have graphics or sound when the terminals didn't have any. But with home computers offeringn the option for bitmaped graphics, suddenly games became a lot more basic looking.
However all that would soon change, Enter Ken Williams and his wife Roberta, A husband and wife duo from Simi Valley, California.
Ken worked as a programmer and a computer consultant for companies like IBM, and Roberta was a traditional homemaker: Cooking, cleaning and taking care of their 2 children, but with a love for fairy tales and story telling. In 1979, Ken formed a small company called On-Line Systems to provide computer consulting, and writing business software for the TRS-80 and Apple II.
One day, Ken had brought a teletype terminal home for programming an income tax program, and while looking through the host system's software catalog, discovered it had a copy of none other than Colossal Cave Adventure. He encouraged Roberta to join him in playing it, and she was enthralled by the game. Soon after, Ken brought a TRS 80 home, and Roberta played through other text adventures by Scott Adams and Softape. After finishing them all, she gets the idea to write her own. Inspired by the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None and the board game Clue, she comes up with the Idea of a Murder Mystery game where players would need to roam a mansion and avoid traps.
Only problem, She lacked the programing skills to make her vision possible, She knew she had to get Ken involved. After going out to dinner at a local restaurant. She explained her idea to Ken, and while he was intrigued, he realized that just a text adventure game wasn't gonna cut it, Being that Apple II was capable of doing graphics and he already had purchased an Apple II for creating a FORTRAN language compiler for the machine and selling it to Apple, he was willing to take the challenge.
Using A VersaWriter tablet, Ken was able to write a program to convert traced drawings into plotting commands that the computer will execute, drawing the illustrations live while the game plays without having to take up the memory space of storing and displaying up to 70 pre-drawn images, all with text descriptions.
They called the game Mystery House, and it made its debut in computer stores in May 1980, it was a decent success, selling 10,000 units at first, But by 1982, It increased to 80,000 world wide, making it one of the best-selling computer games at the time.
The success encouraged the Williams to make more graphical adventures and it became so successful that by 1982, relocated to and moved to Oakhurst, California and changed its name to Sierra On-Line.
Meanwhile In Japan, another video game designer named Yuji Horii learned about the rise of the text adventure computer game genre in the United States, and wanted to create something similar for the Japanese market.
Inspired by manga authors Tetsuya Chiba, Mitsuru Adachi and Katsuhiro Otomo, he comes up with the concept of the player resolving a murder mystery by searching for clues, exploring different areas, interacting with characters, and solving item-based puzzles. He writes the game using BASIC on the NEC PC-6001.
The game was called Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken and made its debut in June of 1983. It was an instant success and was followed up with ports to the MSX and the Nintendo Famicom. It also has historical significance as it was the Famicom port, along with Super Mario Bros., that inspired Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima to enter the video game industry, as well as influence the design of his game Snatcher. As for Yuji Horii, He and the company that published the game, Chunsoft, would go on to create the game Dragon Quest, Inspiring other JRPG's Like Final Fantasy.
Now you're probably wondering, How did the Visual Novel gerne go from games that look and play like Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken to to barely interactive badly written garbage like the Sakura series? Well the answer has to do with how computers evolved in Japan. Take a look at the table below, these are the graphics and RAM specs of the 4 most popular personal computers in the US in the early 80's: The Apple II, the Commodore 64, The Atari 8bit line, and the IBM PC:
Now, lets have a look at the 4 most popular personal computers in the Japan in the early 80's: The NEC PC-8801, the Fujitsu FM-7, the Sharp X1, and the NEC PC-9801:
Notice anything? The graphics resolution of the Japanese machines is much higher than thore from the US, and that was by design as a result of the need of displaying Japanesse text. You see, the Japanese language is made up of three components: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are relatively simple phonetic alphabets with 46 letters each, similar to upper and lower case letters in English, But kanji is a collection of thousands of complex glyphs originating from Chinesse. The sheer number and visual complexity of these characters were beyond the memory and display abilities of most western computers from the US and Europe. For Western languages, a single byte was sufficient to encode most letters and numbers, 1 byte can only express a maximum of 256 characters, around a tenth of what is needed to adequately display Japanese text. Not only that, but while 8x8 pixel blocks are sufficient to clearly display individual characters in Western alphabets, the blocks are too small to render kanji legibly. So the graphics of Japanese machines were more designed and focused on displaying text, they weren't really designed with games in mind, often missing the ability to display things like sprites. To illustrate this, here's the C64 version of Pac-man next to the Sharp X1 version of Pac-man
So, while they struggled to render moving sprites required for arcade and action games popular on computers in the west, they could display still images that were years ahead of computers from the US and Europe. For example, the NEC PC-9801 used planer graphics to generate a resulution of 640 × 400 pixel graphics with 16 colors out of a palette of 4096. A western computer wouldn't be capable of matching that graphics capability until the Commodore Amiga in 1985. This made games like Visual Novels more common of Japanese computers.
From a western perspective, games with gameplay like this would be considered standard in 1983, it didn't take long for adventure games to evolve. Just a year after Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken was released, Sierra's Kings Quest came out. Initially for IBM's ill fated PCjr, and later for the Tandy 1000 and Apple IIc. This game followed the conventions of graphical adventure games, but moved the character perspective from a first person perspective to a first person perspective. Rather than move with the keyboard, you would move the character with the cursor keys, while the keyboard was used for interacting with the environment.
The same year, EA's Heart Of Africa was released for the C64 and Silicon Beach Software's Enchanted Scepters was released for the Macintosh. These used a similar concept but relied more on movements with a joystick or mouse. The following year ICOM Simulations released Deja Vu for the Macintosh, which bought the action commands front and center rather than using a drop down menu. The result of this was the dawn of the Point And Click Adventure game genre.
Although the basic formula was established by Deja Vu, the Genre didn't really take off until the release of Lucas Arts Maniac Mansion in 1987, and The Secret Of Monkey Island 3 years later.
Utilizing the SCUMM engine these games and their lovable stories and characters caused Point And Click Adventure games to explode in popularity, and by 1995, companies like Sierra, Lucas Arts, and Humongous Entertainment held high in charts with titles like Full Throttle, Space Quest 6, and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon.
Meanwhile, back in Japan, Visual Novels ended up evolving very differently. The puzzle-oriented design was dropped in favor of narrative, limiting interactivity, not only that, but animation, multiple backgrounds, and more serious story telling faded as well. Now they resembled the graphic adventure games that inspired them. So while the west moved on with Point and Click adventure games with better graphics, animation, music, sound effects, and so on, Visual Novels were more or less stuck back in the 1980s, occupying the middle ground between the basic text adventure, and the more graphical action games.
The genre would be available to the west until the mid 2000's with Capcom's Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for the Nintendo DS in 2005, one of the first Visual Novel games available on US shores and one of the first to popularize it with American audiences. Combined with RenPy's release the previous year, and suddenly, Visual Novel's found new audiences.
However AAA Visual Novels and RenPy Visual Novels have very different feels. The AAA's have more polish with sound effect, animation, multiple choices and so on, whereas RenPy Visual Novels tend to be more basic, with repeating backrounds, fading still shots of character to represent change of expression, less serious subject matters and so on.
Now that that's all explained, lets resume where we left off in 2015 with me discovering Sakura Angels and how it's bad design stuck with me.
The Conception
So obviously you can tell, the game did not impress me. I complained about it to my middle school classmates, and the games bad design kept haunting me. That wasn't the only Anime styled game that left a bad taste in my mouth, This was at a time when a lot of (In my mind), not good anime styled games with lewd imagery and lets played of them were all over the internet with games like Hunnie Pop, Five Nights at Anime, Yohjo Simulator, and the imfamous Yandere Simulator were all getting Letsplays with each being worse than the last.
By 2020, I had just decided "You know what? I can do a better job that these idiots!", so to prove this and to childishly make fun of these games I came up with a horror comedy parody game concept called: Sakura Nightmare.
The plot would have involved a guy finding an obscure 1980's Japanese computer in his attic, with a cursed visual novel game said to cause madness and death. When the protagonist plays it, eventually 2 girls escape the game and into the real world and constantly stalk and harass him. Being he's the only one that can see them, when he tries to get help, no one believes him and assume hes crazy, So he has to find out a way to get rid of these girls and get his old life back.
The game also would use images drawn on the Apple II and RenPy's interface to mimic a Graphical Adventure game, with the joke being the games using RenPy looked so outdated they might as well be on an Apple II. It was also inspired by a comment made by designer Al Lowe made to Ken Williams during the creation of Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry stating: "There's no way I can do this as a serious game. It's so out of it that it should be wearing a leisure suit" However, other than some test images in the Apple II program Koala Paint, It never made it past that.
Fast forward to around late 2022, and I decided to revisit the concept when I started looking into the indie game website Itch.io, and saw their selection of Visual Novel games. When looking at Visual Novels, I came to a few realizations. There are generally 2 types of Visual Novels that are popular: There's either dating sim games, or there's horror games. Most of them either use an anime art style or picture cutouts, and many of them use sex appeal with revealingly dressed lewd pictures of women or men. They also tend to take place in a fantasy world rather than a realistic one, involving eements like magic or inanimate objects coming to life. They also tend to have a male protagonist you dent actually get to see, and most of the times the characters aren't very bright.
I also realized that the RenPy engine is a lot more capable than many of the games I've seen were showing. With the game One Night Stand being a prime example. Created by German independent video game developer Lucy Blundell (AKA Kinmoku) in 2016, this game made use of rotoscoped Squigglevision animation, a point and click action button interface, and using the player's actions and dialogue choices to unlock multiple endings, ranging from being angrily kicked out to the possibility of friendship.
It was these discoveries that encouraged me to give Sakura Nightmare and RenPy gamemaking another chance. However, I revised my features more than I did for Sakura Nightmare. Like Sakura Nightmare, I really wanted to make it the opposite of Wing Clouds games. Instead of a Modern fantasy Japanesse setting, It would have a realistic 1980's American setting, Instead of a modern Anime art style, it would lean into Apple II graphics to mimic Graphical Adventure games, Instead of focusing on romance or horror with lewd and graphic images with little control, it would focus on an adventure with multiple choice events for multiple endings, and instead of a unseen male protagonist, it would have a female protagonist that will be visible at least once.
I also came up with a new setting one night while in the shower. Inspired by the 2004 movie The Terminal and the 2019 closure of the Icelandic Airline WOW Air, which left multiple passangers stranded without geting to and from Iceland. I learned about it from a video about the airline, and Imagined if somebody wasn't able to get back.
The concept would have involved a Soviet tourist that was unable to get back home and she has to travel around the US to get back. Again, while i did research the layouts of era appropriate airports (Namely JFK), It never made it passed conception. The main problem was I didn't know how to portray the idea of a Russian tourist well, so it ended up stalling.
I then came up with another story idea, Instead of it being based on a foreigner from earth, why not make it about one from space. Inspired by various alien movies like Fire In The Sky, V, and of course Steven Spielberg's classic ET, I came up with a game story I called Adventure From The Sky.
The plot involved a teenage reptilian alien named Reptilia, who accidently crash lands on earth in the Upstate New York town of Littledale in the summer of 1982. She enlists the help of 3 teenage friends: Mike Rogers, David Mclauglin, and John Scallietti to fix her ship to get back home. To write the dialog, I took a spare notebook and jotted down dialog from both the human characters and Reptilia's. The idea behind writing the dialog was i can work on the main dialog first and come up with the branching actions as I went along.
It's also filled with references. Along with the previously mentioned Fire In The Sky, V, and ET, there's also references to other pieces of pop culture. For example the name of Littledale was inspired by the 1960's DC comic series Dial H for Hero which took place in the fictional town of Littleville, Colorado. It's also loosely based on Plattsburgh New York, my hometown.
There's also an unintentional reference to Fire In The Sky with the character Mike Rogers, as there's also a character in the film with the same name. I chose the name since Mike was one of the most common names in the US at the time, and since I wanted to represent New York states rich history of European immigrants and that I wanted the character to have a Dutch surname, I gave the character the last name of Rogers after the only Dutch person I could think of, game designer Henk Rogers. It wasn't until later I realized the name similarity.
It's also uses various pieces of 1980's pop culture as essential pieces to the plot. For example, there would have been a point where Reptilia would get a shapeshifting belt allowing her to take on a human appearance. When coming up with a cover name, a nearby radio starts playing the song Valerie by Steve Winwood, leading her and Mike to chose the name Valerie Winwood. Another point would have involved Mike explaining to his mother why he and his friends were late for dinner, which he replies that David and John were looking for a comic John left in Mike's Basement while they were plaing Pitfall! on the Atari 2600.
I began writting the script in April of 2023, but I ended up abandoning it after forgetting to bring the notebook with me returning from a school break a year later.
I also abandoned it because I was leaning into Sci Fi, and by that point I established I wanted the game to have a realistic setting. It wouldn't be until February of this year I came up with my next concept. This one was inspired by various 80's cold war espionage and thriller films like WarGames, Spies Like Us, and Cloak and Dagger.
I also took inspiration from a real life event called The D-Day Daily Telegraph crossword security alarm. The event happened not in 1980's America, But rather in 1940's Brittan. In 1944, A man named Leonard Dawe was working part time as a crossword compiler for The British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. He also was the headmaster of Strand School in Effingham, Surrey, which was adjacent to a large camp of US and Canadian soldiers preparing for D-Day. Due to low security, there was unrestricted contact between the students and troops. And since Dawe had a habit of saving his crossword-compiling work time by calling boys into his study to fill crossword blanks with words, He unknowingly collected war-related words got into the crosswords including codenames for D-Day. Dawe didn't know that these words were military codewords, and since he liked them, he put them in the paper. Eventually the British Secret Service arrested Dawe under the suspicion of espionage along with his colleague, crossword compiler Melville Jones. Both were interrogated intensively, but it was decided that they were innocent.
All this comes together to form my current RenPy game concept The game currently doesn't have a proper name, but I've temporary gave it the name SpyGames.
I actually was able to come up with a working plot used for the W04 Assignment Mixed Up Movie element. This so far is the only work I have up to this point.
So the plot goes like this: Its 1985 in Littledale New York, and Carol Bailey is a bright, but clumsy college student studying computer science at Littledale University. She has a love for computers and video games with the hope of becoming a video game designer herself, often hanging out at the local arcade or at the towns various electronic stores. One day, she meets her classmate and friend David at his job at the local Radio Shack to demo a new game he bought on the store's Tandy 1000 display, Epyx's Rouge. Liking the games concept, Bailey decides to create a similar game on the schools PDP-11 minicomputer based on the dungeon crawling aspects of Rouge, but with a spy setting. Due to the games size, she programs a password system allowing players to resume their place after quitting. She bases the passwords on various words and phrases she heard nearby like "Whopper", "Coca Cola", and "Where's the beef". Unbeknownst to her, those phrases are nuclear missile defense system codewords from the nearby military base, and when government agents discover this and the fact the game managed to be distributed via modem past the Iron Curtan. Even worse, the game may end up being in danger of getting into the hands of a Russian Anarchist hellbent on roughing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. Being the games creator and the only one who might help, Bailey ends up joining CIA agent Roderick Coleman to venture to the USSR and delete every known copy from their mainframes before its too late!
The Characters, settings and plot elements
Now lets take a look at the story in more detail. The character of Carol Bailey was named after 2 former Atari programmers: Carol Shaw (The creator of Activision's River Raid), and Donna Bailey (The creator of Centipede).
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In terms of the characters appearance and personality, I want the character to look ordinary instead of attractive, You know, less Lara Croft from Tomb Raider or Mai Shiranui from King Of Fighter's, and more Clementine from Telltale's The Walking Dead or Max Caulfield from Life is Strange, A normal looking young woman you might see while walking down the street, only from over 40 years ago. This is reflected in her appearance as well, long curled hair, a pair of glasses, a video game shirt with a denim jacket, a calculator watch, jeans, and a pair of Nike's.
Released in 1984, the Model 1000 was Tandy's first successful entry into the world of IBM compatibles, and became not only the the best IBM compatible that one could buy at the time, but also one of the the most influential PC compatibles of the 1980s, especially in terms of gaming, with its graphics and sound capabilities.
Now I'm sure you might be going: "Isn't Radio Shack that weird store that sell electronic parts, RC Cars and phones that went bankrupt years ago?" and yes we are talking about THAT Radio Shack. But remember, the game is supposed to take place in 1985, and that was at a time when Radio Shack thrived, being the go to place for electronic parts, computers and other electronics. You could imagine someone like Carol hanging out there to get a peak at the latest hardware, software, and games.
The first Radio Shack computer center in California (1980) (See my Septandy Spectacular Entries if your interested on learning more: 1 2 3 )
Another computer that plays a very big role is the DEC PDP-11, A line of minicomputers by Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC) introduced in 1970.
The main reason is because although the computer was losing its luster by 1985, I can imagine it was still used in a various school and businesses that either didn't have the money to upgrade, didn't want to upgrade or both. It's also because it was technically the only computing platform legally available in Russia at the time, Because the LSI-11 model was cloned as the Electronika 60 and BK-0010.
The Gameplay and Features
Enough about story lets talk about the gameplay itself, What's it going to look like? Well it's going to take cures from the Graphical Adventure games of the early 80's like Transylvania and Mystery House. even down to using graphics drawn on the Apple II and using the same font of the Apple II's Signetics 2513 Character Generator chip. Im also planning on adding something the original Apple II couldn't do: Full motion video with voice acting, Obviously taking cues from One Night Stand.
Also unlike those original Graphical Adventure games I plan to make it for the most part non linear, allowing the player to explore around the environments and interact with various background objects. This comes from my love for Open World Sandbox games like Minecraft and the GTA series, games where you can either play through the game's missions or goof off by exploring or playing minigames all with in deep levels of interactivity that draws you into their virtual worlds.
There would also be sort of lots of multiple choice decisions that can cause the story progress differently depending on what you do leading to multiple endings. this takes cues from both old school choose your own adventure games and another game that's been a big influence on me: the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair, Where by selecting different video tracks played from a LaserDisc, you guide the protagonist Dirk through different obstacles by doing certain button and joystick movements to see if he dies or he move on to the next level.
Dragon's Lair (1983) (See my The Quest to play Dragon's Lair entry for more details about the game)
However, while I am leaning into taking advantage of more modern computer capabilities that wouldn't have been possible on the humble Apple II, I do have plans to allow for an "Authenticity" slider in an option menu to range from authentic Apple II adventure to more modern FMV scenes and voice acting. I also plan to (If possible) allow you to actually have the graphics mimic other popular home computers of the time period like the Commodore 64, Atari 8bit line, IBM PC, Tandy Color Computer, and even maybe some 16 bit platforms like the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh, and Apple IIGS.
The Development and Tools
So what do I plan to use to actually write this game? For the game engine, i'll be using RenPy (Obviously!), but for creating the graphics im actually using not 1, but 2 Apple II emulators. The first emulator is the always excellent AppleWin, and the rather clunky and awful (But not for it's intended purpose, in which case its quite excellent) MAME.
Now MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and as you can imagine its designed for emulating arcade machines, not computers. So why am I using it you might ask? Because it can emulate one of these:
This is a DigitalVision ComputerEyes card. It came out in 1984, and it was an early video digitizer card. You could hook up a composite video source like a camera or a LaserDisc player and capture stills on the Apple II. The idea with this is I could use it to convert PNG images to use in the program KoalaPaint.
Speaking of KoalaPaint, Ill also be using 2 peices of graphics software on the Apple II, The Graphics Magician from Peiguin Software (Later Polarware) the same software that powered its own Transylvania, And the aformentioned KoalaPaint (Or rather Koala Micro Illustrator) from Koala Technologies, Which was designed for the first home computer graphic tablet, The KoalaPad.
The Graphics Magician will handle the still images while KoalaPaint will handle editing frames from the ComputerEyes digitizer from the MAME Apple II.
Now I am open to some development problems currently. For one thing, I would have a problem writing the humor, since its based on pacing and its not really possible to pull off in a game without some serious skill. I also have problems on the Graphics side as The Graphics Magician isnt the easiest software to use, However all this is still in early stages and Im hoping to get a finished game out of this by the end of the year.
But for now I hope you enjoyed my in depth explanaiton of my project. Its a little different from the blogs i normally do as I dont usually swear in them (Even censored), but sometimes I got to let my frustrations come out to get through my problems. I also want to say if you found any of this interesting, Give me a comment! I've been doing this blog for over 3 years and I dont know if im just writing to nobody! But as always, Thanks for reading, See you next time!