Good morning, Larryettes.
There have been two extra Kickstarter updates since I last wrote, pertaining to the effort to get both Leisure Suit Larry and Fester Mudd approved via Steam Greenlight. If you haven’t voted for them, and you’re willing to do so, I’d take it as a great favor…especially with Fester Mudd, because that game’s lead designer, Paavo Harkonen, is a talent waiting to be celebrated, and it’s been a privilege for me to work on that game with him.
As you probably know if you read the previous update or two, we’re having a contest, and five of the six prizes are pieces of original art from the game I did with Al back in ’93, Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist. I want you to know that those pieces, original Freddy Pharkas talkers lovingly painted by ex-Sierra artist Ruben Huante, are near and dear to my heart. I’ve never made any of the Freddy artwork available before this year, I’ve been caring for them and showing them off for about 20 years now, and I think it’s time to spread some of the joy around.
(If you haven’t voted yet to enter the contest, here are complete instructions.)
The video that accompanied Kevin’s first update dropped eight full, complete backgrounds on you:
- Lefty’s Exterior
- Lefty’s Bathroom
- Lefty’s Secret Room
- The Come ‘n’ Go Interior
- The Alley right of Lefty’s (got that?)
- Mugger alley
- The Telephone close-up
- Lefty’s Video Gaming Terminal
For those of you keeping track, that’s not nearly all the backgrounds that’ve been finished. Others include Lefty’s interior, Lefty’s hallway, Lefty’s upstairs, the exterior of the Come ‘n’ Go, the close-up of the Hooker, the Taxi, and the Video Gaming Terminal at the Wed ‘n’ Ready (the while-you-wait wedding chapel).
You also got a taste of Larry’s animation and some of his “idle cycles,” the movements he makes randomly and habitually when you’re not telling him to do anything specific. We’re fully cognizant of the sliding issue with Larry’s walking. That’s a fine-tuning task that came standard with pretty much every Sierra adventure: matching the scale of the walker to the scale of the background.
From a narration-and-dialogue standpoint, I’m still keeping up with artwork. I’m going to talk a lot more about my procedures and choices with the text next time, but since there’ve been so many updates in the past two weeks, I’m going to keep this one brief and give you something entirely different today: the video from N-Fusion that I’ve been talking about for so long.
Now you’ll get to see a bit more of the process, put some faces to names, and so on. I love these people, and we’re lucky to have them working with us. They go above and beyond every damn day…weekends included.
More to come…perhaps sooner than you think.
Huggers,
Josh