Over on the SierraHelp forums, we have a game where a portion of the screen shot of a specific game (King’s Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, etc) and others need to guess where the screen shot is from. Some of the games have been going on for quite some time; but we’ve opened up some new ones (like Conquest series which includes Conquest of Camelot and Conquest of Longbow; as well as EcoQuest, Freddy Pharkus, Goldrush, Laura Bow series which is Colonel’s Bequest and Dagger of Amon Ra, and the Manhunter series).

• King’s Quest
• Leisure Suit Larry
• Police Quest
• Space Quest
• Quest for Glory
• Gabriel Knight
• NEW! Conquest Series
• NEW! EcoQuest Series
• NEW! Freddy Pharkus
• NEW! Goldrush
• NEW! Laura Bow series
• NEW! Manhunter series

Be sure to check out the latest post of each thread to see where the game stands! So if you haven’t already, please come by the forums and join in the games! And if you haven’t already registered on the forum – please do! We’d love to have you! Whether it’s to participate in the games, or join us in all the Sierra conversations we have!

Posted by Corey Cole

Lori and I cannot express how much we appreciate both the initial support and continuing patience (or at least acceptance) from all of our dedicated Hero-U backers. Making this game is proving harder than anything else we’ve done, but you’ve also given us the opportunity to create something new and we hope wonderful.

So we wish a Happy Valentine’s Day with love to all of you.

It’s been almost four years, since the original post about LockerGnome Redux… And had a moment during the holidays, to remember this – and invite others to play this quick little game, that allowed full voice audio in the SCI0 games…

Want to learn more? Go here and read (and download) LockerGnome Redux on LarryLaffer.net.

From Corey Cole –

Lori and I, and the entire Hero-U development team, wish all our loyal backers and friends a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. (You can check out last year’s holiday card and poem at http://hero-u.com/happy-holidays-2015/.)

 

I recently shipped all of the “soft goods” – Hero-Unicorn baseball caps, All the Heroes t-shirts, and Blue Meeps – to backers who chose them as rewards in the 2015 Kickstarter campaign or BackerKit. Much thanks and appreciation to Eric Varnes, who designed the images on both the new hats and t-shirts.

Check your pledge at https://hero-u-adventure-role-playing-game.backerkit.com/backer/welcome. If your pledge included a t-shirt, cap, or meep toy, you should have received it by now or at least received an email saying it’s in the mail. If you think you are missing a toy, meep, or t-shirt, contact support (at) hero-u (dot) net.

While you’re at it, please make sure your email and mailing address are up to date on BackerKit. We’ll need them to hook you up with digital and physical game rewards, including the game itself.

I still need to print, package, and mail poster prints to backers who ordered them, and canvas prints to high-end backers from both campaigns. Lori and I decided to wait on shipping prints until we release the game, as it makes much more sense to have a Hero-U poster or painting once you also have the game.

The Year in Review

2016 has been a roller-coaster ride for us. There have been some great and exciting moments, and some sad and terrifying ones. If I needed to describe it all in one word, it would be “unpredictable”. Sadly, I could use the same word to describe most of the development of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption.

The hardest part of running a small indie business has been turnover. To date, we’ve had about 30 people work on Hero-U, but currently we’re down to four regular developers, three occasional contributors, and Lori and me. Health, family, and computer issues have cost almost every team member at least a month during the year, and much more for some. I’m not going to go into details, but many events unrelated to the project have created huge stress for us and the team this year. These challenges have continually impacted the schedule, but we’ll keep pushing until the game is done.

On the positive side, we’ve made tremendous progress with the game. I’m personally funding it at this point, and that’s appropriate. “With great risk comes great reward.” – Dungeonmaster or maybe the D&D Player Handbook. Fortunately, Lori and I turned 60 while working on Hero-U, which opens access to our retirement accounts. We’ll try not to exhaust them, but the game comes first! We’re much too young to actually retire.

A lot of that progress is filling out the fine details of the game text and dialogue. Lori is down to the last few conversations. Josh Mandel has done a wonderful job of filling out the characters and game world by making every object in the game interactable. Our “Explorer” players – and everyone has some Explorer in them – are going to love the fine detail and humor that Josh has infused throughout the game.

Joshua Smyth continues to fill out the game with improved rooms and regions, better lighting, and of course the role-playing game combat. Each monster type has its own “personality” and behavior, although most share the common trait of enjoying the taste of rogue (or any other careless student). We lost Joshua to a “day job” for several months this year, and I can’t emphasize how critical he has been to the project since returning.

Al Eufrasio has had a tremendous impact on the look of the project as our animator. Al wrote a great post about the decisions involved in animating characters that I will share in the next update.

Unity Programmer Help Needed

I’ve had a balancing act throughout the Hero-U project. We need the right developers to complete and polish the game. But we also had to reach “critical mass” on the design, writing, and asset creation so they could get their work done. We also have a limited budget by game development standards, so we’ve had to run with a very lean team. That’s fine except when there’s turnover. In 2016, we lost most of Cidney’s time to recovery from an auto accident, Carolyn left for a full-time job, and most of Adam’s time to a triple-whammy of a dead computer and illness in the family. And now he’s moving on to a full-time day job, which will limit his time in 2017.

To finish Hero-U, we need one or two programmers to work with me on polishing individual scenes. The work will be a three-month contract with possible extension. If you have the right qualifications and want to join our small team, please contact me at jobs (at) hero-u (dot) com. (Note that this is a .com address, not .net as in the support email.) You must meet all of these requirements:

• Experience developing games with Unity and C# (at least six months).
• Available to work at least 20 hours a week, up to 40.
• Able to work independently with a minimum of supervision.
• Ability to communicate well with other team members.
• Since this is a short-term contract, we prefer that you have your own Unity Pro license valid for Unity 4 (this is included in Unity 5 licenses).

RPG Investment Opportunity

Artcraft Entertainment – developer of the upcoming Crowfall RPG – is selling shares on Indiegogo and Microventures. This is an opportunity to invest in the long-term success of the game, although it is of course also a high-risk investment. Visit https://app.microventures.com/crowdfunding/artcraft-entertainment to learn more. For more about the Crowfall game, visit http://crowfall.com/.

Artcraft is headed by Gordon Walton and J. Todd Coleman. Gordon was an executive in charge of Ultima Online, The Sims Online, Star Wars: Galaxies, and Star Wars: the Old Republic. Todd was creative director on Shadowbane, Wizard 101, and Pirate101. I know Gordon through conferences, and I rate him One of the Good Guys.

Merry Christmas! We’ll see you all in 2017. We’re all wishing for a much better year and a Hero-U release that will bring joy to you and us. Have a happy New Year!

Hey everyone, we wanted to give you all an update and let you know the status of things. Most of you have probably guessed that the game is still not quite ready yet, there is no beating around the bush on that. We wanted to let you know where everything stands at the moment.

First off, we are still moving full force at finishing the game as quickly as possible. Nothing has changed there. We absolutely hate making excuses, but we know you all are wondering what is going on. The game is still being worked on everyday, but obviously we are gonna need more time. We are reluctant to set another exact day, because there are a few variables that have to be figured out. One being the fact that SAG-AFTRA(Actors union) is currently on strike and the majority of our voice cast is SAG-AFTRA members. We are not blaming the strike for the reason the game is still not ready, only that it is one of the variables that need to be worked out. Hopefully the strike will get wrapped up in the coming weeks and we can get our voice cast in the studio and record.

Secondly, working out the end of the game has taken longer than expected as well. Some art is still being finalized and the last puzzle mechanics are needing some TLC as well. We also still have some creative death sequences(which we know Space Quest fans love) to work out. We still plan to let you guys(that backed at a high enough level) vote on these along with some artwork voting stuff very soon.

One of the biggest reasons for falling behind this year is due to having to go back and work out a lot of bugs. We definitely still plan to beta test the game with backers that backed at a high enough level, but we want to work out the obvious bugs first. Some of you out there that have worked in game development before probably know one of the pitfalls that can happen. It can be summed up in four words, readjusting previously working code. If not, I’ll shed some light on what we’ve experienced.

SpaceVenture is laid out in four major sections, almost like chapters, because you can re-visit most areas. There are lots of mini sequences that connect three of the four sections together. One being the fact that we want you to be able to travel between pieces of the game freely. Think along the lines of Space Quest 3,4, and 5. The first section of the game is the Nostradamus area that we showcased a teeny bit of in our demo a couple of years back. Once we completed that section we moved to the next, and then next, etc..

The majority of the game is being created on top of our custom built event system that was made through the Unity engine. The event system allows us to tell the characters and scene elements to do anything we want without having to “re-invent the wheel” by reprogramming the same types of code over and over. As we’ve reached the scenes nearing the end of the game, we’ve had to adjust the code of the event system to allow for newer features. This is because we want SpaceVenture to be a unique experience from start to finish and not feel like a hidden objects game.

In changing code and adding new features, this introduced lots of bugs in scenes that were finalized earlier in the game. Going back to earlier sections of the game and ironing out all the wrinkles has been a huge undertaking. We know that a lot of you are excited about beta testing as well. We are getting close to that point, but need to get this obvious bugs worked out first.

HOW THE PROJECT IS DOING FINANCIALLY

We have been pushing VERY hard to keep our belts tight throughout the entire process of working on SpaceVenture, but as you can probably imagine, things are getting down to the wire. The Cluck Yegger game did help bring some funds into the project which is good. Cluck Yegger has been selling on Steam and in the Apple iOS store, but we’ve made a pretty good chunk of change by selling it on bundle websites, such as this one.

Ultimately, we still have the funds for our rewards/shipping(as we estimated), along with our voice actors and paid team members. We have had a couple of artists and programmers that have been willing to work for credits in the game so that has helped move us forward as well. Needless to say though, we are working extremely hard to get this game out quickly so we do not run out of funds. The good news is, we are close!

AN UPDATE ON SCOTT MURPHY

Some of you may know that Scott Murphy had a really bad year in 2015. He addressed some of this in a blog post that can be found here. 2016 has not been any better for Scott as he has had some big health problems that has affected his quality of life. Unfortunately, this has severely hindered his ability to work with the SpaceVenture team. Mark and myself have done our best to keep everything moving towards the finish line, but needless to say, it has been hard without having our third partner. Let me make it clear, that we do NOT blame the fact that the game is still not finished on Scott. But we did want you all to know that he has had to take some time away to work out the things he is dealing with.

From the game being completed perspective, the good news is that with the exception of some final grammar edits, the script is done. The game design has been done for awhile now. We are really pulling for Scott to get back on his feet and rejoin the team full time.

I know I’m being very vague in my above comments regarding Scott. This is because I don’t feel like it’s my place to share his personal challenges. Hopefully, he can address everything in another blog post for you all at some point. We hope you all will be understanding of him and his privacy.

WHEN WILL THE GAME BE RELEASED?

We are reluctant to give another exact release date, but I can tell you that we are close guys. We just need to work out the last few variables that I mentioned above and we will have this game in the can. No one is more excited to have the game done then us. We have enjoyed working on it, but you can imagine the amount of stress involved here. We hate knowing that we have disappointed so many people. It pains us to know that you all gave us money and we have still yet to deliver the product in this amount of time. We hope you all will stay positive, we need as much positivity thrown our way as possible right now.

ARTWORK FROM THE FINAL SCENES

We don’t have as much to show you as I would like due to a huge part of our time being focused on fixing bugs in the game. We also are gonna try and not be too spoilery here because what I’m about to show you happens in the final sequence of the game, we’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Here is another look at a scene that we’ve not shown you before. It is in a close to being finished state, but the artwork is still having final details added.

EPISODE 39 OF THE BI-WEEKLY PODCAST BY THE SPACE QUEST HISTORIAN

This is it! The end. The REAL end! After 12 ‘real’ episodes and 4 Xtra episodes, season 3 finally rolls to a close. There’s some special bloopers and outtakes from the season, as well as finally capping off the Music Talk with Brandon Blume, James Mulvale, and Ken Allen, as well as the ‘merits of the Space Quest series’ chat with Francisco Gonzalez. See you around the chronostream!

LISTEN IN ITUNES or THE RSS FEED HERE

Thanks for all of your support everyone!

Chris Pope a.k.a your humble local intergalactic SpacePope

Beyond Random

I learned a lesson in improbability many years ago while playing Risk. My 12 armies were about to eliminate a player’s last two defenders. When the dust cleared multiple dice rolls later, my lone remaining army stared helplessly at the remaining single defender.

The lesson – high probability is not the same thing as certainty, and low probability is not the same thing as guaranteed failure. We all watched those lessons hammered home in last Tuesday’s U.S. Presidential election, and before that with the Brexit vote.

It’s an important lesson for game designers – there is no such thing as a 90% chance in a one-time puzzle. That puzzle is really a 100% chance for 90% of the players, and a 0% chance for the other 10%. If you want players to solve the puzzle, make it 100% solvable, or allow players to try multiple times until they solve it.

Lockpicking in Hero-U works that way – you might encounter a lock Shawn can’t open, but he’ll get a little practice attempting it. After enough practice and study, and a more advanced toolkit, Shawn can come back and open the lock. Trap disarming involves both Shawn’s skill and the player’s, but every trap can be disarmed with practice and cleverness.

Risky Business

Risk and Reward applies to other aspects of games as well. Backing a Kickstarter project is risky because any project could fail or turn out to be a mediocre game. The hoped-for reward isn’t actually the game itself – it’s helping to make that game become a reality.

From the developers’ viewpoint, the risks are immense. Crowdfunding rarely provides the full budget for a game, so the developer has a monetary risk. They are also committing years of their lives to making the game and other rewards for backers. If the game sells well, they’ll be rewarded. If it fails, all that time and money is gone. However, we’ll have made a game – or hopefully several – of which we can be proud, and that’s its own reward.

Then there are the unforeseen risks, and occasionally rewards. Turnover has been a schedule – and sometimes momentum – killer for us. Thirty people have contributed to the project to date, ten of whom are currently working actively on Hero-U. With our limited budget and distant communications, I don’t know how we could have done much better in that area.

The rewards have come from some amazing team members making terrific contributions to the project. JP Selwood has been with us from the beginning, and his portraits and backgrounds are a beautiful and essential fabric for the game. Our New Zealand contingent of Joshua Smyth and Adam Thompson have added a lot of programming muscle and creativity to the project in the later phases. Finding the right team has been our biggest challenge in making Hero-U.

Project Status

Several team members have had personal and family challenges recently, but we’re working through them. I’m shooting for “feature complete” and alpha testing in January, with Beta testing in February or early March and release 2nd quarter 2017. It’s been a long, stressful journey, but the end is in sight.

After release, we’ll be very busy for several months. First we’ll fulfill the rest of the physical rewards that depend on the game – the boxed games, art book, and canvas prints. Then we’ll visit our super-backer in Germany and make some publicity stops in Europe. Meanwhile, the team will continue to fix any problems reported by players, and we’ll investigate porting Hero-U to other devices such as tablets.

Then we’ll move on to Hero-U 2. We hope to see you on Wizard’s Way!

Sending them Softly

The “soft goods” are ready to roll. I purchased the Hero-Unicorn caps and “All Kinds of Heroes” t-shirts last month (see image at bottom), but a family situation delayed shipping them. I plan to get them out by the end of November. If your reward tier included a t-shirt, cap, or meep toy, or if you ordered any of those as an add-on in the 2nd (2015) campaign, please visit BackerKit and make sure your address is up to date. Visit https://hero-u-adventure-role-playing-game.backerkit.com to verify your rewards and contact information.

References

For more on the surprising frequency of unlikely events, read: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand, or The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I haven’t been keeping up with recent Kickstarter adventure and role-playing games, so instead let me give a shout out to Serena Nelson’s Cliqist site – http://cliqist.com/. Her team does a great job of covering relevant game projects.

How do you tell a story in an interactive medium? How do you give players agency while giving them a good story and keeping the game size manageable?

How can a game writer tell a strong story while also making it the player’s story for each and every player?

There isn’t any single answer. Action games minimize the story, and instead provide an experience to players. Most role-playing games focus on combat while telling a bit of story between (and sometimes during) fights.

Lori and I set a higher bar in our Quest for Glory games. We told stories in which the player was the hero, but players also had the freedom to explore. And yes, fight some monsters to prepare them for tougher challenges.

A Balancing Act

How are we balancing story and player agency in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption? It hasn’t been easy, and that’s the main reason this game is taking so much longer to develop than we predicted. We’ve had to balance our ambitious storytelling goals with some practical compromises. Some of the decisions we’ve made along the way were:

• Each game will feature a single character class, and a particular character. This lets us tailor each game’s story for that character.
• There is a traditional, linear story that progresses around the player.
• If the player fails to act, another character may become the hero for that scene.
• Reputation and relationships are important, and mostly controlled by player actions.
• No movies or long cut scenes once the game has started.
• No voice acting, at least in the initial release.
• Combat is mostly or entirely avoidable at each player’s choice.
• The story is developed in dialogue, and players have many choices.
• Exploration is important, and everything in the game responds to players.

We originally pictured Hero-U as a place where players could walk around and explore. The first attempts, as pictured in our 2012 Kickstarter campaign, were chessboard-style maps. The problem is that those aren’t immersive. We quickly switched to an isometric “stage” view, then to using 3D so that scenes could be much bigger than a single screen.

Last year, when Al Eufrasio joined the team, we started adding much more animation that we originally envisioned, following the storytelling rule of “Show, don’t tell.” But we still needed a way to advance the story visually.

Enter the Vignette

The 1990s answer was “cut scenes”, or non-interactive film-like sequences. LucasArts made these work very well in games such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. But cut scenes have a lot of problems in a game like Hero-U.

One problem is that the player has to sit and wait for the cut scene to complete before going back to exploring and saving the world (or at least maintaining a passing grade). Another is that many cut scenes destroy immersion because they are not from the player’s viewpoint, nor under her control.

But the main problem with cut scenes is that they’re small movies. They have to compete with Hollywood artistry, and that’s beyond both our expertise and budget.

Our solution is the “vignette”, an image that illustrates a particular event in the game. This gives players a closeup showing how their actions affect the game. When a vignette appears, it also represents time passing.

A simple example is suppertime in the dining hall. When Shawn sits down to eat, we bring up a vignette showing a closeup of the Rogue – er, excuse me, “Disbarred Bard” – table. We have several variations on this image depending on how Shawn and the other characters feel about recent events in the castle.

Game text can appear over a vignette. Images and words together tell a story much more effectively than either alone.

State of The Game

We’re making great progress. Adam immediately started to bring new tools to our development process, such as ways of showing the interaction points for all of the objects in a scene. This is a great way to make sure that every object has a waypoint and that they’re in the right places.

Currently we’re working on mini-games such as trap disarming and puzzles. Joshua is getting back to the combat system after adding many new features to the game and Composer systems.

Our target is Beta at the end of the year, and release once the game is absolutely solid. Due to the complexity of character interactions and the scripts, we expect to have an extended beta of around 3 months.

Please keep your address information up to date at www.backerkit.com so we can ship your addon items. We have additional content and a place for your friends to pre-order and support the game at www.hero-u.com. That’s also where you can join us on the Hero-U discussion forum.

The development history of Quest for Glory 1 and 2 is featured in this long Digital Antiquarian article – http://www.filfre.net/2016/09/so-you-want-to-be-a-hero/.

Check out Woven on Kickstarter – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1355836783/woven-solve-puzzles-by-reknitting-your-character. The tag line is “Explore a woolen world threatened by metal insects. Customize your character to get past obstacles. A unique narrated adventure game.” It’s a unique look and might be a fun game.

As I write this, the top athletes in the world are striving – questing, even – for glory in Rio de Janeiro. Our fantasy heroes have been in the questing business longer, but everyone is looking for heroes.

Olympic Glory

Currently the sporting event best representing the final stages of quests for glory is the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Getting to the Olympics at all is the toughest part, but once there, an athlete must be among “the best of the best” to medal. In the end, the medal is really a memento of years of dedication, hard work, and talent.

Winning the Rogue of the Year award at Hero-U may not have the same popular awareness as an Olympic gold medal (especially since officially there are no rogues at Hero-U), but it’s still a difficult and challenging feat. The winner must excel at charm, intelligence, skill, and athleticism to take the prize.

Rogue of the Year is the Disbarred Bards version of the “all-around” competition in a gymnastics event. It isn’t so much an event by itself as an award for being the best at many different skills.

Skills to Pay the Bills

Hero-U features seven skills: Combat, Defense, Stealth, Tool Use, Climbing, Throwing, and Gaming. Each has a unique role, and together they are one of the major differences between a traditional adventure game and a hybrid adventure/RPG such as Hero-U and Quest for Glory.

Instead of a series of puzzles, each with only one solution, Hero-U presents “problems” to the players. Frequently there is more than one solution to a problem depending on Shawn’s skills and the player’s play style. We made a design choice to have a small set of skills that each apply to many situations. For example, “tool use” helps with picking locks, disarming traps, and other tools you may find in the game.

As in Quest for Glory, players can improve their skills, and even their “stats”, through study and practice. Let’s say the player decides Shawn should spend an hour practicing on the tightrope or climbing rope. Either will improve his climbing skill and slightly improve his Fitness and Agility. Playing Poobah is not just a way of earning Lyra; it also improves Gaming, and helps with Smarts, Perception, and Luck.

Challenges within the game are “gated” – Shawn must have a high degree of skill before he can even attempt to use a Houdini 42 toolkit to disarm the most dangerous traps. There is also a mini-game for the player to analyze each trap. As Shawn improves his Tool Use skill and Perception and Luck stats, the game provides more clues to help the player solve the trap puzzles.

Team Changes and Schedule Update

It also takes a lot of skills to make a game like this. We are fortunate to have a team of dedicated developers who are each contributing part of the heart and soul of this game. However, four years is a long time to devote to a single project, and many of our team members have moved on to other jobs. While we miss their presence, we also want to thank them for their contributions and wish them success at their new pursuits.

Our most recent alumni are programmer Carolyn VanEseltine and 3D background artist Aaron Martin. Aaron completed his work on Hero-U, then moved on to another full-time art position. Carolyn also has a new non-gaming day job. In her “free time”, she is one of the founding directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. Read more about Carolyn and her work at http://www.sibylmoon.com/author/carolyn/.

Fortunately, we were able to immediately find a programmer to finish the Hero-U room programming. Adam Thompson of Auckland, New Zealand. Check out Adam’s indie games at http://www.emotiontheory.com/. Adam is a Unity expert and a fan of adventure and role-playing games. We’re very happy to have him on the team.

Where does all that leave our schedule? We plan to reach “code complete” before the end of the year – I’m shooting for mid- to late- November. At that point we will put the game through an extensive testing process, including making builds available to everyone who backed at the $35 or higher level in Kickstarter. We’ll put out the final release when we have a clean version, likely early next year.

I plan to ship non-game physical goods such as Meeps and posters this Fall. Please keep your address info up-to-date at https://hero-u-adventure-role-playing-game.backerkit.com/ if your pledge included any physical goods.

Pump house madness, Nurbs Landing, Hose Zar, Nurbs Bar, new theme music!

Time for another SpaceVenture update. Got some really exciting stuff to show you all. Guys we are going full throttle trying our absolute best to get the game done by November. Fingers crossed, we still have some moons that need to line up, but we are well on our way.

The game script is getting closer as well and we are talking with the Los Angeles voice studio that we will be using to record our voice actors in. Speaking of which, all our original voice actors(minus Gary Owens for obvious sad reasons) are still on board for voicing characters in the game. We haven’t chosen our new narrator, but that should be ironed out in the near future.

The pump room scene takes us down into a hidden level within the TGFA’s space dome. Not to be too spoilery here, but Ace gets a call from the Two Guys to Fix an issue with their in-dome pool (actually more of a lagoon). Rooter(under player control) ends up being the brains behind solving this puzzle though as he lends a hand, er, paw in helping Ace make the repair.

One fun behind the scenes fact about this scene is that it was actually the very first puzzle that was planned for the game, although it actually happens way later in the story. I hope you guys are as excited to see it come to a reality as we are! Special thanks to one of our artists, Patrick Parish, for working so hard on this.

Just a little warning on the video, we’ve disabled a few things that would completely spoil some of what happens here, but rest assured, there will be a few more things happening in the scene when you see it in game. For one, that big display you see in the background will be important to the task at hand. The mechanics for this scene are already in place, programming and all!

https://youtu.be/HMjUquX0WhY

I believe I have mentioned before that this area of the game is a location that I have been the most excited about since the original game design for SpaceVenture. Just so you know, that has not changed! As you can see, the artwork for this area is just absolutely beautiful. Mark Crowe as Art Director and Artist Patrick Parish have done a phenomenal job on all the art assets for the “Nurb’s” area of the game. This area is bound to bring back nostalgic thoughts of your time in the Space Quest games.

A little warning on what you are seeing here. We have a lot of surprises in store for different ships and Aliens that will be seen in this area. Another fun aspect of this area is that you will be able to return to it throughout the game and depending on when you are there, you will experience different creatures.

“Don’t get hosed, see the Zar!”

Nurb, being quite the space faring entrepreneur, not only owns a bar, but also owns a hose shop. Why a hose shop in the middle of no where? The real question is why not! Ace will be needing to pay a visit to the Hose Zar shop in order to continue in a certain portion of the game that I won’t mention right now as to not spoil some of the experience for you all. Let’s just say, it will definitely be worth your while to  “see the Zar” at some point during the game.

Bound to be one of the most memorable scenes in the entire game, it has been hard for me to hold this scene back. The team has almost had a bit to much fun putting this scene together. Nurb’s bar will be packed full of SciFi pop culture references, with gorgeous artwork to boot.

The bar is where Ace will be given an opportunity to catch up with some of us buddies and enjoy some conversation in the goings on throughout the galaxy. This is also where you will meet one of my favorite characters of all, “Url”.

Note on the below content. We have put no where near the characters and props in the scene that we have planned. The bar may look a bit empty right now, but it won’t be in the very near future. Also, when playing SpaceVenture, be sure to revisit this area often to see all the different patrons that are hanging around.

https://youtu.be/tRTRvIpUx_Y

To the right of the bar scene is a corridor that leads to a room called the “Wall of Fame”. As promised, the game will feature a “Wall of Fame”. This area will be connected to Nurb’s bar. $750 and higher backers should have received an email from us in regards to this. If you did not receive that email, please contact us on Kickstarter. Please DO NOT comment on the update regarding not receiving the email, please contact us via private Kickstarter message.

We hope to give you guys a glimpse of this scene in the near future 🙂

Remember the beautiful theme music that was put together for SpaceVenture. Our composer, Ken Allen, added some more polish to it. He is using the same music libraries in this version that movie composers use. This version is what we plan to use when SpaceVenture ships! We thought you all would like to have a listen to it.

https://youtu.be/rdV2Z9BBqSM

Some of you guys pledged at a level that allows you to vote on concept art and death sequences. We’ve got some concept art for some aliens as well as a bit of the end of the game that we will soon be voting on. As for death sequences, there are still quite a few of those that need to go into the game, and we will be allowing voting for that in the not so distant future as well.

EPISODE 31 OF THE BI-WEEKLY PODCAST BY THE SPACE QUEST HISTORIAN  

As CyberCedric is off to broaden his musical horizons (which can only end badly), the Historian interviews avid adventure game player and fellow podcaster Robert Menes of the Nostalgia Roadtrip podcast (soundcloud.com/nostalgiaroadtrip) about his favorite adventure games. Also on the show, more crowdfunding tips from Serena Nelson, and more music talk with Brandon Blume, Ken Allen and James Mulvale.

LISTEN IN ITUNES or THE RSS FEED HERE

Thanks for all of your support everyone!

Chris Pope a.k.a your humble local intergalactic SpacePope