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• adventure / point-and-click / modern
• 480 MB
• from 70 user ratings.add yours
• July 5, 1987
• Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Mac OS X (10.6.8 or newer)
• English
• Sierra / Codemasters
• single-player

Guys From Andromeda LLC is super excited to welcome Sierra On-Line and Space Quest 4 composer, Ken Allen to the project as the main composer for the game!

We wanted to make it very clear to everyone that the music for SpaceVenture is very important to all of us. Over the months we have received insane amounts of resumes from fans and industry veterans wanting to take part in creating the music for SpaceVenture. Not only did we feel Ken Allen’s music for Space Quest 4 was brilliant, but he has continued to send us newly created songs to be considered for SpaceVenture. The Two Guys agree, even the SpacePope agrees, Ken Allen is the man for the job. Yesterday we signed the paperwork and it is official!

Here is a short bio on Ken Allen:

Ken worked at Sierra 89 – 92, and created music for over a dozen games including installments of the King’s Quest and Space Quest series. After leaving Sierra he continued to compose game music for such companies as Interplay Productions, Tsunami Media, Software Toolworks, Futurescape Productions and Accolade Games. Most recently he was a producer on the team that developed the highly aclaimed MMO, Rift, and the expansion pack Rift – Storm Legion. When he heard the Two Guys From Andromeda had reunited, he was compelled to get involved. He feels that some of his best work was for their games.

Want to know more about Ken Allen? Check out the podcast that Chris Pope did with him!

Ken Allen with Chris Pope on the Guys From Andromeda Podcast

Remember the Space Quest 4 intro? Ken Allen did that, check out the intro video, it features the Roland MT-32

Shipping date for SpaceVenture:

We know one of the big questions on everyone’s mind is “When are you going to release SpaceVenture?”. Well, we have said this publicly already but wanted to state it here in an update as well. As much as we would love to have the game out this February, it just won’t be ready by then. There is still a good deal of work that must be done before the game will be ready for everyone to play.

I think everyone will hopefully agree that as long as we’ve all waited for a new game from the “Two Guys”, we don’t want a game to come out that isn’t finished or polished yet. We want to produce a game that fans will love and enjoy. The type of game that will cause a word of mouth virus to take over and spread like wild fire. No I’m not saying we’re planning to infect you with a virus! But we hope word of the game will go viral so that more and more people will want to enjoy the game. This also brings to the table the possibilities of sequels that can be funded without having to ask for money from you fine people on Kickstarter 🙂 We are shooting for a mid-year release but want to make it clear that we won’t set a date in stone until we are 100% in agreement that the game will be ready by then. Thanks again for your patience and support on this.

Backer Rewards:

We are still discussing sending backer items out early. As of right now, we are still planning to ship the backer items when the game ships. Most everyone receiving backer goods are also receiving a boxed copy of the game. Financially we are trying to avoid shipping out things separately, which adds to shipping cost. We have gotten quite a few emails from backers letting us know ways around this issue, such as asking backers to pay for early shipping. This is being discussed, but as of right now, the plan is still to ship things out when the game ships. Thanks for your understanding.

What about GoG credits?

We have purchased GoG credits and will be making an announcement about that very soon. Please continue to be patient, and we’ll have those out to everyone in the coming weeks.

Game Creation:

As you may have guessed, the game creation is still coming together and we are making a good deal of headway in the programming for the game. Scott and Mark have come up with some truly lovable characters that we can hopefully announce to everyone soon. We did want to share this video of the Scraps character being modeled:

Soon we will be showing you all some live footage of game-play for SpaceVenture! Please continue to stay patient! We are really excited about everything that is coming together and can’t wait to show everyone!

Appearances:

We’re going to San Diego Comicon 2013 (SDCC)!!

Mark Crowe, Scott Murphy, and Chris Pope will all be appearing at SDCC 2013! We will have a table set up there helping to promote SpaceVenture. We’re also hoping to have a panel there. If you have any knowledge/connections with setting up a panel at SDCC, and want to help, please email Chris AT Guysfromandromeda DOT com.

When is SDCC 2013? July 18-21st 2013

Where can I get info about coming? Right Here

Any other conventions? As of right now, SDCC is the only confirmed convention for Scott, Mark, and Chris to be at. However Chris will be appearing at Momocon in Atlanta March 8th-10th. As well as Alabama Phoenix Festival May 24th-26th.

We are also hoping to go to PAX 2013. (Seattle) If you’d like to help get that arranged please email Chris AT Guysfromandromeda DOT com

Stretch Goals

The SpaceVenture pledging options are coming to a close. We have had a good run and met not only our Kickstarter, but one of our stretch goals. As you can imagine with the game coming along, we’ve had to set a cut off point for the stretch goals on our website. The cut off date for this will be February 1st 2013. If you’d like to upgrade your pledge to get some of the really cool backer items, the time is running out. Go to http://guysfromandromeda.com and up your pledge before February 1st.

But what happens after February 1st?

We are pleased to announce the official Guys From Andromeda store. The store will contain different items than what was offered for pledging to SpaceVenture. We plan to offer a different SpaceVenture T-shirt than the backer one, official Cluck Y’egger pins, possibly a new SpaceVenture coin(this will not be a Buckazoid, it will simply be a really awesome collectible coin).

Something we also will have available in the store will be a series of collectible cards. Here is a preview:

The cards are standard baseball card size. 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. In creating these cards, we have teamed up with web comic/artist Len Paralta(geek of the week fame). This card was created with direction of Mark Crowe, Scott Murphy and Chris Pope. Scott Murphy did the writing. We plan to release a card for each character in SpaceVenture. 🙂

All items sold in the store will be shipped out shortly after purchase.

Cluck Y’egger game by Titanbase Productions

As you may have heard, Titanbase Productions created a nifty little action arcade type game for iOS devices(android being discussed). They have a $.99 promotion going on right now, so check it out if you have an iOS device!

Click here for details

Video displaying the Cluck Y’egger game:

Podcast:

We’re also pleased to announce that Jim Walls(creator of Police Quest) will be talking with Chris Pope soon on the Guys From Andromeda Podcast! Stay tuned for that, and be sure to check out previous episodes!

Click here for previous episodes

In closing…

We hope everyone is as excited as we are about all that is going on. Please continue to help support the SpaceVenture efforts by spreading the work!

Some links you might want to check out:

Official Guys From Andromeda LLC website

Official Guys From Andromeda online News Paper

Backers Rewards Site

Official Twitter

Office Facebook

 

View In iTunes

• $0.99
• Category: Games
• Updated: Jan 05, 2013
• Version: 1.1
• Size: 45.7 MB
• Language: English
• Seller: Benjamin Lindelof
• © Titanbase Productions and Guys From Andromeda LLC

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later

Happy New Year, Larryettes!

We are now officially in “crunch mode,” although, to be honest, everyone at N-Fusion and I have been in crunch mode all along. But now it’s official, which means a whole new shipment of caffeinated beverages, caffeinated candies, and caffeinated bacon.

Before I go off on minutiae about game text, I’m going to answer a few questions I’ve seen around Kickstarter and the Replay Games fora:

• Yes, we’re still on track for a Q1 2013 release.
• Yes, we’re still planning on foreign language releases concurrent with the release of the English version: French, Italian, German, and Spanish (or “FIGS”).
• Yes, we’re still planning on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android versions. Linux is still a real possibility. Unity 4 makes porting it relatively easy. But it does involve whole additional testing cycles that aren’t in the budget (timewise or moneywise).
• The Kickstarter premiums will ship about the time the game ships. We may be able to push some of the digital items (like the HD wallpaper) out sooner, but our overriding goal is to meet our ship date, and it’s an all-out push with that singular goal in mind. For the physical goods, we don’t want to do more than one wave of shipments, because that will multiply our shipping costs dramatically. (In other words, we don’t want to, say, ship out the T-shirts separately from the Calendars, because that means hundreds of extra shipping containers and thousands of extra dollars in postage.)
• The front of the T-shirt hasn’t changed. The back of the T-shirt is now an N-Fusion-created Larry.
• Al and I would both have loved adding a parser, but that would’ve necessitated a monumental increase in both budget and development time.

Okay, now here’s where I finally get to talk about the State of the Text.
There are currently six basic actions for interacting with everything in Larry’s world: Look, Talk, Use, Taste/Smell, Zipper, and a generic “Inventory Item On” function (along with specialized inventory object on messages when appropriate). As I mentioned during the Kickstarter, I hate generic messages, but I can’t completely get around using them.

Let me define a couple of terms. When I say “flag,” that’s a bit of programming that monitors the state of something in the game that we want to track. I’ll give you an example from the game. Under some conditions, the dog will come along and pee on Larry. After being peed on, I want the first person that Larry meets to comment on the unusual aroma. So there is a flag for Larry called “peedOn.” The vast majority of the time, this flag is off (peedOn==False). When the dog pees on him, the flag is changed (peedOn==True). Many of the characters have a line of dialogue to speak when they encounter Larry and peedOn==True. As soon as they deliver the line, the flag is changed again, back to False. And the cycle of life begins anew.

Flags change constantly throughout the game. Simply looking at a screen feature can change a flag; this is relevant when I want to have a series of messages for something, with that message changing each time you look at the item. First time you look at something, second time you look at something, and so on.
When I say “feature,” I mean a region of the screen that has its own identity and requires its own text text “handling.” For instance, look at the Come ‘n’ Go interior at :06 in the video we created for the Steam Greenlight effort. I identified 28 separate features (not counting Larry himself): the Hot Dog display, the floormat, the refrigerated case, the counter, the Clerk, and so on. The majority of rooms are not this busy, thankfully, or I’d be writing until 2013. Oh, wait, I am.

So I create messages for each of the six basic actions for each of those 28 features. Assuming only one message per feature (although many have two or more), that’s 168 messages right there, before I even start to be able to get into all the specifics that are necessary to cover different flag settings. The specific messages for those features requiring different flag settings can easily double the total number of messages used in a room.
That’s a vast amount of recording and editing, a vast amount of speech to put into a game (especially a mobile game!). And that’s before factoring in the inventory-object-on-inventory-object messages and dialogues between Larry and other characters.

(Side note: I actually started with an experiment: seeing if I could create a couple of rooms where clicking every single inventory object on every single feature would have its own message. It turned out to be immensely time-consuming since there were more than 40 potential inventory items – although, of course, some objects don’t apply to some locations — and dozens of features in each room. I stopped when I got close to 800 messages for the room, and that wasn’t even one of the more crowded rooms.)

With these kinds of totals, I’ve pretty much ended up having to use some generics. For instance, if you try to talk to most inanimate objects, you’ll get a generic message (although it’s always at least unique to the room). And when you click an inventory item on a feature, you’ll get a generic message unless there’s a good reason – comedy and/or puzzle relevance – for a more specific one.

Despite this, I think we’ll still have one of the most robust Larrys ever written in terms of sheer quantity and quality of input responses.

And now, back to work I go. Lots to do. Not enough time in which to do it.

Fondly,
Josh

Happy New Year, everyone!  With the holidays behind us, we’re ramping up the development of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption.  Lori and I have been brainstorming game and story ideas,the artists are hard at work designing and animating characters and monsters, and the programmers are experimenting with different isometric “looks” for the game.

Backer Surveys

I sent out backer surveys to all of the $50 and $65 level backers about two weeks ago.  Most of you have responded, but 78 backers have not yet answered their surveys.  If you are one of them, please visit your survey page soon so that we can send you your previous game key.

I plan to send surveys out to other backers this weekend (and possibly into next week for some categories).  Please respond to the survey when you get it.  We need the survey information to correctly fulfill your rewards, and especially to find out which add-ons you purchased.  If you have questions after answering the survey, feel free to contact me or Chris at support (at) hero-u (dot) net.  Note that I incorrectly listed this as “(dot) com” in a previous Update; if you sent any mail to that address, please resend it to the correct email.

Places to Go, Pages to See

We now have a forum at http://hero-u.net/forum/index.php to discuss Hero-U and our previous games. I’ve set up a few basic topics, but we’ll need many more.  The forum will be a place for Hero-U backers and anyone interested in the game to gather, ask and answer questions, and discuss the games.  Lori and I will drop in occasionally, but we won’t have time to answer everything.

As a reminder, you can still back Rogue to Redemption or increase your pledge through our “Kickstarter Store” page at http://www.hero-u.net/KS-store.  You can also buy merchandise and gifts related to Hero-U at our Cafe Press store – http://www.cafepress.com/herouniversitystore.  Purchases on both of these pages help support the project.  As of the end of December, we received $4,555 in pledges and upgrades on the KS-Store page, bringing the project total to $413,705.

Also visit the main Hero-U web site for more information on the project and team – http://hero-u.net/.

We’re working on a wiki for the developers and plan to put up a design blog on the hero-u.net site.  This will become more important as we get more PayPal backers, since they will not automatically be notified of posts here on Kickstarter.

Interesting Projects

I mentioned “Meriwether: An American Epic” previously.  This project is now in its final two days and looks like a nice mix of role-playing and historical storytelling.  Lori and I will be part of their final-day chat marathon on Google Hangouts this Sunday at 7:00 pm EST.

“The Hidden Crystal” is a project to publish an heroic fantasy novel. It’s getting some beautiful illustrations from JP Selwood, one of Hero-U’s talented artists.  This project is just starting out, and has a very modest $2,000 goal, but needs more people to hear about it so that it can reach its goal.  Daniel Gimness, the author, says, “The plot is right in-line with classic Sierra storytelling and artist John Paul Selwood (who worked on the Sierra AGDI remake games King’s Quest I, II and III, Quest for Glory II, as well Mage’s Initiation, and Hero-U) has illustrated the project.”

Back in the early days of paper-and-pencil role-playing, one of the competitors to Dungeons & Dragons was a game called Tunnels & Trolls.  It featured a simplified combat system and a light-hearted approach to role-playing.  The original authors (including Rick Loomis, Ken St. Andre, and Liz Danforth) want to make an updated version of the game books.  If you like paper RPG’s, check out “Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls“. They just launched the project yesterday, and are nearly at their goal, so now it’s a race to see how much extra they can deliver with the game.

I had planned to keep this update short; we’ve had four updates in December already.

But then I remembered that I promised last time to go into some detail about my text process.

But then I thought that if it were me receiving these updates, I’d say, “C’mon, Hanukkah ended last week, yesterday was Festivus, Kwanzaa’s in a couple of days, tonight’s Christmas Eve. Just cut to the goodies, please.” So I’m throwing caution to the wind and cutting to the goodies!

Here are a half-dozen of Colin Merlo’s finished backgrounds for the game, complete and in all their high-res glory. You’ve seen them in the Greenlight video, but not like this! (Speaking of Greenlight, for those of you who upvoted Larry and Fester, THANK YOU! If you haven’t, we still need every vote we can get…instructions here).

The interior of Lefty’s! (Hi-res version)

Lefty’s Gorgeous Bathroom!  (High-res version)

The “Secret Room”! (High-res version)

The “Come ‘n’ Go”! (High-res version)

The Alley to the right of Lefty’s! (High-res version)

Mugger Alley! (High-res version)

 Happy New Year, everyone! 

(Our High-res Holiday Card)

See you next quarter!

Josh