Women In Tech – Roberta Williams.

Originally posted here on Facebook.

Celebrating Women’s Month by paying tribute to the #WomenWhoInspire us! 

Roberta Williams is a game developer and designer, she is known for creating and designing the first graphical adventure game, Mystery House, and co-founding the game development company On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line.

Roberta Williams, a housewife with no experience in computers or gaming, became interested in home computers in the late 1970s when her husband brought one home. She began playing adventure-style games, but found there weren’t many available. She and her husband created Mystery House, the first computer game with graphics, using a special language he created for graphic adventure games.

They founded their own company, Sierra On-Line, which produced many successful games, including King’s Quest. Williams also created games with female main characters and her success led to opportunities for adaptations into other media forms.

Thank you, Roberta, for being a trailblazer. You are truly a role model for all of us to follow 

#womeintech#womenwhoinspire#womansmonth#womenwholead

SpaceVenture Update #129: Two Guys SpaceVenture – by the creators of Space Quest

Hello everyone! We wanted to give you a quick update with some pretty exciting news. First off, we wanted to thank you for all the feedback we got on the backer only release build of SpaceVenture. We learned a whole lot about items that needed some serious work on the game. We were able to resolve the vast majority of the issues that were brought up by you all that reported issues to us.  

If for some reason you didn’t get the email for that build, please await word from us on a new build. That previous build definitely had some issues and we prefer to send out a new build of the game with fixes. So again, if you didn’t get that build, please stay tuned for a new more stable build of the game to be released in the future. 

After releasing the build of the game towards the end of 2022, we immediately began working on another build, but wanted to make sure we had gotten the reported issues fixed. As always, things slowed down during the holiday season. In January, we began getting ramped up to finalize the new build to send out to you all here at the beginning of 2023, however, we have something really exciting to let you know.

In February, we were contacted by Ken Williams (Co-founder of Sierra On-line/Cygnus Entertainment) about a partnership that would involve some really great possibilities for the future of SpaceVenture. As you are aware, the majority of the team is only able to work on the game part time at this point. And no one is being paid anything, due to being low on funds. We are in talks with Ken about bringing some fresh funding into the project that would involve the following:

  • Some full time paid developers that would help solidify the code and fix remaining bugs that will make the game play better. This would also involve making sure code is updated with the latest and greatest version of the Unity engine.
  • QA folks to assist in making sure the game is at the level of quality that it deserves.
  • Plans to release the game on the promised platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Cygnus has just released their Colossal Cave game on Playstation, Xbox, Switch and is working on it for mobile devices. If a deal comes together, all of those will be considered for SpaceVenture.
  • Plans to release the game in even more languages, which we will announce once we have confirmed them.
  • Additional promotion/marketing of the game to the public
     

In return, we will be splitting any income made on SpaceVenture with Cygnus Entertainment. Our agreement with Ken is that no one makes any money off of SpaceVenture until our backer rewards are shipped. Again, to be clear, our agreement will still include the fact that once the game is available on the various online stores for purchase, we will use the income for reward shipping to backers. We still have plans for making an option available to people who would like to pay their shipping ahead of time, in order to get their rewards quicker. We will provide more information on this later.

As a reminder, please do not email us your address for reward shipping. Once the game is publicly available and we are ready to start shipping items out, we will request your address information.

Please understand that no contracts have been signed yet. We are still in the process of talking and Ken’s developers are looking at the project now and we are all trying to get a feel for what will need to happen and an approximate cost/timeline for everything. Since this negotiation put a few things on hold for us, we felt like it would be good for us to let you all know the situation.

Though this agreement is not solidified yet, we are encouraged by the possibility of working with Ken and Cygnus on making sure that SpaceVenture gets the level of polish that it deserves. As always, thank you all so much for your continued patience and support.

KEN AND ROBERTA WILLIAMS / CYGNUS HAVE RELEASED COLOSSAL CAVE

Just in case you’re out of the loop, we wanted to do a shout out to Ken and Roberta Williams along with our friend Marcus Mera. They have remade the game “Colossal Cave” into a new 3D/VR adventure game. 

Please go check it out when you have some time!

Even better than a Cat Mustache! Son of SEQUEL Now Offers GK3 Story and Concept Art Add Ons!

  1. Get digital High Res images of all 16 storyboard and concept sketches. Graciously donated by Thibaut Saez.
  2. Land a 8×10 Printed copy of your choice of one of the 16 images, signed by Jane Jensen and Robert Holmes. You also receive the digital High Res copies of all 16 images

Pledge today and Grab these Add Ons!

Son of SEQUEL on Kickstarter!