Shortly after Pleurghburg: Dark Ages was released, we began working on a sequel titled Pleurghburg: The Asylum (at about the same time we started work on Calsoon 2 and Urban Joe). This time I made the backgrounds in 3D using the editor for Unreal Tournament, they matched the new, much more detailed version of Jake McUrk rather well. But things started going downhill rather quickly. The game's development hadn't gotten very far before the character artist/animator left due to lack of time. I couldn't find a replacement, so I decided put the game on hold and write a detailed design document before picking up development again.
With P:DA, I only wrote down the most important parts of the story and improvised most of the puzzles that appear in the game. While that luckily turned out rather well, I decided to go with a complete design document this time even though I like having some freedom to add stuff during the development. This I find is okay when you're doing all the graphics and programming yourself. With The Asylum, I had someone helping me with a rather large part of the graphics and I didn't want to make any sudden changes that might cause them unexpected extra work or for some of it to be discarded.
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After a while we finished the first version of Calsoon 2 (a version with speech was released later on). Things were going rather well so at the same time we came up with the idea for Revenants, a survival-horror point & click game. Revenants was even more ambitious than The Asylum, and even though I used graphics similiar to that in P:DA, the backgrounds took alot more time to make. In Revenants you were supposed to be able to do alot of things that would affect the outcome of the story. You were also going to |
explore a whole village and its surrounding forest. Every room in every house was going to be drawn and as if that wasn't enough, the lights could be switched on and off in almost every room. Add to that the ability to use most of what you picked up as weapons and you'll realise that I was way in over my head. All of this since I was once again doing the graphics, programming and the music myself. There was a character animator who helped make the combat animations and someone who helped make the stills in some of the cutscenes, but both of them had to cancel after a while. By now the script for The Asylum had been forgotten.
We spent alot of time on Revenants and we got alot of work done, but despite that we didn't even finish 1/5th of what was supposed to be in the game. This made it rather obvious that I couldn't do this on my own. Especially not with Urban Joe being developed at the same time.
Right now, I'm rewriting both of these games because I do want to make them sooner or later. When they do get made it will most likely be in full 3D. |
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But whether or not GASPOP software ends up developing it only time will tell.
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