David and I could hardly contain our excitement this morning when TheBruce, linked us to this article in The Guardian in which Keith Stuart writes:

But in some ways the really avant-garde work has been going on elsewhere – in the realm of the ARG, or alternative reality game*. Here, proponents like 42 Entertainment and Darklight Interactive create interactive experiences by placing information around the internet, on faked websites, forums and Wikipedia entries, encouraging players to work together to decipher the clues.

Maybe it is partially all the coffee I just consumed, but my heart is racing!  Our relatively small company has just been recognized on the international scene.  And in the same breath as one of the largest companies in the ARG industry.  We are extremely proud and frankly more than a bit surprised.

In the meantime, despite unfortunate distractions of our real lives — I continue to battle a chronic illness (which I write about in my other blog Novel Patient) and David has had to find a new job on short notice — we continue to move forward on Rachel’s Walk.  We’ve been working on all aspects of the game, but in particular Owen has been putting in a lot of hard work on writing copy for activities players will be able to do within the Dream Engine.

Much to my CPU’s dismay, I continue to render and render and render some more.  And in honor of occasion, I’d like to leave you with another small taste of what I’ve been working on.  Another “screenshot” from the game if you will.  This is one of my personal favorites, and I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Fairy River

As a programmer, one of the things that comes with the job description is knowing that some of the best things you will ever create may never see the light of day.

When the core development of Rachel’s Walk began, the “engine” that you use to navigate through and interact with the world was based on the traditional interactive fiction games of Infocom. Even though it had the added bonus of a graphical representation of the area you were in (we call it a “room”, even though it might not necessarily have four walls), the only means of interaction was a text box where the user would type exactly what he wanted to do.

This might sound like a very simple interface, but behind the scenes that can’t be farther from the truth. Rather than use an existing text parse (such as the “Z” interpreter pioneered by Infocom), I decided to write my own. I wound up with a very intricate text interpreter that was able to chop up a sentence in to parts of speech and determine what exactly you were trying to do. This included a word tree, so that multiple versions of the same command (“get” is the same as “take”, “pick up”, “grab”, “snatch”, “acquire”, “appropriate”, etc…) are treated the same way. This word tree even applied to items: it could be a “lamp”, or a “lantern”, or a “light”, or a “light source”, etc… You get the idea.

I spent weeks writing and perfecting this system, and am to this day still proud of it. It was one of the most remarkable things I’d ever created – from scratch – and everyone we showed it to was impressed.

But then we realized something… Who’s actually going to USE it?

I’m from a gaming generation that’s outdated by twenty years. Whereas a game like this might seem natural to me, the modern day “gamer” – who might not have been born when Infocom was around – wouldn’t know what to do with it. Think about this: consider every game that came out in the last ten or fifteen years… In how many of those games is the principle means of interaction typing text? I honestly couldn’t think of a single one in the last decade.

So that beautiful engine of mine was shelved.

In keeping with the traditions on which this game is based, we decided to use another “old school” game engine as a point of reference: LucasArts‘ SCUMM engine, an engine that drove some of the best games in the genre: the original Monkey Island trilogy, two Indiana Jones games, Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road and many more.

Comparatively speaking, designing this engine was absurdly easy. We now had only nine distinct on screen commands (give, open, close, pick up, talk to, look at, use, push, pull), mostly the same commands that are found in the LucasArts games mentioned above, and in thinking about it they had the right idea: you really don’t need more than that for a game of this nature.

Furthermore, unlike the SCUMM engine, you don’t actually see yourself in the world: it’s a first person view. There’s no way to actually move to another location in the same fashion as the original SCUMM engine (click and the character moves there). Therefore we had to use a compass rose as a means of moving from location to location.

Suddenly the learning curve for the interface is much more acceptable: click on a verb, click on an object (be it in the inventory or in the on screen view of the area) and done. We don’t have to worry about how many ways one can say “lamp” or “book”. We don’t have to worry if you wanted to “look AT” something or “look UNDER” it. The engine went from several thousand lines of code to a few hundred.

Unfortunately, we can no longer respond to someone typing “xyzzy”… You can’t win them all, I guess.

When we first began creating the visuals for the world of Rachel’s Walk, we looked to stock photography.  I picked out literally hundreds of images for David to download.  But they all had varying “looks”, and we quickly realized we would have to do something to make them all match if the world was going to have a unified appearance.

Around this time I was starting a new role playing game campaign with some online friends and was looking to make a portrait of my character.  I was looking around for free 3D rendering programs to use for this purpose and stumbled across Daz 3D.  I was so pleased with my render of my character and the power of the program that it occurred to me that we could make the whole world of Rachel’s Walk in this fashion.  Instead of being confined to what I could find on stock photography sites, I could custom render each “scene” to our specifications.

I presented the idea to David and he loved the render of my character and the idea.  But we realized that we would need more than just the free DazStudio software and few free models.  So I made up a proposal of all we would need to complete the game world.  We devised a plan with phases of purchases and a budget.  And then I got to work.

Though the basics of the software were easy to master, some of the more advanced features had a higher learning curve.  Frankly my initial renders didn’t look like much.  But with practice I improved.  As I improved I realized the need for more advanced software to complete the game world.  So we purchased Bryce and most recently Carrara.

The process has been (and continues to be) extremely time consuming and extremely rewarding as I slowly piece the world of Rachel’s Walk together.  And today I am pleased to present you with a sneak peak of 3 “scenes” from the game world in the form of wallpapers for your desktop.  They can be found in various sizes in the new Media section.  I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I’ve enjoyed making them.